In Defense of the Epstein Client

don't release the list, Pam.

I support raising the age of consent to 23. There is no way that college kids with undeveloped brains can possibly consent to something as mind-blowing, life-changing, and soul-altering as genital stimulation.

Raising the age of consent would help lower the birth rate, increase porn addiction, and best of all, it would punish sinful, disgusting humans for the evil crime of being horny. Shameful, yucky humans, always trying to wiggle their genital fluids around! From now on, you will have to do it with consenting adults instead of college age children.

While we’re at it, let’s revise child labor laws to include college kids as well. Allowing 20 year old children to work is cruel; we must protect our sweet 21 year old babies from the evils of the job market. A 22 year old infant cannot possibly consent to contractual labor — their brains are only 99.99% the volume of 23 year olds.

A person without maximum brain volume cannot be entrusted with a 2,000 pound killing machine. Raise the age for driving to 23 as well. That will help keep our streets safe, and our babies at home in the basement, sucking their thumbs and eating chicken tendies, right where they belong, under momma’s careful watch.

To some of you, these prescriptions may seem extreme. Some of you are not ready for this level of deep leftism. Some of you are, dare I say, conservative.

Conservatives like to keep things the way they are: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. One way to achieve conservatism is through democracy, where you ask the mob what it wants. Unlike coastal elites, who want to radically reform our society along utopian lines, the mob has “common sense.”

Unfortunately, while the masses are indeed conservative (they prefer the familiar over the new), they are also intensely hysterical, jealous, quick to scapegoat, easily excitable, and prefer scandal and drama over facts and logic. They are eager to accept conspiracies with a low threshold for evidence.

From 2016 to 2024, Democrats resisted the urge to inflate the Epstein scandal, because the so-called “Epstein client list” was fairly partisan, including Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Les Wexner, and Leon Black. Now that the ball is fully in Trump’s court, Democrats like Will Stancil are willing to play up the conspiracy which they ignored for so long.

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I’m sure Will and I agree on a number of issues, but let me put it this way: if your crusade against Epstein puts you on the same side as Will Stancil, that should be enough to provide you a moment of pause for reflection and double-checking.

The serious part of the article where I stop being annoyingly sarcastic:

There have been two reactions to the Epstein story over the last six years:

1. Ignore it

2. Play it up

The third option, which is to deconstruct, scrutinize, and fact-check the most salacious claims has been absent from my view. That is, until I read this article from Michael Tracey.

I do a lot of joking around and controversial takes on this blog, some of which you may find entertaining. At some point, however, people feel trolled and “rage-baited.” They feel that I am only taking on the most contrarian positions for the purposes of farming engagement. This is a common criticism, and it is understandable. I enjoy making my enemies mad and making my friends laugh.

But reading the account of Michael Tracey, it is clear that the Epstein case represents a serious epistemic crisis in American journalism. The American right is obsessed with conspiracy, and any attempt to rein things in is met with accusations of pedophilia-by-proxy. Now that Trump is refusing to “release the files,” partisan Democrats are agreeing and amplifying Republican delusions. The end result of this process, taken to its logical conclusion, is more Trumpism on the right and more Mamdani on the left.

if they were MILFs would that be better?

A brief history of epistemic crisis

Back in 1956, a man by the name of Revilo P. Oliver worked for National Review. Many of you have not heard of Mr. Oliver, but you may have heard of National Review and its editor, William F. Buckley. Buckley and Oliver were friends, but Oliver was a militant antisemite and a co-founder of the John Birch society. Buckley worked to remove Oliver from National Review in 1960 to maintain its respectability, but remained friends with Oliver afterward.

Oliver, sliding into irrelevance, became too radical for even the John Birch society, and in 1966, he denounced the society as having fallen under the control of the Jews.

Oliver was an extremely intelligent man, a professor of philology, Spanish, and Italian. His first book was a translation from ancient Sanskrit, and his PhD thesis handled ancient Greek. In total, he was fluent in 11 languages.

According to Robert Griffin, Professor at the University of Vermont, Oliver was one of two people most directly responsible for the career of William Luther Pierce.

source, page 130

Pierce, leader of the National Alliance, was a professor of physics at Oregon State University. Between Oliver and Pierce, the radical fringes of organized white nationalism, from 1956 to 2001, were at least in part influenced by highly intelligent and educated men.

This isn’t to say that Oliver and Pierce were morally correct in their values, but that the movements they sought to create were principled. Even if those principles were evil and genocidal, they were consistent and “positive” insofar as they had a distinct goal in mind, that of white supremacy. They were not grifters or clickbait farmers willing to say or do anything in the name of engagement or attention.¹

After 2001, when Pierce died, the organization he left behind fractured into oblivion. White racial animus didn’t disappear, but the energy of white nationalism entered a period of “wandering in the wilderness” without any clear leadership. What emerged out of this chaos was a kind of leaderless “conspiracism” centered on less principled figures like Alex Jones.

If you ask Alex Jones what he believes, it will be no different from any standard Republican or Democratic platitude: freedom, equality, justice, liberty, human flourishing, space exploration, clean air and water, colorblindness, ecumenical Christianity, patriotism, and “common sense.” The basic morality of Alex Jones is no more controversial than frosted flakes cereal.

Like most Americans, Alex Jones hates Nazis. What is unique about Alex Jones is that he claims that Nazis rule the world and are planning to genocide humanity with eugenic vaccines - -² that even so-called Democrats, liberals, and Jews like George Soros are actually secret Nazis in disguise.

It is true that after WWII, some members of the German government were rehabilitated and integrated into the west, and also into the Soviet Union. This is because these men were disillusioned with Nazi ideology and accepted the ideology of their conquerors. There is nothing historically unusual about this.

When Christianity took over Rome, many former pagan governors converted to Christianity and became Christian governors. When Islam took over Persia, Persian princes converted to Islam and ruled as Islamic Emirs. The same thing happened during the spread of Buddhism. There were men who served King George who, after the American Revolution, switched their allegiance to the Republic. Conquered bureaucrats change their ideology and integrate into the new order. This is a story as old as civilization itself.

For Jones, however, Nazis are a mystical force who transcend history, using their time machines and alien technologies. Nazism isn’t just a form of German nationalism, or a kind of racism or antisemitism - - it is Satan incarnate on planet Earth. The conspiracist view is a religious one.

This brings us to the present day, where Trump’s “base” is accusing him of covering up a massive pedophile ring. Elon Musk has deleted the tweet now, but in the past month he accused Trump of being in “the Epstein files.”

My conspiracy about conspiracies:

Conspiracy theorists believe in “predictive programming.” The belief is that elites will plan something like 9/11, and then prior to 9/11, they suggest to the public the potential for something like 9/11, so that when 9/11 happens, the public is “primed and ready” to accept the official narrative.

I would like to use this term in a slightly different way. Rather than believing that elites are using predictive programming to cover up their crimes, I believe that conspiracy theories are a product of a combination of religious and fictional programming. That is, Christians read the Bible, and then project various Biblical stories into the modern day, so that Obama becomes the anti-Christ, or Trump becomes Cyrus, or Jared Kushner becomes Joseph.

In the same way, secular audiences will take things they have seen in a TV show and project that onto reality.

The X-Files (1993-2002) contains many of the elements now considered integral to the “Epstein Files”: a shadowy elite; unspeakable crimes; cover-ups at the highest levels; corruption; atrocities; Satanic forces from other dimensions. The years when the X-Files episodes were aired filled a gap between the second and third series of the Twilight Zone.

Notice the gap from 1990 to 2001, filled by the X-Files.

Here’s a conspiracy about conspiracies: Why would the government want to promote such conspiracy theories? Distraction and demoralization. If the populace is busy hunting pedophiles and aliens, and believes that nothing else matters, then the substantive issues of day-to-day politics recede into the background. All of the populist energy is soaked up like a sponge and wasted on fictional goose chases and witch hunts.

Furthermore, if the government is controlled by aliens and Satanic cults with interdimensional portals in Area 51, there’s not much of a point to protesting in the street or reading up on zoning laws. This creates a kind of “exegetical cult” wherein action becomes useless if you are not sufficiently “woke” or “redpilled” to the esoterica behind the curtain. Those outside the cult are uninitiated and haven’t read enough theory.

But this conspiracy of conspiracies isn’t necessary. Modern conspiracies don’t need to be funded or promoted by governments, foreign or domestic. They could simply be a product of a stupid person’s deformed and hallucinatory concept of how power works. Folklore has always included tales of vampires, werewolves, and other kinds of parasitic, ghoulish, or predatory creatures. Transposing these forces from the dark forest of the Brothers Grimm to the tunnels under DC taps into centuries of built-up mythological power.

What about Prince Andrew?

The person who has been most credibly accused of sex with a 17 year old in relation to Jeffrey Epstein is Prince Andrew. I’m sure the Epstein Truthers have dozens of other claims, but none of them have any evidence. They will say, well, of course, the evidence has been suppressed! but absence of evidence is not evidence of conspiracy.

In the case of Prince Andrew, if the allegations against him are true, I do not give a damn.

In my Defense of P Diddy, I detail the long history of prostitution in the west. There is no civilization in human history which ever hunted down men for paying 17 year olds for sex, until around 1911. Even then, until 1988, filming sex with a 16 year old got you a slap on the wrist, a public apology, and a continued career. The moral panic over age gaps and teenage sex is not something that has ever existed before until 1995. It is a totally novel phenomenon. In fact, I would argue that it is more unusual than transgenderism, since humans have been castrating little boys since ancient times.³

We live in an unprecedented time of low birth rates. People are having less sex and watching more porn than ever before. On the one hand, this is leading to the public acceptance of sex with minotaurs. On the other hand, it is leading to historically abnormal attitudes about male heterosexuality.

Did you know that in 1994, the age of consent in Georgia was 14? Sharia law! Taliban! Pedophile paradise! Did you know that in the year 1999, it was 14 in Hawaii? Forget Little Saint James, we’ve found the real Epstein’s Island!

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The reason for the rise in the age of consent was a weakening of the institution of marriage. It is often claimed that first-wave feminism (granting women the right to vote) had no negative impact on marriage, and that all the “bad feminism” came later in the 1960s. This is another example of conservatives re-writing history to fit their narrow myopia.

In reality, between 1880 and 1920, the rate of divorce tripled, from less than 0.5 to over 1.5. Since 1980, the divorce rate has fallen, but this is a product of people refusing to get married and instead opting for permanent single status.

Again, conservatives claim that the rise in divorce can be entirely attributed to “no fault divorce laws,” but this is not true. These laws made divorce easier, but they are not responsible for the long-term rise in the divorce rate, which was cultural and not legal in origin.

The campaigns to ban alcohol, ban cocaine, grant women the right to vote, and raise the age of consent were all pushed by the same people: 19th and early 20th century Progressives.

Breaking the Speed Limit

In the United States, going 1 mile over the speed limit is a crime. Legally, a police officer can pull you over for going 61mph in a 60mph zone. In practicality, no sane police officer would ever do this without an ulterior motive. Generally, as long as you’re within 10% of the posted speed limit, cops will not pull you over.

For states in which the age of consent is 18, a 10% rule would mean that yes, sex with a 17 year old is technically illegal, but it would be a waste of time and resources on the part of the state to hunt down such infractions. At worst, offenders can be charged with the equivalent of a traffic violation, be forced to pay a fine of a couple hundred dollars, and be let off with a warning not to do it again. Continued infractions could rack up larger charges over time.

If the speed limit is 60mph, and you’re going 80mph, a cop will definitely pull you over, since you’re exceeding the speed limit by 33%. A 33% rule as applied to the age of consent at 18 would come out to 6 years. Any sort of sexual interaction with a 12 year old by an adult demands immediate and serious attention by the state, and goes beyond any sort of excusable accident of confused or mistaken identity.

If the speed limit is 60mph, and you’re going 100mph, that’s a 66% violation, and goes into the territory of reckless driving, which is a felony. For the 18 year standard, a 66% violation would be 6 years old, which most Americans would probably agree is as serious as a murder charge.

The numbers I’m using here aren’t exact or meant to quantify the exact harm caused by each type of crime. 17 is a crime; 12 is a crime; 6 is a crime; but these are clearly three different kinds of crimes. One is a crime which our ancestors would scratch their heads and shrug their shoulders at; the second is one which was campaigned against by 1st wave feminists; the third one one which would be recognized as heinous for thousands of years of civilization.

There are cases where a teacher having sex with a 17 year old student is considered a “pedophile” in the same breath that we talk about Lebanese and Pakistani immigrants gang raping 13 year girls. And these are then equivocated with lurid PizzaGate tales of Hillary Clinton raping babies. This kind of equivocation does not help victims, but resembles a kind of Puritan witch trial.

Calling Prince Andrew a pedophile, while the age of consent in Britain is 16, is utter nonsense. He is the only person, out of all the Epstein rumors, to be accused with any evidence at all (a photograph with him and Virginia Giuffre). If he is representative of the average Epstein client, then the whole “conspiracy” is nothing more than a moral panic.

Israel

Some Epstein Truthers claim that Epstein was contracted by the state of Israel to entrap powerful people to force them to do Israel’s bidding. This is a strange claim, since some of Epstein’s clients and associates (like Lex Wexner and Alan Dershowitz) are Jewish and would have supported Israel anyway.

Are we to believe that if Bill Gates wasn’t entrapped by Epstein, that he would be calling for an end to aid to Israel?

Let’s walk through this idea, step by step:

1. First, Epstein contacts Bill Gates, and says, “hey Bill, want to come to my island?”

2. Bill thinks to himself, “I hate Jews - - however, I do enjoy illegal sex. Ok Epstein, it’s a deal.”

3. Epstein shows Bill a recording: “See Bill, I’ve got you blackmailed. Now you have to support Israel!”

4. Bill thinks about it, “Well Epstein, I used to hate Israel, but now I promise to support it forever. You sure are a smooth negotiator!”

Blackmail makes sense as a strategy of coercion. For example, let’s say I want $50,000, and I have a tape of you cheating on your wife. You don’t want to give me $50,000, but you also really don’t want your wife to see that tape, so you pony up. The end result is you hate me, but you give me the money anyway.

In the case of Israel, Bill Gates has little reason to hate Israel, so it makes no sense to blackmail him. Blackmail requires negotiation: you have to tell the person you’re blackmailing that you’re blackmailing them, otherwise, you don’t control them.

Epstein Truthers get around this logic by claiming that it was secret blackmail, so secret that the participants didn’t even know they were being blackmailed! However, if any of the participants ever “acted up” (by supporting Palestine, apparently), the tapes of them having sex parties on Little Saint James would be released.

This doesn’t make any sense, because if such tapes were made public, they would implicate Epstein and cause an investigation into his behavior. They would result in the seizure of the entire island by investigators, who would then find all the tapes of all the other participants.

Think of it this way: Epstein had a few hundred friends, all of whom were supposedly loyal slaves to Israel. One of these friends “acts up,” and the blackmail is released. However, this also implicates the other 199 “loyal friends.” Seems like a bad strategy to ensure loyalty.

More likely, if Epstein was acting on behalf of Israel, he was simply making friends with powerful people to positively influence them, or collect information with them. The addition of illicit sex wasn’t a blackmailing operation, but perhaps some kind of trust-building exercise. If you trust a man to pimp out a teenager to you, you probably also trust him to share corporate secrets with you, or share whatever other information Israel might be interested in.

To say that “Epstein was an agent of Israel” seems quite superfluous given that Trump is now in his second term in the White House. It’s obvious that Israel commands influence in Washington, and it commands this influence through the ideological strength of Evangelical Christianity, the conservative movement, and through the financial strength of AIPAC. There are other more geopolitical considerations, like the relationship between Iran and America, and the inertia of 80 years of cooperation since Truman and Johnson.

No Satanic cabals are required to explain the American-Israeli relationship. The fact that conspiracists feel it is necessary to “uncover Epstein’s relationship with Israel” is a huge red herring that draws attention away from obvious public facts. But because those facts are boring and can’t hold the attention of the average person, it is necessary to invent a story of a dark magician to appeal to the Marvel Movie audience.

Statistics.

Sexual assault is a real crime in which the majority of the most serious victims are children.

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While the majority of victims at all ages were female, for children under the age of 5, a significant proportion were male.

Contrary to the popular image of a creepy old man making up the majority of offenses, the most common age for offenders was 14.

Even if we only consider victims ages 18 and older, the most common age for offenders was 23. When attempting to address the problem of sexual assault, sodomy, and rape, the most common perpetrator to watch out for is a male ages 15 to 23, not an old creepy guy.

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As with most crimes, the victims of rape and sexual assault are more likely to be poor.

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Among participants of low, middle and high income, their rates of forced intercourse were 11.9%, 4.9%, and 3.3%, respectively. Low income participants were more than twice as likely as middle income and nearly four times as likely as high income participants to be victims of forced intercourse.

According to the DOJ, 34.2% of all juvenile victims are assaulted by a family member, 58.7% by an acquaintance, and only 7% by a stranger. At the youngest category of victim, from infancy to age 5, strangers only make up 3% of offenders. Most sexual assault occurs within neighborhoods and communities.

Why are poor children so much more vulnerable to sexual assault when compared to rich people? There are a few possible explanations:

• Poor children are exposed to poor teens and adults, and poor teens and adults are more likely to commit sexual assault.

• Rich people are more vigilant and less negligent in protecting their children against sexual assault.

• Rich people are less likely to report assault out of fear of the power of their fellow rich people (this seems highly unlikely, given the fear that poor people have of physical violence)

• Poor children are disproportionately black and Hispanic, and both of those demographics have higher rates of sexual assault than whites.

• In Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, he finds that poor people are less likely to get married, stay married, or attend church. According to conservatives like Murray, their sense of sexual morality might be weaker, more hedonistic, and more sadistic.

If the goal is to reduce sexual assault against children, the first priority should be to reduce poverty, and to reduce the number of children raised in poor households and neighborhoods. This can be accomplished through economic growth, redistribution, or family planning policies which lower the fertility of the poorest Americans.

Conclusion.

The sexual assault of children is a serious problem which requires intense efforts on the part of law enforcement. A 50 year study from Cambridge demonstrates that children who are victims of sexual assault are at higher risk for all of the following into adulthood:

• high systemic inflammation

• low lung function

• poor oral health

• suicide attempts

• sexually transmitted diseases

• no formal qualifications (education)

• low socioeconomic status

• high benefit use (welfare)

• financial difficulties (income and debt)

• high delinquency

• criminal convictions

Despite the commonly held beliefs that childhood sexual assault causes hypersexuality, hyposexuality, or the inability to form relationships, those correlations were not found.

It is possible that childhood sexual assault causes systemic dysfunction later in life; it is also possible that the victims of sexual assault are more likely to grow up in dysfunctional neighborhoods with negligent parents, and it is this environment, more than an act of sexual assault, which places them at a higher lifelong risk of dysfunction.

In any case, the vast majority of victims are poor, and the vast majority of offenders are poor. This can be easily confirmed by a quick survey of the sex offender registry: you don’t have to be a phrenologist to tell that the majority of sex offenders are low IQ and low income simply by looking at a picture of their faces.

Are rich men capable of sexually assaulting women? Does their power and influence allow them to escape the consequences of their actions? The answer is clearly yes, and at the same time, irrelevant. Whether or not rich and powerful men are committing sex crimes, the fact remains that the majority of victims are more likely to be assaulted by a welfare recipient than by a billionaire. Those obsessed with the Epstein Files are not concerned with reducing the harm experienced by millions of victims: they are pursuing a religious crusade, an extension of the Progressive movement, dumbed down with the mythology of conspiracism.

For all their ranting and raving about “progressives and socialists,” MAGA and Qanon are their inbred descendants.

The country is dealing with serious problems. Seniors with $500,000 houses receive welfare checks while young people can’t afford a home. Rapists on food stamps run amok in run-down neighborhoods. Young men report less friends than ever before, and Gen Z is the most risk-avoidant generation on record. Our society is descending into gerontocracy, senility, and fear.

Epstein: an opponent of wokeness

It is a common claim of people with schizophrenia that they have been secretly sexually assaulted by “the elites.” This might be because people with schizophrenia are listening to the news and repeating those claims. It might be because people who are paranoid believe that “the elites” are following them and trying to hurt them. The belief that “the elites” are conducting Satanic rituals is evidence that the collective paranoia and narcissism of society is increasing.

In reality, the sexual preferences of elites are more banal. Trump enjoys cheating on his wife; Anthony Weiner sends out dick pics; Harvey Weinstein exchanged career favors for sexual favors.

The blaming of everything on an Epstein conspiracy resembles the last days of the Tsarist Empire: blaming everything on a sorcerer, Rasputin, who gained access to the inner circle of the elite, and supposedly was casting spells and sleeping with the royal ladies on behalf of a foreign government (Germany).

The result of this crisis of faith in the government was the Bolshevik Revolution. In America, for better or worse, things will probably get much worse before any ideological vanguard has the opportunity to seize power.

Optimistically, none of this matters. Some technological advance will come and sweep the current system away. Pessimistically, populists will begin to regulate technology to death, isolating America from the global economy and putting progress in reverse to “return to tradition.” If that were to occur, we might end up with an ecumenical theocracy, Trumpism on steroids, which maintains a hypervigilance about phantom Frankist pedophiles while raising the fertility of the underclass and breeding more food stamp rapists.

1. George Lincoln Rockwell probably meets that description to some extent, although he was still a more serious person than Alex Jones.

2. We’re writing ellipses like this now to signal our lack of AI.

3. You could argue that mastectomies are novel - - I see no historical parallel for them.