RadixJournal - Debunking the Epstein Mythology

00:00:00.000 Michael Tracy. Welcome. I love that you're here. Unfortunately, we're talking about Jeffrey

00:00:08.060 Epstein, but I think there's a lot. There's nothing else to talk about at the moment, but

00:00:13.300 I would like to talk to you about other things regarding the world, and hopefully we can do that

00:00:18.740 later. But I do want to talk about this now. And I guess, let me say this. I have

00:00:27.280 really altered my perspective on Jeffrey Epstein over the past nine months. I was never obsessed

00:00:37.960 with it. And I do have an allergy to they're turning young girls into beef jerky and eating 0.84

00:00:45.680 them and there's aliens. And I've always had an allergy to that. But I basically did assume

00:00:52.640 that Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and a sex trafficker and that he was effectively

00:00:59.640 blackmailing leaders and influencers by, you know, the Godfather Part Two style. You know,

00:01:08.700 I've got this photo of you with a dead prostitute. And if you don't vote this way, I'm going to leak

00:01:14.680 it to the press. I did basically assume those things. And when I learned some more about Jeffrey

00:01:21.280 Epstein, it was all insinuation and speculation, but it seemed to feed into that. And it's really

00:01:29.980 been your work and Deep Left that has changed my mind on this subject pretty dramatically. So I'm

00:01:39.220 very glad that you're here. Maybe this audience will be in a way not hostile enough for you because

00:01:45.640 you're used to sparring with people will be agreeing with you too much. But I have radically changed my

00:01:51.820 mind. So I would like to hear about your own journey to pushing back on the mainstream narrative and

00:02:02.540 really pushing back on MAGA's narrative and so on. But so let's start there, actually.

00:02:08.920 Yeah. Okay. That's a good, that's a sufficient prompt, I think. Yeah. First of all, I wish that

00:02:13.780 more people who virulently disagreed with me would engage with me on a format like this. I've been

00:02:18.880 begging and pleading for some of the most, you know, prominent people and what they like to call

00:02:25.280 the Epstein space. That's Daryl Cooper's bizarre term. I don't know who founded the Epstein space or

00:02:32.160 like where we can go to enjoy the physical space. I guess it's a digital space, but it's like people who

00:02:37.660 think that they're these vaunted researchers who definitely have informed the online perception

00:02:44.480 or the social media perception of the nature of the Jeffrey Epstein case. And then what's interesting

00:02:49.240 about the story is that to the degree that there is a mainstream apprehension of Jeffrey Epstein as

00:02:56.280 embodied, I don't know, by CNN or MSNBC, it fits very neatly with the edgy alt podcast sphere

00:03:04.000 in a manner that I can't really think of a parallel with for any other issue, which is interesting

00:03:11.220 unto itself, just in terms of the cross ideological, cross dispositional convergence on this one

00:03:19.520 particular subject that makes it so enduring and makes it so salient. I have found that a lot of

00:03:29.580 people I've spoken to tell a story that's similar to yours in that they just kind of vaguely absorbed

00:03:37.080 a lot of the ambient assumptions around Epstein because although they maybe found it peripherally

00:03:45.340 interesting and I'm sure like read an article or two here or there or watched a video now and then

00:03:52.120 they never did like a forensic examination of the underlying evidence. They just sort of accepted

00:03:58.320 at face value a lot of the, I would now say folklore or mythology that proliferated that was spawned

00:04:06.640 really by a hook, like a motley crew of mentally ill people, you know, hucksters who know how to game the 0.99

00:04:15.260 algorithm on social media, credulous promoters of quote unquote victims who think that their sole

00:04:21.780 journalistic role, if they even consider themselves a journalist is to just amplify the claims of

00:04:27.800 purported victims as though that they're just this beleaguered victims of this like historic atrocity.

00:04:35.100 And we're not supposed to know that by and large, they're multi-millionaires who received enormous

00:04:42.400 tax-free settlements up to $5 million each from just three funds. And they can go from one fund to the

00:04:52.000 next. And they are showered with just the most mindless adulation wherever they go, whether it's

00:05:00.920 Congress, whether it's the podcast circuit, whether it's the more mainstream media, they get these

00:05:07.360 activists, sinecures now, trafficking awareness organizations. I had always, I had been gradually

00:05:15.500 developing a critique of the whole notion of trafficking for some time now, because something

00:05:20.640 about it just didn't sit right with me. Not that I want any children traffic to be people, so you don't

00:05:25.900 even have to go there, but because it's so amorphous a concept as I, you know, gradually became to,

00:05:33.900 came to ascertain that whenever you see like a big trafficking story of some sort that becomes a

00:05:39.680 news item, to me, there are always grounds. There always ended up being like extreme grounds for

00:05:45.240 skepticism as to the veracity of what was being claimed or like what the first blush impression

00:05:50.120 was. So I don't know if you recall this, but in early 2019, the Patriots had just won the Superbowl,

00:05:56.220 right? And lo and behold, Robert Kraft gets busted. What we were told was a human trafficking

00:06:02.600 investigation because he went to a massage parlor in Jupiter, Florida. And according to the police

00:06:09.540 who did this ridiculous thing at the time, he was found to have been involved in some kind of

00:06:15.900 trafficking operation or he was exploiting traffic, trafficking victims. And everybody, I recall at the

00:06:22.360 time, everybody just took that at total face value, like even like left liberal people who otherwise

00:06:26.820 would be skeptics of over-incarceration or excess credulity toward the cops. When it comes to

00:06:35.680 trafficking, they're 100% just willing to regurgitate whatever some law enforcement entity

00:06:42.680 says. And it was almost like a weird partisan polarized reaction because Robert Kraft was seen to be a

00:06:48.480 Trump supporter. You know, Tom Brady, I guess, supported Trump at one point and he just won the Superbowl.

00:06:52.600 And so bizarrely, like people's views on whether it was good for the Patriots to have won the Superbowl

00:06:56.100 got grafted onto whether they thought this Robert Kraft arrest was legitimate. It was just so stupid.

00:07:00.980 But like, of course, eventually information came out showing that the cops just behaved in the most

00:07:06.760 preposterous way. They like fakes, they, they, they fake some kind of emergency that the, so the alarm in

00:07:14.680 the place would sound and everybody evacuated and they snuck in and like installed surveillance cameras or

00:07:19.240 something so they could catch Robert Kraft, you know, getting a quote massage. I mean, the guy's

00:07:23.380 wife had died. The woman was not some like hapless trafficking victim. She was an adult woman, I think

00:07:29.460 in her forties or something. It was just outrageous. So it was like one example of basically place, which

00:07:35.200 is sort of embarrassing, but the idea that there is a victim of this quote crime, I think stretches

00:07:41.820 and even Andrew Tate, like who I really dislike on the merits for a whole host of reasons when he got

00:07:48.700 arrested or when he was detained in Romania for trafficking offenses and, you know, indicted in

00:07:53.340 Romania, the basically direction of the United States where there was pressure brought to bear on the

00:07:59.900 Romanian law enforcement apparatus to go after this Andrew Tate guy, because he was getting too popular

00:08:04.880 on Instagram and making all the young boys of America raging misogynist or something. Even that,

00:08:13.280 like, I'm sorry, I was, you know, I think it's good practice to disentangle one's preexisting views

00:08:18.840 toward someone from whether the charges that he's being accused that are being brought against him or

00:08:25.040 the offenses he's been accused of committing early legitimate. Now, is it, is that, is what I know of

00:08:30.020 his lifestyle is something that I would ethically endorse? No, but there was weird stuff with that

00:08:36.920 series of events in terms of the incentive for Romania among other countries to comport themselves

00:08:44.800 with the state department's requirements for adequate enforcement of anti-trafficking laws in

00:08:51.800 certain like countries that are in the U S sphere of influence, because that will make them eligible for

00:08:56.840 additional grants or largesse or that, and that will affect their status in terms of the state

00:09:03.760 department's rankings for like democratic governance. And anyway, just, so those are two examples of my

00:09:11.420 sort of longstanding and growing skepticism of the concept of trafficking. So you couple that with my

00:09:17.880 also longstanding and growing wariness of the Epstein issue, which did not come to fully to bear until

00:09:26.380 this past July, but had been simmering for quite some time. Like when the Maxwell trial was underway

00:09:32.460 from November to December of 2021, I was covering other stuff at the time. So I, and I didn't have

00:09:38.900 the bandwidth to like do the deepest of all dives. You couldn't get the transcripts in real time.

00:09:44.360 I couldn't go, I didn't go physically to the courthouse in Manhattan and watch the trial. Although

00:09:48.940 in hindsight, I probably should have, but something about it just never sat right with me. And I, you know,

00:09:54.220 private conversations about it, but I don't like to just bloviate in public with like overly confident

00:10:00.740 views on things, unless I've taken the time to actually do the requisite study, but something

00:10:05.760 that just didn't seem right to me in terms of the evidence that was marshaled and the various claims

00:10:10.360 that were being made. I'll admit that when Epstein died in August of 2010, I like pretty much everybody

00:10:17.520 else was just sort of instinctively skeptical about it. Cause he was probably the highest profile

00:10:23.020 prison inmate in the United States at the time. And yet he ends up dead. So my intuition was aligned

00:10:30.320 with virtually everybody else's. But prior to that, the first time I ever really heard about anything

00:10:34.600 to do with Jeffrey Epstein was 2011. I don't know if you happen to recall this, but this is when the

00:10:41.400 Daily Mail first published that photo of Prince Andrew with Virginia Roberts Gouffre after paying

00:10:48.680 Virginia Roberts Gouffre $160,000 plus serialization revenue for doing an interview with this journalist,

00:10:56.000 Sharon Churcher, who coordinated with this plaintiff's attorney, Bradley Edwards, who's still a central

00:11:00.720 figure now to locate this one particular Epstein victim. They located her in Australia. Churcher goes

00:11:07.020 to Australia. They do a bunch of interviews with her. And then the series of, you know, tabloid style

00:11:12.760 articles comes out about Virginia Roberts Gouffre and her association with Prince Andrew. Interestingly

00:11:19.240 enough, in that initial series of articles, it is asserted that there's no allegation of any sexual

00:11:25.500 contact between Virginia Roberts Gouffre and Prince Andrew, just that it's notable that this guy who's been

00:11:31.340 accused of stuff in the past, Epstein, associated apparently with this younger woman,

00:11:36.360 and then she allegedly encountered Prince Andrew. But then as the years went by, the allegations got

00:11:41.800 more and more extreme. And that's continuing as we speak, where now people are obsessed with like

00:11:46.620 cannibalism and sulfuric acid in which like dead, I guess, babies were incinerated. Like who knows what

00:11:52.960 people are even claiming anymore? Joe Rogan, I mean, people know how to really drive me crazy because

00:11:57.140 they'll send me stuff and that I wouldn't otherwise like bother to see on my own volition. But like I

00:12:03.260 forced myself to sit through this like 12 minute Joe Rogan clip earlier tonight. And he's just like

00:12:06.920 repeating canard after canard that just gets, you know, fed to him at the top of his social media

00:12:13.600 slop heap and just repeating it for a mass audience as though it's true and confirmed and corroborated.

00:12:19.980 He's saying thousands of child rapes have been confirmed. Anyway, I'm going to get sidetracked,

00:12:23.820 but just in terms of my own trajectory, right? I guess it sort of reached a new phase of my

00:12:29.600 wariness when in late 2022, it came out that Virginia Roberts Gouffre recanted her allegations 0.98

00:12:38.900 of child sex trafficking and or rape against Alan Dershowitz, which had been one of the marquee

00:12:46.200 claims throughout of the entire Epstein saga. And yet I noticed that every time like something

00:12:54.100 would occasionally come up, some new development, like unsealing of court records or

00:12:58.500 just some like incremental production of new information that somehow involved Virginia

00:13:06.100 Roberts Gouffre, she would still be reported on with like utmost credulity. And I would just

00:13:12.840 ask myself and eventually started asking, you know, in public, wait a second, this person just recanted

00:13:18.680 the claims that she had made against Alan Dershowitz. Like, shouldn't that influence our perception of

00:13:23.840 this Epstein story in some way? Or are we just like ignoring it? And actually, it was far, far worse

00:13:29.300 than I even surmised at the time. That was before I had done my deepest of all possible dives. Like, I

00:13:35.180 hadn't realized circa 2022, 2023, when I would occasionally discuss this, that not only has she

00:13:41.460 accused Dershowitz, which I had been long aware of, but she actually accused him under oath in

00:13:47.900 depositions and sworn affidavits, and granularly described each individual in alleged instance of

00:13:56.940 sexual victimization, of which she claimed there were at least six or seven, in the most graphic,

00:14:01.880 lurid detail. And then eight years later, like after she's spewed this defamatory bile on him,

00:14:08.400 and he always vehemently had maintained his innocence, but was mocked by people who didn't

00:14:11.840 like him for other reasons. And of course, I have issues with Dershowitz around Israel and so forth.

00:14:16.040 But at the same time, I agree with him on certain civil liberties issues. So it's so mixed, like

00:14:20.340 with most people in life. He was as vindicated as anybody could possibly ever be. Like he never

00:14:25.200 even sought a financial settlement as remuneration for these false charges being leveled on him for

00:14:32.180 so long. All he wanted was a recognition that they were false and put into the public record.

00:14:37.280 And he obtained that. And so then, you know, if you can cash your mind back to last May,

00:14:43.200 cash Patel goes on Joe Rogan. I don't know what genius in the FBI communications department thought

00:14:48.440 that was a good idea, because they decided that was a great time for cash Patel to let everybody

00:14:54.180 know that Jeffrey Epstein actually did kill himself, as though like Joe Rogan would be and his

00:14:59.240 audience would be like perceptive to that message. But it caused this whole firestorm, right? So I was

00:15:04.720 sort of like, I'm a little bit more agnostic about the circumstances of the death as opposed to the

00:15:08.540 other dimensions of all this. But it was just an indication to me that like,

00:15:11.480 something was coming to a head on this story. So then the turning point is July 6th, 2025.

00:15:18.900 That's when Axios posts a sort of a leaked version of a forthcoming FBI and DOJ memo,

00:15:25.880 which I'm sure you recall, basically dispels every plank of the common Epstein mythology.

00:15:31.160 So it says no client list, no predicate to charge any additional third party individuals.

00:15:37.960 There's no blackmail operation to sack a sex ring. They weren't going to prosecute it because

00:15:42.820 there's not enough evidence. So there's no evidence.

00:15:45.020 Yeah, no blackmail, etc. Yeah. And then so I read this at first, I just, you know, my initial reaction

00:15:51.200 was, okay, this is funny, just in the sense that this is like the diametric opposite of what hardcore

00:15:55.600 online MAGA would have wanted. So that was almost like funny. Shouldn't shouldn't Freud for a while.

00:16:01.300 Freud, how do you pronounce that? Sometimes. Okay, I know you're more cultured on me.

00:16:05.400 And sometimes, sometimes there's like a word, which I'll just mostly have only ever read,

00:16:09.260 but now enunciated and like humiliate, humiliate myself when I try to say it live. But I noticed

00:16:15.920 that like, virtually like, you know, 99.9%, probably even 100% of the reaction to this memo online was

00:16:23.340 like unanimous in the unswerving belief that it must be a continuation of a coverup. It must be all lies.

00:16:30.940 And believe me, I'm not inclined to like just believe the FBI. But to me, what I read in that memo was

00:16:37.760 at least consonant with what I knew of the underlying evidence, with the exception of a few

00:16:43.500 weasel word assertions that were thrown in, I think as a political tactic or a political ploy

00:16:50.700 to shield the Trump administration from some of the political blowback that they knew would be

00:16:57.420 inevitable when they put out this memo. So despite dispelling all the common mythology,

00:17:02.240 they also introduced this new claim that Jeffrey Epstein was found to have harmed over 1000 victims.

00:17:09.660 And if I, I had to assume that whoever was involved in drafting this memo, like thought about the word

00:17:16.880 choice pretty carefully. And if they were asserting, if they meant to assert that over 1000 children,

00:17:24.140 you know, underage females were sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, presumably they would have said

00:17:30.360 that, but they didn't. They said harm, which is not like a legal term. It's extremely vague.

00:17:35.960 What are we talking about? Psychic harm? Are we talking about just self-declared harm? Like it's,

00:17:41.280 it was, to me, it was deliberate weasel wordage. So they could say, look, despite us dispelling all

00:17:47.680 this mythology, we still want to underscore our revulsion to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.

00:17:51.780 But it ended up being the worst of all of both worlds, because on its face, that claim didn't

00:17:57.340 make sense if they're going to say that there was this extraordinary number of victims, but there was

00:18:01.940 no larger trafficking operation or nobody else was involved. Right? So then it produced this enormous

00:18:07.660 frenzy. And, you know, fast forward since, you know, this new production as of January 30th,

00:18:12.660 you know, I found that I did an article this week that this over 1000 victims number, which was,

00:18:17.180 has been repeated ad nausea since last July by politicians across the political spectrum,

00:18:22.340 by the media. I mean, I just took a handful of examples I came up with just to establish that

00:18:27.280 point was, you know, I, I have a clip that I had already saved and commented on. Speaker Mike

00:18:31.300 Johnson cited this over the summer saying, look, of course, this is horrible. Ghislaine should be in jail

00:18:36.220 for the rest of her life because of over 1000 victims. It's just, you know, it's just something

00:18:40.880 that I guess it's just one little bit of government propaganda that everybody feels that they can just

00:18:45.260 mindlessly regurgitate without an issue. And it's being stated over and over this week,

00:18:50.720 Democrats and Republicans. And it was just fake. I mean, we now know the genesis of that claim.

00:18:56.580 In an internal FBI communication, they actually give the precise number. It's like 1117 or something

00:19:02.180 like that. And it turns out it's alleged victims, which, you know, I think that qualifier is pretty

00:19:08.980 necessary. Another issue with all this is for some reason, everybody agreed that we can just jettison

00:19:14.800 any need to qualify our ascription of victimhood with alleged or purported or claimed. Like we're

00:19:21.720 talking about just self-declared victims who have never had their claims subjected to any

00:19:28.180 investigation really at all or, you know, just bare minimum corroborative inquiry.

00:19:35.440 They were victims of a age gap sexual relationship, I think.

00:19:39.860 Yeah, a lot of them, you know, so a lot of I don't know what the subset within that 1100 something

00:19:44.380 number is in terms of adult persons who were adults at the time of their claimed victimization.

00:19:49.480 I would say based on everything that I've been able to glean, it would be a significant majority of

00:19:54.000 the overall alleged victims would be adults at the time of their claimed victimization, even though

00:19:57.600 this is supposed to be a massive pedophilia crisis. But even just that number that the FBI

00:20:02.660 admits in this in their internal memoranda, that figure includes both alleged victims and the alleged

00:20:08.300 victim's family members. And which family members are included there? Who knows? Is it like uncles and

00:20:15.640 second cousins and stuff? Did Jeffrey Repstein go around raping every victim's father? It's just like absurd.

00:20:20.800 So that was just like one example of like the clear propaganda that was seeming to proliferate

00:20:25.620 at the time. And yet and like the alternate media and the mainstream media were united in their just

00:20:30.040 like myopic obsession with this one slant on everything. So at that time, like I ended up getting

00:20:36.380 I ended up feeling compelled to like almost do almost start from scratch on the Jeffrey Epstein story,

00:20:40.960 like not just ambiently absorb anything, not just not just assume any premise, go to the voluminous

00:20:47.100 primary source documentary record. I mean, it's amazing what it was or how much was already out

00:20:52.120 in the public domain, even prior to this round of DOJ records releases. But and like, one after the

00:21:00.120 next, when I started doing this, I was just continuously staggered at how they utterly baseless

00:21:05.500 the common mythology really was. So this, you know, the infamous Alex Acosta quote, he belonged

00:21:10.920 to intelligence. And that's why I gave Epstein a sweetheart deal. Right. You must be familiar

00:21:15.000 with this. Yes, that what this is what spawned the entire basically online obsession with Epstein

00:21:22.340 being an intelligence asset of some kind who must have been running some kind of honeypot

00:21:26.420 operation, probably at the behest of Israel or like some combination of intelligence services.

00:21:30.280 And Whitney Webb, who's like somehow like touted as this like oracular savant. Joe Rogan just today

00:21:37.880 was saying like, she's the great she's the most she's like the definitive journalist of our era.

00:21:43.900 She says like everybody was badgering me to read her supposedly authoritative book, One Nation Under

00:21:49.060 Blackmail, which is like no exaggeration, probably the worst book I've ever attempted to slog through.

00:21:53.180 She writes on the first page, the very first page that she was inspired to even get involved in this

00:21:58.480 issue in the first place because she came across that quote by Alex, that purported quote by Alex

00:22:03.140 Acosta that he was told he belonged to intelligence and therefore back off. So what do I do? Okay,

00:22:08.460 I'm going to look into the provenance of this quote because she didn't even cite the cite this like

00:22:12.520 the source of the quote. It's just a mess. It turns out it's like in one fleeting Daily Beast article

00:22:17.860 from July of 2019 by this like former tabloid trash journalist, Vicki Ward. She buries the lead in the 0.53

00:22:23.640 classic journalistic parlance where it's not even like in the headline. You would think if like she actually 0.80

00:22:27.060 got this bombshell scoop, it would be like headline Epstein belonged to intelligence says

00:22:31.360 former Trump administration official and said it's like four paragraphs down. It's like quadruple

00:22:36.540 hearsay. And I once I started to think about it, I immediately suspected that it was Steve Bannon

00:22:43.100 who was the former Trump administration official she was attributing this to as some as having been

00:22:49.220 told to her by this former Trump administration official two or three years prior. And sure enough,

00:22:54.240 like I read this book by Michael Wolfe about largely about Jeffrey Epstein. There's like some chapters

00:23:00.620 about Jeffrey Epstein because Wolfe apparently was the one who's connected Bannon and Epstein in the

00:23:06.200 first place. And Bannon directly is quoted in this book as saying a quote that's almost identical to

00:23:13.580 the one that Vicki Ward reproduces in her article. Vicki Ward, I found out was during the time period when she

00:23:21.660 says in this article, she was told this quote about what Acosta had purportedly said in a Trump

00:23:29.040 transition meeting after winning the 2016 election. She was at that time collaborating with Bannon on a

00:23:34.920 book about the Kushners because Jared Kushner was Bannon's rival in the first Trump administration.

00:23:40.000 So it was a book basically trashing Jared and Charles Kushner. So a lot of stuff sort of aligned that

00:23:45.540 very likely made this made it seem likely that this was Bannon. And of course, like Bannon loves to

00:23:50.200 gap that, you know, he's like the gabber in chief. He loves to just speculate and blah, blah, blah,

00:23:55.160 blah, gossip, including to me at one point, I haven't heard from him recently. He seems not,

00:24:00.100 he seems pretty tight lipped about his Jeffrey Epstein connections at this point, because so much has

00:24:04.040 come out showing like the actually astounding closeness of the relationship. Like they really

00:24:08.440 seem to love each other. It's almost inspiring, like for a platonic male friendships. Like it's like

00:24:15.020 Jeffrey Epstein was the cure to the male loneliness epidemic. And, uh, and then, you know, sure enough.

00:24:22.160 So Alex Acosta. And so like none of these Epstein researchers, okay. Daryl Cooper, Whitney Webb,

00:24:28.460 you know, Mike Benz, who else, you know, fill in the blank. None of them ever bothered to, you know,

00:24:36.340 they're supposedly this vaunted researchers, but like for Daryl Cooper and people, they, what they do

00:24:40.260 really, what they, they don't really do any legitimate research except on Pizzagate. Daryl

00:24:44.180 Cooper actually did deep research on Pizzagate, but in terms of the Jeffrey Epstein story,

00:24:48.320 and he goes on Tucker Carlson, everybody's badgering me to listen to this three hour podcast.

00:24:51.780 It's like, okay, I'll fake, and I'm like resisting because I don't want to vegetate in front of a

00:24:54.700 three hour Tucker Carlson, like emergency Epstein podcast, but Daryl Cooper, if I don't have to,

00:24:59.340 but like, eventually I gave in and listened to it. It's just like amazing, amazing one after the other,

00:25:03.240 like almost everything that comes out of his mouth that he asserts with this like smug factual

00:25:07.160 assertitude is just wrong. Like if you actually do legitimate research, and yet this is going out

00:25:11.540 to a mass audience, but like none of it, neither him or Whitney Webb, like Whitney Webb. So this is

00:25:16.380 one of the most amazing little fact ways. Okay. So anybody who wants to like be legitimately

00:25:20.900 conversant on the Jeffrey Epstein story would have read by now a 2020 report that was produced by the

00:25:26.580 Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility. It's 320 pages. I know it's boring.

00:25:30.880 I know you'd rather like watch a, I don't know, a short form video on some like random, you know,

00:25:35.780 exciting speculative theory, but like, if you actually want to know the hard information on

00:25:40.860 like a primary source basis, you would read this report. And I read it and I look at it and there's

00:25:45.600 like a footnote and saying that like Acosta was asked under oath, under penalty of perjury,

00:25:50.760 did you have any knowledge? Like they asked him about this quote, essentially, that was reported in

00:25:55.180 the media. And they asked him like, did you have any knowledge that Jeffrey Epstein belonged to

00:25:58.400 intelligence? And he's like, absolutely not. And actually in September of 2025, he testified yet again

00:26:04.100 to the House Oversight Committee. And of course, he's asked about this quote again and repeats it

00:26:09.220 again. And actually in that hearing, he is told, I'm not sure by who, it's a little odd,

00:26:15.240 but like one of the staffers, I don't know if it was the Republican staff or the Democratic staffer,

00:26:18.480 they tell him as though they know this for a fact that it was in fact Steve Bannon,

00:26:22.840 who was the source of the quote for Vicki Ward. So like this, it's a, it's just like layer of layer

00:26:27.220 of like just bullshit that gave rise to this whole proliferation of a mythology and like a cottage

00:26:31.640 industry around Jeffrey Epstein, which is why you just existing in this online space would have

00:26:36.860 just kind of, you know, ambiently absorbed this, these premises. And I don't know if I absorb them

00:26:43.720 like quite as willingly as you might have, but I was sort of like, that's sort of the, that's

00:26:48.840 definitely the sea I was swimming in. But like, as I got more into it and like every thread you pull

00:26:53.900 more of the edifice collapses, I was like, wait, this is actually unbelievable. This is actually the

00:26:59.280 great moral, this is like the great moral panic and mass hysteria, like just like fictional narrative

00:27:04.480 of our times. And nobody's looking into it with any like forensic intensity. So I think it was

00:27:11.080 the confluence of a number of different factors that you've mentioned. First off, there really is

00:27:18.860 a me too quality to this because the, these are victims who are adult women. These are victims who

00:27:26.500 brought other women to Jeffrey Epstein. These are victims who in some cases wanted Jeffrey Epstein

00:27:33.540 to be their lover or husband or business partner or so on, but they were kind of victims of being

00:27:41.800 dumped or used, exploited, at least in their mind of being undervalued. They want to sort of revenge.

00:27:51.880 There, there is that quality to it. The other quality to it that I think is, or to the coverage

00:27:58.360 of in the creation of a mythos is something that you've mentioned, which is that so much of the

00:28:04.280 alternative media use conspiracy theories as a way of understanding reality. It's their epistemology.

00:28:12.440 Conspiracy epistemology. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know if, I don't know if I coined that or not,

00:28:16.620 but I've been using that term as well. Yes. Where, I mean, I remember Joe Rogan years ago and

00:28:23.440 that podcast was sort of fun to like, listen to someone talk about UFOs or whatever. Like I,

00:28:30.020 I, but the second, the alternative media that he was part of replaces the mainstream media,

00:28:37.800 you are just basically lost. Yes. And he's talking about serious issues. And I saw a clip

00:28:45.320 before I went on where he was taking serious. And he's a political power broker. Yeah. He's the number

00:28:50.160 one enforcement that was jockeyed for in the 2024 election. Yes. And he makes Theo, I mean, well,

00:28:57.500 in comparison to Theo Vaughn, um, he becomes Aristotle or something. I mean, there, there's even worse

00:29:03.320 that broke it out there. If we're honest, I mean, it's a very bad situation. So you have that where

00:29:10.380 that's how they understand reality. What do we, no one, there's nothing better for getting clicks

00:29:15.820 than a good conspiracy theory. There's also the kind of oracular figures, like Whitney Webb, where I've,

00:29:21.960 I was listening to some of her things and she, it's called Gish Gallop. I think people have used

00:29:27.960 that term of just throwing spaghetti. Yeah. Just like rapid fire. Like you can hardly, yeah.

00:29:34.400 I mean, so when you can't, I can't address anything because the second you are skeptical about one

00:29:40.400 thing, she's moved on to 10 others. It's just a blow torch. And this authority, I remember listening

00:29:46.280 to about a 20 minute thing about how, you know, the world it's only going to get worse. First,

00:29:51.300 there was Epstein blackmailing everyone. Now we have Palantir. So like Palantir is going to be

00:29:56.400 generating sex tapes of you and forcing you to, I don't know, accept fiat currency or whatever

00:30:03.640 she's doing. I think she is kind of a libertarian that's, or get vaccinated or whatever. And it's

00:30:08.560 just, it's ultimately madness. I was thinking after listening to 15 minutes of, of Whitney Webb,

00:30:14.500 I'm a smart guy, you know, more or less. I was like, I don't even know what she's talking about.

00:30:20.220 Exactly. You know, what do we have? So I'll give you an example, right? So people over the summer,

00:30:25.320 especially were bombarded. Like they were, they were accusing me of being too cowardly to engage

00:30:29.420 with the work of Whitney Webb. Because if I did, I would come away humiliated and like groveling

00:30:35.520 and grovel in apology for how very wrong I was. And so I said, okay, fine, I'll do it. I'll engage

00:30:41.800 with the work of Whitney Webb. That's what you guys want me to do. And it's just like, it's comical

00:30:45.800 how just laughable it was if you actually do like a serious examination. So they're saying, okay,

00:30:52.040 listen to this podcast and then read this book, One Nation Under Blackmail. And so get the first

00:30:57.320 podcast appearance I listened to. She goes on this whole tangent with Brianna Joy Gray,

00:31:02.060 who I otherwise have been friendly with as an intelligent person. Yet on this, I don't know,

00:31:06.700 everybody like just makes, they make like a cognitive exception for the Epstein story in ways

00:31:12.040 that I'm still trying to conceptualize why that is the case. But Whitney Webb goes on this whole

00:31:17.700 sort of introductory sort of, everybody watching this podcast, like just is in awe of her and

00:31:22.980 thinks that she's this world historic authority on all things Epstein. So of course they'd assume

00:31:28.160 that everything that she says must be like so deeply researched and true. And she goes on this

00:31:33.280 whole, she spins this whole tale about how the former house manager, I mean, we're going to get a

00:31:39.280 little bit in the weeds here, like, but I'm not like going to, I won't get that far, but like she

00:31:43.220 spins this whole tale about the former house manager of Jeffrey Epstein, Alfredo Rodriguez,

00:31:47.980 who's the one who purloined the so-called little black book from his Palm Beach house.

00:31:52.720 And then the plaintiff's lawyer, Radley Edwards, ends up cooperating with the FBI, becoming an FBI

00:31:59.560 collaborator to set up a sting operation so he can get the little black book from Alfredo Rodriguez,

00:32:05.720 who wants $50,000 for it. So then Alfredo Rodriguez ends up getting put in jail after this,

00:32:11.100 this scheme was hatched. He then also ends up getting charged for like a drug, a gun trafficking

00:32:17.040 thing in Miami. And so Whitney Webb says that she has, she asserts this fact that Alfredo Rodriguez

00:32:23.580 dies in jail, dies in prison. And she's trying to connect this with this other string of mysterious

00:32:28.420 deaths in prison associated with Epstein, because it's like there's this coverup of everybody being,

00:32:32.180 who knows too much being killed. And she somehow tries to tie this into, she says, Alfredo Rodriguez

00:32:40.920 died in 2015. And she ties that to Donald Trump launching his first presidential campaign in

00:32:46.020 2015, with the idea being that in order to clear the way for his ability to run for president and

00:32:52.540 like get rid of all and kill the guy who circled his name in the little black book, which is going 0.54

00:32:58.260 to be a huge political liability for him. Trump has this guy killed in prison and that paves the way

00:33:02.820 for him to announce the presidential campaign. It's just like, well, Michael Tracy,

00:33:06.240 didn't even know what happened after Jeffrey Epstein's death, COVID. And basically, Epstein

00:33:12.740 had a do not kill me switch, where he would launch a global pandemic if they ever dared assassinate

00:33:21.340 him. And so we you see you just look at the timeline. It's right there. I mean, Jeffrey

00:33:26.440 Epstein, I think he might be in Wuhan right now, actually, for all we know. But yeah, so that's

00:33:32.620 like this is like I'm being demanded by these hordes of people who are convinced that Whitney

00:33:37.680 Webb is this like oracular phenomenon. The first claim I hear from her that she doesn't just

00:33:43.340 have claims. She spins a whole narrative out of it. It's just like false, like flatly false

00:33:47.740 made up and like could have been determined to have been false if she ever did any actual

00:33:52.240 legitimate research, which she's always ascribed to have been done. Like this guy, Alfredo Rodriguez,

00:33:57.660 did not die in jail. Like I found his Bureau of Prisons records. And you know, it was it

00:34:03.440 was not that difficult, like cross check. And she also says, like, so we know if he circled

00:34:09.440 the name in the black because he purloins a black book, and he wants to sell it because

00:34:13.240 he saw he's destitute. He's this Bolivian house manager. And he circles like a bunch of

00:34:17.680 names. And Whitney Webb comes up to the theory that he circled both with Donald Trump and

00:34:22.020 Courtney Love. And that tells you that the CIA controlled Grateful Dead is somehow involved

00:34:29.780 in the Epstein story because Courtney Love's father was the roadie for the Grateful Dead

00:34:35.640 or like something like this. It's just like hallucinatory mania. And this is like who these

00:34:40.940 millions of people are being told are who they need to like sit down and just politely like

00:34:45.960 nod and listen to as they she educates them about the real meaning of the Jeffrey Epstein story.

00:34:51.300 I was like, okay, there's like a real problem here that needs to be like unspooled somehow.

00:34:56.000 Well, let me know. Like what happened next? Like I go through like every prominent expert.

00:34:59.620 Daryl Cooper has a hissy fit when I try to engage with them. Julie K. Brown, who did this

00:35:03.080 supposedly landmark Miami Herald series in 2018, which you mentioned, it was like a Me Too

00:35:08.200 story. If you go back and look at those articles now, not only was it a Me Too story, it was

00:35:12.640 an anti-Trump pegged story. Julie K. Brown says she was even motivated to look into Jeffrey

00:35:17.140 Epstein in the first place because she was she was searching for a big anti-Trump scoop.

00:35:20.860 She could possibly find. And also she read this hoax lawsuit from this like, quote unquote,

00:35:25.620 Katie Johnson thing. I don't know if you've ever seen that, but it was a lawsuit that was 1.00

00:35:29.980 brought against Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in 2016 by this pseudonymous Katie Johnson person

00:35:35.240 where that she claims that she was raped by gang raped by Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

00:35:39.580 Oh, she was with that lawyer Bloom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lisa Bloom, the daughter of Gloria,

00:35:45.280 the daughter of Gloria Alred. And it turned out to be a total hoax. Like literally, it was

00:35:49.900 basically a scheme hatched by a Jerry, former Jerry Springer show producer. It was just a flat

00:35:55.340 out hoax. And like, look, if actually something did damning come out on Trump that was legitimate,

00:35:59.620 I'd be the first one to say so. But like, this is just a total hoax. And but that somehow

00:36:04.700 inspired Julie Kay Brown to look into Jeffrey Epstein as an anti-Trump angle. And then if

00:36:10.720 you look at the first installment of that supposedly landmark series, which was was showered with

00:36:16.300 plaudits by every media organization. And like she got every like professional journalism award

00:36:21.840 under the sun for it. It says, you know, the headline is Donald Trump's labor secretary gave

00:36:27.700 sex offender financier the sweetheart deal, something like that. So and she credit and

00:36:34.780 there's almost like a meet there's like a meet to a little banner on the story. And like she credits

00:36:38.380 she did a podcast with Ross Doubted over the summer. And she's like, yeah, I credit me too for

00:36:44.080 catalyzing the renewed interest in Jeffrey Epstein back in 2018. And if you look at some of the new

00:36:49.260 files that have been coming out, you can see prosecutors in the Southern District of New York

00:36:53.520 passing around links to that Miami Herald article amongst themselves saying, hey, can we

00:36:57.040 launch a new investigation against Jeffrey Epstein? And they're like, yeah, but keep it on the down

00:37:01.180 low for a bit. So, yeah, it was a partially a me too thing, partially an anti-Trump thing under

00:37:07.000 Biden. It becomes more of like an anti-Democrat thing because the Democrats in there are covering

00:37:12.300 up pedo sex trafficking rings to insulate their donors and pals like Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman

00:37:20.180 and whoever from scrutiny. Elon Musk gets really involved in it at that point in terms of the client

00:37:25.140 list. This was my intuition for a while, but I spent I actually spent the time looking into it

00:37:30.800 in greater detail. The notion of a client list and that terminology exactly had existed for

00:37:35.040 had existed prior to the Biden administration, but it was it was pegged to the little black book

00:37:40.160 mostly. And people assume the little black book must be interchangeable with what they would assume

00:37:44.420 to be a client list. But then Elon Musk introduced this idea that the client list was like a standalone

00:37:50.380 thing or it was like maybe drawn. It was just like this, I don't know, new folkloric totem thing

00:37:56.040 that Elon Musk invented. And then the low IQ right wing media picks up on it. And one thing leads to

00:38:01.560 another. And by late 2023, Cash Patel is on a podcast with Benny Johnson saying and he's asked about a

00:38:08.300 client list and he tells infamously the then FBI director Christopher Wray, put on your big boy pants

00:38:13.440 and tell us who the pedophiles are. So that's how like the memetic evolution of it went from during the

00:38:19.200 Biden administration. And but yeah, I mean, the Whitney Webb phenomenon is actually pretty fascinating

00:38:25.320 because yeah, it's just like rapid fire, just bullshit. And it's hard to even begin. I spent

00:38:31.860 like several days in like very deep work just to like refute a couple of the claims. And she eventually

00:38:40.560 admitted to me that she made a mistake or she like admitted partial error, but she claimed that

00:38:46.340 she was nervous when she was on this podcast. But then I found like written errors and like the

00:38:51.780 written work that she had done recently, which is, oh, I have a baby and it's, you know, stressing me

00:38:56.600 out. And yeah, but like back to myself, like once again, once the threads began to unravel

00:39:05.640 one by one, I just couldn't stop because like, again, the edifice was just totally collapsing.

00:39:11.400 And it was just astounding to me that nobody had bothered to do this kind of investigation

00:39:16.400 before. And also one thing I wanted to mention, you said, you know, some of these girls are 1.00

00:39:21.080 like, were like chastened lovers or like would be lovers of Epstein. I don't think that characterizes

00:39:25.740 every purported victim. Okay. So here's the steel man case for there being actual victims

00:39:29.960 or like, this is the sub category of alleged victims that I would say have the most justifiable

00:39:36.260 case to claim victimhood. So of the girls who are recruiting one another, you know, 0.76

00:39:41.400 in the Palm Beach area from around 2002 to 2005, every now and then there would be a girl who

00:39:46.960 like gets asked by a friend or like a friendly acquaintance, a friend of a friend, if they

00:39:50.340 want to go to the rich guy's house, do a massage of some kind, and they'll get two or three hundred

00:39:55.160 dollars. And some of them actually were, you know, already sort of promiscuous types or

00:40:01.140 they, you know, some of them were like involved in like strip clubs and things, but others

00:40:05.600 just kind of like normal high school girls who were maybe a bit naive and like their friends

00:40:09.120 were going to make, they felt comfortable. And the whole thing wasn't really explained

00:40:14.140 to them, but they get there. Right. And they're weirded out. Not that Epstein would initiate

00:40:21.200 like an overt sexual encounter with a girl on the first visit. He actually often didn't.

00:40:25.520 It would like take a couple of visits before he would get them acclimated or they would acclimate

00:40:29.440 to him that he would initiate more and more. But of the girls who like didn't really know

00:40:33.900 what they were, what to expect, but just kind of go with maybe because a friend asked them

00:40:38.640 or something and they end up in like a massage room with this like weird old guy. And they

00:40:43.880 only go that one time because they're creeped out and never go again. They're the ones who

00:40:47.900 I could say, I would say, yeah, they might be considered a victim. Although they wouldn't

00:40:53.240 be a rape victim or a pedophile victim. Cause like by and large, they wouldn't have been

00:40:56.680 subjected to any actual sexual contact, which would have been a weird thing. And maybe a little

00:41:01.020 bit of a disconcerting or disturbing thing that, you know, they could like maybe spend

00:41:04.400 a day or two being upset about, but probably would be able to move on if they're like given

00:41:08.000 the right counsel. But beyond that, there's like mitigating or qualifying factors for virtually

00:41:14.380 every victim that are just chronically ignored. And even just yesterday, right? Pam Bondi, who 0.90

00:41:19.900 was like the bimbo in chief. So don't take anything I say about her to like be in a defense 1.00

00:41:25.100 of her in any way. Like people were going crazy yesterday. Like I've been so swamped. I actually

00:41:29.460 still haven't been able to watch that full hearing, but like the one time that I figured

00:41:33.740 last night after I had done, I, for some reason, I agreed to three podcasts in a row

00:41:36.980 tonight. Today I said to myself, I'm not going to agree to any, I ended up agreeing to two

00:41:40.480 of course, but last night I said, okay, I'm going to look at least, you know, I want to

00:41:43.620 see at least who these alleged victims are, who are going wild about having stood up behind

00:41:47.340 Pam Bondi. And of course I'm a maniac. So I recognize them all just by appearance. And

00:41:52.400 I just know right away. I happen to know, cause I've, you know, done the research that

00:41:56.740 none of them were actually one of all of them were adults at the time of their claim

00:42:00.040 victimization in the background of this one photo I happened to see. Um, and like one

00:42:05.440 of them I'm almost certain is just a genuinely mentally ill person who hallucinated her entire 0.50

00:42:11.720 purported experience with Epstein and Maxwell and likely never even met them at all in and

00:42:16.460 out of psychiatric facilities for decades claimed that she didn't even realize that she'd been

00:42:20.140 trafficked until 2019 when Epstein died. And it was about something that occurred in like

00:42:24.160 1991. So not even like really the phase of this that everybody thinks about there's this

00:42:29.500 other woman, her name is Jess Michaels. She's always like MSNBC now. And like, she has this 1.00

00:42:33.240 weird consulting firm for like sex, I don't know, consent on college campuses and all this

00:42:38.140 nonsense. Uh, somebody messaged me that she's going to be speaking at Vanderbilt university

00:42:42.420 in a couple of weeks. And they invited me to go, you know, attend her little talk. Cause

00:42:45.740 like she's her, her whole like professional profile now is like Epstein survivor, Jess Michaels

00:42:50.080 will tell her story and like give you guidance on how to prevent blah, blah, blah. She just

00:42:55.900 like debuted, like she literally, they blew her, debuted her claim in a Ted talk in 2019

00:43:01.640 or 2020 maybe. And you know, it's got nothing to do with like the common associations people

00:43:08.080 make between Epstein and like whatever conduct he's like understood to have committed. It's

00:43:12.020 just like, there's a few really aberrational examples, but they were the ones behind Bondi.

00:43:15.660 Right. And she's like, okay, the, just the, the multitude of journalistic malfeasance around

00:43:20.560 the story is that alone would be enough for me to get really invested in it. Whether it's

00:43:25.620 the Julie Kay Brown stuff, whether it's just like the constant conflation of children with

00:43:30.100 adults to foment a pedophilia panic, which should just like make people deactivate their

00:43:35.300 critical faculties, whether it's the, um, the refusal to just interrogate core premises of

00:43:43.260 all this on any level, the casual defamation, there's just a huge amount of civil liberties

00:43:48.680 issues that nobody else covers. And so again, speaking to my own personal motive and like

00:43:53.440 reasons for, for doing this, like six months ago, I was literally the only one that I knew

00:43:58.120 of who was doing anything even in this, remotely in this vein, like literally alone in terms

00:44:02.680 of people who had any kind of remotely countervailing skeptical perspective. But as the months went

00:44:06.960 by, I would get like whispers from journalists saying, gee, I didn't know it. Like similar

00:44:11.400 to what you said, I didn't really know any of this. So I'm going to shift my perspective

00:44:14.700 somewhat, but I can't say anything really in public because who wants to deal with the

00:44:18.860 blowback of being called a pedo 10 million times a day. And also like, yeah, I noticed

00:44:26.060 the New York times, I was actually listening to their, the New York times daily, like podcast

00:44:30.500 coverage. And they actually stated flat out that there is no evidence in these millions

00:44:36.680 of files. They're using AI to scan it. There's no evidence of a pedophile ring and sex trafficking

00:44:43.580 or any more illegal activity outside of circumstantial things that people will inflate beyond all

00:44:52.400 proportion.

00:44:53.240 But then hold on, but Richard, like one point on that, because I don't think they would have

00:44:56.840 done that. I'll give you a lot of credit. I don't think they would have done that if

00:44:59.700 there wasn't someone pushing back. I mean, I'll, I'll give you a lot of credit on that.

00:45:05.320 Actually, there's just that one voice in your head that says, this isn't right. And it makes

00:45:12.640 you pull back a little and not state these outlandish things that are rampant elsewhere.

00:45:20.720 Yeah. Just today, the wall street journal had a column that was basically just based on

00:45:25.220 me, you know, making some of the, my standard points. I don't know why they just didn't ask

00:45:29.720 me to write it, but, but, but, but, but Ross Douthat had done a column that was largely inspired

00:45:35.940 by me as well in September. So it was, you know, gradually seeping into the mainstream

00:45:40.180 people from the Washington post call me to just to like educate them on Jeffrey Epstein,

00:45:44.420 basically.

00:45:45.040 Yeah.

00:45:45.480 And I've had conversations with more mainstream people, even if they don't like necessarily

00:45:50.820 manifest the full skeptical outlook, but like it definitely like shift their shame of frame

00:45:56.180 of reference somewhat. But I just want to dwell on one thing you just said, because it gets

00:46:01.180 even deeper to like the heart of the fallacy of all this. So the New York times, I hadn't

00:46:06.080 seen what you just referenced, but they said there was no like trafficking, whatever.

00:46:09.140 Then why was Jeffrey Epstein federally indicted in July of 2019? Please go read that indictment

00:46:14.800 people who are listening because like, and then compare and contrast what Richard just

00:46:18.440 said in what is made evident by a comprehensive review of these files. Evidently, I don't have

00:46:23.640 the AI tool. Maybe I should look into how to get it because the search feature on that

00:46:28.140 thing is so clunky.

00:46:29.460 Oh yeah.

00:46:29.900 But so the, why was Jeffrey Epstein federally indicted for a child sex trafficking conspiracy

00:46:37.220 in 2019, who was trafficked and by whom and to whom, if he was the only recipient of the

00:46:46.560 trafficked females. So shouldn't we maybe look into whether that indictment was rightly brought in 1.00

00:46:53.120 the first place or may, could it be the case that it was the bizarre product of this confluence of

00:46:59.760 political and social factors whereby there was this popular clamor for Epstein to get

00:47:08.820 re-prosecuted? The government decided, again, in another huge affront to civil liberties that

00:47:14.620 nobody seems to care about, that they were just going to like effectively nullify the non-prosecution

00:47:20.320 agreement that had been brokered with somebody 11 years before in which he had abided by the terms

00:47:27.260 of in a pretty, which were pretty onerous, meaning register for life as a sex offender,

00:47:31.100 where you have to navigate the requirements in each individual jurisdiction. And he had like

00:47:35.340 properties in multiple States and traveling internationally is a nightmare, which he also

00:47:39.860 did much of the time. Yeah. Obviously he got like probably the most permissive possible

00:47:43.500 paradigm for himself, like given his high powered legal team, but even so it's a huge pain in the ass.

00:47:51.480 He had agreed to this like novel civil litigation resolution mechanism that like was one of a kind

00:48:00.280 in the history of American criminal law. Cause like a non-prosecution agreement or a fed, like a fed,

00:48:05.680 some kind of resolution that's brokered to a criminal offense does not tie into any kind of criminal,

00:48:11.600 civil claims, which like have a financial incentive. Right. But the government, the fed,

00:48:15.860 the feds decided that in this one instance, they were going to require a defendant to pay civil

00:48:22.400 claims, like wave his ability to contest civil claims against him. And also among the government

00:48:27.580 identified victims that had not been adjudicated as such, with the exception of the one girl to whom

00:48:33.060 he pleaded guilty to procuring for prostitution, but, and also he would have to pay for their legal

00:48:37.720 fees. Like you have to pay, like he had to pay a lawyer directly representing people who were suing

00:48:43.360 him more or less. So it was just bizarre, but he abided by it. He served his term of incarceration,

00:48:49.000 which was 13 months. Everybody says it was a sweetheart deal or was so lenient because he

00:48:53.900 eventually got a work release. But in this interview with Bannon that had been covered up forever,

00:48:59.840 but we got like at least two hours of it. I don't know where the other 12 hours is,

00:49:03.500 but he said something I didn't know, which was that for part of his term of incarceration

00:49:07.100 in the Palm Beach County jail, he was in solitary confinement. So is that a sweetheart deal?

00:49:13.360 But the government decided, like they couldn't, like litigation had been underway for years to

00:49:18.720 try to formally nullify the non-prosecution agreement from 2008 on like a variety of

00:49:24.140 technical legal grounds involving the Crime Victims Rights Act. But those efforts failed,

00:49:30.020 so it was still in effect. But the government concocted an argument that nonetheless, they could

00:49:35.060 still basically rehash a bunch of the charges from Florida in the early 2000s, indentic a new charge

00:49:40.900 in New York and then posit some interstate nexus whereby Epstein would have had to use like an

00:49:47.240 instrument of interstate commerce to facilitate this conspiracy. And nobody knew what the instrument

00:49:52.540 was until eventually Maxwell gets charged in lieu of Epstein. And they literally claim the interstate

00:49:58.640 commerce nexus was satisfied because the instrument of commerce was the fact that a massage chair was

00:50:08.460 used in Florida and had been originally manufactured in California. That's how they established a sex 0.98

00:50:14.280 trafficking conspiracy. So I don't know. It seems a little flimsy to me. And if now after millions

00:50:19.780 of files are dumped and the New York Times did an AI search of all of them, and there's really no

00:50:23.360 evidence of like a sex trafficking, like as we would like customarily think of it, then, you know,

00:50:28.340 maybe there's even more that really needs to be seriously reevaluated about this whole thing.

00:50:31.680 We're only scratching the surface. Absolutely. Was Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile? And we mentioned

00:50:39.420 Pam Bondi, who did this grand performance yesterday. She's really had quite a journey

00:50:47.020 along Epstein way over the past year. So she wanted to placate the podcast bros who just like,

00:50:55.040 we got to get the files, man. We got to see what's going on. Yeah. Libs of took talk. Come on over

00:50:59.620 to the White House and we'll give you this binder. And then you can wave it around like you just won

00:51:03.440 the world championship. It was all conservative activists, basically, who were getting this. So

00:51:08.040 it was basically about the Democrats are pedophile demon worshipers. I will never let Jack Posobiec

00:51:14.000 live that down. I don't care. No, you should not. But then her story changed a little bit. And it was

00:51:20.840 in the spring of 2025, where she wasn't fully releasing everything. And she said, well, you know,

00:51:29.040 the Epstein files are hours of video of Jeffrey Epstein with kids. It's child porn and so on.

00:51:38.140 She started to reframe the idea that what it was, and maybe this was to serve Trump's interest to

00:51:46.040 some degree, what the Epstein files are about is Jeffrey Epstein himself as a child predator or so

00:51:53.780 and so we can't possibly release this stuff. Then we, you know, we go through this whole political

00:51:59.320 rigmarole to get the files out there. And then now she has to spin it in a new direction. And she's not

00:52:06.480 really good at doing that. But that claim was made directly by her that there are hours of footage of

00:52:13.540 Jeffrey Epstein raping children. This is the leader of the Department of Justice. This is not a podcast,

00:52:19.360 bro. I mean, is Jeffrey Epstein himself a pedophile?

00:52:24.740 Based on everything we know at this point, including new files that have been released

00:52:28.800 that show contain contemporaneous FBI and DOJ communications during the period at the beginning

00:52:37.400 of the second Trump administration, when they're initiating this review of like the investigatory file

00:52:41.640 where, you know, either Pam Bondi was like woefully misinformed, which I wouldn't rule out.

00:52:46.200 Right. Or she was actively lying. Because what she said, I'll go back and actually check the exact

00:52:53.940 quote. But what they say in these internal discussions, like a notice goes out to the

00:52:59.980 Southern District of New York saying, Director Patel would like you to summarize, you know, the

00:53:05.120 case file, etc. in terms of the videos and images that were obtained from Epstein's devices.

00:53:12.300 And Maureen Comey, who I know people will hear that name and think, oh, she must be corrupt. 1.00

00:53:16.500 She's the daughter of the former FBI director. I'm not denying that there are issues with

00:53:22.860 Maureen Comey, but I would say that the issues with her are that she brings these spurious 0.99

00:53:26.560 trafficking charges because she's like fanatically and ideologically wedded to this idea that like we 1.00

00:53:31.320 have like an epidemic of unpunished trafficking going on. And that's what she did against. 0.96

00:53:36.560 Epstein, Maxwell, and Diddy. Diddy got acquitted. Maybe we were far enough removed from Me Too at

00:53:44.220 that point in summer of 2025 that even a jury in Manhattan acquitted Diddy of the trafficking

00:53:51.080 offenses. Now, he was convicted of like a more run-of-the-mill offense and then got a way

00:53:55.740 excessive sentence, even though he had been like acquitted on the bulk of the charges. So that was

00:53:59.220 another. But that was a humiliation for Maureen Comey. It just gives you maybe a little bit of

00:54:03.300 insight, the speciousness of some of her ideas around like what constitutes a trafficking

00:54:07.660 offense. Like Diddy apparently trafficked his girlfriend of 10 years to him and then didn't

00:54:15.780 actually commit any unlawful sexual acts on. But I mean, it was like just a whole nonsensical

00:54:21.700 construction.

00:54:23.040 And I don't want to defend Diddy either. But don't you think there's some sort of puritanical

00:54:30.160 streak going through Me Too and a number of these people where, look, I don't want to

00:54:36.880 go to a Diddy party that sounds really horrible of hiring male prostitutes and gallons of body 0.99

00:54:44.640 oil, baby oil to, I don't know, cuck celebrities, girlfriends, whatever the hell they were doing. 1.00

00:54:51.120 I think I declined that invite. Although maybe I should go just like as a journalistic endeavor

00:54:54.860 just so I can know what people mean by trafficking nowadays.

00:54:58.360 And it's revolting. And but again, it's like there's this assumption that Diddy was either

00:55:07.640 demonic or it was, you know, child sacrifice was involved or it was some sort of mafia thing

00:55:14.780 where they're trafficking all these people. It just doesn't hold up. The simpler answer to

00:55:20.920 this question is that Diddy is terrible. That's just all you need to say. There's nothing

00:55:26.940 there's no there there. There's nothing beyond that. And it seems to be the same case with

00:55:32.760 Jeffrey Epstein, which is that lo and behold, influential people, power brokers, people who

00:55:39.280 are maybe drunk on their own power, want to hang out with each other, screw some prostitutes 0.99

00:55:46.720 or models and et cetera in hobnob and network. But there's if you want to get them on the crime

00:55:55.840 of hiring prostitutes, fine. But there's no eyes wide shut there. There's no there there. There's

00:56:01.720 nothing beyond what there's nothing beyond what basically millionaires and thousandaires do on a

00:56:09.500 regular basis, which is get some chicks together, get drunk and chill out with the boys. They're just

00:56:17.580 doing it on a grander scale with Jeffrey Epstein was was vehemently anti drug and also never drank

00:56:25.300 alcohol. So that wasn't interesting. He and Trump, I actually prohibited. He prohibited drugs anywhere

00:56:32.740 around him and he prohibited anybody from like having them or doing them in his presence or on his

00:56:37.440 properties. And, you know, I think he might have tolerated alcoholic at the gatherings, but he

00:56:41.080 never drank. He was like a health freak. Yeah, I don't I don't know that I would call them

00:56:45.560 prostitutes. For one thing, something that people don't appreciate is that. So like in 2008, when he

00:56:53.180 pleaded guilty to the two state level offenses in Florida, there were prostitution offenses. Now it

00:56:58.400 would be a taboo to say that any victim, quote unquote, ever engaged in activity that could be

00:57:06.120 characterized as prostitution. So everything got morphed into trafficking. Yeah. So if you'll

00:57:11.980 notice, if you like look at like the latest, you know, indictments that are brought across the

00:57:16.880 country, everything that would have been charged as prostitution, if it were charged at all, like

00:57:20.800 15, 20 years ago, is not charged as some kind of like trafficking conspiracy, because that is supposed

00:57:27.220 to reflect update in the law, whereby we no longer treat the victims of some scheme like this as

00:57:35.900 though they're maligned by it or as if they're incriminated in it. You know, in, in Massachusetts,

00:57:42.420 you know, I have something that I've been working on that involves this, but in the state of

00:57:45.960 Massachusetts, to give you one example, they, there was a sting done, a sting operation done by a local

00:57:51.500 police force, where they posted ads on some website or app, I think saying, hey, there's a, you know,

00:57:58.340 22 year olds that are hot, that are offering up some sort of prostitution services, we X, Y, here are

00:58:05.800 your options, you know, sexually, and let us know, text us, and then you'll come meet us at a hotel.

00:58:12.360 And, you know, we'll do basically this prostitution defense, prostitution, you know, deal, they don't 0.97

00:58:17.200 call it that in the app, but like that. And it was a, it was a police decoy operations, a sting

00:58:20.860 operation. And, um, so guys respond to an ad to go have some kind of sexual contact with who they

00:58:30.940 think to be this hot 22 year old escort, or I don't know, sex worker, whatever term you want to

00:58:36.080 use. And then those guys ended up getting charged in Massachusetts as participating in a sex trafficking

00:58:43.720 enterprise. So they're basically johns, in a traditional sense, as we would conceptualize

00:58:49.100 it. Yeah. And because the contours of trafficking have gotten so elastic, and the, you know, there

00:58:58.060 was an update to the Massachusetts criminal code in 2011, that kind of broadened the criteria for what

00:59:02.080 could be, you know, designated trafficking defense, people who just like they literally, they saw an ad

00:59:06.640 that was set up by a police decoy. They respond to the ad, saying, hey, I would like this surface that

00:59:13.000 you're offering us. And the prosecutors in Massachusetts tried to argue that this was

00:59:18.760 reflective of them, like, putting the fake woman into like sex trafficking. It was bizarre.

00:59:26.300 Thankfully enough, some rationality prevailed when that was appealed up to the courts. And like,

00:59:31.000 even though they were sympathetic to like the spirit of the law, they actually had to shoot that one

00:59:34.120 down. But that's what the, that's what the state was trying to argue. So that just gives you a little

00:59:38.560 bit of insight to like how capacious the parameters are for like, what can be construed now as a

00:59:43.840 trafficking offense. Like think back to speaking of 2008, right? When I've seen pleaded guilty to

00:59:47.860 the prostitution charges, Elliot Spitzer had to resign as governor of New York, because he was caught

00:59:53.340 having gone to a high end escort service. If he were caught doing the same thing, like if the current

00:59:59.760 governor of New York were caught today doing the same exact thing, I can guarantee you they would be

01:00:03.720 accused of committing a trafficking offense or being in a trafficking conspiracy. So that's a huge factor

01:00:10.380 here that I think has not been anywhere near enough discussed and it empowers the state. Like I'm not

01:00:17.480 like a hardcore libertarian or anything, but like, I'm also just instinctively wary of giving the state

01:00:23.640 the ability to craft these cockamamie prosecutorial theories to ensnare whomever and whenever they want for

01:00:32.740 what would otherwise have been like holy innocuous conduct. Um, so something else.

01:00:39.040 Well, I think legalizing sex work would be a major step forward because then you can also really

01:00:47.020 determine what is evil. I don't doubt that there is some horrible operation involving church children 1.00

01:00:54.720 and maybe murder, uh, et cetera, and that the feds need to go after them and it's real. It's, it's

01:01:02.900 serious. It's, it's an obvious crime, but if you can legalize set work, sex work, then you can clear

01:01:10.700 out the murkiness in this. If you're, if you're over 18, if you're willing, if you're treated with

01:01:16.600 respect, et cetera, you can engage in this type of behavior. And so you really can isolate what is

01:01:24.320 genuinely criminal and immoral and evil in these cases. Yeah. Another thing I was going to say,

01:01:30.560 can't do that now. And this, as you said, like Elliot Spitzer, I'm sure, I mean, I don't know this

01:01:35.380 for a fact. I'm sure he just hired a bunch of floozies and what, whatever. It's not a sex 0.97

01:01:40.140 trafficker. He's not a, I know exactly what he did. He would contact this high-end escort service.

01:01:44.840 They would meet the, you know, the girl in a hotel and they would do what they had to do.

01:01:48.880 And that was it. Like, it wasn't really that complicated, but what the point I was going to

01:01:52.260 make is that why I don't think like the characterization of processes is really accurate

01:01:55.640 is I would say that a lot of these, so there's, there are different categories of alleged Epstein

01:01:59.780 victims. The biggest one is women who were adults at the time of their claim victimization, 0.79

01:02:06.120 right? Typically from 18 to 23 or something like that. And to call them prostitutes, I don't think 0.84

01:02:13.080 would be quite right. You know, gotta remember like Epstein was involved in like the modeling

01:02:15.900 industry, you know, by dint of his association with Wexner, who was the owner of Victoria's

01:02:23.520 Secret and so forth. So that's why like, you see like clips of like Donald Trump and Jeffrey

01:02:26.940 Epstein at like some modeling show in the nineties or whatever, because they had mutual interest.

01:02:31.300 Let's say Trump was the proprietor of like beauty pageants and whatnot. But like, so example,

01:02:35.520 this is one woman, Lisa Phillips, she was behind Bondi yesterday. She was, I don't think you

01:02:40.920 could call her a prostitute. What she claims happened is that at age 21, she was a working

01:02:45.520 model. She was like appearing on magazine covers and so forth. She seemed pretty successful. 1.00

01:02:50.040 She was doing a photo shoot in the British Virgin islands. And then a friend who was at the photo

01:02:56.720 shoot asked her if she wanted to take a ferry to visit her friend, Jeffrey's Island in the U S

01:03:01.060 Virgin Island. She accepts, she goes and you know, many years later somehow discovers that she had in

01:03:08.080 fact been sexually assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein just in time for her to get a payment from

01:03:11.680 JP Morgan, even though in 2020, she was on a modeling like theme podcast and said, yeah,

01:03:17.400 this Jeffrey Epstein thing is so wild. I never saw or heard anything about it at all. But like, I,

01:03:22.320 you know, I sympathize with the women and, you know, it's just ridiculous, but like she wasn't 1.00

01:03:26.900 whatever exactly happened with her, whatever she confabulated or didn't, it wouldn't be quite

01:03:31.240 correct to say she was a prostitute. Now there were others, others who were, I would say it was more

01:03:36.040 like, it was almost like a more of a, maybe a sugar daddy type relationship, more so than

01:03:40.460 prostitution, meaning like Jeff Epstein would like subsidize girls, like, like live in apartments, 1.00

01:03:47.260 pretty nice apartments, like Upper East Side, pay for like their medical expenses, sometimes their

01:03:51.820 college tuition, et cetera. And I guess, you know, like the, maybe the implicit, or maybe it was

01:03:56.220 explicit arrangement was, okay, if you're granted your life in Manhattan paid for, and like Jeffrey

01:04:01.760 wants you to come over for a massage, occasionally you go. So would you call that prostitution? 1.00

01:04:06.040 I mean, maybe it's like in the ballpark, but like, to me, that doesn't quite capture it.

01:04:10.520 I understand. Yes. Sugar daddy is, et cetera. But I guess the upshot is that it,

01:04:17.340 this kind of behavior is happening right now. Sure. It's essential. It should be legal.

01:04:21.460 If you wouldn't mind answering a question. So someone in who's listening in Chad,

01:04:25.860 would you like to ask a question to Michael? Hey, Richard. So, I mean, it's more of,

01:04:32.140 it's not a question. It's more of a statement and adding my own thoughts. If you want to just keep

01:04:37.380 it to questions, especially, it might be a bit shorter. Just be succinct and we can, we can respond.

01:04:43.640 Okay. So just to add my thoughts, I mean, like, because I agree and like maybe a little bit of

01:04:48.960 pushback and then add some, some context. So I think the, the, the upshot in a political context of

01:04:57.060 the Epstein issue, like it's being used in a way that politically the right, particularly in the

01:05:04.120 Trump era approaches a lot of issues, which is like adding, like, just, just focusing on really

01:05:10.400 absurd aspects, true or untrue to obfuscate or, or avoid having a more serious discussion. And like,

01:05:21.660 like what I, and, and a discussion which might politically and sort of intellectually advance,

01:05:27.080 like the wider national political debate. So it reminds me sort of back in the campaign last year,

01:05:32.960 or I guess two and a half years ago in 24 or 2024, when the Laura Loomer issue of the Somalis eating the 0.81

01:05:42.020 dogs was like a big topic on the right. And it's Haitians. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

01:05:46.860 Yeah. And, um, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, but instead of talking about, you know, maybe having

01:05:52.880 like a more serious discussion at the time of like immigration and demographics, you know,

01:05:58.200 I mean now granted, like a lot of discussion has since moved, you know, into this territory as Trump

01:06:04.060 has taken office, but at the time it, it, it would have been kind of breaking new grounds to have a

01:06:09.900 more serious discussion about, you know, like long-term, like, like, like a paradigm shift in,

01:06:14.420 in immigration policy and in demographics, it becomes about like eating dogs. Yeah. Like it was

01:06:19.820 just an absurd kind of red herring that distracted from like a more serious discussion that could

01:06:24.420 have been had. And that eventually didn't go anywhere and didn't really lead to, to like any

01:06:28.820 policy shift. And I think, and, and, and, and now you hear this discussion about eating babies,

01:06:34.320 like in the, in the Jeffrey Epstein files. I don't think that, I mean, like if that went on,

01:06:39.020 I mean, like, was that really what the whole Epstein Island was about? Was it just about people

01:06:42.660 going and eating babies? No. There's no evidence that it went on by the way, just to stop you for

01:06:48.060 a moment. I mean, this is just hallucinatory nonsense that people take from like decontextualized

01:06:53.900 snippets of emails and then they just project onto it. And like, amazingly enough, Lauren Boebert,

01:06:59.360 the Congresswoman, she went to the, no, not only that, she clearly went into the DOJ, like physical 0.98

01:07:06.060 building to the little portal that they set up for members of Congress to like look at

01:07:09.940 unredacted files supposedly. And she's like, she searched specifically for cannibals for child 0.99

01:07:14.120 ritual sacrifice and all this, like that was her mission to examine in the Epstein files. It's just

01:07:19.080 like unbelievable. Sure. Chad, let me just add, maybe like, I, let me try to summarize what I think

01:07:26.180 you're getting at, which is that we seem to focus on the red herring in order to articulate something

01:07:34.140 bigger in the sense that, you know, a lot of people who are critical of Israel or don't like

01:07:40.480 what happened in Gaza, they'll talk about Epstein being a Mossad agent, or they'll talk about AIPAC,

01:07:48.280 you know, it's like, oh, the lobbying effort. Those are, Epstein being Mossad is speculation,

01:07:52.980 of course, but AIPAC is a real thing, obviously. But it seems to detract and distract from the real

01:08:01.160 issue at hand in the sense that, are you putting your criticism of Israel, are you staking that on

01:08:09.720 the notion that Epstein was some sort of secret agent, James Bond for the Jews? Like, is that, is

01:08:16.300 that what this is really about? And I think that's a legitimate critique where it's like, we can't ever

01:08:23.120 talk about any of these issues seriously. We've got to go through these sort of roundabout methods

01:08:30.520 of discussing, say, the state of Israel and its actions in Gaza. We have to talk about

01:08:36.720 Jeffrey Epstein as a man from, you know, who was in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut film or

01:08:43.920 something. We can't, like, look at it straight. You know, and on that point, let me just make a

01:08:50.140 quick point. I'm not the biggest fan of the word retarded coming back into circulation, because I 0.98

01:08:57.500 don't know. I still have this vestigial aversion to it, because, like, I had a neighbor who had

01:09:02.500 Down syndrome, and we were all told that was, like, a really bad thing to say. But, you know,

01:09:05.880 I get it. It's like, lexicon changes over time. That being said, I will use it here and just declare

01:09:12.560 that the way in which pre-existing views on Israel have been grafted onto the Epstein story

01:09:21.680 is retarded. I don't know how that exactly happened. I know, like, maybe it just happened 1.00

01:09:27.380 that this whole Epstein uproar was in the context of Gaza and whatnot. But, like, it's so arbitrary

01:09:34.260 where, like, it shouldn't be the case that, like, lots of, quote, neocons or people more toward the

01:09:38.720 end of the spectrum now just agree with me because they think that in refuting some of the overwrought

01:09:44.020 mythology around Epstein, that's, like, good for Israel. And it shouldn't be the case that people 0.94

01:09:48.180 who are more skeptical of Israel now hate me and think I must be compromised by Israel

01:09:51.980 and getting $7,000, like, for each Epstein post because they feel like Epstein is obviously

01:09:58.240 just a proxy for Israel. I mean, this, like, no one would have thought about the Epstein story

01:10:02.580 in that vein before 2025. And, look, I mean, I know, obviously, yeah, one of his associates

01:10:10.880 was the former prime minister of Israel, Ahubarak. Like, I've never doubted that. I've never even

01:10:15.500 thought it was implausible that he probably had some, quote, unquote, connection with

01:10:19.340 Israel in some fashion or, like, affinity for pro-Jewish causes. I mean, he was a secular

01:10:24.280 Jew, basically, from New York, more of, like, a liberal Jew in an American context, hence

01:10:29.740 the more of an affinity with Barack than, you know, Netanyahu or whatnot. We've talked about

01:10:34.140 this before. Would it shock me, like, if he, like, it was involved, like, certain philanthropic

01:10:39.800 networks that were disproportionately comprised of, like, wealthy Jews? No, of course not. But

01:10:46.160 even the Israel connection that he did have, and, like, he had some, like, business dealings by

01:10:51.340 way of Barack, et cetera, with, like, entities connected to the Israeli security state or, like,

01:10:56.720 defense military contractors, et cetera. The idea that, like, just being, you know, that Israel was

01:11:03.520 central to his identity in any way or, like, that was central to his essence is just a fallacy from

01:11:09.040 what I can glean. And not that it wasn't a component, I guess, you know, like, yeah, I mean,

01:11:13.880 I guess a man in his, like, 60s who's Jewish and, like, sort of more culturally Jewish, but still a 0.99

01:11:18.860 Jewish in a sense is going to have, like, some kind of affinity on a basic level with the Jewish

01:11:22.940 state. Okay, fine, I get it. But the way that it's been so foregrounded, especially on the internet,

01:11:28.400 and, like, connected to these, like, you know, swirling espionage theories and, like, it's supposed

01:11:34.480 to be, like, now a sorting device for everybody's pre-existing views on Israel or U.S.

01:11:38.980 foreign policy or, like, whatever. It's just, it truly is retarded. And, you know, I wrote a piece 0.96

01:11:44.440 a couple of months ago on this and just about how arbitrary it was that somehow, like, online

01:11:50.700 reaction to the Epstein story has been sorted around these polls. And so I just pushed back

01:11:58.620 on that. Like, somebody was telling me, like, some pro-Israel guy was complimenting me today and

01:12:03.560 then somebody told him, hey, but Tracy has been critical of Israel, so he's not that great. And he's,

01:12:08.340 like, oh, well, since you're so good on Epstein, like, if you actually, you know, take the time

01:12:12.180 to study the Israeli-Palestine conflict, you know, you'll come, you'll see the error of

01:12:16.600 your ways as though I've never looked into the Israel-Palestine conflict. Like, I actually

01:12:21.240 been to the West Bank. I don't know if this guy has ever been. But anyway, so I just said,

01:12:26.540 like, okay, look, it's not my fault that everybody decided to arbitrarily graph their pre-existing

01:12:29.940 position on Epstein, pre-existing positions on Israel onto Epstein. It actually is retarded. 0.96

01:12:35.000 Like, what's that got to do with whether, like, a girl lied about her age in Palm Beach

01:12:39.320 to give him a massage, right? Look, I know, like, it's a big story and people can latch on,

01:12:44.680 like, whatever little aspect of it that they like to kind of validate whatever worldview

01:12:49.160 that they want to promote. But this isn't just the only world, like, people who have a worldview

01:12:54.480 in Great Britain right now that is Republican in, like, the British context, meaning they're

01:12:58.060 opposed to the monarchy, or they want the abolition of the monarchy. They're using the Epstein

01:13:03.060 story to reinforce that worldview as we speak. Netanyahu is using it to reinforce his worldview

01:13:09.280 because he's using it against his domestic political opponents as he has for many years

01:13:13.440 now. Yes. You have opponents. Trump used it to get elected and then now is facing a backlash

01:13:19.360 because of it. Yeah. Yeah. So if you've chosen to myopically fixate on Israel as somehow like

01:13:24.720 the prism through which we should view this entire sprawling saga, that's a choice you've been,

01:13:30.100 like, algorithmically incentivized to make. So don't take it out on me. Anyway. Yeah. So

01:13:36.360 just a couple of responses. I mean, like, I would add that it's, I mean, it's all speculation right

01:13:44.300 now, right? But I mean, I would say that it's easy, not hard to see why people would connect

01:13:49.940 Epstein to Israel. I mean, like, the original seed capital donors to his, quote unquote,

01:13:56.220 investment firm were Jewish billionaires. And then there's the whole Robert Maxwell, 0.57

01:14:00.580 Ghislaine Maxwell connection. I mean, which is a, which is a, you know, a forest, but go on.

01:14:06.640 Okay. So, so, so Ghislaine Maxwell was not involved in Epstein's operation?

01:14:12.820 No, of course she was. But people who say, Hey, people will just throw out. What about Robert

01:14:17.580 Maxwell as though that makes the case that because the youngest daughter of a man who yes, was sort

01:14:26.840 of like a media mogul and in the United Kingdom and like trafficked arms from Czechoslovakia to the

01:14:33.720 British mandated Palestine for the Arab Israeli war of 1948 and was like a benefactor of like Jewish 0.99

01:14:38.600 causes in Israel. People like think that, and yeah, did get the ceremonial burial in the Mount of

01:14:44.520 Olives and East Jerusalem, just like Sheldon Adelson did. And just like other non-Israelis 1.00

01:14:48.900 are afforded if there seemed to be like a great friend of Israel. So that's all true enough, but

01:14:56.940 like people have always apparently thought that was sufficient to make the logical leap. But therefore,

01:15:02.620 because he had a youngest daughter who became an associate of Jeffrey, like first a romantic and

01:15:08.360 then a platonic associate of Jeffrey Epstein, that therefore substantiates the idea that 15 years

01:15:15.560 after Robert Maxwell died, Jeffrey Epstein was running a Mossad honeypot operation in Palm Beach

01:15:21.140 with like Prince Andrew. I mean, none of it like makes sense in terms of the logical steps people

01:15:26.820 make toward that conclusion. They just say, Oh, Robert Maxwell was XYZ. Okay, well then do some

01:15:31.880 argumentation to explain what, how it is that you figure that shows that not that there's an Israel

01:15:38.100 connection. I don't even know what that means anymore, but that the connections can be posited

01:15:44.660 to logically add up to the place that you want them to add up to. It reminds me of Russiagate. I don't

01:15:49.920 know what your view is on Russiagate now. Maybe you're more sympathetic to it, but like, I know I would

01:15:53.440 always be bombarded in the first Trump administration with like this little like random disparate talk of

01:15:59.240 data point saying, wait a second, look at this DM to Don Jr. from like some account that we figured

01:16:05.200 out was, you know, in communication with WikiLeaks two weeks before. And it's just like, okay, like

01:16:10.040 even if we're going to stipulate that's true, like you're saying somehow this is evidence that Donald

01:16:14.420 Trump and Vladimir Putin were in a collusive conspiracy to subvert the 2016 election and install

01:16:19.920 a Manchurian candidate into office, which was the crux of the theory. And of course, none of it ever 0.98

01:16:23.700 substantiated the crux of the theory. And the crux of the theory for Epstein is also not substantiated by

01:16:28.780 any of these little data points, whether it's Robert Maxwell or anything else that people want

01:16:32.020 to throw out and have me address, you know, line by line. And what's the crux of the theory?

01:16:36.220 Pedophilic blackmail, pedophilic sex trafficking operation enforced by blackmail ensnared all

01:16:41.740 legions, ensnared all manner of prominent persons at the direction of Israel. Like, okay, that's the

01:16:46.620 crux. That's not supported by just like blurting out the name Robert Maxwell, similarly to saying

01:16:51.980 Don Jr. in 2017 received like some press release from WikiLeaks or whatever. It's like,

01:16:57.960 it's not like perfectly analogous, but well, I think this is what it's about where sometimes

01:17:03.200 when your accusation is so out of proportion, you sort of destroy the whole claim. So what do I,

01:17:12.660 what I mean by that is it's like the difference between saying, Oh, this man hired a prostitute

01:17:19.900 one time at a bachelor party with his buddies. And you, you dilate that into this man is an evil

01:17:28.980 sex trafficker and abuser of children. Those two things are vaguely related, but it's so out of

01:17:37.340 proportion that it's totally untrue. And you're totally misrepresenting what actually happened in

01:17:45.320 this case. Clearly Donald Trump has connections with Russia and they go back to at least the 80s.

01:17:53.940 Some people look before that now, and also clearly Russia has an interest.

01:17:59.720 Do you agree with Jonathan Shate that Trump and Russia began their collusion in 1987?

01:18:04.960 Yes. When he visited Moscow about a Trump hotel. Yes. I think that's probably the truth. Yeah.

01:18:11.940 There are people who take it back. I mean, Bernie Sanders visited like the Soviet union on like a

01:18:16.140 friendship. I think was he also colluding with, I don't, is that this is you're sort of, you're

01:18:21.740 anyway, let's not get sidetracked on that. Well, let's get sidetracked for a little bit. Okay.

01:18:24.880 Okay. So Russia has an interest in bringing people in, getting them friendly. You don't know if

01:18:34.200 there's going to be a direct payout. What? I mean, they've tried it. I mean, I've had,

01:18:38.420 I've had outreach. Dude, I hate Michael Tracy. Hold on. Stop. Who's forcing you to listen?

01:18:44.280 Yeah. If you don't, if someone doesn't want to be on here, you just, I mean, why would you

01:18:48.200 waste your time listening to somebody that you say you hate? Don't you have anything better to do?

01:18:51.860 Look, I was rubbing shoulders with a lot of Russia stuff as well. Believe me.

01:18:58.080 I can imagine. Yeah. All I'm saying is that you can, when you start claiming that like Trump is a

01:19:06.740 Manchurian candidate that can easily be broken down in the sense that Trump actually was unlike Obama

01:19:15.420 was the first one to lethally arm Ukraine. Obama only sent blankets. So many interestingly, 0.76

01:19:21.660 before Trump still brags about. Yeah. And before the invasion of Ukraine,

01:19:26.380 Joe Biden was actually lessening sanctions. It's, it's all very Joe Biden renewed the new start

01:19:31.900 treaty with Russia, which, with, which Trump just let expire on February 5th. So now there's no

01:19:37.300 nuclear arms control framework that's operative between the United States and Russia and previously

01:19:44.620 the Soviet Union since 1972, as of the last week. Interesting. But that, so you can dismiss the 0.99

01:19:52.420 notion that Trump is a Manchurian candidate, which I obviously think we should, but you shouldn't then

01:19:58.800 dismiss a kind of lesser claim that Russia has an interest in Trump, that Russia likes MAGA,

01:20:07.480 that Russia brings MAGA people to Moscow, that Russia is funding. I went to Moscow in December

01:20:15.140 of 2023. And yeah, I did meet some of these like crank MAGA people because I don't know,

01:20:19.340 they invited a bunch of misfit social media personalities. And look, I figured I'm never

01:20:23.580 going to get really get a chance to go to Russia under these circumstances now because you can't even

01:20:27.480 get a passport. But I did go and, you know, it was interesting. I've written about it. It's not a

01:20:32.500 secret. It actually made me much more disturbed about the fanaticism around the Ukraine war than

01:20:38.480 I had previously been, meaning the Russian fanaticism. Oh, interesting. Because there 1.00

01:20:43.700 was an exhibit in the Kremlin that they showed us where they were educating the masses in Russia

01:20:49.800 about this concept of Novorusia, which nobody had ever heard of prior to 2022 in terms of like this

01:20:55.960 rightful claim that mother Russia purportedly had to this, you know, swath of Ukraine going from,

01:21:02.160 you know, below Kharkiv to Odessa and whatnot, which was like, you know, and if that was actually

01:21:10.540 the war objective, which a lot of people insisted that it must be. And to the extent that Putin 0.53

01:21:15.260 sometimes gets pushed back in Russia, you know, however carefully they couch it, it's that like

01:21:20.300 he's not doing enough to achieve that war objective. So that just made me much more disturbed

01:21:25.360 about the intensified fanaticism within Russian society about the meaning as they perceived it of

01:21:33.580 the Ukraine war. Right. And the point is, though, like, so now, like in 10 years, because I went on

01:21:42.160 that trip, you know, and I, you know, I actually, you know, they had everybody speak and I, you know,

01:21:47.360 I criticized Russia pretty much. I said, you guys are idiots. If you actually are banking on Donald

01:21:52.360 Trump to achieve whatever it is that you think that electing him again is going to achieve,

01:21:57.980 because the idea that he's going to like, you know, usher in this new era of isolationism,

01:22:04.560 whatever, that's going to allow Russia to run rampant wherever it through the into Kiev or 0.76

01:22:09.260 whatever, it's just like a fantasy. And like, can we get an update at this point? Like did Trump

01:22:13.540 and the Ukraine war in 24 hours? Like, it's just the status quo from the Biden administration

01:22:17.480 with some more like occasional high level diplomatic contacts in the US and Russia. But

01:22:21.980 the weapons provision has gone going, you know, the basic underpinnings of everything that had

01:22:27.600 been gone going on prior to Trump getting in office is still in effect. So, you know, I gave like a

01:22:33.000 critical mini speech. So it's like in 10 years, like, is that going to be a basis for people to say

01:22:37.700 that I'm in some kind of suspicious relationship with Russia based on what you claim can be

01:22:44.080 justifiably claimed about Trump in the 80s? I wouldn't say that I would. But there's some

01:22:50.220 there there in the sense that I think you're an unreliable asset, because you're not a propagandist.

01:22:56.620 You have this will to truth that cuts through the bullshit. And so that's not what they want.

01:23:04.140 They want retards. They will go. So you're not a reliable. And they got some of them based on what 1.00

01:23:09.340 I could tell. No doubt. But I would say this. They did not bring you there because of your

01:23:16.120 good looks. I don't know. Sorry, if you get my I'm just joking. They didn't bring you there because

01:23:21.400 they well, then they lied to me because they said it was solely about my good looks. They want to

01:23:25.000 stroke my beard. More Russian lies. Yes. What I mean is that they brought I know I look haggard, 1.00

01:23:31.400 by the way, because I've seen files. I'll take back that. I was searching for a joke there. But

01:23:36.020 it's OK. Believe me, I hear much worse. 24. What I mean is that they brought you there

01:23:42.200 not to, like, torture you and force you to write an article, but they brought you there

01:23:47.280 to hobnob, wine and dine, maybe more. And they had an agenda by doing that. They had

01:23:55.120 an I agree. I know what their agenda was. The agenda was offered to me and I rejected

01:23:58.820 it. Interesting. There you go. Yes, you're kind of making my case. So there is a reality.

01:24:04.240 I'm not denying that. Like, I mean, I mean, I actually agreed that the whole scandal that

01:24:08.480 erupted when was like September of 2024, when like all these payments to conservative influencers

01:24:13.940 were revealed for like, you know, Benny Johnson got $30,000 per video. Oh, the Tenet Media

01:24:19.160 thing. Yeah, Tenet Media and whatever. There it is. Dave Rubin. Yeah, I think that actually

01:24:23.520 was scandalous. Yes. Not not necessarily because it was this like catastrophic example of how

01:24:32.200 Russia is undermining our democracy or any of these like nonsense sort of Democratic Party 0.96

01:24:37.040 platitudes that they have just recite by rote now after being trained to do so and the post

01:24:43.960 2016. But just because it's like basic almost corruption and stupidity and laziness. And

01:24:48.820 like, I don't know if like Russian propaganda. Here's another point that's sort of interesting

01:24:54.360 kind of ties it even into Epstein. Should we really be that intimidated by the efficacy of

01:25:00.620 Russian propaganda efforts if the best they could do is this Tara Reid person, like another 0.93

01:25:07.260 pure fraud con artist who invented a fake great claim against Joe Biden claims you had to obtain

01:25:15.460 asylum in Russia. Actually, when I was there, like she heard I was there, I guess. And like was trying

01:25:21.880 to like whisper to get me thrown out because like I was the first one who figured out that she was 1.00

01:25:25.320 just a total scammer. Sure. And, you know, there was a very time limited visa anyway. So I left. But

01:25:31.320 like it really if that like that's the best they can do, then so what? It's just like, right,

01:25:37.180 I think if it was back, if it was more proportionately sort of understood, then I guess I'd be I'd be more

01:25:44.800 receptive to it. But I guess maybe I still have like the lingering after effects of this like,

01:25:49.040 over dramatized constant like democracy is being destroyed nonsense that the Democrats like the

01:25:54.380 security state officials fomented in the first Trump administration. And it's almost kind of

01:26:01.140 instinctively apprehensive about some of the tenets of the talking points. Yeah, no, I get it. But to

01:26:08.240 bring it to Epstein, you know, in the sense of is he working with intelligence services? Is he working

01:26:14.260 with Israel? Is he is he working with Russia? These if you make it into he's running a blackmail

01:26:21.980 ring that he's forcing people to do things against their will and getting them to kill babies or have

01:26:29.940 sex with minors or whatever. That's all wrong. But that was the very genesis of the I know.

01:26:35.320 That's why we know the name Jeffrey Epstein. I get it. I get it. But we shouldn't deny the reality

01:26:42.580 of the situation in the sense that my assessment of Jeffrey Epstein is that he's a kind of power

01:26:49.680 broker in this and a broker like a stockbroker. A stockbroker sells a share of a company to an

01:26:56.680 individual out in Kansas or something. That's sort of what he does. So there's no like ideology to

01:27:03.580 Jeffrey Epstein. He's not a list. He's not even a liberal Zionist. He's more of that, of course.

01:27:12.040 But you understand he's not working for the Russians. That's sort of wrong, too. He has

01:27:16.600 every finger in 10 different pies, basically. And he's bringing people together. And the ultimate

01:27:24.700 social lubricant is luxury resorts, beautiful women, etc. And that's where he was genuinely

01:27:32.900 useful. But there's no there's no there. There's no Trump is not a Manchurian candidate. Of course,

01:27:39.140 he's not. But he is like there is a Russia connection. There is something. Jeffrey Epstein

01:27:45.100 isn't blackmailing people on behalf of Israel or Russia. But there are these connections like the

01:27:52.040 fact that he brought Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon together. I'm jealous of that, by the way,

01:27:59.060 I maintain that Jeffrey Epstein was the only man on Earth who could have facilitated that meeting.

01:28:04.360 And they're they're both happy. I've never even seen photos of both of them happy, actually.

01:28:10.540 I mean, they're happy together. The way that Chomsky effused his appreciation for Jeff for

01:28:16.460 Jeffrey Epstein is one of the truly amazing revelations of the quote unquote files that have

01:28:21.820 been released in the past few months. I had known about Chomsky's Chomsky having some kind of

01:28:28.220 relationship with Epstein, but I didn't have any notion that it was as deep as it evidently was.

01:28:35.200 I have a piece coming out. I think it might be out tonight or it's not tonight, tomorrow morning for

01:28:40.100 compact. Right. I just did a straightforward defense of Chomsky because I was like, OK,

01:28:44.120 enough is enough. This is absurd. Chomsky. Did you read that email that he sent after Epstein asked him

01:28:50.820 for advice? This was like the straw that broke the camel's back and why all his former friends

01:28:55.260 and like left wing fellow travelers had to come out and like do these melodramatic denunciations

01:28:59.140 of him while he's 97 years old and incapacitated by a stroke. Pure cowardice. It's unbelievable.

01:29:05.940 And people who have never read him as well, but sort of vaguely like him as like a man of the left.

01:29:12.240 They're like, oh, I no longer like him. But even some even even some people, even some of his actual

01:29:19.040 collaborators and friends like a guy who co-authored several books with them came out

01:29:23.940 and did this. That's sad. And, you know, they point to this supposedly damning email where he

01:29:31.220 gives PR advice. They say, as I argue in this piece, Chomsky was renowned for having this like

01:29:37.880 otherworldly mastery of the facts whenever on whatever the topic, Vietnam, Israel, virtually any

01:29:44.220 topic. I mean, like he I think he is a genius, you know, whatever your ideological perspective.

01:29:50.180 I think he's wrong on linguistics, actually. But fair enough. I have tried to understand the

01:29:55.960 linguistics theory, but like my brain does not wire in a way where I feel like I can comprehend it

01:29:59.920 other than like the most surface level Wikipedia take. Yeah. Well, I don't think the human sorry to

01:30:05.420 digress here. I don't think humanity is hardwired for grammar and language. I think that almost strikes

01:30:13.540 me as a kind of creationism or something like that, like we were built to use language. I think the

01:30:20.160 the answer is in a way more disturbing, which is that language is a kind of technology that is outside

01:30:27.920 humanity that is sort of implanted in our left hemisphere and makes us has changed genuinely

01:30:35.280 changed us changes behavior. But I don't I don't think there's a universal grammar. I just think he's

01:30:40.660 wrong. And it sounds like some sort of creationism to me, to be honest, like is is my dog understands

01:30:48.400 me. Sorry for this digression, but it's interesting. No, it's fine. I just like I'm embarrassed because

01:30:52.600 I'm not going to be able to intelligently engage. Oh, OK, well, I'll just finish it. My dog

01:30:57.740 understands more of what I say than you might imagine. We think he only understands sit and

01:31:03.960 know or things like that. Dogs are actually listening to conversations and they're they're

01:31:09.380 picking up little words. They they might even have a bit of a grammar. But are they hardwired for

01:31:16.260 language? I just think that's a ridiculous thing to say. I just think he's flatly wrong on this

01:31:21.880 concept. Language is a outside technology that's gets implanted in us. We're kind of cyborgs due to the

01:31:29.980 fact that we are language users. So it's a kind of more disturbing truth.

01:31:35.140 There are other email exchanges and it's bizarre that we even have all these email exchanges from

01:31:40.660 Chomsky. I mean, just the universe of stuff that got swept up into this Jeffrey Epstein document

01:31:46.740 production is just unto itself incredible. But there are email exchanges that I haven't seen anybody

01:31:52.040 comment on that I came across where Epstein and Chomsky are going back and forth. It's like discussing

01:31:57.860 science theories like Epstein tells Chomsky, hey, I just did this experiment where Epstein wanted to

01:32:06.260 test his working theory about the neurological processing of music and how, you know, the neurons fire

01:32:17.520 in order to enable the human brain to distinguish music from other auditory inputs or something like

01:32:24.320 this. Right. So he says, I, you know, I figured out that if you overlay several symphonies, like you can

01:32:30.280 test something or other, I honestly didn't even fully follow it, but he says this to Chomsky and

01:32:34.560 Chomsky is like, actually, wow, that's an, that's a fascinating experiment. I just don't think that

01:32:38.720 Chomsky at that point in his life, like 89, 90, 91 would waste his time, like humoring someone if he

01:32:46.320 actually didn't think that they were interesting and valuable. So that's why he was so effusive in like

01:32:51.440 laughing praise on Epstein. He, he honestly did find him intellectually stimulating. He honestly did

01:32:56.480 appreciate the opportunities that Epstein afforded where he, Chomsky could go meet with like Ehu

01:33:01.840 Barack and like learn about the, more about the Tapa Accords of 2001, which is already a longstanding

01:33:06.240 research interest of Chomsky. And he'd like always bemoaned the lack of a diplomatic record

01:33:10.740 around that process. And like Ehu Barack gave him like exclusive information. And there was one

01:33:17.340 occasion where Chomsky was at some other event and Epstein calls up the Norwegian diplomat who

01:33:23.260 is the back channel negotiator for the Oslo Accords. And like Chomsky is able to have a, what he says

01:33:28.900 is a lively interchange with this Norwegian diplomat about obviously an area of his longstanding

01:33:33.140 interests, but he, so it stands for a reason that Chomsky would like enjoy that. And like,

01:33:37.960 he seemed to enjoy Epstein personally, amazingly, some of these emails have come out. I don't know if

01:33:42.420 you've seen, seen this, but like Chomsky had a dispute with his adult children over access to his

01:33:50.080 trust because after his first wife died, the trust that they had set up together happened to be in

01:33:56.800 her names. They always thought that he would die first, but then she became ill and died, you know,

01:34:01.660 predeceased him. And like a new trustee was appointed to oversee the trust. And it was one of the adult

01:34:08.140 children. And then he gets remarried unexpectedly to a younger woman, not like she's like 60 or

01:34:14.900 something. And, uh, the she's, she's above, she's above the age of legal consent. Okay. And you know,

01:34:23.680 they're aware, like the adult children are wary of the new wife and of his, of her potential influence

01:34:30.660 over him. So they try to restrict his ability to access is basically his, uh, wealth that he's

01:34:35.180 accumulated over the course of his life. And it's the whole, you know, painstaking, tedious,

01:34:40.240 kind of like disturbing dispute that arises. And he's like, very hurt by it. He says, you know,

01:34:45.160 my life was great. Other than this one thing, it's like really causing me a lot of pain, distracting me

01:34:49.200 from work. Yeah. I never could have imagined that in my later years, this would happen with my

01:34:53.700 children. It's depressing. And who solves the problem for him eventually? Jeffrey Epstein. It's amazing.

01:35:00.560 So like, that's the context in which, you know, a year or two later, Epstein asks him, Hey,

01:35:06.840 no, like, what do you think I should do about all this terrible press coverage? It's

01:35:09.880 coming my way. And Chomsky gives his thoughts. And, you know, as I argue in this piece that might be

01:35:16.440 out now, everything that the Chomsky wrote in that email was substantively correct. So I actually

01:35:21.760 commend, I actually argued that Chomsky should be commended for being prescient earlier than I was.

01:35:28.140 Like I hadn't done the requisite analysis of the facts at that point yet, just in terms of the

01:35:33.040 hysteria, et cetera. But like that's, but Chomsky being correct is exactly what's getting him

01:35:37.680 repudiated by his former friends and allies and so forth. So I just had to do the straightforward

01:35:43.980 defense that's about to come out. But that is a fascinating wrinkle to all this that I wouldn't

01:35:50.620 have anticipated. Chomsky was also really the only figure of any public notoriety who, when they were

01:35:56.180 asked about their relationship with Epstein, with the expectation, I guess, that they would

01:36:00.120 therefore disavow it. This was an early 20, this was in 2023, like not like a month or two before

01:36:05.280 he had his stroke. Chomsky is the only one who like didn't put out this like PR crafted groveling

01:36:11.400 apology or, you know, buy into the premise that he had something to atone for. He was just like

01:36:17.700 appropriately abrasive and dismissive toward the inquiry. And I think he should be lauded for it.

01:36:25.520 I don't know what to tell you. If I, it just like more, I think it attests to something that he had

01:36:30.920 exhibited time and time again over the course of his life, which is, you know, intellectual rigor and

01:36:36.440 honesty, even in the face of, you know, social appropriation. But so it's supremely ironic that

01:36:42.520 this is now being slated as the cause for him to be retroactively banished.

01:36:47.060 Very sad. Let's go through these questions here.

01:36:51.740 So can we like, maybe another five or 10 minutes or something?

01:36:55.440 Let's do 10 minutes.

01:36:56.260 Some other stuff I have to do.

01:36:57.140 Yeah. We'll hit it at 11 p.m. Eastern time.

01:37:00.120 By the way, where is this airing or where is this going to go?

01:37:02.300 It's going to go up on Substack, but I'm going to put it up on YouTube and on X as well.

01:37:07.460 Okay. No paywall, right?

01:37:09.080 No.

01:37:09.380 I almost, I almost like want to lead a labor movement now for like, where I'm going to organize

01:37:13.580 frequent podcast guests because like, I just get, not that I care that much, but if I end up like

01:37:18.900 on a podcast, right, where I go on, agree to go on, I'll like, agree to go on like anything

01:37:22.940 basically within reason. And then they decide to like, just paywall it. So like, I guess they're

01:37:27.840 like profiting from my labor. I'm not like, look, I'm not like that crazed, but like, it's just

01:37:32.320 annoying because like, then people follow me that with this one. I won't do that. I talked to the

01:37:37.880 group for hours and hours per week. And so most of that is paywalled, but most all of that is

01:37:44.000 paywalled. But in terms of the, your work that you've given, you know, because you feel this way,

01:37:48.940 I'll definitely put it out for free. Okay. Thank you. Like, I'm not that like zealous about it,

01:37:52.860 but like, I get where you're coming from. Yeah. So let's try to keep it real concise because

01:37:57.740 Michael, Michael might be getting a little tired. Blue race, go for it. 1.00

01:38:03.040 Yeah. Say, Hey, Michael, what do you think of journalists like Dave Troy

01:38:07.180 Peter Jukes, Michael Weiss? These, these seem to be the journalists that are pushing the most

01:38:13.200 engaging narrative. And what would you, what do you think also about Epstein and Ehud Barak

01:38:19.140 saying that they want a million Russians coming in to perhaps mess with Israeli,

01:38:23.660 Israeli electioneering? I don't know who Dave, oh wait, Dave Troy. Okay. That does ring a bell.

01:38:28.820 Peter Jukes, Michael Weiss. Yeah. I mean, I could, you mean they're most engaging about it.

01:38:32.660 The, the Russia angle. Oh yeah. I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. Like anybody who has like a preexisting, 0.50

01:38:38.680 you know, quote unquote agenda or however you want to describe it, like they can find,

01:38:42.060 you know, there's such a voluminous amount of material that it's like, choose your own adventure.

01:38:47.560 Anybody can find something to latch onto. So sure. I mean, I'm not surprised that they would go

01:38:53.680 with that angle. I don't know what else really to say about it. And the, I hadn't seen that

01:38:59.060 Ehud Barak remark, but like something that people don't really comprehend or not cognizant of when

01:39:04.740 they go through these materials or when they see something surface on social media, one of these

01:39:09.060 decontextualized snippets is that like Epstein was chronically sarcastic and tongue in cheek

01:39:13.360 and maybe sardonic is the best way of putting it. And obviously that doesn't necessarily come

01:39:20.020 across to the uninformed reader when they're just like glancing at one of these emails,

01:39:25.760 but that's really necessary context to keep in mind. So like if a joke is cracked, right,

01:39:30.780 just like watch that, watch the thing with Bannon and there's like, there's like an undercurrent of

01:39:34.620 sardonic humor to it. And you see that often in like a lot of different contexts with Epstein. So

01:39:40.480 I don't know. I would assume since I haven't seen what you're referring to with Ehud Barak,

01:39:45.340 that it was some kind of joke, right? Or are we saying it was literal? I don't,

01:39:50.460 I don't know exactly what you're referring to. It kind of seemed like Ehud Barak was interested

01:39:55.400 in this, in this thing. It was kind of him saying it in the sort of monotone way in like a longer

01:40:02.240 conversation. Oh, was this in the, like the recording? Yes, I believe. Okay. I haven't. Yes. Yeah.

01:40:07.300 He says, well, we already know that Israel has a long history of Russian immigration and this

01:40:12.880 really can shift the electorate, you know, within Israeli politics, the Mizrahi is the 0.96

01:40:19.020 predominant base. Yeah. Yeah. But even then it did seem like a sort of humorous point. He was

01:40:25.700 basically saying like, now that Israel's established, we can be more selective with the 0.83

01:40:30.140 human capital that we bring in. So we should bring in a bunch of Russians. Yeah. I'm not sure. 0.98

01:40:35.620 Actually, you know, speaking of Robert Maxwell, one of the things he did fund was around Kristallnacht

01:40:42.860 or in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when there was the emigration from Eastern Europe

01:40:46.600 to, of Jews to Israel, Robert Maxwell funded some philanthropic organization that facilitated

01:40:55.780 the emigration of Jews in that area to Israel. Just so just, I don't know, that just came to mind

01:41:03.820 when you referenced that. But yeah, I mean, I just feel like people are hyper literal, how they read

01:41:08.300 a lot of this stuff. It annoys me in a similar way, like during the 2016 presidential campaign,

01:41:14.000 Trump would crack a joke, right? Like the quintessential example is August of 2019. Sorry,

01:41:20.260 2016. Trump does an interview and says, Obama is the leader of ISIS, meaning he's blaming Obama for

01:41:25.940 the emergence of ISIS or whatever. And then you have like CNN and Washington Post fact checkers

01:41:30.000 saying fact check, oh, Barack, President Barack Obama is not in fact a leader of ISIS, as though

01:41:35.820 like we needed that hyper literal intervention. And the hyper literalism with which people want to

01:41:42.380 read a lot of the stuff in the Epstein files, I think belies the actual meaning of a lot of it.

01:41:47.760 People think that they're going in thinking that he's like a intelligence agent, and then they're

01:41:55.520 choosing which statements of his they know are 100% serious. It's like, well, if you think he's

01:42:01.500 playing these people, then why do you think any of this is honest? Really, you have absolutely no

01:42:06.260 idea about the intention of any of these emails. Also, what kind of intelligence agent leaves such

01:42:11.000 a gigantic trail of like unencrypted emails and text messages? Right? I mean, would that be like

01:42:17.280 standard operating procedure for an intelligence agent? I know people can say, well, it doesn't

01:42:21.140 have to be an agent. It could be an asset or like their gradations of the intelligence tie or whatever,

01:42:25.520 but just like, I don't know, this doesn't like strike me as the behavior of somebody who would be

01:42:29.400 even in that category so much. But I don't know, maybe I'm ignorant as to how the intelligence

01:42:34.160 services really work.

01:42:35.180 Yeah, or he would leave in his drafts folder, his evil attempt to blackmail Bill Gates or

01:42:43.180 something, just so that that can easily be seen. Anyway, let's do real quick. So Amalek,

01:42:50.560 why don't you jump in here? And then this might be the last one, but I'll obviously be staying on

01:42:55.560 for at least another hour or so. So Amalek, you can go. 0.99

01:42:58.640 Well, yeah, I was wondering what your take was about if you'd seen the Iranian ball statue being

01:43:04.540 lit on fire with pictures of Epstein on it. And what you thought about that, given the fact that

01:43:09.780 the whole ball, you know, satanic panic thing is literally like based on a, an inscription error,

01:43:15.100 a trans transcription error from the AI they use to go through the files, put it and make it

01:43:20.040 searchable. It just, it says bank name and it just messed that up. And it said ball, B-A-L,

01:43:26.340 which is, you know, linked to all this satanic conspiracy nonsense.

01:43:29.540 In the Hebrew Bible. Yeah. The worship of ball is this terrible thing that Jezebel brought 1.00

01:43:34.380 onto Israel. And so I, I missed all of this. Wait, you're saying that there was a fire,

01:43:38.900 there was a statue that was lit on fire in Iran. I can't believe you missed this. Yeah.

01:43:44.580 I have to be very selective in terms of the information that I consume on this stuff.

01:43:49.240 Don't have like a couple of things that I'm working on. If I just spent all day, just like

01:43:52.960 absentmindedly scrolling through all the crap. Yeah. And, you know, but now I got a ball statue

01:44:00.740 was burned. I think the Iranian government did this. They, they have a statue of a man

01:44:06.380 with a bull head. That's supposed to be the God ball. Who's kind of a storm God. He's,

01:44:11.660 he's actually a Zeus equivalent Jupiter. Uh, but he's in the Hebrew Bible and then they're associating

01:44:18.380 ball with the devil or in revelation, like six, six, six, but it's always so Epstein and

01:44:24.620 looking it up now. Yeah. It's just the most insane clusterfuck ever, but this is very popular

01:44:32.120 on the internet. And this is based on a formatting. This is based on an email that was a formatting

01:44:35.740 or correct. Yes. Similar to what, how, like, you know, this week there was this whole, like,

01:44:41.420 uh, you know, storm of outrage over a nine, over a nine-year-old supposedly when it was like

01:44:47.440 literally a formatting, you know, error in an email. And then if you search it in the DOJ search

01:44:52.220 bar, you can find the correctly formatted version of the email where it says 19. It's not even like

01:44:57.080 clear to whom the 19 year old is being sent. If she, you know, like we need to like, we don't even

01:45:02.200 know the full context, even with the 19 year old, but the nine-year-old, right. I saw, I mean,

01:45:06.540 I tweeted earlier today, you know, um, there was this Republican Senator Cynthia Loomis from 0.63

01:45:10.740 Wyoming. Did you see this where she says, I was wrong. I've changed my view about Epstein.

01:45:14.880 I didn't really think there was much there, but like now I'm really disturbed. And I agree

01:45:18.960 about with everyone who wanted to get this stuff released. Cause like now we know there are nine

01:45:22.600 year old victims and based on this formatting error. And, you know, Jamie Raskin said the same

01:45:28.260 thing. Like everybody was trying to tell me, you know, you're wrong. You, there actually is

01:45:31.880 rampant pedophilia, the nine-year-old victims. It's like Jamie Raskin repeating this email. It's just

01:45:36.660 like unbelievable. Um, but I hadn't seen this. It's amazing. The ball formatting error is even

01:45:44.080 better because it's clearly a bank statement. Like it's a wire transfer order. It has all the

01:45:51.280 different numbers. It has, it's a whole page of things about a wire transfer.

01:45:55.620 Yeah. In their own lore, it makes no sense. It's like, okay. As if like naming your bank account

01:46:01.720 ball gives you magical powers or something, or some sort of like dog whistle to the other ball

01:46:06.080 cultists that you're all a member of the ball cult. Cause you're into bank accounts. Like the,

01:46:10.320 the theory itself is ridiculous and it's being pushed on Twitter. It also means that he hates

01:46:15.520 Israel. So he's actually not an Israeli agent. He's a ballist.

01:46:20.260 We've gotten to the point now where Epstein writ large as a narrative has taken on the

01:46:28.540 characteristics of the satanic panic frenzy of the 1980s in a way that is now much more directly

01:46:37.740 analogous than it had been before. I had argued that there were like some overlap thematically

01:46:42.660 before, but now it's much more explicit where, you know, during the satanic panic, there's this

01:46:46.800 amazing book that I think everybody should read. I would, my mind was blown every page. Debbie

01:46:50.380 Nathan, Satan's children. She was like the chronic early chronicler of like the satanic panic when it

01:46:55.680 was truly unpopular. And then eventually everybody just pretended that they always agreed with her.

01:47:01.320 Right. But she put out this, like, you know, the authoritative book on it in 1994 or five. And I read

01:47:07.700 it a few months ago and it's just, it's astounding. Like just the grotesque claims that we made

01:47:14.080 about ritualistic child abuse that would be taken like deadly seriously and assumed true. Like the

01:47:21.340 most grotesque things that you could possibly imagine, like, you know, infants being raped and

01:47:26.080 like their innards being extracted and toddlers bathed in blood, like all the most like horrendous

01:47:32.340 fantasies that you'd have like in a fevered nightmare. That's what the kind of stuff that is

01:47:37.400 being claimed. And now we've gotten to a point where like, because of this new volume of material,

01:47:43.260 like where people are making these assertions and they're being like validated by people who

01:47:48.360 are perceived to be in some positions of authority, rightly or wrongly, like Lauren Boebert, who's

01:47:53.960 like, wait a second, there was a restaurant called the cannibal in New York city. That's what she took

01:47:57.900 her time to go search for in the DOJ, you know, like allotted 45 minutes or whatever. And yeah,

01:48:04.160 this is stuff that's being propagated now. So it's actually taken on the features of that previous

01:48:10.820 mass hysteria in a way that is much more explicit that happened with the case prior to like a week

01:48:15.820 or two ago. Let me ask you this, Michael, has the absurdity of the response to Epstein made you

01:48:24.460 question some of your liberal priors in the sense of, I'm not a Platonist, but Plato did have some

01:48:33.420 good counsel on the fact that maybe the public shouldn't know everything. And you can't handle

01:48:41.900 the truth is one claim in the Republic. In a way you have to, in a way, lie to people. And this drive

01:48:49.760 for transparency, where people are picking up on some claim that, that Donald Trump murdered a young

01:48:59.000 girl through into Lake Superior or something that they're picking up on jerky cannibalism. Maybe we,

01:49:05.680 they don't need all this information. Maybe it's actually not better to, to have transparency. Maybe

01:49:11.720 it should be an archive. That's sort of hard to access so that only the brave. What does that mean?

01:49:18.660 I can't access it. Well, no, you could access it because you would qualify me to go to be able,

01:49:25.520 I don't think I would be granted access. It is true. I guess it's a double-edged sword

01:49:29.420 because you're an alternative independent journalist. But if you understand my point

01:49:34.360 in general, which is that this will to be transparent, which seems rational, ironically

01:49:41.040 creates madness. Yeah, I get that. I'm not sure that I have a little liberal prior

01:49:46.300 that is what impels me to advocate for transparency. And I don't even really advocate for transparency as

01:49:54.720 a general principle because it's like an inherent good or something. I don't think it's really

01:50:01.480 mostly about my own personal desire to access certain materials that the government is keeping

01:50:06.740 concealed or so I don't really broaden it out that much from there because yeah, you're right. When

01:50:12.220 we do have these, especially the sort of indiscriminate dumps of mass material, such as like,

01:50:18.220 you know, the WikiLeaks, Podesta emails or whatever that then gave rise to Pizzagate.

01:50:21.220 Yeah, it does spawn madness. And so there's definitely some negative consequences. I just

01:50:26.520 don't think that the trade-off, to me, it's an unfortunate but necessary trade-off. If you

01:50:32.840 would ask, like, if I could snap my fingers and not have the Epstein files released, I wouldn't do

01:50:37.820 so because I want, because I can use my own discernment to sift through them in a way that

01:50:41.680 is productive and I can't control really what anybody else does. Maybe it's just like a pure

01:50:47.100 journalistic impulse more than like an ideological one or maybe like just journalistic instinct

01:50:51.540 is almost what my ideology is insofar as I have one. I don't so much associate it with

01:50:58.640 liberalism. I guess maybe you could make an argument that it's like has some thematic

01:51:02.980 connection or something, but it's more kind of parochial in terms of my own self-interest

01:51:07.200 than any kind of broader conviction, I guess I would say.

01:51:11.920 Yeah. Let's do this.

01:51:13.280 I don't want to be, yeah.

01:51:14.520 Okay. Well, go ahead. Ask.

01:51:16.060 No, I wasn't even making a very coherent point, so I'll just cut myself out.

01:51:20.700 You've been very generous with your time and I'm very happy that you're here. So you can

01:51:25.400 tell people before you go how they can find you on Substack and Twitter and all that kind

01:51:30.360 of stuff. Yeah. Mtracy, M-T-R-A-C-E-Y-X, Substack is mtracy.net. YouTube is mtracy. I don't use that

01:51:39.140 as frequently because I am trying to remain like tethered to the, I'm trying to be like

01:51:42.800 countercultural and remain mostly tethered to the written word, but obviously I don't always

01:51:48.020 follow through on that because I ended up doing 10 million podcasts, but I don't know. I just like

01:51:52.380 the podcast, I almost like if I could snap my fingers and do something, I probably would abolish

01:51:56.580 all podcasts at this point because like it's just a horrible way of consuming information.

01:52:00.120 It's just so tedious and it's like almost worse. Like I've declared recently like an alternative

01:52:07.340 media as a failed experiment because it's just like everything kind of converges into this

01:52:11.620 one like conspiracy brain melted vague ideology that's like kind of cross transpartisan or like

01:52:21.120 it's like almost a left-right synergy. This is where it is because I'm 47 years old and so

01:52:27.700 I've been consuming alternative media for a while and I've been in them all alternative

01:52:33.160 media for my entire career. I mean, I wouldn't have a career. I don't think I would have to

01:52:37.400 be a conformist or something if it weren't for the alternative media, but I can remember

01:52:42.120 the day when we were sort of on the margins looking in like you could criticize the New York

01:52:48.840 Times. You could have an alternative viewpoint to what the mainstream media is saying. But

01:52:54.440 now we're kind of like through the looking glass where it's the reverse. It's like Tim

01:53:00.400 Poole is arguably the mainstream media. Joe Rogan is arguably the mainstream media. And

01:53:05.920 like the New York Times is like looking in on them. And I'm exaggerating, of course, but

01:53:11.720 I think you would agree with my point. I mean, that's how average people are consuming. And I

01:53:17.460 do think that is extremely problematic. Yeah. I don't think people have like updated their

01:53:23.220 media critique. Like as long as I've been in the public arena or in the quote unquote media,

01:53:28.140 however you define that, I've always like been inclined to incorporate media critique to some

01:53:33.460 degree. And in 2026, if like your media critique is limited to just like complaining about the New York

01:53:38.920 Times complaining about MSNBC or CNN, it's just like you're stuck. And I don't know when exactly

01:53:44.820 2010 or something, or maybe earlier. Even like in 2010. Okay. It's like kind of viable, but today

01:53:52.660 it's just like, I don't know your time warp or something. Yeah. And you have to like kind of shift

01:53:58.680 your frame of reference in terms of like, what is deserving of critique, which is why I've been going

01:54:04.320 more after this like brain melted all podcasts, media, it's hard to even really define what it is,

01:54:11.540 but like people kind of tend to know if you talk about it. And it's just like, it's again, it all

01:54:16.060 seems to converge in this one ideology. It's like, again, I guess the generic conspiracy, which is

01:54:21.480 conspiracy conspiracy. Yeah. Like, like Jimmy Dore, who like, I used to go on, not because like I

01:54:26.820 necessarily agreed or I felt that it was just like one of the, one of the people who like I was

01:54:31.120 friendly with and I would go on the show because, you know, I go on lots of different shows across

01:54:34.840 the political spectrum, but like now he's just got like video after video saying, you know,

01:54:39.620 Epstein files prove pizza gate is real. And like, they're going through all the grape soda

01:54:44.040 references and it's just come on. And, but now like he's got the same ideology as Tucker Carlson,

01:54:50.380 essentially, even if they might express it more or less articulately than one another.

01:54:54.200 So it's weird. And yeah, if you're stuck in this like more conventional posture of like what media

01:55:00.860 is deserving of critique, like you're missing how public opinion is actually being shaped.

01:55:05.740 I know I'm keeping you too long, but let me just throw this in as a theory. I remember,

01:55:09.840 I think it was actually Catherine Dees who was talking about this, where there's an almost

01:55:13.800 convergence of memes. Like for instance, you know, the crazy JD Vance meme where he has like a

01:55:20.120 crazy curly hair and he, you know, these weird eyes, it's like a cartoon. The weird thing about

01:55:25.500 that is that there was a convergence between people who hated JD Vance and people who liked

01:55:31.100 JD Vance. They were both using the same convergence and convergence is a natural thing. You know,

01:55:37.060 it's like, there were lots of different types of automobiles, but cultural appropriation and many

01:55:43.180 other organic factors, you know, it's like, you've got a steering wheel right here on the left side of the

01:55:49.040 car. There are four doors in a sedan. There's a natural tint, the smartphone as well. Then that

01:55:54.060 wasn't regulated. Just converge to the iPhone is this is what works. So the convergence is natural

01:55:59.780 and in evolution, but it's almost like the young Turks and Tucker Carlson martyr. Young Turks had 0.63

01:56:08.040 a video saying Lauren Boebert exposes like the cannibals or something. I just saw that video

01:56:13.080 happened to happen. Yeah. Like in the past, you know, 12 hours, it's like, wow. So Jimmy Dore,

01:56:18.100 it like it's all the alternative media, which used to be red and blue or left and right, or it's now

01:56:25.720 kind of converging into some general agreement that the elites are bad and evil and they're doing,

01:56:33.920 they're manipulating us. And there's a kind of populist convergence of the alternative media that

01:56:39.300 almost seems to be like the, you know, it's like the final evolution. Like this is what the

01:56:44.020 alternative media will be. It'll be one thing. I don't think it's just vaguely about antipathy

01:56:48.660 toward elites. I mean, I think you could find definitely manifestations of that well, creating

01:56:53.160 whatever this more recent convergence is. I would argue that to the extent that we can identify any

01:56:59.340 linchpin to this ideology that has engulfed different, you know, quadrants of the political

01:57:05.120 spectrum that we might've seen as like in more of opposition to one another. It really is as

01:57:09.480 disturbing as it is to say, at least to me, the linchpin of that ideology is the following. This is

01:57:13.800 like the dogma that unites them. The world is fundamentally governed by the existence of

01:57:20.280 pedophilic sex trafficking operations that are enforced by blackmail and they're being constantly

01:57:24.840 covered up at the highest levels of government. And that's what dictates how our societies are

01:57:30.780 organized. I mean, I think everybody that we've mentioned so far would agree with that statement

01:57:34.960 to some extent, right? Yes. So there you go. If there's another unifying dogma, then explain it.

01:57:42.500 That's it. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Like what are we doing here? And it's also sort of deeply

01:57:49.360 religious on some way because as liberals will point out and they are sort of non-facifiable,

01:57:56.360 as liberals will point out about it, point out, and they're right, even though I don't endorse the

01:58:01.460 hysteria, there's a sort of anti-Semitic canard layer to it. It seems to rhyme with what peasants 1.00

01:58:09.700 would say about local Jews in their community. Oh, they're boiling Gentile boys into matzo balls and 1.00

01:58:17.060 blood libel, basically. It's not the same and not all those people are anti-Semitic, but there does 0.95

01:58:22.060 seem to be this convergence on like peasant stupidity from the middle age, basically.

01:58:30.220 Yeah. I mean, I guess it's, it's, um, it's been accelerated like as, as the Israel critical right 0.56

01:58:37.840 has gotten more prominent on the internet, then they've had greater grounds to converge with the

01:58:43.300 Israel critical left, right? Then obviously I'm aware that the Israel critical right existed on

01:58:50.200 the internet to some degree, but it was more embryonic and definitely since, you know, 2023,

01:58:55.060 much more widespread. So I think that the convergence around anti-Israel as like a presupposition for

01:59:01.780 people in these spheres, then sort of almost fertilizes this new belief system and the presumed

01:59:11.140 existence of pedophilic sex trafficking operations fits comfortably into that newly fertilized

01:59:16.740 belief system as like a unifying ethos. Exactly. And, you know, non-false, non-falsifiability

01:59:24.740 is a hallmark tenet of any dogma. And that's definitely the case because like there's, there's

01:59:30.820 never going to come a point, no matter how many millions more of Epstein files are potentially

01:59:35.320 produced. And they say that there are like several million more. I don't know how true that is.

01:59:38.160 Some of them could be duplicative. There's never going to come a point where people are going to

01:59:42.160 say, okay, well, you know what? Nevermind. We've now gotten enough Epstein files and they don't

01:59:47.000 contain the evidence that we assume they would. So we're now going to renounce the worldview that

01:59:54.400 we've bizarrely constructed. Right. They're going to say, release the real Epstein files.

01:59:57.760 Yeah. There was, there was always going to be like the explanation for the absence of the

02:00:01.460 evidence that they saw is always going to be the continuation of the coverup.

02:00:04.760 Do you think, sorry to keep you, do you think that some of these politicians, even on the

02:00:10.140 right, are trying to use this against Trump in a sort of sneaky way? Like Nancy Mace,

02:00:17.520 Boebert, MTG, who's openly at war with Trump, Bannon, there's a lot of evidence that he wants

02:00:24.540 to run for president and has for a while.

02:00:27.420 I'm not sure about it.

02:00:28.580 Well, I mean, well, maybe in his dreams, but he is dreaming about it. What do you, is this

02:00:36.220 going to bring down Trump? Is this the end? Or are the, or is, are these sort of like rats

02:00:41.800 chewing at his corpse maybe? Or I don't see Bannon like trudging through the snow to, I don't

02:00:47.160 see Bannon trudging through the snow to go to diners in Des Moines.

02:00:50.900 Well, he just podcasts his way to the one.

02:00:52.740 Yeah, I guess so.

02:00:54.020 Yeah. I mean, on the, that, that's, it's an interesting point. Definitely. So there's

02:00:58.580 on the left or in the, in the democratic party, I mean, Ro Khanna is clearly running

02:01:03.600 for president and he's already rehearsing his stump speech, which is around this need

02:01:09.440 to purge the Epstein class. I actually asked him after one of the survivors press conferences

02:01:15.380 in DC in November. So like I asked him, like when you're calling to purge the Epstein class, 1.00

02:01:20.160 like for that, would that include, for example, Noam Chomsky, like no more laudatory references

02:01:27.020 to Noam Chomsky anywhere because he like emailed Jeffrey Epstein and maybe like attended a

02:01:31.020 confab with him. And he was like, well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like

02:01:34.240 he didn't really have a good prepared answer to that. But in the event, like you could obviously

02:01:39.160 tell, like go listen to his speech on the floor of the house two days ago. It's basically a

02:01:44.160 rehearsal for a presidential summit speech. And he identified this as like a salient issue

02:01:50.380 that he could latch onto early, even though he didn't have the slightest clue about the underlying

02:01:54.420 facts to a degree that was embarrassing. Same with Massey. With Massey, I wouldn't be surprised

02:02:00.660 if there's like a, there might, there might be a draft Massey movement to run for president.

02:02:04.980 Like why not? You know, clearly he identified this as something that would be useful for him

02:02:09.500 in the shorter term because he has to win a Republican primary in Kentucky with Trump opposing

02:02:13.880 him. And he needs a sort of a unique donor base. And so he can get a lot of online donations

02:02:19.800 saying, Hey, I'm the guy who's releasing the Epstein files. And so like, you can imagine 0.71

02:02:25.560 that there'll be an avalanche just based on that alone. It's, it seemed to work in terms

02:02:29.700 of others. Yeah. I mean, I do think I could imagine there will come a time where Republicans

02:02:37.280 have to figure out some way to distinguish themselves from Trump. And this is almost like

02:02:42.620 a no brainer type issue. Cause like, I guess it depends how far they want to go with it.

02:02:46.340 Like I think everybody, they could acknowledge that they could go to a limited extent and

02:02:51.780 say, yeah, of course we agree that Pam Bondi screwed the whole thing up. That would be 0.97

02:02:55.180 like step one on the ladder, but they could go a few steps up further saying, you know

02:03:00.400 what, like all those photos and videos of Trump and Epstein partying together. Like maybe we

02:03:05.360 should have took that more seriously in terms of whether the administration was actually

02:03:09.120 going to allow for transparency. And, you know, we were kind of offended when he kept calling

02:03:13.380 it a hoax because, you know, that seems to be insulting to the victims. And then you

02:03:18.180 could go even further and say all those redactions for sure have to mean that there are even more

02:03:24.020 pedophilic perpetrators who have been shielded from accountability. You know, can you see like

02:03:28.000 different versions of that argument potentially being made depending on like what their, the

02:03:33.220 politician is within the Republican.

02:03:35.100 Real MAGA. You know, once we've gotten rid of Epstein and all of those people, real MAGA

02:03:41.060 will be possible.

02:03:42.280 I don't know how Bannon is going to make an argument though. Cause like Epstein was like

02:03:46.460 his best friend at one point. So like, what, what is Bannon himself going to say? MTG.

02:03:51.660 Sure.

02:03:52.280 Yeah.

02:03:52.780 I mean, she's just so dumb. It's unbelievable. Like, I don't know if you saw this, but she 0.99

02:03:56.880 was like, Oh my God, guys, because she's, she latches onto every little tidbit to, I guess,

02:04:01.960 vindicate her efforts to get the files released and like justify her break from Trump, which

02:04:08.940 I admit like a year ago, if you had told me that MTG and Trump would be enemies, I would

02:04:12.360 have found that impossible to believe, but it happened.

02:04:16.760 So she was, to her credit, she sort of calmed down a lot in a way. She like, she was so shrill

02:04:23.340 and aggressive and aggressively stupid. She became, she's still aggressively stupid, but 1.00

02:04:28.500 I know she's still aggressively stupid. It's just not as like, she's not like saying the

02:04:34.600 Democrats are all traitors. Like she's not like shrill in that way, but she's still the

02:04:38.360 same level of stupid. I would argue because she puts like, for example, I just have like

02:04:42.400 somebody sent me just one of her tweets. Cause like, I don't really go out looking for

02:04:46.040 them, but from like a week or two ago where she says, well, my God, it turns out like everybody

02:04:50.800 should be so thankful for me getting the Epstein files released. Cause now we found out that

02:04:55.600 Epstein mysteriously won the lottery in 2008. Did you see this? Um, which is, it's supposed

02:05:01.480 to be, I guess the, the implication is supposed to be that like, it was like some kind of money

02:05:05.680 laundering scheme. Did he say I won the lottery? No, no, no. Clearly it's a metaphor. It's made

02:05:11.520 up like it's, um, it's the idea that so in 2008, there was an entity called the Zorro trust

02:05:18.380 in Oklahoma that was set up by an anonymous winner of the lottery in Oklahoma. And you can collect

02:05:24.420 your winnings anonymously in some States, including Oklahoma. So like an entity was set

02:05:27.780 up to receive the winnings. It was called Zorro trust. And this like activist, anti-trafficking

02:05:34.760 activist slash like quasi journalist was aware of this in like 2009 and like sent a tip to

02:05:40.260 it, to the feds. And of course it came out in the Epstein files. And so like MTG just

02:05:44.420 tasted like a total face value that, okay, this must show. Cause like somebody received an

02:05:47.920 email stating this, that Epstein himself won the lottery mysteriously while he was supposed

02:05:53.000 to be in prison. So this was like July of 2008. So shortly after he had reported to prison.

02:05:58.460 Right. So like, okay, I don't know what this is supposed to prove about like some wrinkle

02:06:01.980 of the conspiracy. Right. But like, it's just like totally not true at all. Like she doesn't

02:06:05.600 take two seconds, nor would she care to ascertain whether it's true. So just like pump it out

02:06:11.860 there, but people believe it. And like, she's like one of the most popular political commentary

02:06:15.620 accounts. So I think it's good for her, but yeah, but that's interesting in terms of how

02:06:19.020 this will be, I'm sure I would love to hear JD Vance have to speak about this at length

02:06:23.080 for some point. Like if you'll have, if you notice, we haven't seen one of his like casual

02:06:27.420 long form podcast appearances recently, which used to be his like Ballywick.

02:06:32.260 I don't, I think it's going to, I said, Joe Rogan today. So here's like how you can tell

02:06:37.980 like these prospective Republican presidential candidates should watch Joe Rogan today. Cause

02:06:41.500 he was like, otherwise, like otherwise, you know, he's kind of like a instinctively Trump

02:06:45.620 guy, I guess you could say in a sense. He's like exasperated, you know, the Trump, you

02:06:49.060 know, the administration's really fucking this up. It's making them horrible. This

02:06:52.500 is like, enough is enough. Like what more do we have to see? Something went on here,

02:06:56.900 et cetera. Like he doesn't know what he's talking about, obviously. It's just like a, like a

02:06:59.740 handful of like slop data points that Jamie is sending him. But, uh, you know, whatever

02:07:06.040 sentiment he's expressing there is something that the Republican candidates will want to comport

02:07:09.500 themselves with or channel or whatever. But yeah, I would love to see JD Vance have

02:07:13.620 to the only way I think he won't receive or be brought down by it is if he somehow separates

02:07:23.340 himself from Trump via the Epstein files, because he's not in them. I mean, he had no

02:07:29.540 association. So he's got his own dark associations with Teal. And he was associated with Teal and

02:07:35.080 he was associated with Epstein. So he's only one step removed. I guess it's one step removed.

02:07:38.780 Although, you know, I'm in the Epstein files, but so am I. Yeah. I was proud in a way, but

02:07:44.620 he did mention me. Jeffrey Epstein did. Okay. I'll have to search. I didn't think to search

02:07:50.820 your name, but I will. Yeah. It's like people were saying Michael Tracy's in the Epstein files

02:07:54.220 because if you search Michael Tracy, there's like two FBI communications department news roundups

02:07:59.180 where they just like summarize two of my articles on completely unrelated subjects. Yeah. Like,

02:08:04.860 I guess that means I'm technically in the Epstein files because like there are responsive search

02:08:08.000 results. Yes. Um, it was involving JF. Uh, it's not, I'm sort of joking when I'm saying I'm proud

02:08:15.320 of it. It's not a huge athlete, but what was I saying? He's not directly in the Epstein files.

02:08:21.640 JD Vance said is. So I think he would really need to separate himself from Trump in quasi denounce

02:08:29.060 Trump. But I just don't think that's something he could do because he is constantly, he's like a

02:08:36.520 human barnacle or, or, you know, he's, you know, he saddles himself onto other horses and rides them

02:08:43.700 off into the sunset. Like he would not exist without Teal, without Trump with, you know, it's without the

02:08:51.700 liberal media loving him back in 2016. So he needs something else beside JD Vance to get anywhere. And I

02:08:59.820 just, I don't think he can do it. I think, I think it's sort of over for him actually over for, for, for

02:09:06.120 Vance. I do think it's over. I think this is I'm again, I don't, as I've made manifestly clear, I don't

02:09:13.420 believe the narrative of Jeffrey Epstein, but I also don't think this is going to go away. And I

02:09:21.600 don't, I sadly don't think you're going to succeed. People have been saying to me for months, I mean, this

02:09:26.340 is going to go away. I mean, just tell them, just wait. Then boom, birthday book, boom, House Oversight

02:09:34.120 Committee record, boom, Peter Manilson, boom, Prince Andrew. Really? It's going to go away? Keir Starmer

02:09:41.320 and Prince Charles are saying their brothers should be like shipped off to the United States to be hauled

02:09:46.300 before Congress. Gee, I can't imagine that getting any press attention. So when people think it's going to go

02:09:51.500 away, I just don't see it. Yeah. I don't know. I have a, I have just like an inkling

02:09:56.340 that JD Vance is at least clever enough that he might be able to conjure up some way to thread

02:10:02.240 the needle here that I can't fully conceive right now, but it would be like, it would be

02:10:10.580 from the standpoint of, okay, well, yeah, we he'll do a version of what he did at the turning

02:10:14.440 point USA thing in December, where it's like him is this like guardian of the, of coalitional

02:10:19.100 unity. Look guys, like we can disagree. We, and we could still be blah, blah, blah, blah.

02:10:25.480 We can be, you know, Satanists. Let's not give it to the left.

02:10:28.840 Satanists, but we're all Republicans. Yeah, but right. Exactly. We'll have to say like,

02:10:33.540 look, we can just agree to disagree about rampant pedophilia networks, but like, let's all remember

02:10:39.400 what really matters, which is opposing the left, something like that. Obviously that's a comical

02:10:43.860 way of putting it, but like, we'll have to summon up some variation of that argument. Yeah. So.

02:10:50.660 All right. I'm going to head out now. Yeah. Thank you for staying over time. And thank you for being

02:10:55.660 here. You want to do cash Carter zone. Oh, guys yourself. All right. All right. There we go.

02:11:02.920 Take care. Thank you, Michael. And I'll, I'll talk to you soon. Thanks a lot for being on here.

RadixJournal - February 13, 2026

Debunking the Epstein Mythology

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