The Epstein Excuses of Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon (News Roundup)
We look at Megyn Kelly's sickening and ludicrous (and instantly infamous) apologia for Jeffrey Epstein in the wake of the dump of Epstein emails, and follow the thread from her, via Richard Hanania's deranged tweets about how it's normal for adult men to fancy minors, and Alan Dershowitz's seemingly eternal dedication to having Jeffrey Epstein's back, all the way back to a 2017 meeting between Epstein and Steve Bannon (et al), as related by Michael Wolff in a book, published in 2021, that contains many things now being treated as revelations by the media... Oh what a tangled web we weave... Gigantic and terrible content warnings. Episode Notes: Articles about Epstein and Bannon at Byline Times by Nafeez Ahmed: https://bylinetimes.com/2025/11/14/steve-bannon-offered-trumps-maga-as-shield-for-jeffrey-epstein/ https://bylinetimes.com/2025/11/17/jeffrey-epstein-had-access-to-trumps-inner-circle-while-working-with-steve-bannon/ Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
I don't give a shit about Trump getting handsy with somebody 20 years ago.
I want someone who will close the border, which he has.
I want someone who will keep boys out of my daughter's sports, which he has.
I want someone who will stand up to the insane DEI policies so that white kids will stop hearing in school that they're born with some original sin from which they cannot recover, which he has.
So, welcome to two middle-aged white guys on a podcast talking about age of consent laws.
This is, this is where...
This is where you never really want to be.
Anytime you have too many searches for age of consent in X state in your browser history, people who care start to perk their ears up just a little bit more.
So, we're going to cover this very lightly, but in prep for this episode, I found myself Googling the phrase Scott Bayo underage girl accusations.
And then I thought, I just typed that into Google and hit search.
Yes, yes.
Well, listen, that's very clearly in context.
When it's just like, what is the age of consent in Florida?
What is the age of consent in New York?
You know, it's like, that looks like you're shopping for something.
We joke, but yeah, this is dark.
You heard the cold open with Megan Kelly making it clear that she's perfectly happy supporting a child molester politically, as long as she believes that he will persecute trans people and immigrants, which is nice of her to make that clear, I suppose.
And she does that on, you know, you do not have to look hard to find clips of her saying words to that effect.
You know, that was that was, she was interviewed for the New York Times a month or two ago.
She is speaking to, in her mind, the hostile press, and she's still saying it that directly.
That tells you this is not something she's trying to hide.
So just to be clear, she would not dispute that she believes that in any sense, not today.
No, you can tell from the, well, I mean, she says everything in a strident, truculent tone of voice from what I can tell.
But you can tell from her tone in that quote that she's very, she's very unabashed about where she stands.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Which is very clearly, I mean, I would say to anybody morally sane, where she stands is on the side of evil.
So she's usually villains in the real world are not sort of wringing their hands and going, ha ha ha ha, I love evil.
But Megan is a.
Although, sometimes, actually, sometimes, you know, sometimes I think it's a recurring theme of the show that sometimes they do.
Sometimes they are, yes.
Or at least the evil thing, the thing that you think is evil is not actually evil.
I appreciate that thing.
Anyway, yes, this episode is, it's not really about Megan Kelly, but she's a way in to what we are talking about, I think.
Well, it's really, it's about the beginnings of the Epstein thing being cracked open because we're at the point now, as of recording, where Trump, you know, it's been through the House and the Senate and it's gone to the White House and apparently Trump has signed the bill releasing,
you know, commanding the Justice Department and the FBI and all these places to release with a couple of caveats here and there that they might try to use to release all the all the material that they have on Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious, now notorious, sex trafficker and child molester, as well as being a shady financier and shady philanthropist and just all-round sort of strange, mysterious entity who, of course, famously died in prison.
And that's controversial.
Well, I mean, it's not controversial he died.
It's controversial how he died.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm, I mean, I'm still firmly of the, of the opinion that he committed suicide, but, you know, I stand to be corrected if further evidence comes out.
I think the more, the more I think about it, the more I look into it, I think I don't really differentiate between he killed himself or he paid a card to help.
It's the version of it that like, oh, he was, he was too close in.
He was, he was going to name names that there's some vast conspiracy of rich people to do him in.
That's the part that I have a really hard time believing.
But the idea that like, you know, a guard helped him, I consider that as like an equivalent, whether he did it himself or whether he helped doing it.
I think he willingly died.
You know, I don't think he was, I don't think he was murdered for what he had done or anything like that.
Anyway, yeah, I have no time for any sort of conspiracy theory that involves an assassination black ops team sneaking in, you know, a la some sort of bit from Oliver Stone's JFK with the music going, you know.
Yes, exactly.
Just actually, just before we started recording, I saw a tweet come up.
Not a tweet, I beg your pardon, a skeet from the historian Kevin Cruz, where he's he's got some screenshots of what looks like a tweet from Candace Owens, where she's talking about how she's been told that the Macrons in France have hired a team of assassins to come and kill her, like they killed Charlie Kirk.
So she's obviously doing well.
Well, that's our Candace.
I'm going to let that slide.
That's too, you know, there's too much to say.
There's too much to say about that.
Maybe we'll come back to that one.
You're just going to no comment that one.
It's kind of like in the Tucker Fuentes interview when Fuentes said how much he admired Stalin and Tucker just goes, oh, that's interesting.
Yeah, maybe we'll come back to that.
And then never brings it up again.
Never touched it again.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
He's just saying, well, this is what he said throughout the interview, Tucker.
He's just saying he hates Jews.
That's all it means.
Because Stalin hated them as well and had them killed as well.
I think there's also like a strongman thing that he likes Stalin because he perceives him as being like a strong leader, like a, you know, who worked for his people or whatever.
I think there's, you know, the great man theory.
I think there's kind of that going on with makes perfect sense to me because I view Stalin as an authoritarian right-wing nationalist despot.
It's exactly the sort of person you would expect Nick Fuentes to like.
If there are death camps, Nick Fuentes is in favor of them.
I think that's the end of the basically.
Yes.
As long as it's well, even if it's, I mean, a lot of the people in Russia were white, but you know, if there are death camps, he's he's on board.
Anyway, we're also not talking about Nick Fuentes today.
Let's uh, I feel like we're trying to avoid this topic for some reason.
It seems like we are.
We've behind the scenes for like 30 minutes before we even started recording.
So, you know, more than 30 minutes in an attempt to put this off.
Yeah, it's the Epstein thing and stuff is none of the official release has yet happened, obviously.
That's that's no way things don't move anything like that quickly.
Uh, but there has been this big dump of emails.
The point being that stuff is coming out and more stuff looks like it might come out.
So a lot of people seem to be trying to get ahead of it.
Yes, yes.
And one of those people was Megan Kelly, who in a conversation with the utterly smooth-brained centrist reactionary pundit Batia Ungar Sargon.
Who never met a Palestinian and she didn't want to bomb.
Yeah, exactly.
It's the only thing, it's the only qualification you need, really, to work for Barry Weiss.
I think she's actually to the right of Barry Weiss.
So that is you, you know.
I don't know.
That's a that's a distinction without a difference, but I think if anything, she's a little bit, you know, even Barry Weiss is going, hold on, hold on there, just a sec.
Slow down, girl.
But not as far as Sam Harris.
Sam Harris is the absolute worst in the English-speaking world.
I know of no one who wants to bomb Palestinians more than Sam Harris.
Anyway, short of Benjamin Netanyahu himself.
Yeah, I think Sam Harris is it.
Yeah, so it's a conversation on Megan's own podcast video podcast, I think, with Batia, which is now fairly infamous because it's been shared in a lot of places.
But we're going to have a list of some of it, aren't we?
We're going to play the context.
So there's like kind of a 30-second version of it.
And we're going to start, I think, with a clip, the kind of extended clip.
And I took, I kind of took about five minutes of the, you know, kind of two minutes on either side of that bit that was kind of shared around.
And I wanted to explain the context to kind of walk through that.
Because this is, we're using this as a synecdoche.
We're using this as a smaller thing.
One little thing that kind of represents the way the entire conversation around, at least among the, among the right-wing, among these conservative and public pundits are kind of covering this in MagnaWorld, who rely on Magna World for their audiences.
I think it's also something that's very important to note here.
Yeah.
Whose job effectively is to balance chasing the moods and the requirements of their audience so that they can continue to make a load of money from pandering to them, balancing that against the requirements of the Trump administration, basically, and Donald Trump personally for ideological cover.
That's the job of people like this.
That's what they spend all their time doing.
And they balance in different ways, but that's what you see in every single one of them all the time.
That is basically their daily task.
Right.
And I think there is some argument about like something like Matt Walsh seems to really trying to be covering his ass a little bit, like, cause he doesn't know what's going to come out in these files.
You know, well, none of them do.
This is exactly, exactly.
And so they're very much like, well, if I hear something more in the future, then of course I'm going to, but, you know, for right now, it doesn't.
At first, they were very unequivocally going like Trump is not guilty of this.
This is all just a Democratic smear.
And then as more and more stuff trickles out, they have to dance with that even ever more closely and going like, well, it still seems like a Democratic, some Democratic bullshit.
But, you know, well, we know we've always done, anyway, we'll get into Megan Kelly's going to tap dance around this for five minutes.
So, you know.
They've also been watching Trump and Mike Johnson and all the people beholden to Trump desperately try to stop this coming out as well, which only makes it look more like, I mean, I am instinctively on the don't expect too much.
Don't expect film of Trump, you know, I mean, God forbid, anyway, to piss on the bed in Russia or whatever, you know, or, you know, molesting a young girl or anything, God forbid, that should exist because, you know, I'd rather that had never happened to anybody.
But don't, don't expect damn, you know, don't do the Russia gate, Mullergate thing again, where you pin all your hopes on, you know, the cavalry is finally going to arrive.
The documentary evidence of Trump being evil is going to be in there and everybody will suddenly go, oh, he's bad.
I didn't realize and he'll have to resign in shame.
And, you know, don't do that.
It's probably not going to be that drastic.
And yet, the amount of desperate scrambling on the part of the Trump administration to stop these files coming out does make it look, I mean, I think the reality is probably that he doesn't know what's in there either.
But he knows that there could be stuff in there that he doesn't want anybody to know.
Right.
No, absolutely.
I mean, what all these people can see as well.
Well, I think, I think it's really interesting, like Kash Patel comes out there and goes, you know, all before Trump is elected, you know, he's all on board with, you know, we're going to release the files.
You're going to be, we're going to just take the victims' names up.
We're going to, everything's going to be out there.
You're going to be able to view all of it.
And then suddenly he has the top job and he takes a look at it and goes, oh, what, what files?
Oh, those files?
Oh, no, no.
We don't need to release those files.
And I think the whole, I mean, I think the big picture is, you know, they interpreted, you know, they interpreted like that the Biden administration didn't release this stuff or didn't really go after people because it implicated Bill Clinton.
And like, well, yeah, of course it implicates Bill Clinton.
That old dog from the 90s, yeah, of course, he's a he's a pervert, but our guy, no, no, no, our pervert from the 90s, clearly, even though he was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein for 10 years, clearly didn't know anything about this, despite all the allegations from him.
You know, he's wet as though.
Yeah, yeah, so many, so many puns I can go for there, but yes, anyway.
They fundamentally do not get the world that they live in.
Yes, absolutely.
You're hearing this from MAGA people all over the place.
Well, if there's incriminating information in the files, then why didn't the Biden administration release them?
Firstly, they had the same problems with these files that you have with them, which is that there's masses and masses and massive masses of information.
And I think probably nobody has been through it systematically.
Probably they didn't know what was in them any more than probably you do.
And secondly, you're dealing with the Democrats who actually have, I would argue, too much respect for institutions.
They have so much respect for the institution, so long as they can use it to bludgeon the left.
You know, that's the whole thing.
Yes, exactly.
But they don't want to implicate rich and powerful and right-wing people in this scandal any more than you do.
You guys, the Republicans, the MAGA Republicans, certainly, you don't care.
As long as you're all right, you will just smash up anybody or anything to get what you want.
The Democrats won't, at least most of them, anyway, establishment Democrats, they won't do that.
They will want to protect you to a certain extent because you hear this all the time from them.
Oh, we need the Republic, we need a strong and sane Republican Party.
They actually believe that crap.
I know it's impossible for most of us, and including MAGA, to understand that, but they actually do believe it.
And the other thing is, of course, that loads of these people have bought Trump's line.
They bought the line that Trump sold for the MAGA faithful, which was we're going to drain the swamp and clean the audience table and we're going to get rid of the deep state and we're going to all these conspiracies.
It's all deep state Democrat paedophile satanic conspiracies and we're going to get in there.
And of course, Trump is the innocent man on the white charger that's going to come in.
People like Kash Patel, which is, I mean, a little bit like that too.
They believe that too.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, or at least they tend to believe.
I don't know.
When we're talking, you know, it's funny.
I was thinking about this from last from the last episode we recorded from the full house.
It's like, well, those guys are just saying what they believe.
I mean, because I mean, they're Nazis, but they know they don't have political power.
You know, if they're saying something, you can be 99% sure 95% certain that they believe some version of it.
They're, you know, they're eliding certain things maybe for their own purposes.
But, you know, when you talk about Megan Kelly or Kash Patel, I mean, there's so much money on the line.
There's so much, you know, prestige.
There's so much political power, like actual political power that it's hard to know exactly what they think.
All you can really do is analyze what they do and what they say.
And it's going to say, well, this is what they're saying.
This is what they said two years ago.
This is what they said five years ago.
Let's try to draw conclusions from that.
And I think we, I think you can draw conclusions from it, but I don't know.
It's a very different thing to try to analyze, like, what does Kash Patel actually believe?
Because everything is, as we're going to get into, everything is then put through this PR spin machine.
I think we'll talk about that a little bit later on.
I do this at the start.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So at the risk of getting drawn completely off course, I will just say I think there is something fundamentally different about how brains of people who are on the far right actually do things like believing things.
I think to them, believing something, thinking it's true, and it being something you like or makes you feel good or profits you or benefits you in some way, those are basically just the same thing.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Yeah.
I think there's a, I think there's a, I think there's a reality that.
So yeah, I think that's why they're on the right, because their brains work like that.
Shall we start the clip?
Yes.
So this is from episode 1192, 1192.
Oh my God.
I have not listened to over a thousand episodes of Meghan Kelly's show.
I dip in from time to time.
I've listened to the last couple of hundred at least.
Anyway, so this is from episode 1192, and it's Sargon.
I always get, I was going to call her Batcha Sargon of a cod, but you know, that's a little bit different.
If we ever, we will probably never do a full episode on Batya, but if we ever do a Barry Weiss episode, she will be prominent in that one.
She appears on with Barry Weiss continually.
And she is a regular kind of frequent co-host with Megan Kelly.
Megan Kelly has her couterie of, you know, people who come on every week or every couple of weeks.
And our Sargon is one of those.
So it's kind of there.
It starts off with Megan Kelly, and she's going to be talking about Epstein liked underage girls, but we don't know that that's true about Donald Trump.
This is where this starts.
So I'm going to hit play and we'll kind of go through this.
But that is not a true fact about Donald Trump.
And if Donald Trump allegedly liked the barely legal type, we would know.
Bacha, we would know.
We know virtually everything about the man's sex life, unfortunately.
Why do you think that is Megan Kelly that we know so much about sex life?
Largely because of like civil and criminal indictments against him, I think is largely how we know these things.
And what things that he says in public about, you know.
What is it specifically that we know?
Are you talking about the string of affairs or the multiple credible accusations of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment?
Are you talking about the fact that he was found guilty in a court?
Well, found liable in a libel court for sexual assault.
And the judge actually said legally equivalent to rape against E.G. Carroll, E. E. Gene Carroll.
That's that's the sex life that we're talking about here.
Those are adult women, you see.
And that's, that's a different.
So that's okay then.
You know, yeah.
Actually, that's going to, that's going to be basically where they go with this.
I mean, it's fascinating.
Yeah.
I will say one other thing.
You can take that exact argument and transpose it to Bill Clinton.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You're not going to do that, are you, Megan?
And look, and look, I, you know, at the, I was a teenager.
I was 18 years old when, when the Bill Clinton came down.
So I'm going to use that as a, you know, I was 18.
I was young and stupid.
I didn't know the ways of the world.
I would say it's a different time, but I don't, I was, I was, I could have known better.
There were people commenting on this at the time, people I respected.
I always was on the like, well, look, she's 23.
This is, you know, she's a consenting adult, whatever, you know.
And of course, you know, that was wrong of me to think that because there's a power imbalance, but I was 18 and I didn't know enough to know, but I'm no longer 18.
And Megan Kelly is certainly not 18 years old.
So she knows, she knows better.
The thing is, we know about Bill Clinton's sexual history, including credible allegations of, again, credible allegations of rape and sexual assault.
Oh, yeah, I guess much deeper than Monica Lewinsky, but and known instances of, at best, questionable relationships like the Lewinsky relationship.
So you could make the same argument that Megan is making.
Well, if Bill Clinton was into young girls, we'd know about it.
It doesn't follow that because we know he behaved in a certain way towards some adult women that he didn't also do.
Oh, I don't know if he did or he didn't.
That's not the point.
The point is you don't know and you can't come to conclusions based on what you what you don't know yet.
And the hypocrisy is the point, isn't it?
The point is that you're making, you, Megan, are making this argument about Donald Trump to say, well, he wouldn't be into the young girls that Epstein was dealing with.
Well, you could make it, you could make the exact same completely rhetorical argument for Bill Clinton.
You're not going to do that because you're a partisan propagandist.
Yes, absolutely.
And I mean, yeah, we're just going to belabor that same point over and over again.
But I think that the pointing out, I mean, look, if Bill Clinton is implicated in these, yes, please go after Bill Clinton.
Noam Chomsky is almost certainly implicated in these files.
Yeah.
Yes.
He clearly knew Epstein a lot closely than he's pretended to.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I think there are a lot of people who were in that orbit.
I'm going to point out now there's a great, we're not going to talk about it, but there's a great video by Rebecca Watson.
Yes, but if she were, if she, if she wanted to be a friend of the pod, she's been, I've been following her for 20 years, practically.
I think it is just about 20 years.
I don't think it's more than 20 years.
She's kind of, this is a bit cringe, but she's kind of a hero of mine.
And yeah, her videos are great.
The originator of like the Gamergate stuff was like about Rebecca Watson back in the day, you know?
I mean, before there was me too, you know, there was Rebecca Watson standing right there.
And she does a video that's like, oh, yes, I'm named in the Epstein files.
And like, yeah, I requested a, I said I'm going to publish this stuff.
I requested a quote for comment.
He asked me to clarify some points.
I thought that was journalistically fair.
And then I published the absolute, you know, she comes off as a hero in these in the Epstein files.
And she's like, you know, yeah, she did her fucking job.
If other, if everybody else, if everybody, if even if like 20 people had done what Rebecca Watson did, we wouldn't be in this place right now.
Like that's, I mean, I think that's where we land on that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
10, 20 mainstream journalists with a big platform had done half the professional journalistic diligence that she does with Lawrence Krauss, as she describes in that video.
Yeah, absolutely.
This would have all been settled long ago, at least in the public sphere of what we, yeah.
I mean, I mean, legal issues aside and what we find out years down the line, but like this was, and that's the thing that frustrates me about all of this is like, well, we'll get into that, but like when we talk about the Michael Wolf book, which you recommended I read a chapter of.
And it's like, oh my God, this is, yeah, we're, we're going to talk about that.
Anyway, that's where we're headed.
We're 15 seconds into this clip.
So let's move on.
We would know if he had a penchant for the super young girls at this point.
Like he ran the Miss Universe contest.
Like, yes, we heard a story about him possibly going backstage into the dressing room at least once.
Not great.
Not particularly shocking given how Trump was when he was younger.
But we have not seen some slew of young women come forward to say, me too, on Donald Trump molesting them or having paid for sex with them when they were barely legal or otherwise.
It just hasn't happened.
I mean, the number of people who have come forward who have said, you know, yeah, he perved on me when I was, you know, when I was underage, when I was in the dressing group at that pageant, like that's, that's not a small number of people.
Like that's a significant number.
He tells that story himself.
He boasts.
You didn't hear that story, Megan.
You heard it from him.
He was boasting when he talked about doing that.
And also, I am very certain all those girls in that pageant signed very strict NDAs on shit.
You know, that's just the way it works.
And there are, as, as you've just said, credible allegations from multiple girls, women who, many of whom were girls at the time, of Trump doing things that qualify as sexual assault or sexual harassment.
And the fact that he was running a Miss Teen World pageant or whatever it was, and that he was running a modeling agency along with this other network of guys, including Epstein, who was to do with the funds of this.
This is, I mean, we've talked about this before.
This is fundamentally what I think where the real dirt lies.
I think this was basically a sex trafficking operation or an operation that tended into that, disguised as a network of modeling agencies and teen pageants.
So she's talking about the real problem as if it absolves him.
Which in their mind, there's this thing that they're trying to do, and they're trying to put the, you know, the, you know, the law and order SVU, you know, the 1931 M, you know, like the, like the, the evil murderous pedophile is like, and if they're not literally that, you know, if they're not literally like fucking kids and eating their corpses or whatever, then like, you know, no, he just liked them a little young.
And we don't think that's great, but it's a different.
And so like there really is this like this like attempt.
And I mean, we, I think there, I think it is a very, I think we really do have to come down hard on this and go like, no, Like fucking a 15-year-old girl when you were in, when you were in a man, when you were a full-on adult, um, this is, this is not just a crime, but this is a moral crime.
This is a social crime.
This is, this is a terrible thing.
You know, I do think it's worth just kind of drawing the line here.
It's like, you know, this is, this is the thing they're going to try to argue.
It's like, well, he liked them a little young.
Now we get to hear from Batya.
Now we get to hear from Batya.
Yeah.
In fact, at that same press conference, the lawyer for one of the, for a group of the women actually said Jeffrey Epstein would prey upon women when they were underage, true and disgusting and horrible.
And then the lawyer said, and when they came of age and he was no longer interested in them, he would then pass them on.
So there was no pedophilia ring.
There was a pedophile who did unspeakable things to vulnerable girls.
And then they would age out of Jeffrey Epstein's pedophilic interests, at which point he would then start to pass them around to his friends, meaning that there were not actual crimes committed by anybody beyond, there's no pedophile ring.
There's a pedophile and then a bunch of friends who were getting massages at that point from women who were no longer underage.
This is from the lawyer at that press conference.
Yes, he was trafficking women, but they were technically of age.
So there's no crime here.
Of course.
Firstly, that's factually inaccurate.
It's actually inaccurate.
Yes, it is.
But even in that telling, it's like, you know, like, no, no, no.
Like, like they're sitting there with a with a stopwatch.
They're sitting there like counting down the minutes.
All right, 1201 on March 3rd.
You know, like, now I can fuck her.
I mean, Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
Anyway.
Firstly, it's factually inaccurate.
That's not what happened.
Secondly, if it were, what you're saying is it's fine because all these other men did was take advantage of girls who had been groomed from childhood by a sex trafficker who then passed them on to them.
That's okay.
Yes.
Apparently, I genuinely cannot sometimes get my brain around the fact that people, not only that they're sufficiently morally deranged to think these things, but they are so lacking in self-awareness or shame that they're prepared to say them in public into microphones.
Yes.
Genuinely.
No.
And I mean, this is all.
I mean, I don't know if Bhattia is, but I mean, Megan Kelly is a lawyer.
Like she is, she is a, she is a very well-qualified lawyer.
She worked for like a white shoe law firm for nine years or something like that.
She knows the law.
So I think that that kind of dispels a lot of the like salaciousness of the story.
People are like, where is the justice for the victims?
The justice is one of the person, the people who did unspeakable things to them died in prison and the other one is still in prison.
So like they got their justice.
And the whole ring idea, I think, has been wildly blown out of proportion for these political reasons.
I don't know about ring.
Again, again, you know, once you turn 18, it's fine to be trafficked for sex.
That's literally the argument.
You're not a victim anymore if you're 18 years old.
I mean, I mean, this is, I mean, it's like all of this would have been perfectly on board if everybody was above the age of 18.
Suddenly all of this would have been a cool and above board.
Like, you know, yeah, no.
And of course not.
Of course not.
No, it's even if the only two people involved were Jeffrey Epstein and Jelaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein dying in prison is not justice for these victims, these survivors.
It's not.
They clearly don't feel that.
And it's completely reasonable for them to feel that that's not the case.
Jelaine Maxwell.
Do you really want to go down that road?
Because she's currently in a club fed in violation of the law because as a very, very clearly as a quid pro quo for telling Todd Blanche what he obviously wanted to hear about President Trump being completely innocent of anything.
President who, I don't even, I don't even know who you're talking about, except he's the best president who's ever lived.
And it's clearly, I mean, very, very clearly, it's being signaled that she's going to get a pardon at some point.
So even if we're just talking about those two, no, justice has not been done.
But the whole point being made by the survivors is that there were loads of other people involved who have never faced justice.
So again, the mind boggles that people are prepared to say these things.
Oh, this is not even, I mean, we could have done a whole, we could have done like three or four episodes on this entire thing if you really wanted to get like nasty with this.
The whole context of what they're talking about here is in response to what's her name?
Virginia, what is it, Guilla Foyle?
Virginia.
Giuffrey, I believe it's pronounced.
Yes, Giofrey.
Sorry, I just don't remember her last name.
Was a victim, was an underage victim who was then a victim of age.
And over the course of a couple of years, and Lady Rome became an advocate.
Well, because she says things about Alan Dershowitz, who is one of Megan Kelly's best friends, she has to be a liar, you see.
And they go through, they went through 20 minutes of this that were or this clip that we're not talking about today.
We're literally like going through the email line by line and going like, well, what does she actually say?
What was, you know, it's just, well, she has to be lying about this.
She's a serial fabricator and the Democrats are doing this.
They're covering up the fact that it's actually that she's the source for all this and it's just a nonsense prosecutor.
And it's just like, oh my God.
Oh my fucking God.
Well, I'm I'm going to be coming back to Dershowitz a little bit myself.
With regards Virginia Dufray, I believe it is now established that in the course of some of her accounts, she has given some, she has said some things that can't actually be correct.
That doesn't invalidate her entire testimony.
When you take into account the entire context, she's clearly telling the truth about what happened to her.
I believe she hasn't made any, she's deceased now, sadly.
She took her own life last year.
Yeah.
Or this year, I beg your pardon.
Which I consider really that she was murdered in slow motion, given what was done to her.
She, I believe, never made any accusations against Trump personally, but it's one of the things that is in this tranche of emails from Epstein's communications is that he's talking to, I think it was to Ghelene Maxwell in an exchange about Trump being with her.
Her name was redacted, but then the Republicans released that that's who they were talking about because they viewed this as politically convenient for them precisely because she had never made any accusations against Trump.
Trump was with her for hours.
So, and in the midst of Epstein also saying Trump knew about the girls.
Of course he did.
Trump knew about the girls.
And that becomes in the telling of Sean Hannity.
Virginia Dufray said that Trump was a perfect gentleman.
He actually had the unmitigated, outrageous gall to tell that lie.
I mean, you know, Hannity lies like he breathes, but that's how he spends that.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's, it's just, it's disgusting stuff.
But there are definitely a couple of very well-connected people who have not been brought to justice.
I'm not going to repeat the names here.
But one of them is a very, very successful business owner.
No, it's, I'm not, I'm just, I don't want to get sued, but one of them is a hugely successful business owner who seems to be a bit of a pervert.
And his name is all over the papers.
His connections to Epstein are very, very well known.
They were connected financially.
They were connected as friends.
And like, I want to know more about him.
There's plenty who I want to know more about who have been publicly linked to Epstein and seem to have dodged responsibility.
That's my own take on it.
It's not that I'm not referring to secret names only.
I know.
I'm talking about names that are in the paper.
But again, like without hardcore proof, you shouldn't say their names because you don't know, but if they're true, but I mean, people know.
Okay.
Okay.
Megan Kelly, don't you pretend to be a journalist?
Isn't this your job?
Oh, well, I know certain things are true, but like I'm going to get sued.
Megan Kelly has, I didn't look it up before we recorded today, but like if you look it up on like the, like the, like the top Spotify podcast or Apple podcast list, she's in the top 50, not top 50 political podcasts, the top 50 podcasts in the world in English.
She has a media empire now.
She is, she is, she is the titular head of an empire that's worth dollars.
I don't know exactly how much it's worth, but it's, it's a lot.
It's a big, it's a big going concern.
You can afford lawyers.
You are a lawyer yourself.
If you wanted to do this story, and she covers true crime, there's a whole like ancillary thing, one of her other channels, one of the she's not, she doesn't produce it.
I mean, she, she doesn't, she's not on the show regularly, but there's an MK true crime thing where all they do is they do true crime.
This is a true crime.
You're telling me there's a rich, there's a rich asshole that you know the name of who's in all the papers and you know for a fact he's into this shit.
And you could, you don't feel a journalistic integrity to talk about that on your, on your podcast?
You don't, you don't think that's, you don't think that's important?
You're calling yourself a journalist?
You call yourself straight news?
What the fuck?
I mean, just who said, she said that to millions of people.
She said, oh, I know the name of this guy, but I'm not going to, I'm, but I'm not telling you.
I'm not telling you.
It's like, hello?
Like, no, I kind of want to know who else do you know about Megan Kelly that you're not, that you're not willing to tell me.
What, what, tell me what you know.
I mean, and again, this only makes it worse because you were yourself a victim of this.
What else?
Who else are you protecting?
If you're saying, no, you're protecting somebody, why, why?
Why?
We should be asking, Megan Kelly should be asked this question every day, whenever she's in an interview.
You said this.
Why don't you, why don't you're a journalist?
Don't you have a responsibility to do this?
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I'm holding her to very basic journalistic stators.
I don't think this is too much to ask.
If you can't talk about it, then don't talk about it.
But to say it that concretely and then be like, well, no, no, we can't talk about that.
I don't, I don't know what that is.
I don't, I honestly, I don't know what you're doing.
That's, that's, that's ridiculous to me.
Sorry, please continue.
I'm just, I'm not doing the Tucker Carlson pretending to be flowery ass thing.
I legitimately listened to that.
I was like listening to the clips and I kind of listened to it the first time.
I'm like, okay, a lot of times it's just ocean waves.
It just goes over my brain.
And then I go through it to like, I transcripted it and I'm going through it to do it on the podcast.
I'm like, this is a big admission.
Like, this is huge.
This is, this is, I mean, this is massive.
Why don't you we talk about this?
I think we might come back to this later on in the episode.
Not about Megan Kelly, but about complicity and such.
But anyway, please respond.
If you're aware of this, that's called a lead.
And it's a big, if it's true or it's a good lead, it's a big story.
So you should be researching it.
If you are a journalist, as you claim, and I believe we actually played a clip of you on one of our, on one of our episodes about the Charlie Kirk assassination, where you were talking about how terribly dangerous it is for you and Ben Shapiro, et cetera, to talk about the news now with all this left-wing terrorism.
You were talking about what a brave journalist you are.
If that's your job, you should be following the lead.
She just tells it straight.
She just does the straight facts.
She's not spinning things at all.
Sometimes I throw my opinion in there, but that's just, that's just what people want.
So you boast about being a news reporter and you boast about being brave because you have to be these days.
This is a huge story that you've just outlined.
If you haven't got enough information, enough corroboration to go public with it now, then I'm assuming that it's one of your major preoccupations at the moment is working on that and following that story so that you can bring it to us at some point.
And if you don't ever do that, you never back this up with anything.
I feel perfectly entitled to just assume that you're making shit up.
Why shouldn't I?
Or that this person is a Republican.
Well, yeah, there's that, isn't there?
Yeah.
This person is a major donor to the network.
It's someone, someone, you know, either it's a lie or it's complicity at some point, you know, if we're not, if we're not going to get a story about this.
But she doesn't act like she's going to reveal this.
She's not acting like this is something that she's actively working on.
She doesn't say we don't have the evidence.
We can't get it through legal or whatever.
It's just like, oh, no, I know this has happened.
We don't want to get sued.
It's like, well, is this a story or not?
Maybe give the information.
The New York Times would run with it.
I'm sure.
Yes.
The lying New York Times.
I mean, I have very little time for the New York Times at this point, but they would cover that story.
You could even do it as a blind, you know, you could even be a whistleblower.
You know, like she doesn't care.
The way in which you avoid getting sued is you do the journalism.
You do the research and you bodyguard the story with facts and sources.
And then you go public with it.
And then somebody says, I'm going to sue you.
And you say, well, good luck with that in court because I've got this evidence and this evidence and this evidence and this evidence.
That's kind of just basic journalism, isn't it?
And I mean, we are in the, this is in the United States where, I mean, the First Amendment still applies, you know, at least if you're wealthy, if you're a person like Megan Kelly, the First Amendment still very much applies to you.
There are very strong defenses, you know, especially if this person is as well known as where he's in all the papers.
He's got all this stuff.
If this person is that well known, he's probably a public figure who literally cannot sue for defamation.
Maybe my little, maybe my little like leftist brain just doesn't understand.
I don't know the fancy law stuff that she knows, but there seems to seem like there are ways around this.
You have the resources, Megan, to do this if you, if you chose to.
And the fact that you choose not to, I think, speaks volumes.
Maybe she's talking about Johnny Depp, who apparently can be on tape confessing to things and juries will still find that he didn't do them.
Oh, she was so against Amber Heard.
Of course she was.
Of course she was.
Megan Kelly makes the wrong choice.
And literally every single, okay, she really didn't like P. Diddy.
She didn't like, she covered P. Diddy's exploits, but what P. Diddy was doing, I mean, as nasty as it was, is nothing compared to what Donald Trump is apparently doing.
Maybe there's a reason that P. Diddy, she doesn't like P. Diddy and she likes Donald Trump.
I don't know.
I was going to say, there is a difference.
There might be a reason.
There might be a shade of difference here that really kind of colors how you would, how you would think about that issue.
Sorry, that's a little bit gross.
She's got some skin in the game.
We're going to hell.
Anyway, all right.
So we can.
Sorry, I know that.
We already are in hell, Daniel.
Yeah, that's true.
I know, like, look, I know that that was an aside, but I think that's a really important point.
Like, it gets the core of this.
Yes.
You know, absolutely agree with you.
Yes.
Oh, the names.
We've heard them many, many times.
Anyway, I do think there are some who are so well connected or did such a good job of hiding their tracks that they'll never be facing real charges.
As for Epstein, I've said this before, but just as a reminder, I do know somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything.
Not everything, but virtually everything.
And this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile.
Okay.
And this is gets to, so this is the clip that people know about.
This is sort of like the famous stuff.
This is the famous clip.
And we're going to get into this.
And I did, but I did, again, it's all in like deep background.
Well, I know somebody who's very, very close to the case who doesn't know absolutely everything, but knows everything.
So who's like, okay, I have sources.
I have sources that, you know, like, again, this, and I think that there's a, you know, like one of the things you run into when you're sitting with these more mainstream figures like Jack Pesobiac and Megan Kelly and like, and like Charlie Kirk.
I mean, you know, these, it's like, they're only, they have, they have like administration officials on speed now.
They're in the same group chats.
They're, they're, they're, there's no clear differentiation between Megan Kelly and Jack Pesobiac and JD Vance at this point, except one of them is actually holding political office and the other two are not.
Poso literally acts as like an advisor to the president.
But if she found out that like Rachel Maddow and the guys at Chapo Trap House and like Kamala Harris were all in a group chat together, you know, like, you know, if I mean, just imagine that.
Just imagine, like, just imagine that being a thing.
If that existed, if there was ever a hint of something like that existing, do you know what Fox News would have done with that?
Like, you know, like, you know, like Hassan Piker is like hanging out with Kamala Harris, you know?
Like, yeah.
I mean, they're using Hassan Piker as a gotcha now on Fox News anyway.
Somebody, I can't remember who it was.
It might have been Mam Dani.
You know, they find a single neutral reference to Hassan Pika in anybody's back catalog of speeches or tweets or whatever.
And it's, it's like they found your membership card in ISIS.
Stroke the Communist Party.
Yes.
Yeah.
That's how they think.
That's how they think the left-wing, you know, political, the gigantic conspiratorial left-wing Democratic Party, Communist Party, ISIS machine works.
And of course, the fact that they think it works that way is it works that way for them.
Exactly.
It's a cliche, but every accusation is a confession.
Yes, absolutely.
Okay.
Now let's get into the actual.
Now we're going to talk about what barely legal actually means and what it doesn't mean.
I'm sorry, Miss Lawyer, fancy pants lawyer.
Barely legal is not is not what this means.
Anyway, this is this person's view who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type.
Like he liked 15-year-old girls.
And I realize this is disgusting.
I'm definitely not trying to make an excuse for this.
I'm just giving you facts.
That he wasn't into like eight-year-olds, but he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.
And that is what I believe.
And that is what I okay.
Okay.
Here we go.
You should start.
I have too much to say.
You should start.
Go ahead.
Okay.
We've, we've already touched upon the I know somebody thing, but that is, you shouldn't be allowed to get away with that.
If you know somebody who is so close to the case that they know all these things, they know all about it.
They can tell you exactly all about the ins and outs of Jeffrey Epstein's sexuality.
Again, why is this the biggest story in America at the moment?
And it has been for weeks.
Why is this been a years-long story?
This is, I mean, this isn't, this is, I mean, obviously it's, it's, it comes and goes, but, but, you know, this is, this is, you've had years to do this.
You know, it's, it's not even like, oh, this is a big story right now.
It's been a story for years.
I don't know.
I'm just, I'm just going to say it.
That's bullshit.
You haven't got a secret friend who's close to the case, who knows all this stuff.
I don't believe you.
I don't believe you, Megan.
This is a rhetorical device.
You're using this because you want to say something and you want to distance yourself from it.
You want to say it at one remove.
You don't want to be saying it.
You want to be telling us about somebody else saying it.
That's what I think.
Anyway, call me cynical.
Yeah, no, I think that's a perfectly valid read.
I think that's probably more valid than where I was going with it.
But yeah, so I mean, I think that, you know, she has a lawyer friend who does, she knows somebody who knows somebody, who knows somebody who says this is kind of where I land with it.
Like, oh, he's, he's super close, but he's not in the case.
He's just close to the case.
Oh, there's gossip.
Lawyers gossip all the fucking time.
I would believe, especially high-level lawyers, which she was.
I would believe she knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who's close to it or whatever.
Like, you know, and it's, it's just gossip.
It's just whatever.
Like, I would believe that.
But yeah, I was possibly, yeah, she's just making it up.
I don't know.
Well, maybe that's true.
It's some, it's probably somewhere in between.
It's probably somewhere between, you know, she knows somebody who knows somebody who said something and making it up.
You know, I'm not, I'm not wedded to the position that this is all just completely coming out of her head.
But it's either way, the point is that she is putting a rhetorical somebody between her and the words, right?
That reeks of what lawyers call consciousness of guilt.
So do loads of other things that she says in this.
Like, I'm not, I know this is disgusting.
I'm not trying to make excuses.
Right.
Yes, you are.
That's precisely what you're doing.
That's exactly what you're doing.
Well, it's like, well, I'm not trying to make excuses while I make an excuse.
You know, I'm not trying to say, I'm not trying to say I have a big penis, but, you know, like, you know, I said this is exactly that.
You know, the fascists always use Endy Fuentes doesn't, you know, I'm not saying I hate all Jews, but don't you just have to really consider the things that they do?
I mean, it's the same, it's the same rhetorical device, you know, where you're like, I'm not saying this, which I'm clearly actually saying.
It's such a bullshit argument, you know.
And it's never like I'm trying to find the nuance.
It's just like, well, I don't want to be, if I say I'm not trying to say this, then when you quote me back, I can say, but I said I wasn't trying to say that.
It's like exactly.
It's the Sam Harris maneuver.
It's, I want to say something, but I don't want to be held accountable for it.
So I'm going to build in, you know, three, four, five layers of abstraction and separation between me and it and fake nuance so that when somebody challenges me about it, I can say, I didn't say that.
That's all.
You're misquoting me.
You're misquoting me.
You're taking me out of context.
That's all it is.
I'm just giving you facts.
She says, no, you're not giving us facts.
You're giving us the opinion.
If we, if what you say is absolutely true, what you're doing is giving us somebody's opinion.
That's, I mean, I suppose it's a fact that it's their opinion.
Okay.
If we want to get into that sort of sophistry.
We're really using the subjunctive mood a lot here.
You know, we live in the land of the subjunctive today.
Please continue.
Sophistry is the word because that's all this is.
This is a, I always say this.
Right-wing arguments are always just word games.
That's all this is.
This is a word game.
He wasn't a pedophile.
He liked 15-year-olds.
Well, it might be that the word paedophile is technically incorrect if you're talking about somebody who is applied to adolescent people.
That might be, we're at the, it's not paedophilia, it's a feverophilia stage.
That's what we're doing.
That might be true.
I don't know.
Nevertheless, all you've done, if that's true, and you've pointed that out to us, all you've done is you've pointed out that colloquial speech, that the popular colloquial way of speaking about this, calling Jeffrey Epstein and people like him paedophiles is technically inaccurate.
Well, as an argument, that's equivalent to somebody says, I didn't do nothing, and you reply, that's a double negative.
That means you did something.
That's what we're talking about here.
Okay.
So technically speaking, he wasn't a paedophile.
He was whatever you call somebody who's attracted to teenage girls or adolescent girls or whatever.
That's meaningless.
It's a distinction without a difference.
You flourish it at us like it's this triumphant logical checkmate.
It's completely without any content at all.
It has no meaning at all because the actual content of the complaint, the accusation, is intact, which is that he was sexually predating upon underage girls, girls who were 15.
And actually, it was worse than that in the actual actual historical record.
Yeah, leaving morality aside completely.
Legality.
15 is not barely legal.
15 is illegal.
Well, here's, I do want to, I love this.
I mean, again, you're a lawyer, Megan.
Like, come on.
Like, barely legal is not the term.
That term is not used in this context.
Barely legal refers to adult entertainment.
refers to pornography in the, like in the state of Florida, the state of, um, the state of the, the age of consent is 18.
You cannot have sex for the age of 18.
I think.
I think there are circumstances that like if there's an age gap between like less than a year or two, different states have different rules.
Again, this is not the kind of thing you want to have like memorized in your head for all these kinds of reasons.
I think the ambiguity, I think some of the complexity of that, I think is valid, you know, because you do have cases of like, well, the girl is 17, the boy is 18, the parents don't like the boy.
And so they rat him out.
And then suddenly he gets put down for CSAM or whatever.
And that's teenagers texting each other.
Anyway, this is beyond the scope of this conversation, but I think that that stuff is real.
Where I live in the state of Michigan, the age of consent is 16.
You can be 16 years old, have sex with, I believe, anyone you like.
I don't know the exact rules, but you can have sex with your 18-year-old boyfriend.
That is completely legal here in the state of Michigan.
I think that's fine.
What you cannot do is film it and sell it for money because then you were a position of child sexual abuse materials.
The barely legal refers to pornography.
You cannot perform a sex act on camera, particularly for money, until you are 18 years old.
That 17 years and 364 days, you're making illegal materials.
At 18, you're suddenly you're making legal materials.
Tracy Lawrence splitted this back in the 80s because she appeared a whole bunch of shit before she was 18.
The second she turned 18, she made one that she owned the rights to.
Everything else got destroyed and she made a buttload of money off of it.
I'm not saying, but that is a legal distinction.
That is a legal state.
It is about pornography.
It's about adult entertainment.
It has nothing to do with what was going on with Jeffrey Epstein.
Now, this is a distinction without a difference.
Of course it is.
She's using it.
Jailbait would have been a better term, honestly, for her to use.
But then if she uses the word jailbait, oh, you're kind of leaning into, you're leaning into what was actually going on here.
She was performing illegal acts.
So you have to call it barely legal.
It's just so blatantly wrong.
It's just so blatantly.
And so blatantly in bad faith.
Like it's subtly, but it's subtle but blatant.
You know what I mean?
Because if you actually know what these terms mean, and she presumably she knows, again, she's a lawyer.
You're a lawyer.
You're a lawyer.
You don't get the excuse here.
You're a lawyer.
Like, I mean, I'm sorry to keep going back.
And a journalist.
And a journalist.
Yeah.
You're two layers of professional that's supposed to understand and get this right.
Yes, exactly.
And instead, because the job is to protect Donald Trump at all costs, she is making a fool of herself.
She does it all the time.
I listen to her podcast every fucking day.
She makes a fool of herself continually.
But you parse this at this level.
You parse this as like, what is she actually arguing here?
This is rhetorical bullshit.
This makes no sense.
If you view this through the lens of through the legal lens, this is just spin.
That's all she's doing here.
It's, and this is what all of these people, every time you see this kind of justification, a lot of them are not lawyers and a lot of them, but when you see that, it's all just a bunch of PR nonsense.
It's all just protecting Donald Trump at all costs because he's the sun and the, he's the way.
He is, he is the sun and we are the moon, you know, whatever, or we are the plants, whatever.
But Megan is, Megan has been for years in and was trained in the right-wing propagandist school of apologetics, which treats, which, which teaches people to do this exact thing, this exact word game form of pseudo-argument all the time.
This is where you get the right-wing argument.
This is a republic, not a democracy, and stuff like that.
This is where all of this comes from.
Don't you know what re publica means in Latin?
No, you don't remember your Latin?
Actually, I do, asshole, but you know, let's continue.
All in defense of a party which fights across the country to keep child marriage legal, defends the ability of predatory pastors in churches and cults to abuse young people.
And we all know, again, we all know that if any of this, any of this were about Zorhan Mamdani or any Muslim man, she would be on her on her tiptoes screaming about Islamic culture and how it's inherently abusive.
You know, Muhammad had a five-year-old wife.
Yeah.
Exactly.
That's what, you know, that's sort of just racist nausea.
I'm sorry to even say that.
But, you know, this racist bile.
Yeah.
No, I mean, you know, there was a great episode of another podcast, the If Books Kid Kill podcast.
It might have been, but it was the reaction to Zorhan Mamdani and Peter Shamshiri is half Iranian.
And so he's like, oh, no, no, this is the bigotry, the anti-Islam bigotry.
Yeah, no, no, that, that feels very, very real to me.
Yeah, no, that's, that's, it's Tuesday, buddy.
I get it.
You know, anyway.
Yeah.
You remember we covered this.
Zorhan Mamdani was filmed eating biryani with his hands and she lost her fucking mind.
She lost her fucking mind.
I heard Charlie Kirk declared the fall of Western civilization, as I recall.
Eating biryani with your hands.
I actually ordered biryani the other day and I'd ate with my hands.
It was delicious.
Anyway, yeah, no, I mean, the hypocrisy is not the point, but it has to kind of be the point sometimes.
We just have to cover that.
Anyway, we've got a little bit of this left.
I'm going to, I'm going to hit play, okay?
And now she's going to go, it turns out that he has actual CCM materials.
And so, you know, and then they talk about there's a particular person they don't, they're not very fond of right now.
And her name is Pam Bondi.
Reliably was told for many years.
And it wasn't until we heard from Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged, forgive me, they used to call it kiddie porn.
Now they call it child sexual abuse material on his computer that for the first time I thought, oh, no, he was an actual pedophile.
I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos.
She's never clarified it.
I don't know whether it's true.
I have to be honest.
I don't really trust Pam Bondi's word on the Epstein matter or anything else.
Yeah, so I don't know what's true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say, I was a, like a, I was under 10.
I was under 14 when I first came within his purview.
Look, it's, you can say that's a distinction without a difference.
No, it's not.
I think there is a difference.
There's, there's a difference between a 15-year-old and a five-year-old.
You know, it's just whatever.
It's sick.
Every time we start talking about Epstein, it makes your skin crawl.
You write it?
The whole thing is just disgusting.
Totally.
Well, I just wanted to include the middle.
I know that's maybe a distinction without a difference, but no, I don't think so.
No, It is a distinction without a difference.
Again, legally speaking, it is a distinction without a difference.
Legally speaking, it was just as illegal to do it to a 15-year-old to do it to a five-year-old.
Yes, 100%.
Yes.
Again, again, consciousness of guilt, the fact that you raise that, you can say it's a distinction without a difference in order to dismiss it tells me that you know that's exactly what it is.
You know what you're doing and you're trying to raise the objections in order to dismiss them preemptively, which is what all this is about.
This is all about raising or starting to gin up in advance a rhetorical, aesthetic, semantic way of defending Donald Trump.
If there's stuff in those files that shows him abusing 15-year-olds or 14-year-olds or something like that.
And on what she said, that is factually inaccurate.
There are accusations about Trump and Epstein, particularly Epstein, concerning girls as young as 13 or 12, as you ought to know if you're going to be talking about this in public, Megan.
And even if that weren't true, just said it.
Distinction without a difference.
Okay, the victims weren't eight or 10, we hope.
Okay, the material on the computer is abuse material concerning girls of 15.
That makes it all right, does it?
No, obviously that's not what you're saying.
And you know, you can't actually, you don't, you don't want to say that because you know, you know what that is.
So you're talking around it in this conviluted, you can always tell, George Orwell said this, you can always tell when somebody is making an argument they know is untrue because their use of language goes to absolute shit straight away.
They start overcomplicating everything, making every sentence too long, full of claw.
You know, they start doing exactly what she's doing because they're trying to distance themselves from saying the thing.
They're trying to disguise the thing that they're saying because they know that they're lying.
Absolutely.
100%.
Just, yeah.
Yeah, I love the reference to Orwell.
I didn't think of that.
But yeah, no, absolutely.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
No, I completely agree.
That's why in Orwell's essay, that's why he diagnoses so much political writing from fascists and communists, which of course in his time meant Stalinists, you know, apologists for Stalin's Soviet Union as so impenetrable and unreadable because it's written by people who are just, they're towing the party line and they're saying things that they know aren't coming from inside them.
They're coming from Moscow or wherever.
That's why it's so impossible to read.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
Same thing.
And that's why, I mean, again, we've spent like an hour going through this like five minute clip from Megan Kelly.
Yeah.
I mean, it is like the minute you start to actually analyze this rhetorically, the immediate you actually say, like, what are we actually saying here?
I just found the whole thing.
And I found the whole conversation around the barely legal comments to be frustrating because it was all like, you know, oh, you're saying 15 year olds are okay to fuck.
And it's like, no, no, there is, there is a deeper problem here.
Our culture, I mean, we've covered, we've talked to this before, our culture has, is really kind of okay with men perving on 15-year-old girls in a lot of ways.
Because our culture hates them.
Our culture hates women generally, but it particularly hates young women and teen women.
Well, in particular, it hates women who are using their sexuality in ways that please them and not ways that please, you know, and we got into this with the Full House episode recently, you know, with, you know, a young sexually vivacious woman, say one who is of age, you know, but a sexually vivacious woman who is making her own decisions about what who she does and does not want to sleep with.
That is a woman who is not under your control.
That is a woman who needs to be brought in, who needs to be reined in, you see.
And so the whole like thing of like being attracted to very young girls, to adolescents, to the whole argument is like, well, if we get them young, if I get them when they're like 15, 16, they just never know any different.
And so they're just, there's, they come, they become my property instead of the property of her dad.
And so suddenly, you know, she never has the opportunity to express herself and her desires in any more concrete way, you know?
And then, you know, what, once I've done that, then I, once I get sick of her, I can pass her on to my friends who don't mind if she's a couple of years older, which according to Batia Ungar Sargon is fine.
Apparently, that's an alibi.
Yeah, it's an alibi.
No, no, no, they were.
Once she's 18, it's fine.
I mean, I was saying this on Blue Sky the other day.
You know, I remember like there were, there were websites at Canada Downey, you know, the Olson twins, Mary Kate and Ashley Olson, who were like celebrities from the time they were infants.
They were on the show full house.
I don't know how well you know the full house show, but like, you know, it was like a mainstay of my childhood.
And there were like, cause they turned like 11 and they started doing like the show window.
They do these little like tweeny things, like where they were always twins and they were like billionaires by the time they turned 18, but there were websites counting down the days until they turned 18.
You knew these actresses when they were a year and a half old was the first time they appeared on that show.
But this is culture-wide.
And it certainly was in the 90s when all this stuff in the 2000s when all this stuff was happening.
Because that's that era.
That's when that happened.
That's when Limazey Lohan got dig.
And that's when Brittany Spears was this, was this young ingenue.
I think she was, I think she started when she was 16 or 17.
And there were, you know, people were counting that down, you know, constantly.
Yeah.
And there was a, I saw part of a speech that Natalie Paul gave where she talked about how, you know, she, she got her breakout role in Leon playing Matilda.
And that's a, you know, that's a, that's a problematic text, that movie.
That is a very problematic text.
So it gave rise to essentially from that point on, she, as, as, as a kid, she's like 12 or 13 or something when she does that movie.
She was really excited about, oh, God, I'm so young and I have this hit.
I'm a star.
That means I have this career open to me as an actress.
And, you know, and she talks in this speech about how she suddenly became aware that the entire culture was looking at her in this sexualized way and talking about her as if she was, she was already a sexual being and how she had to, she had to completely change her life.
She had to, you know, think about that when she decided which roles she was going to take and stuff like this.
And it's heartbreaking to hear somebody, she's doing okay in life, you know, but it's heartbreaking that that's the reaction.
I remember when the Harry Potter movies were coming out.
Oh, the British tabloids.
The British tabloids, every other day, there would be a photograph of Emma Watson on the front cover in a, you know, in a, in a prom dress or whatever, because she's gone to the premiere of another, of the latest movie.
And the way she was photographed and the way she was presented and the way she was talked about.
And, you know, she's there on the cover because it sells to middle-aged men that want to perv on her.
Yeah, exactly.
Bathroom reading, as they call it.
Sorry.
It's a little crude, but you know what I mean.
Yeah.
And I, you know, Emma Watson, I mean, for all the, for all the shit that, I mean, you know, we should never support Harry Potter again in your life because you just give him a jiggy rowling.
And I was too old for it to be, it was never, it was, it was a phenomenon of my teenage years, not my childhood.
So I never like got hooked on it.
I do admire the fact that all those kids turned out to be pretty all right.
You know, Radcliffe and Grant and really all of them, I think there was like, even in the supporting cast, even like the minor characters, you know, I think there were like one or two who got into some trouble later on.
But like, you don't see that with child actors very often.
And so that's, you know, it's remarkable how that they were protected from that.
And I think there was a culture on making those films.
Anyway, there were responsible adults in charge.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I was like, geez, imagine what can happen when there's responsible adults in charge.
What would Megan Kelly do?
Man, and she has daughters.
She has daughters who are like getting, they're, I mean, they're kind of getting to be that age.
I think they're like seven and 10 or something like that.
Like, you know, are you going to say this in like four or five years when your daughters are about that age?
No, it doesn't apply to her daughters, does it?
The whole thing is predicated on her assumption that she and hers are going to be okay, which again is just, that's the Republican, that's the right-wing mindset to a T, isn't it?
I'm okay.
The people I care about in my circle are going to be okay.
So, I mean, that's why this, that's why all of this happened to these girls that became the Epstein survivors in the first place, because they weren't in any privileged groups.
They weren't being looked after by anybody with money.
They were there for somebody like him to prey upon, somebody who thought of himself as a superior form of life and thought of them as just his serfs, basically, his sexual serfs to be used and discarded and passed on.
That's why Megan Kelly feels on a fundamental level that she has to defend this, because it's essentially the same set of values that she lives by.
Okay, she's probably not sexually abusing people, I assume, but it's still the same basic assumption of superiority and the right to just use and abuse the lesser people as you wish and or just cast them to the curb if they're of no value to you, as long as you're all right.
It's the same mindset.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, this is ultimately what wealth and power gives you.
You know, the little people just, they don't, they don't matter so much.
They don't matter.
And they're material for you to use.
Yeah.
All right.
Editing jack popping in.
By the way, Megan in 2017.
As hard as it is for women like those that Charlie allegedly harassed.
She's talking about Charlie Rose.
To stand up for themselves in the moment and thereafter.
And it is so hard.
It's so hard, especially for young women not in powerful positions.
The time has come.
The time has come.
We are in the middle of an empowerment revolution in this country.
And the only way forward is for women to get comfortable, get comfortable throwing some sharp elbows, making waves and taking risks and holding the powerful to account.
It is not, yeah.
And Megan in 2018.
You know, you, you feel as a victim.
You feel a victim.
You to people who are going to be out there, because you know some are going to judge and say you were 15, you were 16, you were 17, you were a willing participant.
Again, the legal age of consent in California is 18.
So there's no consenting for a 14 or even a 17 year old in these circumstances.
Okay, so very much on the same topic, I wanted to mention a couple of other people who've been who've been making very much the same kinds of excuses because this has been one in one form or another, this has been the excuse that's been popping up right the way across the entire right.
One of them that made me laugh, albeit a dark, sad laugh, is the stuff that's been coming from Richard Hanania, who's really been leaning into this on Twitter.
He had a scientific racist kind of Nazi fight figure, Richard Hanania, who somehow gets to just be a dude that people take seriously.
It's like, okay.
Yeah, he's just rehabilitated.
Of course, you know, he's just a normal guy.
He just believes things about race and IQ that very normal people believe.
So, you know, it's fine.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it worked for him.
He just renounced.
He just formally sort of renounced white nationalism, but kept most of those views.
99% of those views.
I'm definitely not a white nationalist, but it's the same rhetorical move, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's the one that Marjorie Taylor Greene is clearly hoping is going to work for her because she's resigning from Congress immediately after she's been there long enough to qualify for the lifelong pension and healthcare.
Oh, is that how that works?
Yeah.
I didn't read that bit of that detail, but that's interesting.
That's very interesting.
Yes.
And she's publicly fallen out with Donald Trump for supporting the Epstein victims completely opportunistically, in my opinion, and cynically, despite all the unearned kudos that she's getting from people.
That's because she comes from that conspiracy QAnon wing of MAGA, and she's still loyal to that.
And she's, you know, MAGA is splitting down the line on this, and she's decided which way she's going to jump.
And I'm sure she sees herself deading MAGA in a few years' time.
Yeah, there's a definite war going on.
And they're really trying to decide, like, where you stand on that line is really going to make the difference.
It was funny.
Like, after the November elections, there was this recrimination among these guys.
It's like, we lost all these elections.
You know, the Democrats cleaned our clock this year.
We have a Muslim socialist mayor of New York.
What the hell happened?
And, you know, like, yeah, we definitely should have spent all this time arguing about racist kids in group chats and not like attacking the left.
We didn't attack the left enough.
We didn't call him a socialist enough times.
We didn't call him a communist.
We made too few AI-fueled nonsense videos about how terrible he was going to be.
We needed to do that more.
Those AI videos from the Cuomo campaign.
I mean, again, listen to If Books Could Kill talking about that.
I mean, it really is like the Democrats were doing shit that was so racist that like, I mean, two Zoron Momdami.
Sorry, I almost did an episode about this, but the moment passed, you know, but in this is more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We could have sat and laughed at that for ages.
And that's exactly what Peter and Michael did.
So go listen to that podcast.
MTG clearly sees herself leading MAGA once Trump's gone.
And she, you know, she's a candidate for it.
I mean, I think when Trump dies, she, she's going to, you know, I think, I think she hasn't made at least as much of a case for it as Vance does.
You know, I mean, Vance is more so than Vance.
But she's useless.
She's much more close to the ground on that on that MAGA world stuff.
You know, she's much more, she is actually of them, whereas Vance just pretends to be.
Vance is more like Hanania, you know, in that scientific racist kind of bullshit, you know.
Which, which is why she jumped the way she jumped on the Epstein thing, because she's still connected to that sort of MAGA QAnon conspiracy strain that still sees Epstein as a way into, you know, cracking open the deep state paedophile conspiracy stuff.
She's, she's still, I don't know if she still literally believes all that stuff.
I think she's made too much money from being in Congress to be fully pilled in the sincere sense anymore, but she's still connected to that wing of it.
And she sees the point being she's she's detached from Trump, but her departing statement makes it clear that she's every bit the MAGA fascist she ever was.
And she's gambling on managing to sort of recuperate her image in the mainstream, which seems very depressingly and enragingly.
It seems to be working, just like it worked for Hanania.
But Hanania's been tweeting up a storm about this.
There's one where he says, to call being attracted to 17-year-olds paedophilia is basically calling all men paedophiles, which no.
You're telling on yourself there.
Yeah, really are telling on yourself there.
There's another one where he says, they start by calling Epstein a paedophile.
You say nothing.
First, they came for the paedophiles, huh?
You say nothing.
Before long, they'll declare you a pervert if your girlfriend isn't at least 40.
Resist the moral panic.
But my absolute favorite, and see if you can see what's wrong with this one, Daniel.
My absolute favorite is when American Beauty came out in 1999, no one thought Kevin Spacey was sexually unusual for being attracted to the teen girl.
I mean, hey, has it turned out it wasn't the teen girls?
First of all, me.
I remember I was, I was, that was a movie.
I haven't seen that movie in a long time, but it was like one of those formative, I was 19.
So I said, like, budding movie geek kind of movies, like one of the, oh, the greatest movie of the year type thing, you know, I remember like really responding to that.
I saw it two or three times theatrically.
Yeah, no, there was actually a discourse about this in 1999, my friend.
I mean, it actually was a thing.
I've seen the movie once.
I saw it back in the day when it first came out.
And I remember it sufficiently well.
First of all, I absorbed it sufficiently well at the time.
And I remembered it sufficiently well to know that actually the guy being weird and creepy and sad for being attracted to the teenage girl is literally the entire fucking point of the film.
Well, that's what the film is about.
And when the, sorry for spoiling a 26-year-old movie here, but you know, at the end, what happens is she decides to give herself to him.
And he's been, she's been this ingenuous.
She's been this, you know, this Lolita figure to him.
She decides to, for, for reasons of her own, you know, she decides, so, well, I'll get, you know, I'll actually have sex with you.
And then she says, can you, can you go easy to me?
It's my first time.
And suddenly he wakes up like, holy shit, this is a child.
And like, the whole point is, oh, no, oh, no.
Oh, no.
That's, that's actually bad.
What I was doing was bad.
It is, it cannot be clearer in text.
It's what's happened in this film.
I mean, Kevin Spacey as a human being is a piece of shit.
But then Lester Burnham is a decent guy.
You know, it turns out he does the right thing.
Yes.
Anyway, he matures during the course of the film.
The point of the film is that he is he's a middle-aged man, but he is still incredibly immature, which is why he's attracted to a you know a girl.
And he comes through a process of mature.
You know, it's not particularly psychologically realistic, probably, but in the course of the film, he goes through a process of maturation to the point where he thinks better of it.
So the whole film is about, no, it's weird and immature for a grown man to have that sort of feeling about a cheerleader.
That's the point.
God, no, I want to do American Beauty.
No, let's not discuss this topic anymore.
Anyway, yes, no.
Yeah, that is, that is a beautiful, that is a beautiful tweet.
I love it.
Anyway, no, no, it's a continue.
It's a thing of beauty.
Yeah.
An American beauty.
Anyway, yes.
Okay.
Continue.
Continue.
Another person who's been doing the same thing is no surprises here, Alan Dershowitz, because he's pleaded guilty to one count of having sex for money with a 17 and year and 10 month old person.
That's not pedophile.
And he's long been on the we need to get rid of statutory rape and get rid of age of consent laws thing.
Now, I found a tweet from Julie Kay Brown, who is the brilliant journalist who broke loads of the Epstein story after the initials about that a few years ago.
I remember listening to that and liking it quite a bit.
Yeah, anyway.
So she responds to this.
Dershowitz, who helped Jeffrey Epstein get the sweetheart deal, knows full well that there were almost three dozen dozen girls ages 13 to 17.
This refers back to what Megan Kelly was bullshitting about earlier, who were named in a list that accompanied this plea deal.
The final plea paperwork was manipulated to pick just one victim and his lawyers, that includes Dershowitz, made sure they chose the oldest one so that it didn't look so bad.
But the girl who first came forward to police was 14.
And the list of other victims attached to that deal included many young girls, which I think makes everything very clear.
Yeah, absolutely.
Megan Kelly is young.
Well, A, we don't have connection to Trump literally doing this.
Trump is just, you know, he's just the Miss Teen world pageant or whatever.
You know, he's just looking into the locker rooms at T He because like, oh, they're pretty young girls.
They're a little young, but, you know, hey, what red-blooded American man doesn't does it?
The pretty 15-year-old girls.
And he's like, no, no, no.
Some of those were 13 and they were complaintants.
They were, they were, they, and you worked out this deal.
Now you're claiming, you're claiming, well, you know, that girl was actually a little bit older.
And so, you know, but no, no, no, that, that's because you personally, you, Alan Dershowitz, you made that.
You made that happen.
You made that be true.
And you know that there were younger girls.
You know for a fact that there were younger girls.
There were young complaintants.
What a slime ball.
There's no more to defend that man.
There's nothing else but defend that man.
It's just, you know, like, yeah, no.
He is the lowest of the low, that guy.
He is the worst of the worst.
There's no sleazier, slimier, lying piece of shit than Alan Dershowitz.
He is genuinely one of the people on this earth that I have, that I hold in the most contempt.
Yeah.
Well, now that Dick Caney is gone, the joke is going to be Alan Dershowitz, I guess.
Is Alan Dershowitz even in this thing?
I love it.
One of the narratives I've noticed about the recent tranche of emails that have been shared or dumped or leaked or whatever is people are reacting with a kind of surprise about certain things.
But one of the things I've heard a lot is, oh, well, Michael Wolf, the journalist, is far more involved with Epstein than we realized.
Now, there's an extent to which I think that's fair comment because Michael Wolfe in those emails is definitely seen to be actively trying to help Epstein in his PR battles and so on in 2016, 2017, and so on.
I think it's a little bit overstated because we've known about Michael Wolf being embedded with Epstein and his coterie of people for quite a long time.
There's a book that was published in 2021 by Michael Wolf.
It's a collection of essays that have previously been published in other places.
And one of the essays in that is the entire last chapter of the book.
It's called Monster.
The subtitle is The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein.
And the first part of that is an account of a sort of meeting in Epstein's palatial New York home between Epstein, one of Epstein's lawyers, this guy Weingarten, I think his name was, Ehud Barak, the Israeli labor politician and former prime minister and former general and former intelligence operative, and over the phone, Steve Bannon.
Now, this is another thing that's been said about these emails is that they're revealing that Bannon is more connected to Epstein than we ever realized.
Again, we've known about this connection.
Bannon met Epstein in 2017 and they were thick as thieves, really, for the next year or couple of years until Epstein dies.
I think Epstein died in 2020, didn't he?
I believe so.
Was it during the pandemic?
Yeah, it was during the pandemic.
Again, I think it's true that the level of engagement, there's been some very good articles over at Byline Times about this where they go through Epstein and Bannon seem to have been up to between them.
I'll link to those.
Basically, Bannon was trying to use Epstein's connections and to help him form this international sort of network of right-wing figures.
He's trying to create this network, which includes people like Farage and Salvini and Orban and so on.
And one of Epstein's things is that he's kind of connected to so many people and he can put people together if they want to be put together.
And Bannon is, again, in these articles, it's quite clear he's trying to sort of, he's trying to get that done via helping Epstein with his travails, you know, his the accusations against him.
Trying to improve the PR.
Yeah.
Yes.
The sort of the one sentence version of it, the way Nafiz Ahmed puts it in one of the pieces is they were going to create a new sort of far-right movement that was going to stave off Me Too and Time's Up for 10 years, thus helping Epstein in some way, I suppose.
They seem to have been obsessed with the idea that just get the PR right, then all of this will go away.
Well, and prior to the actual, to the, to the, to the arrest, I think there was a sort of logic to that, you know, and I think that's, that shows through in the, in the chapter.
I read that chapter.
You know, you're at your request, you were like, yeah, you should read this.
We're going to talk about it.
And I'm like, oh, yeah, this is actually quite interesting.
What happened was suddenly he gets arrested.
And then like even the big fancy PR firm, like the last place that would even begin to help him, who had a legitimately like an interesting idea about how to how to do this.
I mean, it's disgusting.
But it's like, yeah, no, we don't think we can help you anymore.
And I think it literally is like, no, no, no, now, now you're fucked, dude.
You're never going to revive your public opinion.
It's just not possible anymore.
One of the things that's very clear, I think, from the emails that have come out recently, and it's very clear also in this chapter of this book, again, published in 2021 in book form anyway, this chapter, is that Epstein and apparently everybody around him, all his friends, he felt that he was being treated terribly unfairly.
Was he?
He, as far as he was concerned, he had done basically nothing wrong at all except enjoy life yeah, and he was a victim of censorious moralism and changing attitudes and and so on and so forth.
The whole thing seems to have just been a pr issue.
As I say, just get the pr right and rehabilitate himself in the public mind.
And this conference which Wolf describes and Wolf is clearly there it's one of those instances of it's.
We talked about this when we talked about In Cold Blood.
Caputa gives us a a in terms of the way it's written.
It's written to read like fiction, but it's a fictional account of actual events.
I mean, we're getting this from Michael Wolf, so take that for what you think that's worth, but it's a fictionalized event of actual account of actual events where Wolf is clearly sat in the room but he himself is not a character in the chapter, so to speak.
He doesn't recount himself.
Yeah, I don't think I appears anywhere in it.
He doesn't say I said this or I said that and he doesn't recount himself saying anything as part of the conversation.
But he's clearly sat in the room with these people, with Epstein, with Weingarten, with Barack and with Bannon on the phone where they discuss how to try to save Epstein by rehabilitating his pr and doing the right sort of tv and getting Epstein's interview technique right and stressing this and and stressing that.
And do we have to worry about any more girls coming forward and stuff like that?
There's a, there's a great line I from from Bannon, i'd like to really go back.
If you don't mind, if you don't mind no no please, this isn't a bad.
Sorry, I said this in jacket.
I'm like this is legitimately funny, all right.
So they talked about like where he could go, like can you go to?
Can you go to?
Would 60 Minutes take you?
Could you do a nice interview on 60 Minutes?
They're like with Rachel Maddow.
Would Rachel Maddow give you?
You know?
Like okay yeah, that's a good idea.
Yeah, that's great, that's great.
Yeah, I don't know Msnbc in that era, I don't know who knows um.
Anyway okay, said Bannon, you're the Jeffrey surrogate sitting with Rachel Maddow and she's gonna say how many girls were there.
Were there 10, were there a hundred, a thousand?
Now you're on national television.
What do you say?
I'm confident it's less than a thousand, was it?
Said Bannon, turning to Epstein, like he's literally turning to Epstein, going like, hold on, was it less than a thousand?
And Epstein going like yeah, I think so.
It's like you know, like he literally doesn't know, like how many, how many was it?
How many was it?
Uh Epstein, how many, Jeff, how many young girls did you actually abuse?
Wasn't a thousand?
You know, I just love the image of him like turning to Epstein, going like it was less than a thousand right, you know?
Yeah, when I read that I couldn't help imagining it done sort of with comic timing.
So Bannon's saying i'm confident he's, he's in character as the person talking to Rachel Maddow, i'm confident it was less than a thousand.
Pause turns to Jeffrey, was it?
I am, I am, I am confident you could make, like Adam Mckay can make a movie out of this material.
I think oh, i'm sure he will one day.
Yeah no it's it's, it's great no, it's.
And I, as you, as you said to us in the, as you said to me in the, in the, in the chat, you know um, what's fascinating is how like grounded Bannon seems compared to everybody else.
He's like yeah, this is a problem, but you know, we're gonna like he's got like very, Like concrete solutions in mind.
He's very, and he comes across as like the only adult in the room to a certain degree because, like, yeah, dude, this looks bad.
This, this is no matter how you spend this, like, you are giving terrible answers to this.
Like, people are going to think you're a monster because you're a monster.
But, you know, if we're going to, if we're going to do, we got to change like everything about the way you're answering these questions.
I love it.
He like does they do like an initial like uh like sit down and he does like a faux interview with Bannon sits down and like does like pretends he's a hostile journalist or whatever.
And at the end of it, it's like, yeah, like 95% of what you said there was completely the wrong thing to say.
You should not have said any of that stuff.
Nonetheless, everything else was great.
Yeah, there's a line like Bannon's discussing Jeffrey's performance with the cameraman or something.
And he says something like, no, he was great, apart from the words.
Yeah, you gotta, you gotta wonder if that's uh, you gotta wonder if that's Bannon speak or if that's a wolf kind of uh massaging that a little bit, you know.
This is, I mean, it does read like it's been fictionalized, and uh, I don't know, but how much of this is real or not.
But let's let's take it as you know, a representation of actual conversations.
As you say, Bannon very much seems like the grown-up in the room, and the fact that he is so deeply, you know, he and Jeffrey Epstein are clearly very close friends at this point, and he is fully invested in trying to help Jeffrey Epstein for the reasons that I think are best found in those articles at Byline Times that I mentioned.
He wants Epstein's connections to help him build this far-right international network.
But he's he's all in, he's trying to do what he can to help this man evade justice for being what he was.
Despite the fact that in the years since Bannon on the War Room podcast has constantly used this issue, as indeed the Trump campaign did, to pander to the conspiracy theorizing about the deep state of their base, Bannon knew the truth and he was trying to help the guy.
And I think almost immediately after that passage you just read, there's another passage I want to read this, uh, read a little bit.
Um, actually, this is Bannon speaking.
Actually, here is the first question: What's the age of the youngest girl?
That would be good, said Epstein, because the answer to that question is that there was one girl who was 14 years old who's just saying it in front of this room full of people.
And she told me, including a reporter.
She told the police she lied about her age.
She told everyone she was 18 because she was afraid she would never be allowed into the house and never be invited back.
That's the only one.
Bannon, that's the only one who is under the age of 18.
Epstein, no, the youngest one.
Bannon snorted loudly over the phone.
All right, okay.
So get to the issue.
Bang.
He's been branded a paedophile.
No, he's a paedophile.
While in fact, these are not underage or barely underage.
He's literally just told you that they are.
I'd rather have that discussion about what is a paedophile than for people just to assume he is one.
There it is.
There it is in that room back then when they were talking about how to spin this in terms of PR.
Bannon, I'd rather have that discussion about what is a paedophile than for people just to assume he is one.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
To the extent that anybody was underage, it was slightly underage and they lied about it.
None of them were acting under duress.
There were no, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Blaming the girls, fudging the issue, blatantly disregarding what Epstein himself has said about the ages of the girls.
There's another bit.
That's the line.
There's a line you might be about to go there, but he says, Epstein says, well, they had piercings and tattoos, and you can't get those until you're 18.
So I assume that they're piercing the tattoos.
In Florida, it's apparently at least Epstein claims.
I don't know how true this is.
I didn't look it up.
But he's like, well, you can't get a tattoo or an earring or an ear piercing if you're if you're not 18.
So clearly these girls are 18 because they had them.
Does this level of ID checking is that?
Is that also how I should handle things?
Well, he said he was born here.
Let's just, let's just not bother to check.
God, if you've ever held a job in the United States the last like 70 years, you go through all kinds of like ID verifications and shit.
I mean, it would be a federal crime if they were not 18, but we're just going to take them at their word.
I don't know.
This is so.
Yeah.
Only way you didn't know is because you didn't want to know.
That's the only way.
And I get that they're trying to, I get that they're trying to do the propaganda.
They're trying to do the PR.
They're trying to figure out how to spin it.
But at the same time, it's just like, you know, there's no way you didn't know.
I'm sorry.
Exactly.
And this makes that very clear.
The things that they're saying in the course of trying to gin up the defense make it very clear what was actually going on.
The bit you mentioned is the next bit I was going to read.
This is Epstein.
These girls, including the 14-year-old, the 14-year-old worked in strip clubs, massage parlors.
They had tattoos, tattoos and piercings, which in Florida require you to be 18.
That's your defense.
But Your Honor, she had a piercing.
Now, under Florida law, that's anyway.
Bannon says that's helpful, but you're besmirching the victims.
The line here is between having to respect the victims and having to show that they are batshit crazy or coldly in it for the money.
Which is also the other thing that Megan Kelly was doing in other parts of that clip that I didn't play for you.
It's like, yeah, well, they all got paid for it.
And then some of these guys, some of these girls are just grifting after, you know, they were just, you know, because, you know, Epstein couldn't defend himself at a certain point.
He wasn't allowed to by the terms of his eviction, of his plea deal.
And so he had to pay out all this money to these like, he doesn't use those words, but gold digging whores.
You know, they're just, they're all just, you know, they're in it for the money, you know, yeah.
I'm the victim of Jeffrey Epstein.
I am the victim.
Yes, exactly.
That leads me quite nicely into the last bit I want to read, which is actually something said by the lawyer Weingarten.
I'm betting that for a lot of these girls, the best thing they did in their day was to visit Jeffrey compared to what they were doing in their miserable lives.
But you can't actually say that.
Oh, God.
And this is like, this is just lawyer shit.
Lawyers at this level, you are just, you are a dog on a chain and you're just, you're there to, to finally remember regardless.
But that is so disgusting.
Wolf makes it clear that Weingarten is also a personal friend of Epstein's as well.
No, no, I mean, clearly, yeah, no, no, I wasn't trying to defend him.
I'm just saying like, no, no, I know.
Yeah, no, it's God, the level, the level of, well, of course, it was true that being abused by Jeffrey Epstein, look at the beautiful house that they got to be abused in.
Look at, look at the opulence that surrounded it the whole time.
Of course, the abuse is terrible, but they were just going to be abused by, you know, some dumb fuck red deck in the swamps of Florida if Jeffrey Epstein didn't abuse them.
And it gave them an education.
They gave them a job.
They get a paycheck.
I mean, we can't say this.
I mean, people would think we're monsters if we say this, but it comes through in the rest of the conversation that Wolf recounts that they think they can't say these things because the culture has gone mad.
You know, what we mean to and all that.
The culture has gone far too to the left and you can't say these things anymore.
As reasonable as they undoubtedly are, suddenly the entire media is hostile to people like Mr. Epstein for some reason.
The world has gone so woke.
The world has gone so off-kilt.
A very kind billionaire can't even get a handjab from a 14-year-old anymore without people making a federal case about it.
Well, I mean, that's pretty, that's pretty much exchange.
That's almost plain text.
And in a slightly encoded, obfuscated form, it's what Megan Kelly is saying in that clip as well, which is really the point that struck me, which is that the apologetics that are being now being made now for Epstein still, and preemptively, obviously, this is the agenda, preemptively being made for Donald Trump, in case there is stuff in the files that shows him directly engaged in abuse of young girls.
These defenses, these apologetics, they go right the way back to Epstein himself.
They are the same arguments, the same PR strategies, and the same inherently misogynistic and classist assumptions that are being discussed in that room between Jeffrey and his lawyers and Steve Bannon.
Same attitudes.
Yeah.
Almost, almost, almost as if maybe Steve Bannon and Megan Kelly are in a group chat together.
I believe he's appeared on the show.
So, you know, I can find out right now.
Hold on, let me check.
Oh, yeah.
A few moments later.
Yeah, no.
Yeah, two months ago.
Talking about Jimmy Kimmel, apparently.
Steve Bannon came on and talked about Jimmy Kimmel.
So at least once, and probably more often than that.
And recently, and recently.
So, you know, yeah, you want to bet those two do not do not text.
There's no way that all these people text.
So she may be getting the actual exact same talking points directly from Steve Bannon.
It's entirely possible.
It doesn't take anything.
Yes.
They're probably thrashing out the line in their WhatsApp group or whatever.
Yes.
I hope they're using Signal.
I hope for their sake they're using Signal.
You know, none of these people can keep a secret.
God, I actually dope they are using something much less secure than Signal, but you know, these guys, they are dumb fucks, but hopefully they're not that big of dumb fucks, you know, anyway.
It's quite conceivable that Megan is basing talking points that she's coming out with when she's talking to Batyar Ungar Sargon on, you know, conversations she's having in Signal or whatever with Steve Bannon.
And Steve Bannon is recycling them from memories he has of meetings actually with Epstein and his defense team.
Yeah.
That's the point, you know, for me is that we are still making Epstein's argument.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, and certainly we focused on, you know, like this like right-wing propaganda machine because I think that's what we focus on.
But again, I think the conversation around these like kind of barely legal comments is much, it's culture-wide.
