Jeffrey Epstein’s mythology—from Whitney Webb’s debunked claims (like Alfredo Rodriguez’s death in prison or CIA-Grateful Dead ties) to the DOJ’s 2020 report dismissing intelligence links—exposes media and political collusion. Over 1,000 alleged victims lack verification, while figures like Noam Chomsky face baseless backlash for pragmatic advice. The "ball statue" panic and lottery misrepresentations (e.g., Marjorie Taylor Greene’s false assertions) reveal how unchecked files fuel cross-ideological hysteria, distracting from real issues like immigration or U.S.-Israel relations. Epstein’s role was networking, not conspiracy, yet his story now unites fringe factions under a weaponized, evidence-light narrative. [Automatically generated summary]
Unfortunately, we're talking about Jeffrey Epstein, but I think there's a lot.
There's nothing else to talk about at the moment.
But I would like to talk to you about other things regarding the world.
And hopefully we can do that later.
But I do want to talk about this now.
And I guess let me say this.
I have really altered my perspective on Jeffrey Epstein over the past nine months.
I was never obsessed with it.
And I do have an allergy to they're turning young girls into beef jerky and eating them.
And there's aliens.
And I've always had an allergy to that.
But I basically did assume that Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and a sex trafficker and that he was effectively blackmailing leaders and influencers by, you know, the godfather part two style.
You know, I've got this photo of you with a dead prostitute.
And if you don't vote this way, I'm going to leak it to the press.
I did basically assume those things.
And when I learned some more about Jeffrey Epstein, it was all insinuation and speculation, but it seemed to feed into that.
And it's really been your work and deep left that has changed my mind on this subject pretty dramatically.
So I'm very glad that you're here.
Maybe this audience will be in a way not hostile enough for you because you're used to sparring with people, will be agreeing with you too much, but I have radically changed my mind.
So and I would like to hear about your own journey to pushing back on the mainstream narrative and really pushing back on MAGA's narrative and so on.
But so let's start there, actually.
Yeah, okay.
That's a sufficient prompt, I think.
First of all, I wish that more people who virulently disagreed with me would engage with me on a format like this.
I've been begging and pleading for some of the most prominent people in what they like to call the Epstein space.
That's Daryl Cooper's bizarre term.
I don't know who founded the Epstein space or like where we can go to enjoy the physical space.
I guess it's a digital space, but it's like people who think that they're these vaunted researchers who definitely have informed the online perception or the social media perception of the nature of the Jeffrey Epstein case.
And then what's interesting about this story is that to the degree that there is a mainstream apprehension of Jeffrey Epstein as embody, I don't know, by CNN or MSNBC, it fits very neatly with the edgy alt podcast sphere in a manner that I can't really think of a parallel with for any other issue, which is interesting unto itself, just in terms of the cross-ideological,
cross-dispositional convergence on this one particular subject that makes it so enduring and makes it so salient.
I have found that a lot of people I've spoken to tell a story that's similar to yours in that they just kind of vaguely absorbed a lot of the ambient assumptions around Epstein, because although they maybe found it peripherally interesting and I'm sure like read an article or two here or there or watched a video now and then they never did like a forensic examination of the underlying evidence.
They just sort of accepted at face value a lot of the, I would now say, folklore or mythology that proliferated that was spawned really by a like a motley crew of mentally ill people, you know, hucksters who know how to game the algorithm on social media, credulous promoters of quote unquote victims who think that their sole journalistic role, if they even consider themselves a journalist,
is to just amplify the claims of purported victims as though they're just this beleaguered victims of this like historic atrocity.
And we're not supposed to know that by and large, they're multi-millionaires who received enormous tax-free settlements up to $5 million each from just three funds.
Bizarre Super Bowl Trafficking Claims00:02:38
And they can go from one fund to the next.
And they are showered with just the most mindless adulation wherever they go, whether it's Congress, whether it's the podcast circuit, whether it's the more mainstream media.
They get these activist sinecures now, trafficking awareness organizations.
I had always, I had been gradually developing a critique of the whole notion of trafficking for some time now because something about it just didn't sit right with me.
Not that I want any children trafficked to be people, so you don't even have to go there, but because it's so amorphous a concept as I gradually became to came to ascertain that whenever you see like a big trafficking story of some sort that becomes a news item, to me, there are always grounds, there always ended up being like extreme grounds for skepticism as to the veracity of what was being claimed or like what the first blush impression was.
So I don't know if you recall this, but in early 2019, the Patriots had just won the Super Bowl, right?
And lo and behold, Robert Kraft gets busted.
What we were told was a human trafficking investigation because he went to a massage parlor in Jupiter, Florida.
And according to the police who did this ridiculous thing at the time, he was found to have been involved in some kind of trafficking operation or he was exploiting trafficked traffic trafficking victims.
And everybody, I recall at the time, everybody just had a total face value, like even like left liberal people who otherwise would be skeptics of over incarceration or excess credulity toward the cops.
When it comes to trafficking, they're 100% just willing to regurgitate whatever some law enforcement entity says.
And it was almost like a weird partisan polarized reaction because Robert Kraft was seen to be a Trump supporter.
You know, Tom Brady, I guess, supported Trump at one point.
They just won the Super Bowl.
So bizarrely, like people's views on whether it was good for the Patriots to have won the Super Bowl got grafted onto whether they thought this Robert Kraft arrest was legitimate.
And it was just so stupid.
But like, of course, eventually information came out showing that the cops just behaved in the most preposterous way.
They like faked, they faked some kind of emergency that the, so the alarm in the place would sound and everybody evacuated and they snuck in and like installed surveillance cameras or something so they could catch Robert Kraft, you know, getting a quote massage.
I mean, the guy's wife had died.
The woman was not some like hapless trafficking victim.
Outrageous Claims00:03:09
She was an adult woman, I think in her 40s or something.
It was just outrageous.
So it was a really place, which is sort of embarrassing, but the idea that there is a victim of this quote crime stretches credulity.
Even Andrew Tate, like who I really dislike on the merits for a whole host of reasons, when he got arrested or when he was detained in Romania for trafficking offenses and indicted in Romania, the basically direction of the United States, where there was pressure brought to bear on the Romanian law enforcement apparatus to go after this Andrew Tate guy, because he was getting too popular on Instagram and making all the young boys of America raging misovageness or something.
Even that, like, I'm sorry, I was, I think it's good practice to disentangle one's pre-existing views towards someone from whether the charges that he's being accused that are being brought against him or the offenses he's been accused of committing are like legitimate.
Now, is it is that is what I know of his lifestyle something that I would ethically endorse?
No.
But there was weird stuff with that series of events in terms of the incentive for Romania, among other countries, to comport themselves with the State Department's requirements for adequate enforcement of anti-trafficking laws in certain like countries that are in the U.S. sphere of influence,
because that will make them eligible for additional grants or largesse or that and that will affect their status in terms of the state department's rankings for like democratic governance.
And anyway, just so those are two examples of my sort of longstanding and growing skepticism of the concepts of trafficking.
So you couple that with my also longstanding and growing wariness of the Epstein issue, which did not come to fully to bear until this past July, but had been simmering for quite some time.
Like when the Maxwell trial was underway from November to December of 2021, I was covering other stuff at the time.
So I didn't have the bandwidth to like do the deepest of all dives.
You couldn't get the transcripts in real time.
I couldn't go.
I didn't go physically to the courthouse in Manhattan and watch the trial, although in hindsight, I probably should have.
But something about it just never sat right with me.
And I, you know, I have private conversations about it, but I don't like to just bloviate in public with like overly confident views on things unless I've taken the time to actually do the requisite study.
But something that just didn't seem right to me in terms of the evidence that was marshalled and the various claims that were being made.
I'll admit that when Epstein died in August of 2010, I, like pretty much everybody else, was just sort of instinctively skeptical about it because he was probably the highest profile prison inmate in the United States at the time, and yet he ends up dead.
So my intuition was aligned with virtually everybody else's.
But prior to that, the first time I ever really heard about anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein was 2011.
Virginia Roberts Recantation00:02:44
I don't know if you happen to recall this, but this is when the Daily Mail first published that photo of Prince Andrew with Virginia Roberts Guffray after paying Virginia Roberts Guffray $160,000 plus serialization revenue for doing an interview with this journalist, Sharon Churcher, who coordinated with this plaintiff's attorney, Bradley Edwards, who's still a central figure now to locate this one particular Epstein victim.
They located her in Australia.
Churcher goes to Australia.
They do a bunch of interviews with her.
And then this series of tabloid-style articles comes out about Virginia Roberts Guffray and her association with Prince Andrew.
Interestingly enough, in that initial series of articles, it is asserted that there's no allegation of any sexual contact between Virginia Roberts Guffray and Prince Andrew, just that it's notable that this guy who's been accused of stuff in the past, Epstein, associated apparently with this younger girl woman, and then she allegedly encountered Prince Andrew.
But then as the years went by, the allegations got more and more extreme.
And that's continuing as we speak, where now people are obsessed with like cannibalism and sulfuric acid in which like dead, I guess, babies were incinerated.
Like, who knows what people are even claiming anymore.
Joe Rogan, I mean, people know how to really drive me crazy because they'll send me stuff and that I wouldn't otherwise like bother to see on my own volition.
But like I forced myself to sit through this like 12 minute Joe Rogan clip earlier tonight.
And he's just like repeating.
Canard after Canard.
That just gets fed to him at the top of his social media slop heap and just repeating it for a mass audience as though it's true and confirmed and corroborated, he's saying, well, thousands of child rapes have been confirmed anyway.
I'm going to get sidetracked, but just in terms of my own trajectory right, I guess it uh sort of reached a new phase of my wariness when, in late 2022, it came out that Virginia Roberts Gouffrey recanted her allegations of child sex trafficking and or rape against Alan Dershowitz, which had been one of the marquee claims throughout of the entire Episteme saga.
And yet I I noticed that every time, like something that would occasionally come up, some new development like unsealing of court records or just some like incremental production of new information that somehow involved Virginia Roberts Gouffrey, she would still be reported on with like utmost credulity.
And I would just ask myself and eventually started asking, you know, in public, wait a second, this person just recanted the claims that she had made against Alan Dershowitz.
Dispelling Weasel Words00:06:58
Like shouldn't that influence our perception of this Epstein story in some way, or are we just like ignoring it?
And actually, it was far, far worse than I even surmised at the time.
That was before I had done my deepest of all possible dives.
I hadn't realized circa 2022, 2023, when I would occasionally discuss this, that not only had she accused Dershowitz, which I had been long aware of, but she actually accused him under oath in depositions and sworn affidavits and granularly described each individual in alleged instance of sexual victimization.
Thank you.
of which she claimed there were at least six or seven in the most graphic, lurid detail.
And then, eight years later, like after she's, spewed this defamatory bile on him and he always vehemently had maintained his innocence but was mocked by people who didn't like him for other reasons and of course, I have issues with Dershowitz around Israel and so forth, but at the same time, i've agree with him on certain civil liberties issues.
So it's show mixed like with most people in life.
He was as vindicated as anybody could possibly ever be like.
He never even sought a financial settlement as remuneration for these false charges being leveled at him for so long.
He all he wanted was a recognition that they were false and put into the public record, and he obtained that.
And so then you know, if you can cash your mind back to last may Kash Patel goes on.
Joe Rogan, I don't know what genius in the FBI communications department thought that was a good idea because they decided that was a Great time for Kash Patel to let everybody know that Jeffrey Epstein actually did kill himself, as though like Joe Rogan would be and his audience would be like receptive to that message.
But it caused this whole firestorm, right?
So I was sort of like, I'm a little bit more agnostic about the circumstances of the death as opposed to the other dimensions of all this, but it was just an indication to me that like something was coming to a head on this story.
So then the turning point is July 6, 2025.
That's when Axios posts a sort of a leaked version of a forthcoming FBI and DOJ memo, which I'm sure you recall basically dispels every plank of the common Epstein mythology.
So it says no client list, no predicate to charge any additional third-party individuals.
No blackmail operation.
They issued a sex ring.
They weren't going to prosecute it because there's not enough evidence.
So there's no evidence.
Yeah, no blackmail, et cetera.
And then, so I read this.
At first, I just, you know, my initial reaction was, okay, this is funny, just in the sense that this is like the diametric opposite of what hardcore online MAGA would have wanted.
So that was almost like funny Schudenfreud for a while.
Freud, how do you pronounce that?
Sometimes, okay, I know you're more cultured on me.
Sometimes there's like a word, which I'll just mostly have only ever read, but now enunciated, and I humiliate myself when I try to say it live.
But I noticed that like virtually like 99.9%, probably maybe even 100% of the reaction to this memo online was like unanimous in the unswerving belief that it must be a continuation of a cover-up.
It must be all lies.
And believe me, I'm not inclined to like just believe the FBI.
But to me, what I read in that memo was at least consonant with what I knew of the underlying evidence, with the exception of a few weasel word assertions that were thrown in, I think, as a political tactic or a political ploy to shield the Trump administration from some of the political blowback that they knew would be inevitable when they put out this memo.
So despite dispelling all the common mythology, they also introduced this new claim that Jeffrey Epstein was found to have harmed over 1,000 victims.
And if I had to assume that whoever was involved in drafting this memo, like thought about the word choice pretty carefully.
And if they were asserting, if they meant to assert that over 1,000 underage females were sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, presumably they would have said that, but they didn't.
They said harm, which is not like a legal term.
It's extremely vague.
What are we talking about?
Psychic harm?
Are we talking about just self-declared harm?
Like it was, to me, it was deliberate weasel wordage.
So they could say, look, despite us dispelling all this mythology, we still want to underscore our revulsion to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.
But it ended up being the worst of all of both worlds.
Because on its face, that claim didn't make sense if they're going to say that there was this extraordinary number of victims, but there was no larger trafficking operation or nobody else was involved.
Right.
So then it produced this enormous frenzy.
And, you know, fast forward since this new production as of January 30th, I found that I did an article this week that this over 1,000 victims number, which has been repeated ad nauseum since last July by politicians across the political spectrum, by the media.
I mean, I just a handful of examples I came up with just to establish that point was, you know, I have a clip that I had already saved and commented on.
Speaker Mike Johnson cited this over the summer saying, look, of course this is horrible.
Ghillain should be in jail for the rest of her life because of over a thousand victims.
It's just something that I guess it's just one little bit of government propaganda that everybody feels that they can just mindlessly regurgitate without an issue.
And it's being stated over and over this week: Democrats and Republicans.
And it was just fake.
I mean, we now know the genesis of that claim.
In an internal FBI communication, they actually give the precise number.
It's like 1,117 or something like that.
And it turns out it's alleged victims, which, you know, I think that qualifier is pretty necessary.
Another issue with all this is for some reason, everybody agreed that we can just jettison any need to qualify our ascription of victimhood with alleged or purported or claimed.
Like, we're talking about just self-declared victims who have never had their claims subjected to any investigation really at all, or, you know, just bare minimum corroborative inquiry.
They were victims of an age gap sexual relationship, I think.
Yeah, a lot of them.
So a lot of, I don't know what the subset within that 1,100 something number is in terms of adult persons who were adults at the time of their claimed victimization.
I would say, based on everything that I've been able to glean, it would be a significant majority of the overall alleged victims would be adults at the time of their claimed victimization, even though this is supposed to be a massive pedophilia crisis.
But even just that number that the FBI admits in this, in their internal memoranda, that figure includes both alleged victims and the alleged victim's family members.
And which family members are included there?
Who knows?
Is it like uncles and second cousins and stuff?
Did Jeffrey Repstein go around raping every victim's father?
Adult Victims Misrepresented00:14:54
It's just like absurd.
So that was just like one example of like the clear propaganda that was seeming to proliferate at the time.
And yet, and like the alternate media and the mainstream media were united in their just like myopic obsession with this one slant on everything.
So at that time, like I ended up getting, I ended up feeling compelled to like almost do, almost start from scratch on the Jeffrey Epstein story.
Like not just ambiently absorb anything, not just assume any premise, go to the voluminous primary source documentary record.
I mean, it's amazing what it was, how much was already out in the public domain even prior to this round of DOJ records releases.
But, and like one after the next, when I started doing this, I was just continuously staggered at how utterly baseless the common mythology really was.
So this, you know, the infamous Alex Acosta quote, he belonged to intelligence.
And that's why I gave Epstein a sweetheart deal.
You must be familiar with this.
Yes.
This is what spawned the entire basically online obsession with Epstein being an intelligence asset of some kind who must have been running some kind of honeypot operation, probably at the behest of Israel or like some combination of intelligence services.
And Whitney Webb, who's like somehow like touted as this like oracular savant, Joe Rogan just today was saying like she's the great, she's the most, she's like the definitive journalist of our era.
She says like everybody was battering me to read her supposedly authoritative book, One Nation Under Blackmail, which is like no exaggeration, probably the worst book I've ever attempted to slug through.
She writes on the first page, the very first page, that she was inspired to even get involved in this issue in the first place because she came across that quote by Alex, that purported quote by Alex Acosta that he was told he belonged to intelligence and therefore back off.
So what do I do?
Okay, I'm going to look into the provenance of this quote because she didn't even cite this, like the source of the quote.
It's just a mess.
It turns out it's like in one fleeting Daily Beast article from July of 2019 by this like former tabloid trash journalist, Vicki Ward.
She buries the lead in the classic journalistic parlance where it's not even like in the headline.
You would think if like she actually got this bombshell scoop, it would be like headline, Epstein belonged to intelligence, says former Trump administration official.
And so it's like four paragraphs down.
It's like quadruple hearsay.
And Once I started to think about it, I immediately suspected that it was Steve Bannon, who was the former Trump administration official she was attributing this to, as some as having been told to her by this former Trump administration official two or three years prior.
And sure enough, like I read this book by Michael Wolf about largely about Jeffrey Epstein.
There's like some chapters about Jeffrey Epstein because Wolf apparently was the one who connected Bannon and Epstein in the first place.
And Bannon directly is quoted in this book as saying a quote that's almost identical to the one that Vicki Ward reproduces in her article.
Vicki Ward, I found out, was during the time period when she says in this article, she was told this quote about what Acosta had reportedly said in a Trump transition meeting after winning the 2016 election.
She was at that time collaborating with Bannon on a book about the Kushners because Jared Kushner was Bannon's rival in the first Trump administration.
So it was a book basically trashing Jared and Charles Kushner.
So a lot of stuff sort of aligned that very likely made this, made it seem likely that this was Bannon.
And of course, like Bannon loves to gap that, you know, he's like the gabber in chief.
He loves to just speculate and blah, blah, blah, blah, gossip, according to me at one point, I haven't heard from him recently.
He seems not, he seems pretty tight-lipped about his Jeffrey Epstein connections at this point because so much has come out showing like the actually astounding closeness of their relationship.
Like they really seem to love each other.
It's almost inspiring, like for platonic male friendships.
Like it's like Jeffrey Epstein was the cure to the male loneliness epidemic.
And then, you know, sure enough, so Alex Acosta.
And so like none of these Epstein researchers, okay, Daryl Cooper, Whitney Webb, you know, Mike Benz, who else, you know, fill in the blank.
None of them ever bothered to, you know, they're supposed to be this vaunted researchers, but like for Daryl Cooper and people, they, what they do really, what they, they don't really do any legitimate research except on Pizzagate.
Daryl Cooper actually did deep research on Pizzagate, but in terms of the Jeffrey Epstein story, he goes on Tucker Carlson.
Everybody's badgering me to listen to this three-hour podcast.
It's like, I'll fake, and I'm like resisting because I don't want to vegetate in front of a three-hour Tucker Carlson, like emergency Epstein podcast with Daryl Cooper, if I don't have to.
But like eventually I give in and listen to it just like amazing, amazing.
One after the other, like almost everything that comes out of his mouth that he asserts with this like smug factual certitude is just wrong.
Like if you actually do legitimate research and yet this is going out to a mass audience, but like none of it, neither him nor Whitney Web, like Whitney Webb.
So this is one of the most amazing little fact ways.
Okay.
So anybody who wants to like be legitimately conversant on the Jeffrey Epstein story would have read by now a 2020 report that was produced by the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility.
It's 320 pages.
I know it's boring.
I know you'd rather like watch a, I don't know, a short form video on some like random, you know, exciting speculative theory.
But like if you actually want to know the hard information on like a primary source basis, you would read this report.
And I read it and I looked at it and there's like a footnote and saying that like Acosta was asked under oath, under penalty of perjury, did you Any knowledge, like they asked him about this quote, essentially, that was reported in the media.
And they asked him, Did you have any knowledge that Jeffrey Epstein belonged to intelligence?
He's like, Absolutely not.
And actually, in September of 2025, he testified yet again to the House Oversight Committee and, of course, is asked about this quote again and repeats it again.
And actually, in that hearing, he is told, I'm not sure by who.
It's a little odd, but like one of the staffers, I don't know if it was the Republican staff or the Democratic staffer, they tell him as though they know this for a fact that it was in fact Steve Bannon, who was the source of the quote for Vicki Ward.
So, like, this is just like layer of layer of like just bullshit that gave rise to this whole proliferation of a mythology and like a cottage industry around Jeffrey Epstein, which is why you just existing in this online space would have just kind of you know ambiently absorbed this these premises.
And I don't know if I absorbed them like quite as willingly as you might have, but I was sort of like that's sort of the that's definitely the sea I was swimming in.
But like as I got more into it and like every thread you pull, more of the edifice collapses.
And I was like, wait, this is actually unbelievable.
This is actually the great more, this is like the great moral panic and mass hysteria, like just like fictional narrative of our times.
And nobody is looking into it with any like forensic intensity.
So do you think it was the confluence of a number of different factors that you've mentioned?
First off, there really is a me too quality to this because these are victims who are adult women.
These are victims who brought other women to Jeffrey Epstein.
These are victims who, in some cases, wanted Jeffrey Epstein to be their lover or husband or business partner or so on.
But they were kind of victims of being dumped or used, exploited, at least in their mind, of being undervalued.
They want a sort of revenge.
There is that quality to it.
The other quality to it that I think is, or to the coverage of it and the creation of a mythos, is something that you've mentioned, which is that so much of the alternative media use conspiracy theories as a way of understanding reality.
It's their epistemology.
Conspiracy epistemology, exactly.
Yeah.
Where I don't know if I don't know if I coined that or not, but I've been using that term as well.
Yes, where I mean, I remember Joe Rogan years ago, and that podcast was sort of fun to like listen to someone talk about UFOs or whatever.
Like, I, I, but the second the alternative media that he was part of replaces the mainstream media, you are just not amusing me anymore.
You're lost.
Yes.
And he's talking about serious issues.
And I saw a clip before I went on where he was.
And he's a political power broker.
Yeah.
He's the number one endorsement that was jockey for in the 2024 election.
Yes.
And he makes Theo, I mean, well, in comparison to Theo Vaughan, um, he becomes Aristotle or something.
I mean, there's even worse than Rogan out there, if we're honest.
I mean, it's a very bad situation.
So you have that where that's how they understand reality.
What do we, no one, there's nothing better for getting clicks than a good conspiracy theory.
There's also the kind of oracular figures like Whitney Webb, where I've, I was listening to some of her things, and she, it's called Gish Gallup.
I think people have used that term of just throwing spaghetti.
Yeah, just like rapid fire.
Like you can hardly, yeah.
I mean, so when you can't address anything because the second you are skeptical about one thing, she's moved on to 10 others.
It's just a blowtorch and this authoritative.
I remember listening to about a 20-minute thing about how, you know, the world, it's only going to get worse.
First, there was Epstein blackmailing everyone.
Now we have Palantir.
So, like, Palantir is going to be generating sex tapes of you and forcing you to, I don't know, accept fiat currency or whatever she's doing.
I think she is kind of a libertarian that's or get vaccinated or whatever.
And it's just, it's ultimately madness.
I was thinking after listening to 15 minutes of Whitney Webb, I'm a smart guy, you know, more or less.
I was like, I don't even know what she's talking about.
Exactly.
Whitney Webb.
So I'll give you an example, right?
So people over the summer, especially, were bombarded.
Like they were accusing me of being too cowardly to engage with the work of Whitney Webb.
Because if I did, I would come away humiliated and like groveling and grovel an apology for how very wrong I was.
And so I say, okay, fine, I'll do it.
I'll engage with the work of Whitney Webb.
That's what you guys want me to do.
And it's just like, it was comical how just laughable it was if you actually do like a serious examination.
So they're saying, okay, listen to this podcast and then read this book, One Nation Under Blackmail.
And so, okay, the first podcast appearance I listened to, she goes on this whole tangent with Breonna Joy Gray, who I otherwise have been friendly with, is an intelligent person.
Yet on this, I don't know, everybody like just makes they make like a cognitive exception for the Epstein story in ways that I'm still trying to conceptualize why that is the case.
But Whitney Webb goes on this whole sort of introductory sort of everybody watching this podcast like just is in awe of her and thinks that she's this world historic authority on all things Epstein.
So of course they assume everything that she say says must be like so deeply researched and true.
And she goes on this whole, she spins this whole tale about how the former house manager, I mean, we're going to get a little bit in the weeds here, like, but I'm not like going to, I won't get that far, but like she spins this whole tale about the former house manager of Jeffrey Epstein, Alfredo Rodriguez, who's the one who purloined the so-called little black book from his house.
And then the plaintiff's lawyer, Bradley Edwards, ends up cooperating with the FBI, becoming an FBI collaborator to set up a Sting operation so he can get the little black book from Alfredo Rodriguez, who wants $50,000 for it.
So then Alfredo Rodriguez ends up getting put in jail after this scheme was hatched.
He then also ends up getting charged for like a drug, a gun trafficking thing in Miami.
And so Whitney Webb says that she asserts as fact that Alfredo Rodriguez dies in jail, dies in prison.
And she's trying to connect us with this other string of mysterious deaths in prison associated with Epstein because there's this cover-up of everybody being who knows too much being killed.
And she somehow tries to tie this into, she says Alfredo Reguez died in 2015.
And she ties that to Donald Trump launching his first presidential campaign in 2015, with the idea being that in order to clear the way for his ability to run for president and like get rid of all and kill the guy who circled his name in the little black book, which is going to be a huge political liability for him.
Trump has this guy killed in prison.
And that paves the way for him to announce the presidential campaign.
It's just like well, Michael Tracy, did he just be on belief?
It happened after Jeffrey Epstein's death, COVID.
And basically, Epstein had a do not kill me switch where he would launch a global pandemic if they ever dared assassinate him.
And so we, you see, you just look at the timeline.
It's right there.
I mean, Jeffrey Epstein did not.
He might be in Wuhan right now, actually, for all we know.
But yeah, so that's like, this is like, I'm being demanded by these hordes of people who are convinced that Whitney Webb is this like oracular phenomenon.
The first claim I hear from her that she doesn't just have claim, she spins a whole narrative out of it.
It's just like false, like flatly false, made up.
And like, could it been determined to have been false if she ever did any actual legitimate research, which she's always ascribed to have been to have done?
Like this guy, Alfred Rodriguez, did not die in jail.
Like, I, you know, found his Bureau of Prisons records.
And, you know, it was, it was not that difficult to like cross-check.
And she also says, like, so we know if he circled the name in the black, because he purloins the black book and he wants to sell it because he saw he's destitute.
He's this Bolivian house manager.
And he circles like a bunch of names.
And Whitney Webb comes up with a theory that he circled both Donald Trump and Courtney Love.
And that tells you that the CIA-controlled Grateful Dead is somehow involved in the Epstein story because Courtney Love's father was the roadie for the Grateful Dead or like something like this.
It's just like hallucinatory mania.
And this is like who these millions of people are being told are who they need to like sit down and just politely like nod and listen to as they she educates them about the real meaning of the Jeffrey Epstein story.
I was like, there's like a real problem here that needs to be like unspooled somehow.
Well, let me know.
So like whatever next, like I go through like every prominent expert, Daryl Cooper has a hissy fit when I try to engage with them.
Julie K. Brown, who did this supposedly landmarked Miami Herald series in 2018, which you mentioned it was like a Me Too story.
If you go back and look at those articles now, not only was it a Me Too story, it was an anti-Trump peg story.
Anti-Trump Peg Stories00:10:55
Julie K. Brown says she was even motivated to look into Jeffrey Epstein in the first place because she was searching for a big anti-Trump scoop she could possibly find.
And also she read this hoax lawsuit from this like quote unquote Katie Johnson thing.
I don't know if you've ever seen that, but it was a lawsuit that was brought against Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in 2016 by this pseudonym and this Katie Johnson person where she claims that she was raped by gang raped by Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
Oh, she's 13 lawyer Bloom in the Lisa Bloom.
The daughter of Gloria Alrit.
And it turned out to be a total hoax.
Like literally, it was basically a scheme hatched by a Jerry's former Jerry Springer show producer.
It was just a flat out hoax.
And like, look, if actually something did damning come out on Trump that was legitimate, I'd be the first one to say so.
But like, this is just a total hoax.
And but that somehow inspired Julie K. Brown to look into Jeffrey Epstein as an anti-Trump angle.
And then if you look at the first installment of that supposedly landmark series, which was showered with plaudits by every media organization, and like she got every like professional journalism award under the sun for it, it says, you know, the headline is Donald Trump's labor secretary gave sex offender financier the sweetheart deal, something like that.
So, and she credit, and there's almost like a meet, there's like a Me Too little banner on the story.
And like, she credits, she did a podcast with Ross Doubtlitt over the summer.
And she's like, yeah, I credit Me Too for catalyzing the renewed interest in Jeffrey Epstein back in 2018.
And if you look at some of the new files that have been coming out, you can see prosecutors in the Southern District of New York passing around links to that Miami Herald article amongst themselves saying, hey, can we launch a new investigation against Jeffrey Epstein?
And they're like, yeah, but keep it on the down low for a bit.
So, yeah, it was partially a Me Too thing, partially an anti-Trump thing.
Under Biden, it becomes more of like an anti-Democrat thing because the Democrats are covering up pedo sex trafficking rings to insulate their donors and pals, like Bill Gates and Reed Hoppin and whoever from scrutiny.
Elon Musk gets really involved in it at that point in terms of the client list.
This was my intuition for a while, but I spent, I actually spent the time looking into it in greater detail.
The notion of a client list and that terminology exactly had existed for, had existed prior to the Biden administration, but it was pegged to the little black book mostly.
People assume the little black book must be interchangeable with what they would assume to be a client list.
But then Elon Musk introduced this idea that the client list was like a standalone thing, or it was like maybe drawn.
It was just like this, I don't know, new folkloric totem thing that Elon Musk invented.
And then the low IQ right-wing media picks up on it.
And one thing leads to another.
And by late 2023, Kash Patel is on a podcast with Benny Johnson saying, and he's asked about a client list.
And he tells infamously the then FBI director, Christopher Wray, put on your big boy pants and tell us who the pedophiles are.
So that's how like the mimetic evolution of it went from during the Biden administration.
And, but yeah, I mean, the Whitney Webb phenomenon is actually pretty fascinating because, yeah, it's just like rapid fire, just bullshit.
And it's hard to even begin.
I spent like several days in like very deep work just to like refute a couple of the claims.
And she eventually admitted to me that she made a mistake or she like admitted partial error, but she claimed that she was nervous when she was on this podcast.
But then I found like written errors in like the written work that she had done recently.
She's, oh, I have a baby and it's, you know, stressing me out.
And yeah, but like back to myself, like once the, again, once the threads began to unravel one by one, I just couldn't stop because like, again, the edifice was just totally collapsing.
And it was just astounding to me that nobody had bothered to do this kind of investigation before.
And also, one thing I wanted to mention, you said, you know, some of these girls are like, we're like Chasin's lovers or like would-be lovers of Epstein.
I don't think that characterizes every purported victim.
Okay, here's the steel man case for there being actual victims.
Or like, this is the subcategory of alleged victims that I would say have the most justifiable case to claim victimhood.
So of the girls who were recruiting one another in the Palm Beach area from around 2002 to 2005, every now and then there would be a girl who like gets asked by a friend or like a friendly acquaintance, a friend of a friend if they want to go to the rich guy's house, do a massage of some kind, and they'll get two or three hundred dollars.
And some of them actually were, you know, already sort of promiscuous types or they, you know, some of them were like involved in like strip clubs and things, but others just kind of like normal high school girls who were maybe a bit naive and like their friends were going to something they felt comfortable.
And the whole thing wasn't really explained to them, but they get there, right?
And they're weirded out.
Not that Epstein would initiate like an overt sexual encounter with a girl on the first visit.
He actually often didn't.
It would like take a couple of visits before he would get them acclimated or they would acclimate to him that he would initiate more and more.
But of the girls who like didn't really know what they were what to expect, but just kind of go maybe because a friend asked them or something and they end up in like a massage room with this like weird old guy.
And they only go that one time because they're creeped out and never go again.
They're the ones who I could say, I would say, yeah, they might be considered a victim, although they wouldn't be a rape victim or a pedophile victim because like by and large, they wouldn't have been subjected to any actual sexual contact.
It would just have been a weird thing and maybe a little bit of a disconcerting or disturbing thing that, you know, they could like maybe spend a day or two being upset about, but probably would be able to move on if they were like given the right counsel.
But beyond that, there's like mitigating or qualifying factors for virtually every victim that are just chronically ignored.
And even just yesterday, right, Pam Bondi, who was like the bimbo in chief.
So don't take anything I say about her to like be in a defense of her anyway.
Like people were going crazy yesterday.
Like I've been so swamped, I actually still haven't been able to watch that full hearing.
But like the one time that I figured last night after I had done, I, for some reason, agreed to three podcasts in a row.
Tonight, today I said to myself, I'm not going to agree to any.
I end up agreeing to two, of course.
But last night I said, okay, I'm going to look at least, you know, I want to see at least who these alleged victims are, who everybody's going wild about having stood up behind Pam Bondi.
And of course, I'm a maniac.
So I recognize them all just by appearance.
And I just know right away, I happen to know because I've, you know, done the research that none of them were actually, all of them were adults at the time of their claim victimization in the background of this one photo.
I happened to see.
And like one of them, I'm almost certain is just a genuinely mentally ill person who hallucinated her entire purported experience with Epstein and Maxwell and likely never even met them at all in and out of psychiatric facilities for decades, claims that she didn't even realize that she'd been trafficked until 2019 when Epstein died.
And it was about something that occurred in like 1991.
So not even like really the phase of this that everybody assumes thinks about.
There's this other woman, her name is Jess Michaels.
She's always like MSNBC now and like she has this weird consulting firm for like sex, I don't know, consent on college campuses and all this nonsense.
Somebody messaged me that she's going to be speaking at Vanderbilt University in a couple of weeks and they invited me to go attend her little talk because like she's her whole like professional profile now is like Epstein survivor Jess Michaels will tell her story and like give you guidance on how to prevent blah blah blah.
She just like debuted like a she literally they blew her debut her claim in a TED Talk in 2019 or 2020 maybe and you know it's got nothing to do with like the common associations people make between Epstein and like whatever conduct he's like understood to have committed.
It's just like there's these really like aberrational examples, but they were the ones behind Bondi right, and she's like okay, the just the the multitude of journalistic malfeasance around the story is that alone would be enough for me to get really invested in it.
Whether it's the Julie K. Brown stuff.
Whether it's just like the constant conflation of children with adults to foment a pedophilia panic which just like makes people deactivate their critical faculties.
Whether it's the um, the refusal to just interrogate core premises of all this on any level, the casual defamation.
There's just a huge amount of civil liberties issues that nobody else covers.
And so again, speaking to my own personal motive and like reasons for for doing this, like six months ago I was literally the only one that I knew of who was doing anything even in the remotely in this vein.
Like I was literally alone in terms of people who had any kind of remotely countervailing skeptical perspective.
But as the months went by.
I would get like whispers from journalists saying gee, I didn't know, like similar to what you said, I didn't really know any of this, so i'm gonna shift my perspective somewhat.
But I can't say anything really in public, because who wants to deal with the blowback of being called a pedo 10 million times a day and also like, did they did it?
Yeah i've, I noticed the NEW YORK Times.
I was actually listening to their, the NEW YORK Times Daily, like podcast coverage and they actually stated flat out that there is no evidence in these millions of files they're using AI to scan it.
There's no evidence of a pedophile ring and sex trafficking or any more illegal activity outside of circumstantial things that people will inflate beyond all proportion.
But But then hold on, but Richard, like one point on that, because this is the same thing.
I don't think they would have done that.
I'll give you a lot of credit.
I don't think they would have done that if there wasn't someone pushing back.
I mean, I'll give you a lot of credit on that, actually.
There's just that one voice in your head that says this isn't right.
And it makes you pull back a little and not state these outlandish things that are rampant elsewhere.
Yeah, just today, the Wall Street Journal had a column that was basically just based on me, you know, making some of my standard points.
I don't know why they just didn't ask me to write it, but Ross Douthed had done a column that was largely inspired by me as well in September.
So it was gradually seeping into the mainstream.
People from the Washington Post call me just to like educate them on Jeffrey Epstein, basically.
And I've had conversations with more mainstream people, even if they don't necessarily manifest the full skeptical outlook, but like it definitely like shifts their shame of frame of reference somewhat.
But I just wanted to dwell on one thing you just said, because it gets even deeper to like the heart of the fallacy of all this.
So the New York Times, I hadn't seen what you just referenced, but they said there was no like trafficking, whatever.
Government's Reversal on Epstein00:04:03
Yes.
Then why was Jeffrey Epstein federally indicted in July of 2019?
Please go read that indictment, people who are listening, because like, and then compare and contrast what Richard just said and what is made evident by a comprehensive review of these files.
Evidently, I don't have the AI tool.
Maybe I should look into how to get it because the search feature on that thing is so clunky.
Oh, yeah.
But so why was Jeffrey Epstein federally indicted for a child sex trafficking conspiracy in 2019?
Who was trafficked and by whom and to whom if he was the only recipient of the trafficked females?
So shouldn't we maybe look into whether that indictment was rightly brought in the first place?
Or may could it be the case that it was the bizarre product of this confluence of political and social factors whereby there was this popular clamor for Epstein to get reprosecuted.
The government decided, again, in another huge affront to civil liberties that nobody seems to care about, that they were just going to like effectively nullify the non-prosecution agreement that had been brokered with somebody 11 years before, and which he had abided by the terms of, which were pretty onerous, meaning register for life as a sex offender, where you have to navigate the requirements in each individual jurisdiction.
And he had like properties in multiple states and traveling internationally is a nightmare, which he also did much of the time.
Yeah, obviously he got like probably the most permissive possible paradigm for himself, like given his high power legal team.
But even so, it's a huge pain in the ass.
He had agreed to this like novel civil litigation resolution mechanism that like was one of a kind in the history of American criminal law.
Because like a non-prosecution agreement or a Fed, like a Fed, some kind of resolution that's brokered to a criminal offense does not tie into any kind of civil claims, which like have a financial incentive.
But the government, the feds decided that in this one instance, they were going to require a defendant to pay civil claims, like waive his ability to contest civil claims against him.
And also among the government identified victims that had not been adjudicated as such, with the exception of the one girl to whom he pleaded guilty to procuring for prostitution.
And also he would have to pay for their legal fees.
Like you have to pay, like he had to pay a lawyer directly representing people who were suing him, more or less.
So it was just bizarre, but he abided by it.
He served his term of incarceration, which was 13 months.
Everybody says it was a sweetheart deal or was so lenient because he eventually got a work release.
But in this interview with Bannon that had been covered up forever, but we got like at least two hours of it.
I don't know where the other 12 hours is, but he said something I didn't know, which was that for part of his term of incarceration in the Palm Beach County jail, he was in solitary confinement.
So is that a sweetheart deal?
But the government decided, like, they couldn't like litigation had been underway for years to try to formally nullify the non-prosecution agreement from 2008 on like a variety of technical legal grounds involving the Crime Victims Rights Act.
But those efforts failed.
So it was still in effect.
But the government concocted an argument that nonetheless, they could still basically rehash a bunch of the charges from Florida in the early 2000s, indentic a new charge in New York, and then posit some interstate nexus whereby Epstein would have had to use like an instrument of interstate commerce to facilitate this conspiracy.
And nobody knew what the instrument was until eventually Maxwell gets charged in lieu of Epstein.
And they literally claim the interstate commerce nexus was satisfied because the instrument of commerce was the fact that a massage chair was used in Florida and had been originally manufactured in California.
Acquitted Diddy: The Flimsy Case00:03:24
That's how they established a sex trafficking conspiracy.
So I don't know.
It seems a little flimsy to me.
And if now, after millions of files are dumped and the New York Times did an AI search of all of them, and there's really no evidence of like a sex trafficking, like as we would like customarily think of it, then maybe there's even more that really needs to be seriously re-evaluated about this whole thing and we're only scratching the surface.
Absolutely.
Was Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile?
And we mentioned Pam Bondi, who did this grand performance yesterday.
She's really had quite a journey along Epstein way over the past year.
So she wanted to placate the podcast bros who just like, we got to get the files, man.
We got to see what's going on.
Yeah, Libs of Tuk, come on over to the White House and we'll give you this binder.
And then you can wave it around like you just won the conservative activists, basically, who were getting this.
So it was basically about the Democrats or pedophile demon worshipers.
I will never let Jack Sovik live that down.
I don't care.
No, you should not.
But then her story changed a little bit.
And it was in the spring of 2025 where she wasn't fully releasing everything.
And she said, well, you know, the Epstein files are hours of video of Jeffrey Epstein with kids.
It's childborn and so on.
She started to reframe the idea that what it was, and maybe this was to serve Trump's interest to some degree.
What the Epstein files are about is Jeffrey Epstein himself as a child predator.
So on.
So we can't possibly release this stuff.
Then we, you know, we go through this whole political rigmarole to get the files out Out there.
And then now she has to spin it in a new direction.
And she's not really good at doing that.
But that claim was made directly by her that there are hours of footage of Jeffrey Epstein raping children.
This is the leader of the Department of Justice.
This is not a podcast, bro.
I mean, is Jeffrey Epstein himself a pedophile?
Based on everything we know at this point, including new files that have been released that show contemporaneous FBI and DOJ communications during the period at the beginning of the second Trump administration when they're initiating this review of like the investigatory file, where either Pam Bondi was like woefully misinformed, which I wouldn't rule out, or she was actively lying.
Because what she said, and I have to go, I'll go back and actually check the exact quote, but what they say in these internal discussions, like a notice goes out to the Southern District of New York saying, Director Patel, we'd like you to summarize the case file, et cetera, in terms of the videos and images that were obtained from Epstein's devices.
And Maureen Comey, who I know people will hear that name and think, oh, she must be corrupt.
She's the daughter of the former FBI director.
I'm not refuting, I'm not denying that there are issues with Maureen Comey, but I would say that the issues with her are that she brings these spurious trafficking charges because she's like fanatically and ideologically wedded to this idea that like, we have like an epidemic of unpunished trafficking going on and that's what she did against.
Diddy's Escorts Controversy00:10:29
So that's what she did against Epstein Maxwell and Diddy.
Diddy got acquitted.
Maybe we were far enough removed from me too at that point in summer of 2025 that even a jury in Manhattan acquitted Diddy of the trafficking offenses now he was convicted of like a more run-of-the-mill offense and then got a way excessive sentence, even though he had been like acquitted on the bulk of the charges.
So that was but um, that that was a humiliation for Maureen Comey and just gives you maybe a little bit of insight into the speciousness of some of her ideas around, like what constitutes a trafficking offense, like Diddy apparently trafficked his girlfriend of 10 years to him and then didn't actually commit any unlawful sexual acts on buddy.
I mean, it was like just a whole nonsensical construction.
And look, I don't want to defend Diddy either, but don't you think there's some sort of puritanical streak going through me too and a number of these people where.
Look, I don't want to go to a Diddy party.
That sounds really horrible of uh, hiring male prostitutes and gallons of body uh, baby oil to I don't know cuck celebrities girlfriends I I, whatever the hell they.
I think I decline that invite, although maybe I should go, just like as a journalistic endeavor, just so I can know what people mean by trafficking nowadays, and it's disrevolting, and but again, it's like there's this assumption that Diddy was either demonic or it was, you know, child sacrifice was involved, or it was some sort of mafia thing where they're trafficking all these people.
It just doesn't hold up.
The simpler answer to this question is that did he is terrible.
That's just all you need to say.
There's nothing, there's no there there.
There's nothing beyond that.
And it seems to be the same case with Jeffrey Epstein, which is that lo and behold, influential people, power brokers, people who are maybe drunk on their own power, want to hang out with each other, screw some prostitutes or models and et cetera, and hobnob and network.
But there's, if you want to get them on the crime of hiring prostitutes, fine, but there's no eyes wide shut there.
There's no there there.
There's nothing beyond what there's nothing beyond what basically millionaires and thousandaires do on a regular basis, which is get some chicks together, get drunk and chill out with the boys.
They're just doing it on a grander scale with Jeffrey Epstein was vehemently anti-drug and also never drank alcohol.
So that wasn't interesting.
He and Trump, I, you know, more actually he prohibited, he prohibited drugs anywhere around him and he prohibited anybody from like having them or doing them interesting in his presence or on his properties.
And, you know, I think he might have tolerated alcohol at the gatherings, but he never drank.
He was like a health freak.
Yeah.
I don't know that I would call them prostitutes.
For one thing, something that people don't appreciate is that, so like in 2008, when he pleaded guilty to the two state-level offenses in Florida, they were prostitution offenses.
Now it would be a taboo to say that any victim, quote unquote, ever engaged in activity that could be characterized as prostitution.
So everything got morphed into trafficking.
So if you'll notice, if you like look at like the latest, you know, indictments that are brought like across the country, everything that would have been charged as prostitution, if it were charged at all, like 15, 20 years ago, is now charged as some kind of like trafficking conspiracy because that is supposed to reflect an update in the law whereby we no longer treat the victims of some scheme like this as though they're maligned by it or as if they're incriminated in it.
You know, in Massachusetts, you know, I have something that I've been working on that involves this, but in the state of Massachusetts, to give you one example, there was a sting done, a sting operation done by a local police force where they posted ads on some website or app, I think, saying, hey, there's a, you know, 22-year-olds that are hot that are offering up some sort of prostitution services.
X, Y, here are your options, you know, sexually and let us know, text us, and then you'll come meet us at a hotel and we'll do basically this prostitution defense, a prostitution, you know, deal.
They don't call it that in the app, but like that.
And it was a, it was a police decoy operation.
It was a sting operation.
And so guys respond to an ad to go have some kind of sexual contact with who they think to be this hot 22 year old escort or I don't know, sex worker, whatever term you want to use.
And then those guys end up getting charged in Massachusetts as participating in a sex trafficking enterprise.
So they're basically Johns in a traditional sense, as we would conceptualize it.
And because the contours of trafficking have gotten so elastic and the, you know, there was an update to the Massachusetts Criminal Code in 2011 that kind of broadened the criteria for what could be designated a trafficking offense.
People who just like, they literally, they saw an ad that was set up by a police decoy.
They respond to the ad saying, hey, I would like this surface that you're offering us.
And the prosecutors in Massachusetts tried to argue that this was reflective of them like putting the fake woman into like sex trafficking captivity.
It was bizarre.
Thankfully enough, some rationality prevailed when that was appealed up to the courts.
And like, even though they were sympathetic to like the spirit of the law, they actually had to shoot that one down.
But that's what the, that's what the state was trying to argue.
So that just gives you a little bit of insight into like how capacious the parameters are for like what can be construed now as a trafficking offense.
Like think back to, you know, speaking of 2008, right?
When Epstein pleaded guilty to the prostitution charges, Elliot Spitzer had to resign as governor of New York because he was caught having gone to a high-end escort service.
If he were caught doing the same thing, like if the current governor of New York were caught today doing the same exact thing, I can guarantee you they would be accused of committing a trafficking offense or being in a trafficking conspiracy.
So that's a huge factor here that I think has not been anywhere near enough discussed and it empowers the state.
Like I'm not like a hardcore libertarian or anything, but like I'm also just instinctively wary of giving the state the ability to craft these cockamame prosecutorial theories to ensnare whomever and whenever they want for what would otherwise have been like wholly innocuous conduct.
So something else.
Well, I think legalizing sex work would be a major step forward because then you can also really determine what is evil.
I don't doubt that there is some horrible operation involving children and maybe murder, et cetera, and that the feds need to go after them.
And it's real, it's serious, it's an obvious crime.
But if you can legalize sex work, then you can clear out the murkiness in this.
If you're over 18, if you're willing, if you're treated with respect, et cetera, you can engage in this type of behavior.
And so you really can isolate what is genuinely criminal and immoral and evil in these cases.
Another thing I was going to say.
He can't do that now.
And as you said, like Elliot Spitzer, I'm sure, I mean, I don't know this for a fact.
I'm sure he just hired a bunch of ploozies and whatever.
He's not a sex trafficker.
He's not a.
I know exactly what he did.
He would contact this high-end escort service.
They would meet the, you know, the girl in a hotel and they would do what they had to do.
And that was it.
Like, it wasn't really that complicated.
But what the point I was going to make is that why I don't think like the characterization of prostitute is really accurate is I would say that a lot of these, so there's, there are different categories of alleged Epstein victims.
The biggest one is women who were adults at the time of their claim victimization, right?
Typically from 18 to 23 or something like that.
And to call them prostitutes, I don't think would be quite right.
You know, got to remember, like, Epstein was involved in like the modeling industry, you know, by dint of his association with Wexner, who was the owner of Victoria's Secret and so forth.
So that's why you see like clips of like Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein at like some modeling show in the 90s or whatever, because they had mutual interests.
Let's say Trump was the proprietor of like beauty pageants and whatnot.
But like, so except this is one woman, Lisa Phillips, she was behind Bondi yesterday.
She was, I don't think you could call her a prostitute.
What she claims happened is that at age 21, she was a working model.
She was like appearing on magazine covers and so forth.
She seemed pretty successful.
She was doing a photo shoot in the British Virgin Islands.
And then a friend who was at the photo shoot asked her if she wanted to take a ferry to visit her friend Jeffrey's Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
She accepts.
She goes and many years later, somehow discovers that she had in fact been sexually assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein just in time for her to get a payment from JP Morgan, even though in 2020, she was on a modeling theme podcast and said, yeah, this Jeffrey Epstein thing is so wild.
I never saw or heard anything about it at all, but like I, I, you know, I sympathize with the women and you know, it's just ridiculous.
But like she wasn't, whatever exactly happened with her, whatever she confabulated or didn't, it wouldn't be quite correct to say she was a prostitute.
Now, there were others, others who were, I would say it was more like, it was almost like a more of a maybe a sugar daddy type relationship, more so than prostitution, meaning like Epstein would like subsidize girls like live in apartments, pretty nice apartments in like the Upper East Side, pay for like their medical expenses, sometimes their college tuition, et cetera.
And I guess, you know, like the, maybe the implicit or maybe it was explicit arrangement was, okay, if like you're granting your life in Manhattan paid for, and like Jeffrey wants you to come over for a massage occasionally, you go.
So would you call that prostitution?
Jewish Red Herrings Discussed00:15:22
I mean, maybe it's like in the ballpark, but like to me, that doesn't quite capture it.
I understand.
Yes, sugar daddyism, et cetera.
But I guess the upshot is that this kind of behavior is happening right now.
Sure.
It's essential.
It should be legal.
If you wouldn't mind answering a question.
So someone who's listening in, Chad, would you like to ask a question to Michael?
Hey, Richard.
So, I mean, it's more of, it's not a question.
It's more of a statement and adding my own thoughts.
If you want to just keep it to questions, especially it might be a little bit more saint and we can respond.
Okay, so just to add my thoughts, I mean, like, because I agree and like maybe a little bit of pushback and it adds some context.
So I think the upshot in a political context of this Epstein issue, like it's being used in a way that politically, the right, particularly in the Trump era, approaches a lot of issues, which is like adding, like, just focusing on really absurd aspects, true or untrue, to obfuscate or avoid having a more serious discussion.
And like what, and a discussion which might politically and sort of intellectually advance like the wider national political debate.
So it reminds me sort of back in the campaign last year, or I guess two and a half years ago in 2014 or 2024, when the Laura Loomer issue of the Somalis eating the dogs was like a big topic on the right.
And it's Haitians.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
Haitians.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So so, but instead of talking about, you know, maybe having like a more serious discussion at the time of like immigration and demographics, you know, I mean, now, granted, like a lot of discussion has since moved, you know, into this territory as Trump has taken office.
But at the time, it would have been kind of breaking new grounds to have a more serious discussion about, you know, like long-term, like a paradigm shift in immigration policy and in demographics.
It becomes about like eating dogs.
Like it was just an absurd kind of red herring that distracted from like a more serious discussion that could have been had and that eventually didn't go anywhere and didn't really lead to like any policy shift.
And I think, and now you hear this discussion about eating babies like in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
I don't think that, I mean, like if that went on, I mean, like, was that really what the whole Epstein Island was about?
Was it just about people going and eating babies?
No.
There's no evidence that it went on, by the way, just to stop you for a moment.
I mean, this is just hallucinatory nonsense that people take from like decontextualized snippets of emails and then they just project onto it.
And like, amazingly enough, Lauren Bobert, the congresswoman, She went into the no, not only that, she clearly went into the DOJ like physical building to the little portal that they set up for members of Congress to like look at unredacted files, supposedly.
And like she searched specifically for cannibals, for child ritual sacrifice and all this.
Like that was her mission to examine in the Epstein files.
It's just like unbelievable.
Sure.
Chad, let me just add maybe like, let me try to summarize what I think you're getting at, which is that we seem to focus on the red herring in order to articulate something bigger in the sense that, you know, a lot of people who are critical of Israel or don't like what happened in Gaza, they'll talk about Epstein being a Mossad agent or they'll talk about AIPAC.
You know, it's like, oh, the lobbying effort.
Those are Epstein being Mossad is speculation, of course, but APAC is a real thing, obviously.
But it seems to detract and distract from the real issue at hand.
In the sense that are you putting your criticism of Israel?
Are you staking that on the notion that Epstein was some sort of secret agent, James Bond for the Jews?
Like, is that what this is really about?
And I think that's a legitimate critique where it's like, we can't ever talk about any of these issues seriously.
We've got to go through these sort of roundabout methods of discussing, say, the state of Israel and its actions in Gaza.
We have to talk about Jeffrey Epstein as a man from, you know, who was in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut film or something.
We can't like look at it straight.
You know, and on that point, I would add actually that let me just make a quick point.
I'm not the biggest fan of the word retarded coming back into circulation because I don't know.
I still have this vestigial aversion to it because like I had a neighbor who had Down syndrome and we were all told that was like a really bad thing to say, but you know, I get it.
It's like lexicon changes over time.
That being said, I will use it here and just declare that the way in which pre-existing views on Israel have been grafted onto the Epstein story is retarded.
I don't know how that exactly happened.
I know like maybe it just happened that this whole Epstein uproar was in the context of Gaza and whatnot, but like it's so arbitrary where like it shouldn't be the case that like lots of quote neocoms or people more toward that end of the spectrum now just agree with me because they think that in refuting some of the overwrought mythology around Epstein, that's like good for Israel.
And it shouldn't be the case that people are more skeptical of Israel now hate me and think I must be compromised by Israel and getting $7,000 like for each Epstein post because they feel like Epstein is obviously just a proxy for Israel.
I mean, this like, no one would have thought about the Epstein story in that vein before 2025.
And look, I mean, I know, obviously, yeah, one of his associates was the former prime minister of Israel at Hooper Rock.
Like, I've never doubted that.
I've never even thought it was implausible that he probably had some connect, quote unquote, connection with Israel in some fashion or like affinity for pro-Jewish causes.
I mean, he was a secular Jew, basically from New York, more of like a liberal Jew in an American context, hence the more, more of an affinity with Barack than Netanyahu or whatnot.
We've talked about this before.
Would it shock me if he was involved in certain philanthropic networks that were disproportionately comprised of like wealthy Jews?
No, of course not.
But even the Israel connection that he did have, and like he had some like business dealings by way of Barack, et cetera, with like entities connected to the Israeli security state or like defense military contractors, et cetera.
The idea that, like, just being, you know, that Israel was central to his identity in any way, or like that was central to his essence is just a fallacy from what I can glean.
And not that it wasn't a component, I guess, you know, like, oh, yeah, I mean, I guess a man in his like 60s who's Jewish and like sort of more culturally Jewish, but still a Jewish in a sense is going to have like some kind of affinity on a basic level with the Jewish state.
Like, fine, I get it.
But the way that it's been so foregrounded, especially on the internet, and like connected to these like, you know, swirling espionage theories and like it's supposed to be like now a sorting device for everybody's pre-existing views on Israel or U.S. foreign policy or like whatever.
It's just, it truly is retarded.
And, you know, I wrote a piece a couple of months ago on this and just about the how arbitrary it was that somehow like online reaction to the Epstein story has been sorted around these polls.
And so I just push back on that.
Like somebody was telling me to like some pro-Israel guy was complimenting me today and then somebody told him, hey, but Tracy has been critical of Israel.
So he's not that great.
And he's like, oh, well, since you're so good on Epstein, like if you actually take the time to study the Israeli-Palestine conflict, you know, you'll see the error of your ways.
I said, oh, I've never looked into the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Like, I actually been to the West Bank.
I don't know if this guy has ever been, but anyway.
So I just said, okay, look, it's not my fault that everybody decided to arbitrarily graft their pre-existing position on Epstein, pre-existing positions on Israel onto Epstein.
It actually is retarded.
Like, what's that got to do with whether like a girl lied about her age in Palm Beach to give them a massage, right?
Look, I know like it's a big story and people can latch on to like whatever little aspect of it that they like to kind of validate whatever worldview that they want to promote.
But this isn't just the only world, like people who have a worldview in Great Britain right now that is Republican in like the British context, meaning they're opposed to the monarchy or they want the abolition of the monarchy.
They're using the Epstein story to reinforce that worldview as we speak.
Netanyahu is using it to reinforce his worldview because he's using it against his domestic political opponents, as he has for many years now.
Yes.
You have a proposal that used it to get elected and then now is facing a backlash because of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if you've chosen to myopically fixate on Israel as somehow like the prism through which we should view this entire sprawling saga, that's a choice you've been like algorithmically incentivized to make.
So don't take it out on me anyway.
Yeah.
So yeah, just come with responses.
I um I mean, like I would add that it's, I mean, it's all speculation right now, right?
But I mean, I would say that it's easy, not hard, to see why people would connect Epstein to Israel.
I mean, like the original seed capital donors to his quote-unquote investment firm were Jewish billionaires.
And then there's the whole Robert Maxwell-Ghislaine Maxwell connection.
I mean, which is a, you know, a farce, but go on.
Okay.
So, so, so Ghislaine Maxwell was not involved in Epstein's operation?
No, of course she was.
But people who say, hey, people, we'll just throw a what about Robert Maxwell as though that makes the case that because the youngest daughter of a man who, yes, was sort of like a media mogul and in the United Kingdom and like trafficked arms from Czechoslovakia to the British Mandate of Palestine for the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and was like a benefactor of like Jewish causes in Israel.
People like think that, and yeah, did get the ceremonial burial in the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, just like Shelton Adelson did and just like other non-Israelis are afforded if they're seen to be like a great friend of Israel.
So that's all true enough, but like people have always apparently thought that was sufficient to make the logical leap.
Therefore, because he had a youngest daughter who became an associate of Jeffrey, like first a romantic and then a platonic associate of Jeffrey Epstein, that therefore substantiates the idea that 15 years after Robert Maxwell died, Jeffrey Epstein was running a massage honeypot operation in Palm Beach with like Prince Andrew.
I mean, none of it like makes sense in terms of the logical steps people make toward that conclusion.
They just say, oh, Robert Maxwell was XYZ.
Okay, well, then do some argumentation to explain how it is that you figure that shows that not that there's an Israel connection.
I don't even know what that means anymore, but that the connections can be posited to logically add up to the place that you want them to add up to.
It reminds me of Russia Gate.
I don't know what your view is on Russia Gate now.
Maybe you're more sympathetic to it, but like, I know I would always be bombarded in the first Trump administration with like this little like random disparate talk of data point saying, wait a second, look at this DM to Don Jr. from like some account that we figured out was in communication with WikiLeaks two weeks before.
And it's just like, okay, like even if we're going to stipulate that's true, like you're saying, somehow this is evidence that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were in a collusive conspiracy to subvert the 2016 election and install a Manchurian candidate into office, which was the crux of the theory.
And of course, none of it ever substantiated the crux of the theory.
And the crux of the theory for Epstein is also not substantiated by any of these little data points, whether it's Robert Maxwell or anything else that people want to throw out and have me address, you know, line by line.
And what's the crux of the theory?
Pedophilic blackmail opera, pedophilic sex trafficking operation enforced by blackmail, ensnared all legions, ensnared all manner of prominent persons at the direction of Israel.
Like, okay, that's the crux.
That's not supported by just like blurting out the name Robert Maxwell, similarly to saying Don Jr. in 2017 received like some press release from WikiLeaks or whatever.
It's like it's not like perfectly analogous, but well, I think this is what it's about, where sometimes when your accusation is so out of proportion, you sort of destroy the whole claim.
So what do I mean?
What I mean by that is it's like the difference between saying, oh, this man hired a prostitute one time at a bachelor party with his buddies.
And you dilate that into this man is an evil sex trafficker and abuser of children.
Those two things are vaguely related, but it's so out of proportion that it's totally untrue.
And you're totally misrepresenting what actually happened in this case.
Clearly, Donald Trump has connections with Russia and they go back to at least the 80s, some people look before that.
Now, and also clearly, Russia has an interest.
Do you agree with Jonathan Shate that Trump and Russia began their collusion in 1987?
Yes, when he visited Moscow about a Trump hotel.
Yes.
I think that's probably the truth.
Yeah.
There are people who could take it back.
I mean, Bernie Sanders visited like the Soviet Union on a friendship.
And was he also colluding with?
I don't is that this is you're sort of you're judging.
Anyway, let's not get sidetracked on this.
No, well, let's get sidetracked for a little bit.
Okay.
Okay.
So Russia has an interest in bringing people in, getting them friendly.
I don't know if there's going to be a tried on me.
What?
I mean, they've tried it.
I mean, I've had, I've had re outreach.
Dude, I hate Michael Tracy.
Hold on.
Stop.
Who's forcing you to listen?
Yeah.
If you don't, if someone doesn't want to be on here, you just mean, why would you waste your time listening to somebody that you say you hate?
Don't you have anything better to do?
Look, I was rubbing shoulders with a lot of Russia stuff as well, believe me.
I can imagine.
Yeah.
All I'm saying is that you can, when you start claiming that like Trump is a Manchurian candidate, that can easily be broken down in the sense that Trump actually was, unlike Obama, was the first one to lethally arm Ukraine.
Obama only sent blankets.
So many, interestingly, before Trump still brags about.
Yeah.
And before the invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden was actually lessening sanctions.
Ukraine War Propaganda00:09:06
It's all very interesting.
Joe Biden renewed the new start treaty with Russia, which Trump just let expire on February 5th.
So now there's no nuclear arms control framework that's operative between the United States and Russia and previously the Soviet Union since 1972, as of last week.
Interesting.
But that, so you can dismiss the notion that Trump is a Manchurian candidate, which I obviously think we should, but you shouldn't then dismiss a kind of lesser claim that Russia has an interest in Trump, that Russia likes MAGA, that Russia brings MAGA people to Moscow, that Russia is funding.
I went to Moscow in December of 2023.
And yeah, I did meet some of these like crank MAGA people because I don't know, they played a bunch of misfit social media personalities.
And look, I figured I'm never going to really get a chance to go to Russia under these circumstances now because you can't even get a passport.
But I did go and, you know, it was interesting.
I've written about it.
It's not a secret.
It actually made me much more disturbed about the fanaticism around the Ukraine war than I had previously been, meaning the Russian fanaticism.
Oh, interesting.
Because there was an exhibit in the Kremlin that they showed us where they were educating the masses in Russia about this concept of Novo Russia, which nobody had ever heard of prior to 2022 in terms of like this rightful claim that Mother Russia purportedly had to this swath of Ukraine going from below Kharkiv to Odessa and whatnot.
Which was like a, you know, and if that was actually the war objective, which a lot of people insisted that it must be, and to the extent that Putin sometimes gets pushback in Russia, you know, however carefully they couch it, it's that like he's not doing enough to achieve that war objective.
So that just made me much more disturbed about the intenseified fanaticism within Russian society about the meaning as they perceived it of the Ukraine war.
Right.
But the point, the point is, though, like, so now, like in 10 years, because I went on that trip, you know, and I, you know, I actually, you know, they had everybody speak and I, you know, I criticized Russia pretty much.
I said, you guys are idiots if you actually are banking on Donald Trump to achieve whatever it is that you think that electing him again is going to achieve because the idea that he's going to like, you know, usher in this new era of isolationism or whatever that's going to allow Russia to run rampant wherever it through the into Kiev or whatever is just like a fantasy.
And like, can we get an update at this point?
Like, did Trump end the Ukraine war in 24 hours?
Like, it's just a status quo from the Biden administration with some more like occasional high-level diplomatic contacts between the U.S. and Russia, but the weapons provision is gone going.
You know, the basic underpinnings of everything that have been going on prior to Trump getting office is still in effect.
So, you know, I gave like a critical mini speech.
But so it's like in 10 years, like, is that going to be a basis for people to say that I'm in some kind of suspicious relationship with Russia based on what you claim can be justifiably claimed about Trump in the 80s?
I wouldn't say that.
But there's some there there in the sense that I think you're an unreliable asset because you're not a propagandist.
You have this will to truth that cuts through the bullshit.
And so that's not what they want.
They want retards.
They will go.
So you're not a reliable person.
And they got some of them based on what I could tell.
It was just like.
But I would say this.
They did not bring you there because of your good looks.
I don't know.
Sorry, if you get my, I'm just joking.
They didn't bring you there because they liked it.
Well, then they lied to me because they said it was solely about my good looks.
They wanted to stroke my wildy beard.
More Russian lies.
Yes.
What I mean is that they brought you there.
I know I look haggard, by the way, because I've been Epstein files.
No, I'll take back that.
I was searching for a joke there.
It's okay.
Believe me, I hear much worse 24.
What I mean is that they brought you there not to like torture you and force you to write an article, but they brought you there to hobnob, wine and dine, maybe more.
And they had an agenda by doing that.
They had an agenda.
I agree.
I know what their agenda was.
The agenda was offered to me and I rejected it.
Interesting.
There you go.
I guess you're kind of making my case.
So there is a reality.
I'm not denying that.
Like, I mean, I mean, I actually agreed that the whole scandal that erupted when was like September of 2024, when like all these payments to conservative influencers were revealed for like Benny, Benny Johnson got $30,000 per Tino and Timpool.
Yeah, Tenet Media and whatever.
There it is.
Dave Rubin.
Yeah, I think that actually was scandalous.
Yes.
Not necessarily because it was this like catastrophic example of how Russia is undermining our democracy or any of these like nonsense sort of Democratic Party platitudes that they have just recite by rote now after being trained to do so in the post-2016.
But just because it's like basic almost corruption and stupidity and laziness.
And like, I don't know if like Russian propaganda, here's another point that's sort of interesting and kind of ties even in to Epstein.
Should we really be that intimidated by the efficacy of Russian propaganda efforts if the best they could do is this terror read person, like another pure fraud, con artist who invented a fake gray claim against Joe Biden, claims he had to obtain asylum in Russia.
Actually, when I was there, like she heard I was there, I guess, and like was trying to like whisper her to get me thrown out because like I was the first one who figured out that she was just a total scammer.
Sure.
And, you know, there was a very time-limited visa anyway.
So I left.
But like, really, if that, like, that's the best they can do, then so what?
It's just like, right.
I think if it was, if it was more proportionately sort of understood, then I guess I'd be, I'd be more receptive to it.
But I guess maybe I still have like the lingering after effects of this like over-dramatized constant like democracy is being destroyed nonsense that the Democrats, like the security state officials fomented in the first Trump administration.
And it's almost, I'm kind of instinctively apprehensive about some of the tenets of the talking points.
Yeah, no, I get it.
But to bring into Epstein, you know, in the sense of, is he working with intelligence services?
Is he working with Israel?
Is he working with Russia?
These, if you make it into he's running a blackmail ring, that he's forcing people to do things against their will and getting them to kill babies or have sex with minors or whatever.
That's all wrong.
But that was the very genesis of the Epstein.
That's why we know the name Jeffrey Epstein.
I get it.
I get it.
But we shouldn't deny the reality of the situation in the sense that my assessment of Jeffrey Epstein is that he's a kind of power broker in this and a broker, like a stockbroker, a stockbroker sells a share of a company to an individual out in Kansas or something.
That's sort of what he does.
So there's no like ideology to Jeffrey Epstein.
He's not a.
He's not even a liberal Zionist.
He's more of that, of course, but you understand.
He's not working for the Russians.
That's sort of wrong too.
He has every finger in 10 different pies, basically, and he's bringing people together.
And the ultimate social lubricant is luxury resorts, beautiful women, et cetera.
And that's where he was genuinely useful.
But there's no, there's no there.
There's no, Trump is not a Manchurian candidate.
Of course he's not.
But he is like, there is a Russia connection.
There is something.
Jeffrey Epstein isn't blackmailing people on behalf of Israel or Russia, but there are these connections.
Like the fact that he brought Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon together to I'm jealous of that, by the way.
I maintain that Jeffrey Epstein is the only man on earth who could have facilitated that meeting.
And they're both happy.
I've never even seen photos of both of them happy, actually.
I mean, they're happy together.
The way that Chomsky effused his appreciation for Jeffrey Epsky is one of the truly amazing revelations of the quote-unquote files that have been released in the past few months.
I had known about Chomsky's, Chomsky having some kind of relationship with Epstein, but I didn't have any notion that it was as deep as it evidently was.
Chomsky And Epstein00:03:00
I have a piece coming out.
I think it might be out tonight or it's, it's not tonight, tomorrow morning for compact.
I just did a straightforward defense of Chomsky because I was like, okay, enough is enough.
This is absurd.
Chomsky, did you read that email that he sent after Epstein asked him for advice?
This was more like the straw that broke the camel's back and why all his former friends and like left-wing fellow travelers had to come out and like do these melodramatic denunciations of him while he's 97 years old and incapacitated by a stroke.
Pure cowardice.
It's unbelievable.
And people who have never read him as well, but sort of vaguely like him as like a man of the left, they're like, oh, I no longer like him.
But even some, even some people, even some of his actual collaborators and friends, like a guy who co-authored several books with him, came out and did this.
That's that.
And, you know, they point to this supposedly damning email where he gives PR advice.
They say, as I argue in this piece, Chomsky was renowned for having this like otherworldly mastery of the facts whenever on whatever the topic, Vietnam, Israel, any virtually any topic.
I mean, like, he, I think he is a genius.
You know, whatever your ideological perspective.
I think he's wrong on linguistics, actually, but I have tried to understand the linguistics theory, but like my brain does not wire in a way where I feel like I can comprehend it other than like the almost the most surface level Wikipedia take.
Yeah, well, I don't think the human, sorry to digress here.
I don't think humanity is hardwired for grammar and language.
I think that almost strikes me as a kind of creationism or something like that.
Like we were built to use language.
I think the answer is in a way more disturbing, which is that language is a kind of technology that is outside humanity that is sort of implanted in our left hemisphere and makes us has change genuinely changed us, changes behavior.
But I don't think there's a universal grammar.
I just think he's wrong.
And it sounds like some sort of creationism to me, to be honest.
Like, my dog understands me.
Sorry for this digression, but it's interesting.
No, it's fine.
I just feel embarrassed because I'm not going to be able to intelligently engage.
Oh, okay.
Well, I'll just my dog understands more of what I say than you might imagine.
We think he only understands sit and no or things like that.
Dogs are actually listening to conversations and they're picking up little words.
And they might even have a bit of a grammar, but are they hardwired for language?
I just think that's a ridiculous thing to say.
I just think he's flatly wrong on this concept.
Language is a outside technology that gets implanted in us.
We're kind of cyborgs due to the fact that we are language users.
So it's a kind of more disturbing truth.
Email Exchanges Reveal Chomsky's Honesty00:05:12
There are other email exchanges, and it's bizarre that we even have all these email exchanges from Chomsky.
I mean, just the universe of stuff that got swept up into this Jeffrey Epstein document production is just unto itself incredible.
But there are email exchanges that I haven't seen anybody comment on that I came across where Epstein and Chomsky are going back and forth as like discussing science theories.
Like Epstein tells Chomsky, hey, I just did this experiment where Epstein wanted to test his working theory about the neurological processing of music and how, you know, the neurons fire in order to enable the human brain to distinguish music from other auditory inputs or something like this, right?
So he says, I, you know, I figured out that if you overlay several symphonies, like you can test something or other.
I honestly didn't even fully follow it, but he says this to Chomsky and Chomsky's like, actually, wow, that's a fascinating experiment.
I just don't think that Chomsky, at that point in his life, like 89, 90, 91, would waste his time humoring someone if he actually didn't think that they were interesting and valuable.
So that's why he was so effusive in like lavishing praise on Epstein.
He honestly did find him intellectually stimulating.
He honestly did appreciate the opportunities that Epstein afforded where he Chomsky could go meet with like Ehud Barak and like learn about more about the Tapa Accords of 2001, which is already a longstanding research interest of Chomsky.
And he like always bemoaned the lack of a diplomatic record around that process.
And like Ehu Barak gave him like exclusive information.
And there was one occasion where Chomsky was at some other event and Epstein calls up the Norwegian diplomat who is the back channel negotiator for the Oslo Accords.
And like Chomsky is able to have what he says is a lively interchange with this Norwegian diplomat about obviously an area of his longstanding interests.
So it stands for reason that Chomsky would like enjoy that.
And like he seemed to enjoy Epstein personally.
Amazingly, some of these emails have come out.
I don't know if you've seen this, but like Chomsky had a dispute with his adult children over access to his trust because after his first wife died, the trust that they had set up together happened to be in her name.
So they always thought that he would die first, but then she became ill and died, you know, predeceased him.
And like a new trustee was appointed to oversee the trust and it was one of the adult children.
And then he gets remarried unexpectedly to a younger woman, not like egregious.
She's like 60 or something.
And she's above the age of legal consent.
Okay.
And, you know, they're aware, like the adult children are wary of the new wife and of his, of her potential influence over him.
So, they try to restrict his ability to access basically his wealth that he's accumulated over the course of his life.
And the whole painstaking, tedious, kind of like disturbing dispute that arises.
And he's like very hurt by it.
He says, You know, my life was great, other than this one thing that's like really causing me a lot of pain, distracting me from work.
Yeah, I never could have imagined that in my later years, this would happen with my children.
It's depressing.
And who solves the problem for him eventually?
Jeffrey Epstein.
It's amazing.
So, like, that's the context in which, you know, a year or two later, Epstein asks him, Hey, Noam, like, what do you think I should do about all this terrible press coverage?
It's coming my way.
And Chomsky gives his thoughts.
And, you know, as I argue in this piece that might be out now, everything that Chomsky wrote in that email was substantively correct.
So I actually commend, I actually argued that Chomsky should be commended for being prescient earlier than I was.
Like, I hadn't done the requisite analysis of the facts at that point yet, just in terms of the hysteria, et cetera.
But like, that's, but Chomsky being correct is exactly what's getting him repudiated by his former friends and allies and so forth.
So I just had to do the straightforward defense that's about to come out.
But that is a fascinating wrinkle to all this that I wouldn't have anticipated.
Chompsky was also really the only figure of any public notoriety who, when they were asked about their relationship with Epstein, with the expectation, I guess, that they would therefore disavow it.
This was in early 20, this was in 2023, like not like a month or two before he had his stroke.
Chomsky's the only one who like didn't put out this like PR crafted groveling apology or you know buy into the premise that he had something to atone for.
He was just like appropriately abrasive and dismissive toward the inquiry.
And I think he should be lauded for it.
I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah.
If any, it's just like more, I think it attests to something that he had exhibited time and time again over the course of his life, which is, you know, intellectual rigor and honesty, even in the face of social opproprium.
But so it's supremely ironic that this is now being cited as the cause for him to be retroactively banished.
Very sad.
Iranian Ball Statue Incident00:10:47
Let's go through these questions here.
So can we like maybe another five or 10 minutes or something?
Because there's other stuff I have to do.
Yeah.
We'll hit it at 11 p.m. Eastern time.
By the way, where is this airing or where's this going to go?
It's going to go up on Substack, but I'm going to put it up on YouTube and on X as well.
No, no paywall, right?
No.
I almost almost like want to lead a labor movement now for like where I'm going to organize frequent podcast guests because like I just get not that I care that much, but if I end up like on a podcast, right, where I go on, agree to go on, I'll like agree to go on like anything basically within reason.
And then they decide to like just paywall it.
So like, I guess they're like profiting from my labor.
I'm not like, look, I'm not like that craze, but like it's just annoying because like then I follow me.
I won't do that.
I talk to the group for hours and hours per week.
And so most of that is paywalled, but most all of that is paywalled.
But in terms of the your work that you've given, you know, because you feel this way, I'll definitely put it out for free.
Okay, thank you.
Like I'm not that like zealous about it, but like I get where you're coming from.
Yeah.
So let's try to keep it real concise because Michael might be getting a little tired.
Blue race, go for it.
Yeah.
Say, hey, Michael, what do you think of journalists like Dave Troy, Peter Jukes, Michael Weiss?
These seem to be the journalists that are pushing the most engaging narrative.
And what would you, what do you think also about Epstein and Ehud Barak saying that they want a million Russians coming in to perhaps mess with Israeli Israeli electioneering?
I don't know who Dave.
Oh, wait, Dave Troy.
Okay, that does ring a bell.
Peter Jukes, Michael Weiss.
I mean, I could, you mean they're most engaging about the Russia angle.
Oh, yeah, I'm sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like anybody who has like a pre-existing, you know, quote-unquote agenda or however you want to describe it, like they can find, you know, there's such a voluminous amount of material that it's like choose your own adventure.
Anybody can find something to latch on to.
So sure, I mean, I'm not surprised that they would go with that angle.
I don't know what else really to say about it.
And the I hadn't seen that Barack remark, but like something that people don't really comprehend or are not cognizant of when they go through these materials or when they see something surface on social media, one of these decontextualized snippets is that like Epstein was chronically sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek and maybe sardonic is the best way of putting it.
And obviously that doesn't necessarily come across to the uninformed reader when they're just like glancing at one of these emails.
But that's really necessary context to keep in mind.
So like if a joke is cracked, right?
Just like watch that, watch the thing with Bannon.
And there's like sorry, there's like an undercurrent of sardonic humor to it.
And you see that often in like a lot of different contexts with Epstein.
So I don't know.
I would assume since I haven't seen what you're referring to with Ehud Barak that it was some kind of joke, right?
Or are we saying it was literal?
I don't, I don't know exactly what you were referring to.
It does kind of seem like Ahud Barak was interested in this thing.
It was kind of him saying it in the sort of monotone way, in like a longer conversation.
Was this in the like the recording?
Yes, I believe.
Okay, I haven't listened to it.
Yeah, he says, well, we already know that Israel has a long history of Russian immigration and this really can shift the electorate.
You know, within Israeli politics, the Mizrahi is the predominant is.
But even then, it did seem like a sort of humorous point.
He was basically saying like, now that Israel is established, we can be more selective with the human capital that we bring in.
So we should bring in a bunch of Russians.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
Interesting.
Actually, you know, speaking of Robert Maxwell, one of the things he did fund was around Crystal Naut or in the dissolution of the Soviet Union when there was the emigration from Eastern Europe to of Jews to Israel.
Robert Maxwell funded, I don't know, some philanthropic organization that facilitated the emigration of Jews in that area to Israel.
That just came to mind when you referenced that.
But yeah, I mean, I just feel like people are hyper-literal how they read a lot of this stuff.
It annoys me.
It annoys me in a similar way, like during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump would crack a joke, right?
Like the quintessential example is August of 2019.
Sorry, 2016.
Trump does an interview and says, Obama is the leader of ISIS, meaning he's blaming Obama for the emergence of ISIS or whatever.
And then you have like CNN and Washington Post fact checker saying, fact check, President Barack Obama is not in fact the leader of ISIS.
As though like we needed that hyper literal intervention.
And the hyper literalism with which people want to read a lot of the stuff in the Epstein files, I think, belies the actual meaning of a lot of it.
100%.
People think that they're going in thinking that he's like an intelligence agent and then they're choosing which statements of his they know are 100% serious.
It's like, well, if you think he's playing these people, then why do you think any of this is honest?
Really, you have absolutely no idea about the intention of any of these emails.
Also, what kind of intelligence agent leaves such a gigantic trail of like unencrypted emails and text messages, right?
I mean, would that be like standard operating procedure for an intelligence agent?
I know people say, well, it doesn't have to be an agent.
It could be an asset or like there are gradations of the intelligence tie or whatever.
But just like, I don't know, this doesn't like strike me as the behavior of somebody who would be even in that category so much.
But I don't know, maybe I'm ignorant as to how the intelligence services really work.
Yeah, or he would leave in his drafts folder his evil attempt to blackmail Bill Gates or something, just so that that can easily be seen later.
Anyway, let's do real quick.
So Amalek, why don't you jump in here?
And then this might be the last one, but I'll obviously be staying on for at least another hour or so.
So Amalek, you can go.
Cool.
Yeah.
I was wondering what your take was about if you'd seen the Iranian ball statue being lit on fire with pictures of Epstein on it and what you thought about that, given the fact that the whole ball, you know, satanic panic thing is literally like based on an inscription error or a transcription error from the AI they use to go through the files, put it and make it searchable.
It just, it says bank name and it just messed that up and it said BAL, B-A-A-L, which is, you know, linked to all this satanic conspiracy in the Hebrew Bible.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The worship of Baal is this terrible thing that Jezebel brought onto Israel.
So I missed all this.
Wait, you're saying that there was a fire, there was a statue that was lit on fire in Iran.
I can't believe you missed this.
Yeah.
So the Iranian.
I have to be very selective in terms of the information that I consume on this stuff.
So I have like a couple of things that I'm working on.
If I just spent all day just like absentmindedly scrolling through all the crap, then, you know, but now I got ball statue was burning.
I think the Iranian government did this.
They have a statue of a man with a bull head that's supposed to be the god Baal, who's kind of a storm god.
He's actually a Zeus equivalent, Jupiter, but he's in the Hebrew Bible.
And then they're associating Baal with the devil or in Revelation, like 666, but it's also Epstein and yeah, it's just the most insane cluster fuck ever, but this is very popular on the internet.
And this is based on a formatting.
This is based on an email that was like a formatting error.
Correct.
Yeah.
Similar to how like, you know, this week there was this whole like, you know, storm of outrage over a nine-year-old, supposedly, when it was like literally a formatting, you know, error in an email.
And then if you search it in the DOJ search bar, you can find the correctly formatted version of the email where it says 19.
It's not even like clear to whom the 19-year-old is being sent.
We don't even know the full context even with the 19-year-old, but the nine-year-old, right?
I saw, I mean, I tweeted earlier today, you know, there was this Republican senator, Cynthia Loomis from Wyoming.
Did you see this?
Where she says, I was wrong.
I've changed my view about Epstein.
I didn't really think there was much there, but like now I'm really disturbed.
And I agree about with everyone who wanted to get this stuff released because like, now we know there are nine-year-old victims based on this formatting error.
And, you know, Jamie Raskin said the same thing.
Like everybody was trying to tell me, you know, you're wrong.
There actually is rampant pedophilia, the nine-year-old victims.
It's like Jamie Raskin repeating this email.
It's just like unbelievable.
But I hadn't seen this wrong.
It's amazing.
The ball formatting error is even better because it's clearly a bank statement.
Like it's a wire transfer order.
It has all the different numbers.
It's a whole page of things about a wire transfer.
Yes, in their own lore.
It makes no sense.
It's like, okay, as if like naming your bank account Ball gives you magical powers or something or some sort of like dog whistle to the other ball cultists that you're all a member of the ball cult because you're into bank accounts.
Like the theory itself is ridiculous and it's being pushed on Twitter.
It also means that social media is Israel.
So he's actually not an Israeli agent.
He's a ballist.
We've gotten to the point now where Jezebel. where Epstein writ large as a narrative has taken on the characteristics of the satanic panic frenzy of the 1980s in a way that is now much more directly analogous than it had been before.
I would argue that there were like some overlap thematically before, but now it's much more explicit where, you know, if you're in the satanic panic, there's this amazing book that I think everybody should read.
My mind was blown every page.
Debbie Nathan, Satan's Children.
She was like the early chronicler of like the satanic panic when it was extremely unpopular.
And then eventually everybody just pretended that they always agreed with her, right?
But she put out this, you know, the authoritative book on it in, I think, 1994 or five.
And I read it a few months ago.
And it's just, it's astounding.
Like just the grotesque claims that we made about ritualistic child abuse that would be taken like deadly seriously and assumed true.
Like the most grotesque things that you could possibly imagine, like, you know, infants being raped and like their innards being extracted and toddlers bathed in blood, like all the most like horrendous fantasies that you'd have like in a fevered nightmare.
Conspiracy Fertile Ground00:12:30
That's what the kind of stuff that is being claimed.
And now we've gotten to a point where like, because of this new volume of material where people are making these assertions and they're being like validated by people who are perceived to be in some positions of authority, rightly or wrongly, like Lauren Bobert, who's like, wait a second, there was a restaurant called The Cannibal in New York City.
That's what she took her time to go search for in the DOJ, you know, like allotted 45 minutes or whatever.
And yeah, this is stuff that's being propagated now.
So it's actually taken on the features of that previous mass hysteria in a way that is much more explicit than had been the case prior to like a week or two ago.
Let me ask you this, Michael.
Has the absurdity of the response to Epstein made you question some of your liberal priors in the sense of, I'm not a Platonist, but Plato did have some good counsel on the fact that maybe the public shouldn't know everything.
And you can't handle the truth is one claim in the Republic in a way.
You have to, in a way, lie to people.
And this drive for transparency where people are picking up on some claim that Donald Trump murdered a young girl and threw her into Lake Superior or something, that they're picking up on jerky cannibalism.
Maybe they don't need all this information.
Maybe it's actually not better to have transparency.
Maybe it should be an archive that's sort of hard to access so that only the brave would.
Does that mean I can't access it?
Well, no, you could access it because you might.
What would qualify me to go to be able, I don't think I would be granted access.
It is true.
I guess it's a double-edged sword because you're an alternative independent journalist.
But you understood my point in general, which is that this will to be transparent, which seems rational, ironically creates madness.
Yeah, I get that.
I'm not sure that I have a little liberal prior that is what impels me to advocate for transparency.
And I don't even really advocate for transparency as a general principle because it's like an inherent good or something.
I don't think it's really mostly about my own personal desire to access certain materials that the government is keeping concealed.
Or so I don't really broaden it out that much from there because, yeah, you're right.
When we do have these, especially the sort of indiscriminate dumps of mass material, such as like, you know, the WikiLeaks put Esther emails or whatever that then gave rise to Pizzagate.
Yeah.
It does spawn madness.
And so there are definitely some negative consequences of it.
I just, you know, don't think that the trade-off, to me, it's an unfortunate but necessary trade-off.
If you would ask, like, if I could snap my fingers and like not have the Epstein files released, I wouldn't do so because I want because I can use my own discernment to sift through them in a way that is productive.
And I can't control really what anybody else does.
Maybe it's just like a pure journalistic impulse more than like an ideological one, or maybe like just journalistic instinct is almost what my ideologist ideology is.
If insofar as I have one, I don't so much associate it with liberalism.
I guess maybe you could make an argument that it's like has some thematic connection or something, but it's more kind of parochial in terms of my own self-interest than any kind of broader conviction, I guess I would say.
Yeah.
Let's yeah.
Okay.
Oh, well, go ahead.
Ask you.
No, I wasn't even making a very coherent point.
So I'll just cut myself off.
You've been very generous with your time, and I'm very happy that you're here.
So you can tell people before you go how they can find you on Substack and Twitter and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
M Tracy, M-T-R-A-C-E-Y, X Substack is mtracy.net.
YouTube is M Tracy.
I don't use that as frequently because I am trying to remain like tether to the I'm trying to be like countercultural and remain mostly tethered to the written word.
But obviously, I don't always follow through on that because I end up doing 10 million podcasts.
But I don't know.
I just like the podcast.
I almost like, if I could snap my fingers and do something, I probably would abolish all podcasts at this point because like it's just a horrible way of consuming information.
It's just so tedious.
And it's like almost worse.
Like I've, I declared recently like alternative media is a failed experiment because it's just like, everything kind of converges into this one like conspiracy, brain melted, vague ideology that's like kind of cross transpartisan or like it's like almost a left-right synergy.
This is where it is because I'm 47 years old.
And so I've been consuming alternative media for a while and I've been in the alternative media for my entire career.
I mean, I wouldn't have a career.
I don't think I would have to be a conformist or something if it weren't for the alternative media.
But I can remember the day when we were sort of on the margins looking in.
Like you could criticize the New York Times.
You could have an alternative viewpoint to what the mainstream media is saying.
But now we're kind of like through the looking glass where it's the reverse.
It's like Tim Poole is arguably the mainstream media.
Joe Rogan is arguably the mainstream media.
And like the New York Times is like looking in on them.
And I'm exaggerating, of course, but I think you would agree with my point.
I mean, that's how average people are consuming.
And I do think that is extremely problematic.
Yeah.
And I don't think people have like updated their media critique.
Like as long as I've been in the public arena or in the quote-unquote media, however you define that, I've always like been inclined to incorporate media critique to some degree.
And in 2026, if like your media critique is limited to just like complaining about the New York Times, complaining about MSNBC or CNN, it's just like you're stuck in, I don't know when exactly 2010 or something, or maybe, yeah, earlier.
Yeah.
Even like in 2010, okay, it's like kind of viable.
But today it's just like, I don't know, your time warp or something.
Yeah.
And you have to like kind of shift your frame of reference in terms of like what is deserving of critique, which is why I've been going more after this like brain-melted alt podcast media.
It's hard to even really define what it is, but like people kind of tend to know if you talk about it.
It's because like it's again, it all seems to converge in this one ideology.
It's like, again, I guess the generic conspiracy is- Which is conspiracy.
Conspiracy.
Yeah, yeah.
Like Jimmy Dore, who like I used to go on, not because like I necessarily quote agreed or like felt that it was just like one of the one of the people who like I was friendly with and I would go on the show because you know, I go on lots of different shows across the political spectrum, but like now he's just got like video after video saying, you know, Epstein files prove Pizzagate is real.
And like they're going through all the grape soda references and it's just, come on.
And but now like he's got the same ideology as Tucker Carlson, essentially, even though they might express it more or less articulately than one another.
So it's weird.
And yeah, if you're stuck in this like more conventional posture of like what media is deserving of critique, like you're missing how public opinion is actually being shaped.
I know I'm keeping you too long, but let me just throw this in as a theory.
I remember, I think it was actually Catherine Dees who was talking about this, where there's an almost convergence of memes.
Like, for instance, you know, the crazy JD Vance meme where he has like a crazy curly hair and, you know, these weird eyes.
It's like a cartoon.
The weird thing about that is that there was a convergence between people who hated JD Vance and people who liked JD Vance.
They were both using the same convergence.
And convergence is a natural thing.
You know, it's like there are lots of different types of automobiles, but cultural appropriation and many other organic factors, you know, it's like you've got a steering wheel right here on the left side of the car.
There are four doors and a sedate.
There's a natural tendency, the smartphone as well.
And that wasn't regulated.
Just converge to the iPhone is this is what works.
So the convergence is natural in evolution, but it's almost like the young Turks and Tucker Carlson martyr made.
The Young Turks had a video saying Lauren Boebert exposes like the cannibals or something.
I just saw that video happen to happen like in the past 12 hours.
It's like, wow.
So Jimmy Dore, the alternative media, which used to be red and blue or left and right, or it's now kind of converging into some general agreement that the elites are bad and evil and they're doing, they're manipulating us.
There's a kind of populist convergence of the alternative media that almost seems to be like the, you know, it's like the final evolution.
Like this is what the alternative media will be.
It'll be one thing.
I don't think it's just vaguely about antipathy toward elites.
I mean, I think you could find definitely manifestations of that well-creating, whatever this more recent convergence is.
I would argue that to the extent that we can identify any linchpin to this ideology that has engulfed different quadrants of the political spectrum that we might have seen as like in more of opposition to one another.
It really is, as disturbing as it is to say, at least to me, the linchpin of that ideology is the following.
This is like the dogma that unites them.
The world is fundamentally governed by the existence of pedophilic sex trafficking operations that are enforced by blackmail and they're being constantly covered up at the highest levels of government.
And that's what dictates how our societies are organized.
I mean, I think everybody that we've mentioned so far would agree with that statement to some extent, right?
Yes.
So there you go.
If there's another unifying dogma, then explain it.
That's it.
Yeah.
Isn't that crazy?
What are we doing here?
And it's also sort of deeply religious on some way.
Because as liberals will point out, and they are.
It's non-falsifiable.
Non-falsifiable.
As liberals will point out about it, point out, and they're right, even though I don't endorse the hysteria.
There's a sort of anti-Semitic canard layer to it.
It seems to rhyme with what peasants would say about local Jews in their community.
Oh, they're boiling Gentile boys into matzah balls and blood liable, basically.
It's not the same and not all those people are Anti-semitic, but there does seem to be this convergence on like peasant stupidity from the middle ages.
Basically who yeah, I mean, I guess it's, it's um, it's been accelerated, like as as the Israel Critical Right has gotten more prominent on the internet, then they've had greater grounds to converge with the Israel Critical LEFT Right.
Then not obviously I, i'm aware that the Israel Critical Right existed on the internet to some agree degree, but it was more embryonic and definitely, since you know 2023, much more widespread.
So I think that the convergence around Anti-israel, as like a presupposition for people in these spheres, then sort of almost fertilizes this new belief system, and the presumed existence of pedophilic sex trafficking operations fits comfortably into that newly fertilized belief system as like a unifying ethos exactly.
And you know non-false, non-falsifiability is a hallmark tenet of any dogma, and that's definitely the case because, like there's, there's never going to come a point, no matter how many millions more of Epstein files are potentially produced and they say that there are like several million more, I don't know how true that is, some of them could be duplicative there's never going to come a point where people are going to say okay well, you know what, never mind.
We've now gotten enough Epstein files and they don't contain the evidence that we assumed they would.
So we're now going to renounce the worldview that we bizarre.
They're going to say, release the real Epstein files.
Yeah, there was, there's always going to be.
Like the explanation for the absence of the evidence that they saw is always going to be the continuation of the cover-up.
Do you think?
Sorry, to keep you?
Massey's Guess: Epstein Files Debate00:03:35
Do you think that some of these politicians, even on the right, are trying to use this against Trump in a sort of sneaky way, like Nancy Mace, Bobert Mtg, who's openly at war with Trump?
Bannon he, there's a lot of evidence that he wants to run for president and has for a while.
I'm not sure about it.
Well, I mean well, maybe in his dreams, but he is dreaming about it.
What do you?
Is this going to bring down Trump?
Is this the end, or are the or is?
Are these sort of like rats chewing at his corpse, maybe?
Or I don't see Bannon like trudging through the snow to.
I don't see Bannon trudging through the snow to go to diners in Des Moines.
Well, he just podcasts his way to the one.
Yeah, I guess.
So yeah, I mean on the that that's.
It's an interesting point, definitely so on the left or in the Democratic Party?
I mean, Rocan is clearly running for president yeah, and you, he's already rehearsing his some speech, which is around this need to purge the Epstein class.
I actually asked him after one of the survivors press conferences in Dc in november.
So like I asked like, when you're calling to purge the Epstein class, like for that, would that include, for example, Noam Chomsky?
Like no more laudatory references to Noam Chomsky anywhere, because he like emailed Jeffrey Epstein, maybe like attended a confab with him and he was like well blah blah, blah.
Like he didn't really have a good prepared answer to that, but in the event, like you could obviously tell like go listen to his speech on the floor of the House two days ago it's basically a rehearsal for a presidential summit speech and he identified this as, like a salient issue that he could latch on to early, even though he didn't have the slightest clue about the underlying facts to a degree that was embarrassing.
Same with Massey.
With Massey, I wouldn't be surprised if there's like uh, they might, there might be a draft Massey movement to run for president.
Like why not?
You know, clearly he identified this as something that would be useful for him in the shorter term, because he has to win a Republican primary in Kentucky with Trump opposing him and he needs a sort of a unique donor base and so he can get a lot of online donations saying hey, i'm the guy who's get uh, releasing the Epstein files and so, like you know, you can imagine that there'll be some avalanche just based on that alone.
It's, it seemed to work.
In terms of others yeah, I mean, I do think uh, I I could imagine there will come a time where Republicans have to figure out some way to distinguish themselves from Trump, and this is almost like a no-brainer type issue because like, I guess it depends how far they want to go with it.
Like, I think everybody they could acknowledge, like they could go to a limited extent and say yeah, of course we agree that Pambony screwed the whole thing up.
That would be like step one on the ladder, but they could go a few steps up further saying, you know what, like all those photos and videos of Trump and Epstein partying together, like maybe we should have taken that more seriously in terms of whether the administration was actually going to allow for transparency.
And you know, we were kind of offended when he kept calling it a hoax, because you know that seems to be insulting to the victims.
And then you go even further and say all those redactions for sure have to mean that there are even more pedophilic perpetrators who have been shielded from accountability.
Like you can see, like different versions of that argument potentially being made, depending on like what their, the politician's relationship is within the Republican.
Once we've gotten rid of Epstein and all of those people, real maga will be possible.
MTG's Dumb Beliefs00:05:50
I don't know how Bannon is going to make an argument though because, like Epstein was like his best friend at one point.
So like what?
What is Bannon himself gonna say?
MTG sure yeah, I mean, she's just so dumb, it's unbelievable.
Like I don't know if you saw this, but she was like oh my god guys, like because she's she latches onto every little snit tidbit to, I guess, vindicate her efforts to get the files released and like justify her break from Trump which, I admit, like a year ago, if you had told me that Mtg and Trump would be enemies, I would have found that impossible to believe.
But uh, it happened so and she was to her credit.
She sort of calmed down a lot.
In a way she like she was so shrill and aggressive and aggressively stupid she became.
She's still aggressively stupid, but I know she's.
Yeah, she's still aggressively stupid.
She's not as like.
She's not like saying the Democrats are all traitors like.
She's not like shrill in that way, but she's still the same level of stupid.
I would argue because she pushed like, for example, I Happened, like somebody sent me just one of her tweets because, like, I don't really go out looking for them, but uh, from like a week or two ago, where she says, Oh my God, it turns out like everybody should be so thankful for me getting the Epstein files released because now we found out that Epstein mysteriously won the lottery in 2008.
Did you see this?
Um, which is it's supposed to be, I guess, the implication is supposed to be that, like, it was like some kind of money laundering scheme.
Did he say I won the lottery?
No, no, no, clearly as a metaphor, it's made up.
Like, it's um, it's the idea.
Like, so in 2008, there was an entity called the Zorro Trust in Oklahoma that was set up by an anonymous winner of the lottery in Oklahoma.
And you can collect your winnings anonymously in some states, including Oklahoma.
So, like, an entity was set up to receive the winnings.
It was called Zorro Trust.
And this like activist, anti-trafficking activist/slash, like, quasi-journalist was aware of this in like 2009 and like sent a tip to it to the feds.
And of course, it came out in the Epstein files.
And so, like, MTG just takes it like a total face value that, okay, this must show because like somebody received an email stating this that Epstein himself won the lottery mysteriously while he was supposed to be in prison.
This was like July of 2008.
So, shortly after he had reported to prison, right?
So, like, okay, I don't know what this is supposed to prove about like some wrinkle of the conspiracy, right?
But like, it's just like totally not true at all.
Like, she doesn't take two seconds, nor would she care to ascertain whether it's true.
So, just like pump it out there, but people believe it.
And, like, she's like one of the most popular political commentary accounts.
So, like, I guess good for her.
But, yeah, but that's interesting in terms of how this will be.
I'm sure I would love to hear JD Vance have to speak about this at length at some point.
Like, if you, if you notice, we haven't seen one of his like casual long-form podcast appearances recently, which used to be his like ballywick.
I don't, I think it's gonna, I, I sent Joe Rogan today.
So, here's like how you can tell, like, these prospective Republican presidential candidates should watch Joe Rogan today because he was like, otherwise, like, otherwise, you know, he's kind of like an instinctively Trump guy, I guess you could say, in a sense.
He's like exasperated, you know, the Trump, you know, the administration is really fucking this up.
It's making them look horrible.
This is like enough is enough.
Like, what more do we have to see?
Something went on here, etc.
Like, he doesn't know what he's talking about, obviously.
It's just like a handful of like slop data points that Jamie is sending him.
But, you know, whatever sentiment he's expressing there is something that the Republican candidates will want to comport themselves with or channel or whatever.
But yeah, I would love to see JD Vance have to.
The only way I think he won't receive or be brought down by it is if he somehow separates himself from Trump via the Epstein files because he's not in them.
I mean, he had no associations.
He's got his own dark associations with Teal.
He was associated with Teal and Teal's associated with Epstein.
So he's only one step removed.
I guess it's one step removed.
Although, you know, I'm in the Epstein files, but so am I.
Yeah, I was proud in a way, but he did mention me.
Jeffrey Epstein did?
Okay, I have to search.
I didn't think to search your name, but I will.
Yeah.
And it's like people were saying Michael Tracy's in the Epstein files because if you search Michael Tracy, there's like two FBI Communications Department news roundups where they just like summarize two of my articles on completely unrelated subjects.
Yeah.
Like, I guess that means I'm technically in the Epstein files because like they're all responsive search results.
Yes.
It was involving JF.
It's not, I'm sort of joking when I'm saying I'm proud of it.
It's not a huge accolade, but what was I saying?
He's not directly in the Epstein files, JD Vance said is.
So I think he would really need to separate himself from Trump and quasi-denounce Trump.
But I just don't think that's something he could do because he is constantly, he's like a human barnacle or, or, you know, he's, you know, he saddles himself onto other horses and rides them off into the sunset.
Like he would not exist without Teal, without Trump, you know, it's without the liberal media loving him back in 2016.
So he needs something else beside JD Vance to get anywhere.
And I just, I don't think he can do it.
I think I think it's sort of over for him, actually.
Over for 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 believe the narrative of Jeffrey Epstein, but I also don't think this is going to go away.
And I don't think you're going to succeed.
People have been saying to me for months, I mean, this is going to go away.
I mean, just tell them, just wait.
And boom, birthday book.
Boom.
Boom Goes Away00:01:32
House Oversight Committee records.
Boom.
Peter Mandelson.
Boom.
Prince Andrew.
Really?
It's going to go away.
Pierre Starmer and Prince Charles are saying their brothers should be like shipped off to the United States to be hauled before Congress.
Gee, I can't imagine that getting any press attention.
So when people think it's going to go away, I just don't see it.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I have a, I have just like an inkling that JD Vance is at least clever enough that he might be able to conjure up some way to thread the needle here that I can't fully conceive right now.
But Mike Johnson.
It would be like, it would be from the standpoint of, okay, well, yeah, we'll he'll do a version of what he did at the Turning Point USA thing in December, where it's like him is this like guardian of the of coalitional unity.
Look, guys, like we can disagree and we could still be blah, blah, blah, blah.
We can be Satanists.
Let's not give it into the left Satanists, but we're all Republicans.
Yeah, but right, exactly.
We'll have to say, like, look, we could just agree to disagree about rampant pedophilia networks, but like, let's all remember what really matters, which is opposing the left, something like that.
Obviously, that's a kind of comical way of putting it, but like, we'll have to summon up some variation of that argument.