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I’m going to be honest, I have misgivings about writing this, and many may not want to read it just because of how lurid some of the discussion is. Note I say “discussion” and not “facts.” There are doubtless some facts in here. There’s also a whole bunch of febrile fantasy and determination to read certain facts between certain lines.
Telling which is which is no mean feat, especially in a mess like this, but sometimes “in rerum confusione, veritas,” and so, we soldier on.
I’m going to try very hard to be even-handed and avoid extrapolation from conjecture.
Forgive me if I miscarry. This topic is basically the Venn intersect of a Rorschach test and intellectual polonium, with a side order of “hard R” true crime stories.
Let’s start here:
What the Epstein dump is not: the smoking gun.
No one says, “I done it! Come arrest me!”
This is not why it was feared.
Neither is “it makes lots of important people look bad.”
Sure, sucks to be them, but eggs, omelets, etc.
And there is a lot of what looks like it could be sanitization, censorship, and missing bits, but this is conjecture on my part, a sort of negative space analysis that “this does not read like the good stuff.”
But then, perhaps it wouldn’t, would it? If this really were dark and nefarious and IC adjacent, the idea that the real goodies would be on open email accounts that everyone had and knew about seems vanishingly small.
So, I suspect this “e-mail dump” is basically destined to leave everyone unsatisfied. Those determined to find a satanic elite drunk on power and adrenochrome will find plenty to say, “See, told you!” And those determined to call it a nothingburger will see little hard evidence to sway them and ask, “So, who can you convict from this?” And the rest of us are just going to get a bit queasy at the implications contained and the spaces they might imply and just what those spaces might be full of.
But I think there may, indeed, be some cause for some groups involved and adjacent to this to be worried.
Here’s my pet theory:
The reason this dump was (rightly) so feared is that, even if adulterated, it’s enough volume to do real pattern analysis, a mosaic of 3 million things, most of which could be dismissed on their own, that, as a collective, form a picture that increasingly comes into focus.
I wonder if in here somewhere is a sort of evidentiary Simpson’s paradox whereby no single thing can be proven, but that as a whole passes some balance point and starts to look dispositive, a sort of trusted network emerging from untrusted nodes in something akin to statistically powering a study.
Consider:
1 email about pizza proves nothing.
900 emails where a large group of powerful people seem oddly obsessed with it? Now you’re raising questions.
Layer on top of that a widespread and bizarre focus on “dentistry,” which seems to make no contextual sense save as another code word, and then drop the truly disturbing possible connotations of widespread networks all asking about “jerky” and “beef jerky” (that, inexplicably, seems to need to be refrigerated), and the idea that you have a large network here speaking in codes about some set of practices that they all certainly seem to know better than to actually name starts to look high probability, especially as these intense focuses seem to cluster on just a few keywords rather than being more generalized. (No one speaks of “pork chops” or “the dermatologist.”)
It’s a fascinating puzzle.
I’ve been really hesitant to weigh in on this. Frankly, I still am, both for fear of being wrong and perhaps more terrifying of what might actually wind up proven, because somewhere between grindhouse horror and nothingburger lies a truth. If and whether and to what extent it can become knowable to us remains unclear, but one must, I suppose, try.
About most of this, I am not going to try to tell you what to wind up believing. This is for everyone to sort out on their own.
So don your bomb disposal gear and come along.
This is not a pleasant journey.
Once more: we’re going to be dealing in supposition and balance of likelihood. “Proof” in the absolute sense is elusive here; we’re dealing in the slipperier and more elusive precincts of probability.
And some of it is difficult to even ponder.
I had always suspected that there was likely something to the incredibly suspicious goings on around “pizzagate,” but this was, to be honest, a sort of imaginable horror: powerful people running a sex ring for deviant desires would hardly be a new-new idea. It’s awful, but it’s a predictable kind of awful, an awful that falls within the precincts of imagination which normal (or even sane) people might envision. (Though, like the scandals in the UK, that people seem highly desirous to look away from and sweep beneath carpets.)
But some of the rest of this starts to push into places from which imagination recoils, the kinds of ideas that even the most avid and committed of conspiracists fear to explore because the psychic damage of having to accept that you live in a world like that, that humans do things like this, that it could be so widespread and pervasive as to comprise an actual power base and a system for keeping severely cluster B “elites” in lockstep unity through the mutually assured destruction of “if anyone catches us doing this they will literally bring back the guillotine,” is simply more than a healthy mind can or wants to bear. It’s a horror too far, a thing too actively abhorrent and insane to look upon and not be changed.
And, of course, taken as game theory, this is just the sort of transgression that would be required to keep such a group in line. The penalty for defection or exposure has to be worse than anything else you could plausibly fear.
These emails and documents are, in many ways, a horrifying embarrassment for law enforcement because when you piece them together, you can, if you look from certain angles and under certain assumptions, see a group hiding in plain sight and surfing the edge of deniability with such contempt and disregard for the idea of consequences it knows full well will not accrue as to move past insult and into pure dismissal.
And if that is so, we have a monster infestation of astonishing proportions.
But these emails do not have the smoking guns.
The purported “kompromat” is not here.
All that talk about “we cannot convict based on this” seems true.
And they are so late in coming out, and so many years have passed, that what evidence actually remains has been left alone with professional scrubbers and cleaners who may well (again, assuming the conspiracy theorization is correct) have nation-state scale resources. Finding “the trove of proof” is likely to remain elusive, and the snipe hunts have been led in many of the wrong directions (and away from places like Zorro Ranch).
The classic playbook has been and will be deployed, and all the big guns are out:
Deny, deny, deny. It’s old news.
This too seems like information.
They want it to go away as “perhaps once a thing, but long gone.” Close your eyes again, go back to pretending you did not see this. If ever it was scary, the fear is over and you’re going to be fine. Any conspiracies that may or may not have existed are over.
And they have a real shot at running this playbook because humans mostly want the world they wake up in today to be a lot like the world from yesterday, and the implications of accepting facts too far outside of any practical or ethical norm are enormous and irrevocable.
Faced with sufficient atrocity, no moral person may sit inactive, and the actions required may be things that end your life as you know it and pull you into a world you simply cannot or do not wish to absorb, a Rubicon you do shy away from crossing because “there is no back.”
What if monsters are real?
As a purely hypothetical basis, consider the plot of ’80s cult classic “They Live,” where the protagonist gains glasses allowing him to see that all our elites are actually space aliens dominating the world.
You all lived through the times COVIDian and have seen “the after.” Ask yourself: based on that, what percentage of humanity, upon seeing the aliens, would admit to having seen them and then actually go on to attempt to do anything about it? What percentage would stomp on the glasses that brought this insight and try to go back to living as before?
Would you really want to see a thing like that if it meant the end of everything you knew? This is not a trivial question. Not in any way.
And interestingly, half the answer resides in the question of “what could I actually do even if I tried?”
They Live (1988) is one of Carpenter’s best! : r/johncarpenter
That is the scope of the issue. “Not wanting to see” will be the far more potent driver than “unable to see,” and the level of prebunking and ideological and frame capture is high.
On to Epstein:
There is a great deal here which we do not yet know, perhaps a great deal we will never know, but I will tell you one thing of which I am certain:
There is nothing “bygone” about this “elite.”
It’s not over. It’s not gone. It’s in power and has no plans to give it up. This NYT gaslight from November is classic preemptive crisis handling.
The goal is to make it easy for you to decide not to pay attention.
“Bygone elites” do not do this. Active ones do.
They’re trying to pull a Keyser Soze.
And they have a great many aligned allies.
I suspect this is some of the dirtiest water ever carried by the NYT, and that is really saying something.
The truly difficult part here is that you can ignore any one part of this if you want to: find a reason to not see it, call it a coincidence, decide that sometimes “pizza is just pizza.”
I’m not here to tell you where that line is. We’re all going to need to sort that out for ourselves and make an assessment of what we think is going on, whether this was just a bunch of bored rich people with popularity obsessions and penchants for dark humor or an actual bona fide atrocity mill, what is happenstance and what is “enemy action.”
But there certainly is no shortage of outcomes sufficiently suspicious to give one pause, and past a point, the profound incuriosity of media and justice organs alike about such things becomes thunderous in its silence.
These facts are all validated. You can watch the video on the link above. Obviously, no one apart from the abductors knows for sure why this kidnapping occurred. The mother has not been found.
these facts are all validated. you can watch the video on the link above. obviously, no one apart from the abductors knows for sure why this kidnapping occurred. the mother has not been found.Before we get any deeper into this, let’s agree to be very careful about our biases.
I claim no special knowledge here. I’m working off the same stuff as everyone else, and I want to make one thing extremely clear:
Trusting text just because it’s in these files is very dangerous.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve been slow to speak here.
“Whistleblowers” are notoriously unstable and untruthful. Many are just plain bonkers. Others are bang-on honest and just telling tales too wild to believe. Determining which are which is incredibly difficult, and once stories and urban myths proliferate, the fact that 3 unrelated accounts agree stops actually being confirmation and may just be multiple people fixating on the same salacious story.
Or, it might be true.
Or, most difficult of all, it might be true but some of those talking about it might be lying because they heard about it and tried to inject themselves into the story. Such people are the best friends of the conspiracist because they tell a true tale but discredit it because their own relationship to it is provably false.
Stop and think about that one. If you had a nefarious cult engaging in awful activities, wouldn’t you fill the heads of crazy people with mostly true facts so they would shout them from rooftops and then be discovered never to have been to the places or seen the things? It’s very effective infowar.
This is the meat and potatoes of intelligence agencies and narrative shaping.
And it makes it impossible to tell, at face value, what is what.
Add to this how easy it is to misinterpret textual communications, especially those using sarcasm, inside jokes, or dark humor, and, again, we need use extreme caution jumping to conclusions.
Let he who is in a group chat where they never used dark, shocking, edgelord humor that could make you look really bad if read uncharitably and out of context cast the first stone.
Take an example from “a purported victim” who claims to have been a victim of ritualistic sacrifice in which his feet were cut with a scimitar that, oddly, left no scars.
12 different parts of this story seem impossible or implausible, but I have seen people say, “But look, the cops seem to take it seriously!”
But try reading it as sarcastic. “Oh, I didn’t realize that Elvis was there as well!” “Yup, he’s got more to tell us!”
We cannot be dispositive, but on balance, that seems like a far more likely outcome than sincerity.
I suspect those claims to be wholesale bunkum.
This is a time to be careful, but assiduous.
It’s a time to make sure we have loads and loads of context and triple check our facts.
By contrast, as far as I can tell, everything in this tweet is correct.
So, context one: there are monsters in the world.
Of this, there can be little doubt. And they seem to have some worrying interactions with the rich, powerful, and famous. How bad this is, how widespread, how debased? That is an open question, but the question is and remains “who and how many and how badly?” not “if.”
And that’s important.
If this sits uneasily upon your mind, good. Congratulations. You’re likely an actual human. This should sit uneasily; it should be nearly impossible to look at directly, an abyss which, when stared into, threatens one’s sense of reality and evokes the visceral desire to sharpen stakes and hunt the vampire.
No decent person wants to see this.
And I fear it’s why we must.
And oddly, for all the lurid car-crash horror of much of this, the real information may be probabilistic.
The power of these releases is not in the smoke of their firearms but statistical inference from a preponderance of facts.
Consider this:
