Dear Reader,

At the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, Saddam Hussein, the despotic ruler of the latter land, was in debt to the tune of $9 billion to his smaller, wealthier neighbor to the southeast—Kuwait, a country most Americans in the summer of 1990 had never heard of, let alone could locate on a map. For two years Saddam tried to negotiate with his creditors, pleading for refinancing on more favorable terms, if not loan forgiveness entirely. And for two years, he was told by the Kuwaitis to pound sand.

Fed up, Saddam began massing troops on the border—140,000 soldiers, 18,000 tanks—in what looked like the preface to a full-scale invasion. The U.S. Ambassador, April Glaspie, met with Saddam in July 1990 and delivered an ambiguous message:

We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait….I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 1960s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America…We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi [Chedli Klibi, Secretary General of the Arab League] or via President Mubarak [of Egypt]. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly.

Saddam interpreted this as, “We will not stop you; have at it.” And a few weeks later, the invasion was on. His first move was to hit up the Central Bank of Kuwait and steal the money there; like all dictators, Saddam Hussein was first and foremost a criminal.

A gander at the map suggests that, based purely on geography, Kuwait should be part of Iraq. Perhaps it would have been, when the French and the British re-drew the map of the Middle East at the end of the First World War, had Kuwait City not been a British protectorate and a key port.

Iraq wasn’t even its first aggressor. Right after the Great War, Kuwait found itself under attack by ibn Saud of Nadj, who would later become the first ruler of Saudi Arabia. Its people experienced extreme poverty in the decades that followed that would not abate until the discovery of oil at Burgan Field in 1938. After that, Kuwait became one of the wealthiest nations on earth.

Saddam Hussein’s annexation of his neighbor demanded a strong response from the United States. President George H.W. Bush engaged in “telephone diplomacy,” rallying an impressive coalition of nations to the cause of Kuwaiti liberation. It was an easy sell. But in his own country, Bush had a public relations problem. As John R. MacArthur explains in his brilliant book, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War:

Before his seizure of Kuwait, the Iraqi dictator was regarded by many politicians and journalists as merely another unpleasant Third World strongman for whom the U.S. foreign-policy establishment had a necessary affinity. From 1980 to 1988, Hussein had shouldered the burden of killing about 150,000 Iranians, in addition to at least thirteen thousand of his own citizens, including several thousand unarmed Kurdish civilians, and in the process won the admiration and support of elements of three successive U.S. Administrations. While it might overstate the case to suggest that in 1980 the Carter Administration encouraged Hussein to attack Khomeini’s Shiite legions, one can safely say that no one in the Carter camp objected very loudly….

[B]y 1984 the Reagan Administration “tilted” towards Iraq and against Iran. Better the mustachioed Saddam, with whom one could deal, the thinking went, than the bearded Khomeini, who actually meant what he said when he called America the “Great Satan.” As Germaine Greer put it in London’s The Independent Magazine, the West “saw Iraq as a sort of repulsive friend in that it was slaughtering the sons of a worse enemy.”

Bush handled the situation with decisiveness and aplomb. With the help of a prominent PR firm, he convinced enough Americans that Saddam Hussein, our erstwhile ally, was Adolf Hitler 2.0, and that Iraqi troops were slaughtering babies in Kuwaiti hospitals. He gathered together the aforementioned coalition. He neatly articulated the war objective, i.e., get the strongman out of Kuwait. He even voiced some proto-Hegsethian swagger when he declared, “This will not stand, this aggression of Kuwait.” And he presided over a sort of anti-Vietnam: a quick, clean war, with minimal U.S. casualties, that overwhelmed the enemy, achieved the objective, and then came home.

Thirty-five years later, in light of Washington’s disastrous handling of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequent invasion of Ukraine, I have come to regard the Gulf War as a model in how to handle a vainglorious dictator and preserve the Westphalian order. Saddam seized another country; we told him he couldn’t do that because of international law; we made him leave; and once he was out, we headed home. In a related story, Saddam never again invaded another sovereign nation. A policy of not appeasing dictators works!

Turns out, Bush 41 wasn’t much concerned with preserving the Westphalian order. Although he hankered for a “new world order” based on peace, there is little doubt about the real reason the U.S. sent troops to Kuwait. As UVA’s Miller Center puts it:

Indeed, oil was driving force behind the invasion and would lead to U.S. military involvement. “The fundamental U.S. interest in the security of the Persian Gulf is oil,” Paul Wolfowitz, under secretary of defense for policy in the George H. W. Bush administration, told Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. The administration estimated that after invading Kuwait, Hussein was in control of 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

None of this resonated with me in 1990. I remember being in my swimming pool when news of the invasion of Kuwait broke out. It was August, it was hot, and I was heading into my senior year of high school. I began to worry that this might start World War III, and that I’d be called upon to serve my country—which I had no pressing desire to do.

My friend Mike was at my house cutting my hair when Operation Desert Storm started in January 1991. I was 18 years old, he was a few months younger, and we were graduating in June. Would there be a draft? What would I do if there were a draft? I didn’t see myself as a conscientious-objector type, nor did I have any mad desire to flee to Canada. Other than a few trips to California, I’d never been more than four hours away from North Jersey.

In the moment, my sentiments about the Gulf War closely matched those of Steve Stein, a copywriter for a New York advertising agency, who in January 1991 was 40 years old. As he told Big Daddy magazine years later:

That was more like ‘Ah, fuck you guys, this ain’t a real war’. It was like we cooked it up so George Bush could claim to be a wartime president. I just didn’t get it. Here was this country that got invaded, the size of a postage stamp, it was such a nebulous little Middle Eastern dispute—what are we doing in the middle of this? Sending people to get their asses killed. The whole thing was seriously bogus, the same as Reagan’s Grenada war, the same bullshit. I’m just extremely cynical when it comes to this stuff.

Stein was respected on Madison Avenue and relatively well-to-do. But he had a double life. The Batman to his copywriting Bruce Wayne was the DJ, turntablist, and musical collage artist called Steinski. By 1991, the mixtapes he made with his musical cohort, the sound engineer Doug “Double Dee” DiFranco, were already the stuff of legend. “Lesson 1 – The Payoff Mix,” their entry into a remixing contest by Tommy Boy Records in 1983, practically invented a genre. These “mixes” are like visual collage art, where clippings from newspapers and magazines and whatever else the artist finds appealing are appropriated and laid out together in a creative new way—only with music.

As David Shields explains in 2010’s Reality Hunger:

Mixtapes are used—as they’ve traditionally been used—to advertise and promote a new record, but they’re also becoming a forum for illegal music: music that has uncleared samples and thus can’t be released through the proper channels.

Musical collage eventually gave way to mash-up—a combination of two or more songs that becomes its own distinct aural entity. Also in 2010, the DJ known as Girl Talk put out a full-length mash-up record called All Day that is one of my favorite albums of all time; one of these Sundays I will write about it. (It was because of my fondness for Girl Talk, in fact, that I found out about Steinski—from a writer friend whose father had been, coincidentally, a high-ranking military leader during the Gulf War.)

Steinski was on the cutting edge—a true pioneer. And he was uniquely positioned to thrive in this brave new musical world. For starters, he was (and still is) a creative genius, with a breadth of knowledge of music, from the latest funk and disco records to obscure old recordings from decades earlier. And because he made a good living at his day job, he didn’t have to worry about his records making money; the use of so many samples makes the monetization of this sort of thing difficult.

In 1991, after the Gulf War, Steinski put out a single called “It’s Up To You,” about our foray into Kuwait. The artist is listed as “Steinski and Mass Media.” I thought “Mass Media” was a clever name for another artist, but no—Mass Media is literally mass media; Steinski builds his song with clips from all manner of audio recordings that sound like someone flipping through TV channels (back when we used to do that instead of browse the Netflix offerings). This is layered over a sample by the Chambers Brothers, a band I’d never heard of, that operates as a catchy, funky song on its own, without any of the overlaying audio clips. There is a chorus, a build-up, a climax—all from samples and snippets of conversation. It’s an astonishing piece of art.

It’s better to listen than to have me struggle to explain:

Most of the overlaid audio clips are of Bush 41 giving various speeches. By subtly altering the speed of the clip, Steinski somehow conjures up a rhyming chorus that’s just Bush talking:

Regrettably
We now believe
That only force
Will make him leave

The first time we hear this “chorus,” it is preceded by what sounds like a PSA for psychopathy: Sometimes extreme behavior can be the warning signs of mental illness. Learn to see the sickness.

There are snippets of Howard Beale losing his shit, from the movie Network:

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. They’re worse than bad. They’re crazy.

and

Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamn amusement park!

We hear Joe Mantegna in David Mamet’s House of Games: “I’m from the United States of Kiss My Ass.”

There’s also Reginald Gardiner as Commander Schultz in The Great Dictator, delivering a line to Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler spoof character right before Schultz is sent to a concentration camp: “Demonstrations of this kind are demoralizing the whole country.”

At one point, Jello Biafra—who is presumably a fan of Substack—exclaims: “Don’t hate the media; become the media.”

And, as a sort of climax, Steinski includes a clip of the famous civil disobedience speech Mario Savio delivered at Berkeley in 1964:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

In the cleverest part of the song, Steinski intersperses Bush’s remarks with various television and movie snippets, to make his point:

I am certain our cause is just

(A gallon of gas)

And I am certain our cause is moral

(Loss of life)

And I am certain our cause is right

(Give me the goddamn money)

A new world order…

The song ends with Bush extolling the courage of our troops that never fails to chill me: What a group of kids we’ve sent out into the world.

Steinski created, essentially from found objects, a powerful anti-war protest song. Listening to it now, 15 days into the dunderheaded war with Iran, it is no less powerful—although it makes me nostalgic for the times when our president did things like gather a coalition of other countries, ask Congress for approval, and articulate a clear and high-minded war objective…and when our Defense Secretary was not a drunk Fox News loudmouth but [checks notes] Dick Cheney. Those were the days.

The Gulf War had its unintended consequences, as all wars do. The decision to take out civilian infrastructure and not just military targets created a humanitarian disaster in Iraq in the years after the war. Saddam was no less ruthless with his own people, especially the Kurds.

But most consequential to the United States was a promise to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that we broke. As Lawrence Wright explains in The Looming Tower:

The Americans had already made a decision, however. If, after snacking on Kuwait, Saddam gobbled up the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, he would then control the bulk of the world’s available oil supply. That was an intolerable threat to the security of the United States, not just the Kingdom. U.S Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney flew to Jeddah with a team of advisors, including General Norman Schwarzkopf, to persuade the king to accept American troops to defend Saudi Arabia. Schwartzkopf showed satellite images of three armored Iraqi divisions inside Kuwait, followed by ground troops—far more manpower, he contended, than the number needed to occupy such a small country. The Saudi had intelligence that several Iraqi reconnaissance teams had already crossed the Saudi border.

Crown Prince Abdullah advised against letting the Americans enter the country, for fear they would never depart. In the name of the president of the United States, Cheney pledged that the troops would leave as soon as the threat was over, or whenever the king said they should go. That promised decided the matter.

“Come with all you can bring,” the king implored. “Come as fast as you can.”

We came with all we could bring. We came fast. And we never left.

That an Arab country was forced to rely on aid from imperialist U.S. apostates rather than defend itself was a personal affront to the most famous Saudi national: Osama bin Laden. That the heathens stayed after the war was intolerable. Eighty-sixing the Americans from the Kingdom became an obsession for him. Eventually, it caused the Saudis to revoke his passport and took him first to Sudan and then to Afghanistan—with dire consequences for the United States. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that the day in 1991 when George H.W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress on the Iraq war was September 11th.

We are just two weeks and a day into the Iran war—a war that has no discernible purpose; a war undertaken at the behest of a genocidal war criminal who as I type this is either dead, infirm, or in hiding like a coward; a war that seems intended to distract from the Epstein Files and forestall the release of proof of our president’s singular depravity; a war that will likely bankrupt the country; a war that will cause a global recession and worldwide suffering; a war that most Americans do not support; a war that began with U.S. planes killing scores of girls at a school; a war in which we have ceded the moral high ground to the fucking Ayatollah.

Or, as Bush 41 would “sing” in the Steinski track:

I am certain our cause is unjust,
And I am certain our cause is immoral,
And I am certain our cause ain’t right.

In this New World Order, the United States is no longer #1.

God help us.

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ICYMI

Zarina Zabrisky, who has been covering the war in Ukraine for years, stayed up late in Kherson to update us on what’s happening at the front:

Photo credit: Publicity still of Steinski, 1991.

Here is a transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. It’s seven o’clock in the morning of Friday the 13th—March 13th, 2026. I’ve been away for the last week. I haven’t really had much opportunity to talk about the war that Trump has got us in. And I wanted to share some thoughts on that.

David Ignatius, the columnist who writes about foreign policy for the Washington Post—and who’s usually pretty good about laying out what’s happening—referred to this metaphorically as Trump “taking us over the waterfall.” And that’s a perfect analogy for this. We got too close, we got too close, and now the bombing of Iran—you know, we don’t come back from that so easily.

I think up until this point, all of the stuff that Trump has done, while horrifying and awful, is also reversible, with the right leadership in place, over time. This is not. This completely changes the trajectory of the country and the world. And it helps Russia, of course, because everything Trump does helps Russia, as I’ve been saying for almost 10 years now.

So it’s a catastrophe, this war. It’s an absolute catastrophe. It makes me enraged. It makes me sad and heartbroken. It makes me embarrassed. I was in Germany last week and people ask about the war and I can’t defend it. You know, it’s not my war at all. Trump is a clown, and he’s done this for reasons that nobody seems to be able to articulate.

So just a quick summary of what’s going on here. This is day 14 of the war. So we’ve been at this for two weeks now. I guess it was supposed to be over in three days, right? Like Putin’s war in Ukraine supposed to be over in three days.

First of all, we have service members dying. We’re already losing American soldiers, sailors, pilots in this war, which is horrifying and unnecessary. And Trump doesn’t care at all, as he’s made very clear in his statements. Pete Hegseth doesn’t care at all. These people don’t care at all about the loss of human life. And I don’t know that we want leaders in a war that are like that.

The White House continues to make these disgusting meme videos, interspersing shots of the war with scenes from movies and football games and video games and other things that are completely disgusting and inappropriate, trying to get this whole rah-rah, frat boy, Hegsethian excitement—bloodlust, I think is the word—bloodlust revved up among the idiots who still support him.

There’s no clue on the strategy. There’s no coherent strategy. They’re not able to explain why we’re doing the war. Is it regime change? No. We killed the Ayatollah, but that was almost inconsequential. The regime is basically all still in place. So that’s not a thing. Taking out the nukes? Nah, that wasn’t really a war aim either. So why are we there?

Basically we’re there because Bibi Netanyahu told Trump to do it and Trump did it. And we can sit here and hash out the reasons why, but I think it’s pretty clear to me that the Epstein Files has a lot to do with this. Trump knows that the Israeli government has videos of him, and evidence of him, doing horrible things that we can’t even begin to imagine. So he feels obligated to go along with this. Netanyahu, this butcher, this genocidal madman, asks Trump for help and he delivers it.

And Lindsey Graham, the Senator from South Carolina—who looks more pickled than Scotch every time you see him—has been just disgustingly cheering this on, trying to twist Trump’s tiny arm into going to war because he, Lindsey Graham, went over to Israel and met with agents of Mossad and met with Netanyahu to try to coordinate the messaging to Trump to get us into war with Iran.

That’s where we’re at. This isn’t even our war. This is a war that a genocidal maniac asked us to help with, and we were like, “Great, let’s go!” Over the waterfall we went.

The generals up at the top have failed us by even doing this at all. It’s not legal. Trump didn’t ask Congress. He didn’t notify anybody. He just made a unilateral move to attack a country that can fight back. I don’t know if Iran can “defeat us” or whatever, but they can and they will fight back. This is something that Trump, being a bully, isn’t used to. He likes to pick on smaller victims. So this probably isn’t going the way that he maybe thought it would.

And then right off the bat, we kill all the girls in the girls school. That’s us. We did that. Our military did that. I don’t know why that happened. I don’t know if it was a failure of the intelligence on the ground or just a missile that hit the wrong place, I don’t know. But the fact remains that we killed a bunch of girls in a school, which is disgusting and morally reprehensible and indefensible. Indefensible, inexcusable.

And one of the Iranian foreign ministers, I forget which one, said basically, “In this Epstein administration, they either rape little girls or kill little girls.” And sadly, that’s true. That’s true. Morally, that’s the ground that we’re standing on now. Really pretty shaky.

Obviously the oil prices have gone up. Here in Ulster County, New York, it was about $2.98 a gallon when I left for Munich ten days ago. It’s now up to like $3.59, I think something like that. So it’s gone up 60 cents in the last two weeks per gallon, which is a lot. It’s going to go up more. The Straits of Hormuz are still pretty much choked off; that’s going to affect the oil prices. It’s also gonna affect other things, other commodities that depend on that as a trade route. So there might be supply chain disruptions—but hey, Bibi said to do it, so we had to do it.

And I feel like I have a little bit of egg on my face because, to be honest, I didn’t think that this would happen. I thought that Trump would not go to war with Iran because I thought that he knows Iran can fight back and he didn’t want that. I always said Trump doesn’t want to be a wartime president because that would interfere with his daily routine of golfing and ogling women at the Mar-a-Lago omelet bar and watching TV. What I didn’t consider is that he would keep on doing these things and just outsource the administration of the war to the lesser Fox News host with the hair gel and the very credible sexual assault claims against him.

That would be Pete Hegseth, whose rah-rah, frat boy statements to the press are so disgusting and immature and—you know, just small dick energy. There’s no other way to say it. He’s a horrible man. The fact that Trump and Hegseth are in charge of the war is mind boggling and so embarrassing.

And then you have Jared and Witkoff over there just ironing out deals. You have crypto, all this crypto payment stuff going on that Trump is launching. Then, you know, it’s bad enough that he wore his fucking MAGA hat to the dignified transfer, but now he’s fundraising using photos of the dead soldiers’ bodies coming home from the dignified transfer. This is all a game to him. It’s all a money machine. He doesn’t fucking care.

The people who are going to pay the price are us, you know, because these oligarchs have so much money, they can leave the country, they could do whatever. We’re here, we’re Americans, and we’re going to bear the brunt of this, whether it’s economic or, you know, international/geopolitical or a terrorist attack, which Timothy Snyder, the fascism scholar, I think correctly suggests is coming, and that this is something Trump wants in order to have an excuse to call off the midterms so that we don’t impeach him. So we’ll see.

I want to also talk about the economics of the war. Now, this is being compared obviously to the ill-fated, ill-advised foray into Iraq in 2003 under Bush II. That was a catastrophe, a blunder, and just the sinkhole of money.

Just to put this in perspective, money-wise, that war in Afghanistan cost $2.3 trillion. The war in Iraq cost $1.7 trillion. And at the same time, Bush and Cheney gave a tax cut to the wealthiest people—during a war, which is, you never do that—which cost $1.7 trillion by depriving us of that fund.

That’s $5.7 trillion total. That’s enough to pay off every student loan in the country, which is $1.83 right now—trillion and all the credit card debt in the country, which is $1.27 trillion right now, and fund USAID for 10 years. That would cost a mere $500 billion, for 10 years of USAID. And we’d have enough left over to write a check for $6,000 to every single person living in the United States.

That’s how much money Bush and Cheney wasted with those wars. And that’s not even considering the many lives that were lost, both American lives and Afghan and Iraqi lives, and all the other assorted horrors of war. It was just a colossal waste. Now we already are struggling from that enormous hit to our treasury, which resulted in nothing. We got nothing out of that war, not a thing.

On 9/11, in the days after, people were willing to make sacrifices, and Bush didn’t ask them to. He squandered the crisis. Now we were, you know, ostensibly not going to war with Saudi Arabia, but there was a lot of fingers being pointed there because what, nine of the terrorists were Saudi. So Bush could have set up an alternative energy plan right there. He could have used the crisis to convince people that we needed to stop our dependency on foreign oil, and really jumpstarted it in a way that by now, 20-whatever years later, things would be up and running with that. And we wouldn’t be relying on the fucking Straits of Hormuz so much.

But Bush didn’t do that. So he screwed up the money. He screwed up the opportunity, and he failed miserably. And I’ve been saying for a long time that years from now, when historians go back and look at the end of American empire, it will be the economic hits from those wars, combined with the tax cuts, that started the decline.

And that was then—that was before Trump. Now, this “Big Beautiful Bill” that was passed—that’s depriving us of an additional $3.4 trillion over 10 years.

The debt payments for the US were something like $330 billion yearly three years ago. They’re now over a trillion a year. So they’ve tripled in that time. We’re already on shaky ground economically because of all the fucking tax cuts and these Republicans doing horrible things—even though we’re also having our services cut because DOGE and Elon Musk and all that stuff. And yet we’re drowning in debt.

And now we’re going to this war. And, the first thing I thought about was, “This is it. It’s over.” We can’t sustain this. It’s not sustainable. We don’t have the money to pay for it. And we don’t have the credit, debt-wise, to generate funds to pay for it.

I’m not an economist, obviously. So I looked up some studies. A couple of years ago, the Penn Wharton Budget Model—which of course is Trump’s alma mater—they studied the debt. And the tipping point is when the service of the debt—meaning just the yearly payments—get to be 200 percent of GDP. We’re already at almost 100 percent of GDP. But when it gets to be 200%, that’s when you just—there’s nowhere else to get money from. You can’t borrow, you can’t pay anymore, because there’s no more money in the treasury to pay, and bad, bad economic things happen.

Whether it’s default—it’s hard for the US to default for various reasons, but: bad things happen to the economy. There’s massive economic fallout, huge inflation, whatever. We don’t know what would happen, but it will be bad and not something that we want.

And that was before this war. They forecast that this would happen, the 200 percent threshold, in 2040-2045, which is closer than you think. It’s really in the next 15 to 20 years that we’ll get to that point if nothing changes.

But now something has changed. Trump has accelerated it massively, because of this war. And that’s something to look out for. And I don’t mean to be like doom and gloom here on Friday the 13th, but I don’t know what to do about this.

And the thing that just blows my mind is: Why? For what? What do we get out of this? We make Bibi a little happier. Bibi’s flexing his muscles, saying Israel’s now the region’s superpower, because all the other Middle Eastern countries are getting hurt by this war that we’re helping him with and have lost American lives helping with, in addition to all the money.

There’s nothing—we get nothing out of this at all. The Iranians were not a threat to us; they just weren’t. The nuclear thing has always been just kind of a bullshit excuse to swing our dicks around, tiny as they may be. And now we’ve, you know, we’ve poked the, what is it? Poked the bear, awakened the dragon, whatever you want to call it.

Iran is one of the largest manufacturers of drones in the world. The Russians are helping the Iranians target the drones to maximize the damage on us and our allies. And Trump is just like, “Yeah, yeah, Putin’s fine. He said he wasn’t doing it, so it’s okay.” So once again: We have a Kremlin asset in the White House who’s delivered a massive, massive victory for Putin at the expense of everybody in United States. And expense meaning death, expense meaning loss of standing in the world, and expense meaning expense, like actual money lost and squandered by these people—just squandered.

The only way out of this economically is to seize funds from the oligarchs who are participating in it. All of those oligarchs who have ties to Epstein, all of the oligarchs fronting and helping this war effort, they all need to be tried and we need to have massive asset forfeiture. And we have to tax the shit out of them. Nobody needs to make $500 billion. I mean, it’s ridiculous. The money at that point, it gets to be mind boggling. What are they even doing with it? They’re spending the money they have to pay less money in taxes—which, when you’re at that stage, your taxes are just helping people.

So it’s really a bleak view that I have. Nothing about this is good, but the silver lining is this is going to accelerate people turning on Trump. And we’ve seen this bear out in polls. We’ve seen it bear out in some of the early voting that’s going on with the primaries and stuff like that. He’s going to try to, you know, not have the elections for the midterms. He’s going to try to tamper with the election, but there is a point at which so many people are going to stream in to vote against Republicans that it might be enough for us to impeach him.

Now we impeach him, we get Vance, we have to impeach Vance. So maybe the Speaker of the House in January is somebody different instead of Mike Johnson. It’s looking like that’s going to be the case anyway. He’s already on pretty flimsy ground.

So we’ll see what happens. But that’s the only good thing that I can see is that this will be so bad, and so widespread in how the effects are felt, that there will be real desire on the part of a vast majority of the American people to fix this.

And that’s how you fix it. You get out of the war. You tax all these gajillionaires to pay down the debt that we wasted. This is their war anyway, these AI fuckers. Let them pay for it. And if they can’t figure out a way to pay for it, write it into ChatGPT.

God. I don’t know. This is—it really does feel like we’re in a bad sci-fi movie that we can’t escape from. It really does, every day. Every week I say it can’t get crazier and worse; every week it gets crazier and worse.

But it’s Friday the 13th. The Ides of March are coming—Ides of March, historically not a great day for dictators. So I don’t know. Perhaps we will have some good news over the weekend. Stranger things have happened.

In the meantime, the weather at least is getting nicer. And I think that helps a lot. We’ve got No Kings marches coming up. We’ve got candidates to support. We have primaries. The midterms, every day get a little bit closer. And while I caution about putting all the eggs in the midterm basket, it’s still a way that we can make our voices heard.

In the meantime, try to enjoy the weather as much as you can. Try not to let all of this paralyze you into feelings of dread and grief and shame and rage. To be honest, this happened to me a couple of times in the last two weeks.

Remember, nobody likes this guy anymore. And that’s good for us. His days in the White House are numbered. They are. So I know it looks bleak right now, but I still feel like we shall prevail.

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“That,” my cab driver says, gesturing at an arena with spokes like tent poles ringed around the top, giving it the appearance of a jester’s crown, “is the Olympiastadion, built for the 1972 Summer Games.”

He is an older man of Middle Eastern descent, with a long white beard and a graduate degree in geology, and has the calm, unhurried air of a philosopher. I get the sense that he’s driving his immaculate Mercedes taxi as an excuse to talk to the tourists. “Bayern München played there until they built Allianz Arena in 2006.”

Then he gestures to the other side of the highway, to a towering, Soviet-looking apartment complex. “And that is the housing built for the athletes. That’s where the hostages were taken.”

The Israeli athletes, he means, who were taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists from a group called Black September, and later massacred during a bungled rescue attempt at Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base.

I have been in Munich less than two hours and have already seen its second-most awful sight.

And I’m struck by how that one word—Munich—can have so many different connotations. Despite this being a charming and beautiful city, quite unlike the more disjointed and unlovely (but hipper and more artsy) Berlin, most of the historical connotations are negative.

The footage from Tehran makes me physically ill.

We blew up the oil refineries. We reduced buildings to rubble. Black smoke chokes out the sunlight. Residents of the city describe it as “apocalyptic” and “dark, like our future.”

This isn’t some remote Persian outpost. Tehran is a vast and sprawling metropolis of nine million people—16.8 million if you include the surrounding area…although the population is lower now than it was two weeks ago.

“This is no longer just a human rights violation,” one resident told the Guardian. “It is truly anti-human behavior. If someone has a problem with the Islamic Republic government, that is one thing—but not with us, the people. You cannot attack water systems or refineries. Most of Tehran’s water comes from dams. If those become polluted, what happens then? The government has basically left people on their own.”

We did this. For reasons the Trump regime is still struggling to articulate.

Every word uttered last week by the bloviating drunk Pete Hegseth is so childish, so fake macho, that it’s hard to tell what is real and what is self-parody. Where is the line between the actual Secretary of Defense (or War, or Special Military Operations, or Armageddon, or whatever) and the Hegseth spoofed by Colin Jost on Saturday Night Live?

Most of the fightin’ words spewed by Whiskey Pete at his March 4 press briefing read like something from a bad Sylvester Stallone movie—except that even Rambo, named after all for a poet, understood that war is something best avoided. Molly McKew said it best: “What’s meant to sound big stick is actually just small dick.”

In this passage, I think, Hegseth tells us all we need to know:

Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be. Thus far, Operation Epic Fury has delivered twice the air power of shock and awe of Iraq in 2003, minus Paul Bremer and the Nation Building.

What this means is, first, the entire point of the war special military operation is to flex. In Donald Trump’s addled, Swiss-cheese mind, it’s just another military parade, but with explosions—something that plays well on the TV.

The president is physically weak and getting weaker by the day, as evidenced by the bruises on his hands and what appeared to be vampire bites on his neck; the indiscriminate Iranian destruction is intended to make him appear mighty. That is not working, will not work. But we have crossed a line now that there’s no coming back from.

Second, while it may not be a fair fight, Trump and Hegseth have wildly underestimated the strength of the enemy. Are they even aware that Iran is a world leader in drone technology and manufacture? And that in modern warfare, drones are more important—and a lot cheaper—than missiles?

Furthermore, while it’s true that most of the old Osama bin Laden / al-Qaeda / jihadi crew are Sunni Muslims, and the Ayatollah was a Shiite, you don’t just assassinate (call it what it was) an Islamic spiritual leader, however odious, however corrupt, and expect the wider Muslim world to just shrug—especially not when you’re invoking Christian nationalism and framing this as a holy war, as Hegseth and some of his generals have been doing. This seems almost designed to provoke a retaliatory terrorist attack, as the fascism scholar Timothy Snyder suggested.

Third: we’re not punching them while they’re down, we’re punching down, period. If we’re going to hurl Jovian thunderbolts at world leaders, there’s one in Moscow much more deserving of swift death from on high than the hateful old geezer in Tehran. But Donald the poltroon is too chicken-shit to take out his evil whoremaster.

And then, finally, the petty dig at Paul Bremer and nation-building: in this war for oil, Hegseth is telling us, there will be no noble invocations of democracy, however hollow. No no no. Fuck that noise. We’re going to blow the fuck out of Iran…and then we’re going to leave.

The footage, as I said, makes me ill. The images of Tehran are very fire-and-brimstone, very End Times.

The Ayatollahs have spent the last 47 years denouncing the United States as the Great Satan. And what did we do? We turned their capital city into Hell.

For a brief moment during the German Revolution at the end of the First World War, a group of Communists led by the playwright Ernst Toller established the Bavarian Soviet Republic, with Munich as its capital. It lasted for just four months, from April to August 1919, before the Free State of Bavaria reclaimed power.

Hitler denounced the short-lived Marxist entity as “rule of the Jews.” The Munichian foray into Communism fueled the burgeoning antisemitism in the south of Germany. Gustav von Kahr, the prime minister of Bavaria after 1919, expelled all the Bavarian Jews who did not hold German citizenship.

Things got worse from there. Bavaria became a breeding ground for Nazis. It is no accident that Hitler chose Munich as the site of the Beer Hall Putsch, his ill-fated attempt to overthrow the Weimar government. After the Nazis rose to power, Munich became known as the Hauptstadt der Bewegung, or the Capital of the Movement.

The first concentration camp—Dachau—was built on the outskirts of the city: that’s the most awful of the city’s sights. I didn’t visit the museum there, or tour the crematorium. I’d intended to, but I didn’t. I couldn’t handle it. Not now. Not with American Nazis building concentration camps in the U.S. Not with the war.

I wouldn’t have been able to stop crying.

At the behest of Bibi Netanyahu—a corrupt, genocidal butcher who presumably has video of Trump raping little girls—we started an unnecessary war.

Trump and Hegseth have admitted as much—we’re just giving Bibi what he wants. And Lindsay Graham, that disgusting traitor with the reptilian lips and a closet full of (child-sized male, one assumes) skeletons, was working with Netanyahu and with Mossad, helping them craft arguments that might convince Donald to order a strike on Iran.

So: World War III has begun because Trump doesn’t want his idiotic MAGA disciples to know that when the sex-trafficked 13-year-old girl who was being forced to fellate him bit his mushroom penis, he punched her in the head.

The primary connotation of “Munich” is “appeasement.” It was in Munich that the British prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was bamboozled by Hitler into signing an agreement allowing the Nazis to keep the Sudetenland—territory it had seized from Czechoslovakia.

The Munich Agreement was signed on September 30, 1938. “Peace for our time” lasted less than a year; on the first of September, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, and the Second World War began.

Lesson: you can’t appease Nazis. You have to nip them in the bud.

Brooke Harrington introduced me to the idea of what she calls the “Competitive Depravity Olympics.” We see this in the Epstein Files: oligarchs kept pushing the boundaries to see what they could get away with—and who could get away with the most depraved acts.

What is more depraved than raping—and subsequently killing—trafficked girls? Like, where do you go from there?

Genocide.

Bibi did his genocide in Gaza. Now Trump feels compelled to “hold my beer” him and do a genocide in Tehran. At least, that’s what this looks like to me.

Other than by stealing the hardware from its actual recipient, like he did with the Venezuelan opposition leader—and like Putin did with Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ring—how else can Donald get his gold medal in the Competitive Depravity Olympics?

We know he doesn’t give a shit about the service members who died last week; he told the press, “Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.” And then, to prove his lack of respect, he wore his stupid ugly MAGA hat to Dover for the dignified transfer—such an obvious fuck-you to the military that FoxNews felt compelled to edit it out of its coverage.

Does anyone think Trump wouldn’t order a nuclear strike on Tehran? After all, he can’t be viably mentioned in the same breath as his hero Adolf Hitler until he kills many millions more than he’s already killed.

Nuremberg is a little over an hour north of Munich by train. I kept seeing highway signs for it—Nürnberg, it reads, in German.

It was there that the Nuremberg trials took place after the Second World War.

At Nuremberg, the world was introduced to the idea of international criminal law. Because of Nuremberg, the International Criminal Court charged Bibi Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin with war crimes.

Twelve Nazis were sentenced to death and hanged after the Nuremberg trials, including the foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (the Marco Rubio of Nazi Germany). Hermann Göring (not an exact analog, but kind of a Nazi Pete Hegseth) killed himself the night before he was to be executed.

Also at Nuremberg, “I was just following orders” was thrown out as a viable defense—something the generals overseeing the Iran offensive might bear in mind.

One of the Iranian ministers said this on TV last week something like: “This Epstein administration either rapes little girls or kills little girls.”

And he was right.

That’s what breaks my heart: he was right.

Donald Trump kills little girls. Witness the girls’ school we bombed. Now, he’s—to use the parlance of the traitors to humanity in Silicon Valley—scaling up.

But it’s not Trump doing the killing. It’s us. It’s the United States of America. It’s you and me. It’s in our name that he’s unleashed Armageddon.

These ignoramuses have spent the last ten years undermining expertise. They have railed against higher education. They have defunded medical science. They have put all their economic eggs in the basket of AI—a technology seemingly designed to make us stupider.

What happens when a society seeks to eradicate the study of the humanities? That society loses its humanity.

Written by Eric Roth (who penned Forrest Gump and The Insider) and Tony Kushner (who is the author of Angels in America, arguably the best American play of my lifetime, and who is not related to Jared), and directed by Steven Spielberg (who is Steven Spielberg), Munich is a 2005 film about Operation Wrath of God, the covert Israeli response to the Munich Olympics massacre.

After the 1972 tragedy, Prime Minister Golda Meir assembled a small team of Mossad agents and told them, basically—and I’m perhaps paraphrasing—“Track down and kill every last motherfucker who had anything whatsoever to do with the massacre.”

No doubt the underlying idea of Munich—its “rah-rah” aspect—would appeal to Pete Hegseth, who sees the world in black and white. When the Defense Secretary said this…

But when you add the Israeli Defense Forces, a devastatingly capable force, the combination is sheer destruction for our radical Islamist…adversaries. They are toast and they know it, or at least soon enough they will know it. And we have only just begun to hunt, dismantle, demoralize, destroy and defeat their capabilities…

…he could just as easily have been talking about Operation Wrath of God as Operation Epic Fury (a name, incidentally, that has the same initials as “Epstein Files,” as I pointed out last week.)

What actually happened with Operation Wrath of God was a lot messier than what was intended, as the film dramatizes. And that’s where Hegseth, as usual, misses the point. War is always messy. There are always unintended consequences. Military operations are impossible to predict with absolute certainty. Sometimes the mightiest powers don’t prevail; how Pete Hegseth could have been deployed to Afghanistan and not been aware of this speaks to his dizzying intellectual ineptitude.

The Iraq War was stupid, even in the moment. But at least it was approved by Congress. At least there was a coalition there fighting alongside us. At least there was some international support.

But war with Iran? A unilateral decision made by a fatally compromised and unpopular Kremlin asset seeking to distract from his heinous Epstein crimes? A war started without Congressional approval? At the behest of a genocidal war criminal? Unprovoked? With no clear objective and no exit strategy? A war that’s helping Russia? A war that’s wasting military resources that would have been better spent in Ukraine, defending an actual ally from an actual enemy? A war that is crippling our treasury, perhaps fatally, at a moment when the cost of everything, already much higher than a year ago, is about to skyrocket?

Something else that has eluded Pete Hegseth: in Operation Epic Fury, we’re not the good guys. Ironically, given our partners in war crime, we’re not the Mossad assassination team. We’re Black September. And it’s the height of hubris to think that the Wrath of God isn’t going to come for us.

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Photo credit: Yours Truly. Police turn down a Munich sidestreet.

“obsessively secretive”

“knows everyone.”

“the sort of guy who will turn up behind you on a flight to Rio”

“a real man of mystery”

“unbelievably connected”

“our modern version of a homeless billionaire…constantly working, constantly traveling”

“Rolodex off the charts for someone so young”

“collects people”

“a Zelig-like quality”

Sounds like Jeffrey Epstein, right? But those quotes are from a recent Financial Times article on the press-averse, secrecy-obsessed 42-year-old British venture capitalist Ian Osborne, whom the Telegraph calls the “fixer to the elite”—another descriptor befitting of Epstein.

Although their relationship would not be public knowledge until well after the pedophile sex trafficker’s 2019 death, Epstein seems to have taken Osborne under his wing back in 2011—at least, that’s what we glean from the many hundreds of Ian Osborne-related emails in the Epstein Files.

It may be that, having his aura of invincibility punctured after doing time in prison, Epstein realized the importance of succession planning. Perhaps he saw a little of himself in the young British arriviste.

Like Epstein, Osborne is ruthlessly ambitious. Like Epstein, Osborne emerged out of nowhere, with zero practical experience in the field. Like Epstein, he immediately Tom Ripley’d himself into the good graces of a billionaire—Mike Bloomberg, in his case. Like Epstein, he operates in the shadows. Like Epstein, he appears to have a casual relationship with morality. And like Epstein, he knows everyone.

Ian Osborne is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

“It sounds [like] an easy thing to do but connecting people is a rare talent,” one rich guy told FT. “Dozens of people around the world that Mike [Bloomberg] and I have good relationships with were introduced by Ian. Global business leaders never meet without a go-between. There is no Yellow Pages for that.”

There is also no Yellow Pages for the sex trafficking of minors for the purpose of elite sexual exploitation. (Is there a Yellow Pages for anything anymore? Does anyone under the age of 40 know what the Yellow Pages even are?) But we should make very clear up front that an important distinction between the dead American “fixer to the elite” and the living British one is that, unlike Epstein, Ian Osborne is not, has never been, and hopefully will never be involved in the world’s largest child sex trafficking operation.

Indeed, in the interest of objective journalism, we should probably print Osborne’s obligatory statement of Epstein contrition, which ran in the Telegraph one month ago today: “I wholeheartedly regret that I ever met or had any association whatsoever with Epstein. I never witnessed, nor was aware of, the repellent and illegal behaviour by him. I am forever sorry for all the people who suffered by him. It was a serious error of judgment and one I bitterly regret.” Attend: not just wholehearted regret; bitter regret.

If Ian is the Second Coming of Jeff, it’s because of his behind-the-scenes, off-the-radar networking prowess, as well as his facility with arcane financial chicanery—and nothing more. Again: Ian Osborne is not, has never been, and hopefully will never be involved in the world’s largest child sex trafficking operation.

I first heard about Osborne’s connection to Epstein during their mutual associate Jes Staley’s humiliating flameout at Barclay’s. During the investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority, the UK’s regulatory watchdog, we learned that the two shadowy multi-millionaires had worked together on “Project Jes,” a concerted, and eventually successful, attempt to land Staley the job as CEO of the venerable British bank.

I’ve covered Staley and JPMorgan Chase, the venerable bank at which he was a top executive and Jeffrey Epstein’s devoted client manager, extensively at PREVAIL:

Emails in the Epstein Files reveal a longer and deeper relationship between Epstein and Osborne than was previously known. A search for “Ian Osborne” turns up 2,565 entries on the DOJ website; eliminate the “Ian” and you get 4,322 hits—although, to be fair, a few hundred of those are duplicates from his name being used multiple times in the same email. Even so, for the better part of three years, the two “fixers” were chummy enough to communicate on the regular. And, given how many of the emails involve scheduling in-person meetings and visits to Epstein’s New York residence, the Zorro Ranch, and Little St. James, it’s clear that their relationship was not limited to phone calls and emails.

But who is Ian W. Osborne? And is he really Jeffrey Epstein 2.0?

Here is what (little) we hoi polloi non-members of the Epstein Class know about “IWO”:

Osborne is an “Xennial.”

He was born in May of 1983—30 years after Epstein. He’s part of the “micro-generation” in the horoscopical DMZ between Generation X and the Millenials.

(The term was coined by a writer named Sarah Stankorb in 2014: “[T]hose of us born in the fuzzy borderland between Gen X and Millennial are old enough to have logged in to our first email addresses in college. We use social media but can remember living life without it. The internet was not a part of our childhoods, but computers existed and there was something special about the opportunity to use one.”)

Although he is British by birth, Osborne is a legal resident of Hong Kong.

This is per the filings for his venture capital firm, the uglily-named Hedosophia, of which more later. (This is unlike Epstein, who was no fan of the Far East.)

Osborne came from a privileged family—but not an insanely wealthy one.

Like Epstein, Osborne is not a nepo baby; his father is a lawyer, well-to-do but not loaded. Unlike Epstein, Osborne went to good schools and actually graduated: St. Paul’s School, King’s College London, London School of Economics.

He certainly has a more intellectual bent than Epstein—and is more creative.

Osborne has a background in theater and the arts.

In 2002, Osborne, then a 19-year-old King’s College student, was one of the producers of the London production of “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” a prison drama set on Riker’s Island that was nominated for an Olivier Award. Another of the play’s producers was—as she was listed in the program—Madonna Ritchie, whom he would later humble-brag was a client. (Per an email to Epstein, Osborne claimed that the film director Guy Ritchie, Madonna’s ex-husband, “knows exactly who I am because I advised Madonna on the other side during a very contentious period.”)

Osborne, Business Insider reports,

went on to produce multiple stage adaptations of works by British media personality Toby Young, including a salacious satire about Boris Johnson called “Who’s the Daddy?”

“As a producer, Ian was a writer’s dream: put up the money, never gave me a single note on the script and didn’t try and cheat me out of any of the profits,” Young told Insider in an email. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up buying a movie studio.”

Osborne has some writing credits to his name.

According to his official bio at the California-based Berggruen Institute— an “independent think and action tank” that seeks “to foster dialogue and the development of ideas, from keeping open channels of communication through exchanges between Chinese President Xi Jinping and our global council of former heads of government, tech executives, and global intellectuals to promoting citizens’ assemblies in Europe”—Osborne “is a Contributing Editor of The Spectator and GQ, and writes occasional columns for several newspapers.”

I found nothing by him in the archives at GQ. The Spectator dispatched him to France in 2012, to cover election night with the family of Nicholas Sarközy. He writes well, adopting the tone of a witty gossip columnist: dropping names, spilling tea, delighting in his backstage access, winking at us. Here’s an example:

Once all the other candidates have spoken, and with all the television networks waiting anxiously, Sarkozy is ready to address the nation. I find myself whisked to the front row between Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac. (Chirac’s loathing for his successor is hardly a secret, but party unity calls for a united front at this critical juncture.) While Sarko (as he is universally known) has polled 1.5  per cent behind Hollande — a fate which has never befallen an incumbent president of the Fifth Republic — he has assumed the mantle of the underdog. And is relishing it. Realising that he must reach out to the disenfranchised supporters of National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who received a record 19 per cent of the vote, he implores them directly: ‘I know (your) worries, and I understand them.’

And another:

It never ceases to amaze me how few senior French politicians speak English or, indeed, any foreign language. Sarkozy’s Anglais has always been poor, but even the politician-graduates of l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration fare little better. When François Hollande visited London last month, he specifically learned one English phrase: ‘I am not dangerous.’ The top aides to all senior French politicos are fluent, as indeed are the spouses. Carla Bruni has no such issues, having romanced Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton in their native tongue.

He wants us to know that he knows who Carla Bruni is…and also that he is sitting next to her…and also that he knows from experience that she speaks terrific English.

By 2012, when this was published, Osborne was already a big macher in the halls of power, and very much in Epstein’s orbit.

Mike Bloomberg gave Osborne his first big break…

Osborne graduated from LSE in 2005; set up his own PR firm, Osborne & Partners; moved to New York; and began advising the billionaire and former NYC Mayor, whom he’d met at a dinner party in London, and had, as best as I can tell, already been working for, as BI reports:

He became an outside consultant for Bloomberg, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Insider, and was frequently around Bloomberg LP’s office in New York, coordinating strategic meetings on Bloomberg’s behalf and carrying out other tasks.

…but it was Yuri Milner who really got him going.

Osborne did not fumble the ball. Or—to put it in the language of musical theater, a realm he’s more familiar with than American football—he wasn’t throwin’ away his shot.

He parlayed his work with Bloomberg into work with Yuri Milner, the Moscow-born investor and founder of DST Global. BI reports that this was around 2009, when Milner suddenly began to invest huge amounts of money in Facebook and Twitter—money that, at least in part, derived from Russian state-owned banks and finance firms, as the Paradise Papers leaks revealed.

“Behind Mr. Milner’s investments in Facebook and Twitter were hundreds of millions of dollars from the Kremlin,” wrote Jesse Drucker in the New York Times. “Obscured by a maze of offshore shell companies, the Twitter investment was backed by VTB, a Russian state-controlled bank often used for politically strategic deals.” Milner also reportedly took investment capital from another sanctioned Kremlin finance outfit, Gazprom Investholding, owned by Alisher Usmanov—whom the OCCRP describes as the “Uzbek-born multi-billionaire is known to be close to both Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom he is alleged to have financial ties, and former President Dmitry Medvedev, who has reportedly benefited from the personal use of Usmanov’s luxurious residences.”

Osborne was so bothered by Milner’s covert dealings with sanctioned Russian banks and sanctioned Uzbek billionaires that he [checks notes] stood as Milner’s best man at his 2011 wedding.

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Michael Wolff connected Osborne with Epstein.

During his time in New York, Osborne made the acquaintance of “media-industry types” like Andrew Ross Sorkin and, crucially, Michael Wolff.

The File emails show that, at Wolff’s urging, Osborne, Wolff and Epstein met on Saturday, May 7, 2011. Osborne’s first visit to Epstein’s mansion was on Tuesday, June 14, 2011. That was one day after he sent Epstein this email:

Jeffrey,

• In the time since we met last month, I’ve reflected on the unique challenges and opportunities of your situation, and I am ready to propose what I believe to be the right strategy.

• I shall send the document by email later today but I wanted to let you know I am planning to stop off in New York en route to San Francisco tomorrow AM.

• If you happen to be around, perhaps we can discuss this in person (together with Michael). If not, then we can certainly do so by phone.

Best wishes,

Ian

The document was indeed sent, although the attachment, alas, does not seem to be available in the Files database.

Osborne appears to have pitched Epstein on doing PR work for him.

Given that Osborne was still mostly focused on his PR operation in late spring of 2011, and given the wording of the initial email—“I’ve reflected on the unique challenges and opportunities of your situation, and I am ready to propose what I believe to be the right strategy”—it appears that he was angling to add Jeffrey Epstein as a client.

If the “unique challenges and opportunities of your situation” is a diplomatic way of addressing the sex-trafficked elephant in the room—and I’m not sure how this can be read in any other way—the email to Epstein seems to contradict Osborne’s recent statement of wholehearted and bitter regret, in which he claims he “never witnessed, nor was aware of, the repellent and illegal behaviour by him.” We can easily swap out “unique challenges and opportunities of your situation” with “your repellent and illegal behaviour” in that email without changing its meaning.

It seems inconceivable that Osborne didn’t have some inkling of what Epstein was when he pitched him on the “unique challenges” of his “situation.” Are we really to believe that, in the days leading up to their first meeting in May 2011, Michael Wolff, of all people, one of the most notorious gossips in New York, didn’t dish to Osborne, whose writing profile suggests a similar appetite for salacious tittle-tattle, failed to mention Epstein’s sick predilections? Or that Osborne, already well established in the halls of power, didn’t hear about Jeffrey Epstein and underage girls? Or that this Xennial mover-and-shaker didn’t think to Google “Jeffrey Epstein” and see what popped up in his browser?

I knew about Epstein in 2011, ffs. And I was an obscure novelist in the podunk Hudson Valley, not a fancy big-city PR guy with access to all kinds of intel who was hoping to meet with him.

During the course of 2011-12, Osborne ingratiated himself with Epstein.

There are so many emails in the Files from Lesley Groff, Epstein’s administrative assistant, either mentioning that Osborne called, asking Epstein to call Osborne back, or saying she “LM”—left message—for Osborne on Epstein’s behalf, that it’s hard to tally them all.

The tone of the exchanges quickly morphs from the more tentative way you’d write a potential client, or someone you’re trying to impress, to something markedly less formal. Here, on August 3, 2011, at the beginning of their relationship, Epstein is matter-of-fact:

EPSTEIN: new schedule.. i will leave rome on mon afternoon, to dubai, ( rulers ) then abu dhabi ( rulers ) then saudi , „ then senegal . then paris on sat. 13

And Osborne is still in ass-kiss mode, replying:

OSBORNE: Noted. That's an eclectic collection of rulers and despots in one week. Shall we say Sunday evening/ Monday morning in Rome? I will head there from Aspen prior to London.

I’m not sure if the Rome meeting ever took place, but Osborne says he met with “Valentini,” presumably the Italian politician Valentino Valentini, on August 2nd, about Berlusconi’s attitude toward Prince Andrew, presumably about the Duke of York’s sordid reputation:

OSBORNE: Spoke to Valentini. As of now he is more likely to be in Sardinia than Rome on Sunday — with Berlusconi these things are fluid, especially with the EU bailout talks at the moment.

He will keep me posted. I can meet you in Rome, or alternatively in Paris early next week.

EPSTEIN: Great , FYI always remember I prefer brutal honesty ie if they are concerned re prince Andrew

OSBORNE: Understood. But in this case, they are aware and as Valentini pointed out, Mr. B isn’t without his own issues in that department. So it is not just him being polite.

This is further indication that Osborne knew rather well that Epstein, too, had “issues in that department.”

Epstein seems to have been a mentor to Osborne.

Here as well, we find parallels in their respective backgrounds. As chronicled on these pages, Epstein came to power under the aegis of three powerful men: first, Ace Greenberg, the Bear Stearns CEO who plucked him out of obscurity; and then the British arms dealer Douglas Leese, who introduced him to the shadowy world of foreign intelligence and deal-making; and finally the odious Robert Maxwell, whose network of mobsters and spies Ghislaine Maxwell brought to Epstein as a sort of dowry after her old man’s death in 1991.

Osborne was plucked from obscurity by Mike Bloomberg and exposed to a more shadowy world of “playing in the gray” by Yuri Milner. Was Jeffrey Epstein Robert Maxwell to Ian Osborne’s Jeffrey Epstein?

(A 2.0 version, after all, is the original, but with the bugs and defects removed. So: Epstein, but a generation-and-a-half younger, and without the sex trafficking or the pedophilia.)

As two “connectors,” Epstein and Osborne helped broker meetings between powerful people.

By September of 2011, they are more chummy, as in this exchange on the first of that month, 2011:

EPSTEIN: the libyan meeting here, is filled with please help me understand social media.. i can only respond" not my yob"

OSBORNE: More proof (not that any were needed) of your business case. Soon, hopefully you will be able to say "not my job but his". Call me after today's events have wrapped up.

Among the powerful people is MBZ—Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates—whom (presumably) Yuri Milner is “very keen” to meet. On September 20, Osborne writes:

Jeffrey,

Yuri is very keen to meet MBZ, either this week in NY or in the Middle East within the next couple of weeks.

It is a high priority for him and he will move whatever to make it work. Perhaps you can advise how best to do this?

Best wishes,

Ian

Other big games mentioned in the exchanges: Hosain Rahman, CEO of Jawbone, a now-defunct pioneer of “wearable technology;” George Osborne (no known relation), Britain’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer; the Brazilian businessman Eike Batista, who in 2012 had not yet lost his immense fortune or been put under house arrest; and Wendi Murdoch, Ivanka Trump’s bestie, who at the time was still married to Rupert Murdoch. She is mentioned in this September 2012 exchange between Osborne and one of Epstein’s assistants:

ASSISTANT:

Hello Ian. Jeffrey is asking if you could bring Wendy [sic] Murdoch here to his home around 2- 2:30 to meet the head of the Nobel Prize Peace Committee.

AND, if Wendy [sic] can not come, Jeffrey would still like you to come.

Please let me know what works.

OSBORNE:

Wendi says she has another appointment immediately after lunch and can’t make it today, but that she’d be glad to look at other times, or for Rupert to meet Jagland when he is in Europe.

Best wishes,

Ian

Jagland, of course, is Thorbjørn Jagland, the former Prime Minister of Norway who was charged with “aggravated corruption” for his dealings with Jeffrey Epstein, and who last week reportedly attempted suicide while in custody (although his lawyers deny this was the cause of his hospitalization).

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Epstein helped advise Osborne when he started his investment company, Hedosophia.

By November 2011, Epstein and Osborne are kicking around business plans concerning Jacob Burda—an academic and the son of the billionaire German publisher Hubert Burda—whom Osborne has brought into Epstein’s circle:

EPSTEIN: tell jacob„ less than six hours left till he comes up with a name > > -- > ******** >

OSBORNE: In the nick of time he has come up with a tentative name, just checking out the web domain and provenance!

On January 3, 2012, Osborne writes, using proper English grammar:

Jeffrey,

Good to speak earlier.

Please find attached the updated plan with timeline, which I’ve discussed extensively with Michael.

We believe this to be fast but achievable. Just to reiterate, by doing this you are not obliged to put the finished site up. Of course, our instinct is that you should (and the sooner, the better) but it depends on your exact circumstances and plans at the time, and we recognise that these things are subject to change.

In the meantime, I will send our usual agreement to Darren.

Michael will begin work this week, and I will begin next Monday, January 9th.

Best wishes,

Ian

Epstein replies, in his punctuation-challenged way:

do not begin any work„ until everything is reviewed„ in addition i am waiting for the investment papers. for [P]artnership 53

And Osborne comes back with:

That’s fine. I’m sending the same client agreement and information to Darren that we discussed in Paris back in November.

I will forward you Solina’s comments shortly, for your advice on what to incorporate and what to resist. I will also email you with the lawyers at Slaughter and May, who will send the investment papers. As for the name, which is ultimately a minor point, Jacob is rather attached to “hedosophia” which I actually like. It just merges the Greek works for “pleasure” and “wisdom”.

• We prefer this to the blander “partnership 53” because we want to establish a brand in elite circles, one that we can use for as a platform for some other things that we have been contemplating. I trust you will be ok on this point. Many thanks.

• Look forward to seeing you in Paris. I will call you with a few further thoughts on Gates before Friday.

Hedosophia is indeed the name of Osborne’s investment firm, which was founded, per his LinkedIn, in 2012. (Emails suggest that Nicole Junkermann, the German investor, seems also to have been involved.)

We would be remiss not to note that “Julia Korn, a spokesperson for [Jacob] Burda, wrote to Forbes that he had never been involved with pitching investments into Hedosophia to Epstein”—which doesn’t mean Epstein didn’t help advise him and Osborne, as the Files suggest. Burda is referred to as Osborne’s “partner” numerous times in the Files, and there are direct exchanges between Burda and Epstein—including one where Burda writes, in response to Epstein asking if he is “having fun,” “Doing quite well on the fun side I think, although by your standards you surely wouldn’t be too impressed...”

Also, Epstein appears to have been jealous of Burda, as we shall soon see.

Osborne apparently hooked Epstein up with Peter Thiel…

Like Reese of Reese’s Pieces fame combining chocolate and peanut butter—but for absolute evil.

Peter Thiel: Capo di tutti capi of the PayPal Mafia, early investor in Facebook and Twitter, co-founder of the omniscient surveillance company Palantir, owner and sole proprietor of fascist couchfucker JD Vance, sweaty eminence grise of the Trump Redux, radical Catholic of the Leonard Leo persuasion, immigrant from Germany via South Africa, billionaire whose politics are to the right of Hammurabi, philosophy major obsessed with the Antichrist—but then, we’re all somewhat obsessed with ourselves.

On November 14, 2011, Osborne wrote Epstein: “I have a meeting with Peter Thiel in an hour and will speak to him about you. I do know he will be in NY Monday to Wednesday next week.”

Those emails suggest that Epstein either did not yet know Thiel, or did not have his contact information. The “w/ background” implies the former.

The union of Epstein and Thiel, in my opinion, would have a profound impact on the 2016 election. If those two detestable supervillains had never met, would Hillary have been the 45th president?

…and Epstein apparently hooked Osborne up with Jes Staley.

You don’t request contact information for someone you already know.

Like Epstein, much of Osborne’s wealth derives from knowledge of an obscure corner of finance.

Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, are vast pools of investment capital that wait around to buy up stuff. Investopedia explains:

Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) have no commercial operations. They are formed strictly to raise capital through an initial public offering (IPO) that it can then use to acquire or merge with another company. After a period of relative obscurity—they were most popular in the lead-up to the 2007–2009 financial crisis—SPACs had a remarkable resurgence in the early 2020s, with a record-breaking number of SPAC IPOs and mergers, before quieting down in the mid-2020s.1

Experts say reasons for this renewed popularity include increased market volatility, a desire for faster and potentially less costly public listings, and the involvement of high-profile sponsors and investors. SPACs also gained mainstream attention with the highly publicized 2024 merger that took then-former President Donald Trump’s media company public under the ticker symbol DJT.

I’m reasonably certain SPACs will be responsible for a global financial crisis at some point in the not-too-distant future. In any event, SPACs are apparently a speciality of Hedosophia, Osborne’s firm.

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Their networks do not completely overlap.

Unlike here in the United States, where the federal government has sat on the Epstein Files for lo these many years, the British authorities are taking matters seriously. Already royally defrocked, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was recently arrested; the same with the former British ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson, another Epstein buddy. (Peter Mandelson is gay, and images from the Files suggest that the “massages” were not just given by girls.)

But as best I can tell from the emails, Osborne doesn’t have a relationship with either of those creeps, despite them being his countrymen. His people are younger, more worldly, and not pedophiles.

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Osborne does not share Epstein’s perverted proclivities.

“I never witnessed, nor was aware of, the repellent and illegal behaviour by him.”

It may well be true than Osborne never beheld the full scope of Epstein’s depravity, and therefore chose to believe that the more salacious rumors weren’t true. Ian Osborne went to the ranch a few times and was only at the island once—on business. His relationship with Epstein did not veer into Prince Andrew territory; quite the opposite.

Epstein was careful with who he admitted to the “massage” rooms. He apparently took Osborne to be more buttoned up than, say, Jes “Snow White” Staley. The emails suggest that Epstein wasn’t even sure if Osborne was straight.

Nevertheless, Epstein found a way to install himself into his friend’s sex life. He dispatched a woman named Miranda—who I believe is Austrian, and whom the Telegraph says was “a lawyer in her mid 20s”—to meet Osborne in February 2012.

In the wee hours of Sunday, February 19, 2012, she reported back to Epstein: “So Ian thanked me. probably should thank you.” That wasn’t enough for Epstein, who demanded “Details please,” and asked, “Did you do Ian? Jacob?”

Details were provided; TMI, but that’s how Epstein liked it:

Preparing to meet up with Osborne again that night, Sunday the 19th, she asked, “What would you suggest me to do with Ian tonight?”

Epstein replied, in a note riddled with typos, “give him everything, and right before y=u leave . say .. Jeffrey deserves a thank you note.”

First she asked for clarification: “Everything....you mean fucking, right?” Then she wrote back, “hahaha, ok, maybe, I’ll try to find out what he likes.”

And then she did some detective work: “Actually we met. He doesn’t like your girls - almost disgusted. he probably won’t like me anymore if I play that. He doesn’t like easter[n] european girls at all. He likes sweet cute intelligent natural.”

This prompted a one-word reply from Epstein: “Fuck.”

But Miranda clarified: “He likes me. He likes my blow jobs. This must give you some satisfaction even without telling him because he will stop liking them. No point to introduce him to girls because he won’t like them by the sole fact that they were introduced by you. This also explains why he didn’t tell me first he recognized me at the party.”

Epstein subsequently forwarded the entire email thread to someone else, whose name is redacted, saying, “She better not do Jacob!!” (Was he jealous? Did he see Jacob as a threat? Or was he just afraid that the dashing young academic might make Miranda forget all about him?)

Was Epstein trying to gather blackmail material on his protégé? Or was this his sick, twisted version of sending a business associate a case of scotch? Either way, this is creepy behavior—but Osborne apparently didn’t know Miranda was sent to him until recently, as these sad paragraphs from the Telegraph story explain:

A source close to Mr Osborne confirmed that the first encounter took place after he met the woman at a Paris nightclub but that he was unaware Epstein had any involvement until recent days.

“He believed this was a genuine and sincere relationship and is dismayed and shocked to learn she appears to have been encouraged and manipulated by [Epstein] behind the scenes,” the source said.

I almost feel bad for the guy.

Osborne and Epstein didn’t email much after 2013.

A search on JMail, the indispensable website that shows the released Epstein emails in a Gmail-style format, returns only 24 results for “Ian Osborne” after Christmas 2013.

Did their relationship cool after the initial “honeymoon” frenzy of 2011-13? Was there not as much to talk about, after the launch of Hedosophia and the failure of “Project Jes?”

Maybe, maybe not.

Osborne wrote Epstein an email on January 3, 2015, expressing concern. “Rather unfortunately, your ongoing case has made the front page of every British newspaper today (see attached),” he wrote his friend. “I hope that all is ok.”

When Epstein assured him everything was cool, Osborne replied, “It’s just that I feel bad that your stuff is set never to end...”

What was happening on January 3, 2015? A New York Times story that day is headlined “Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz Are Mentioned in Suit Alleging Sex With Minor.” In the BBC, the headline was “Prince Andrew sex claims woman ‘should not be believed.’” DW: “Palace denies sex claims against Prince Andrew.” The day before, the Guardian headline was “Jeffrey Epstein: the rise and fall of teacher turned tycoon.”

So yeah, maybe the two stopped communicating on the regular. Or maybe the more recent emails have yet to be released. Or maybe they just moved their exchanges from Gmail to a new app that came out in July of 2014—an encrypted message service called Signal?

Osborne is NOT a criminal, alleged or otherwise.

Let me again stress: Osborne has not broken any laws. Everything he’s doing is legal. But then, other than the obvious and odious sex crimes, what laws was Epstein breaking?

Jeffrey Epstein fell from his throne because the child sex trafficking was too egregious for the authorities to ignore. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not save him from consequences (although Alan Dershowitz tried his level best). Had Epstein not been so brazen, so contemptuous of morality, so committed to gold medaling in the “Competitive Depravity Olympics”—had he merely limited the sex trafficking to Eastern European women 18 and older—he likely would never have gotten caught.

Osborne remains an obscure figure in the United States.

A gander at a list of my sourcing for this piece reveals primarily European publications: the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Financial Times: all British. Business Insider is based in New York but is owned by the German media company Axel Springer SE. Le Monde ran a piece last month about Epstein’s attempts to influence the Sarközy government, in which Osborne is mentioned.

Those are all, notably, foreign sources. In the U.S., Ian Osborne has managed to avoid media scrutiny. He is mentioned fleetingly in a few longer New York Times pieces on Epstein. But as best as I can tell, an American legacy media outlet has yet to do a profile on him. Even Bloomberg News has been conspicuously silent on the subject of its billionaire founder’s former advisor.

What this means is that the American public, which gets the lion’s share of its news from American media, has never heard of the guy. Stop a thousand people on the street and ask them who he is, and they’d probably guess he’s Ozzy’s son.

It’s almost like Ian Osborne doesn’t exist.

Epstein would approve.

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Note: There are no pictures of Osborne that are free to use—and very few in circulation; the press usually runs the same one. Here’s an older shot of him.

Dear Reader,

How do we process death?

Just as it is a universal truth that we all die, it is also true that, with very rare exception, all of us experience, again and again, the death of people we love. What do we do with that? How do we manage the pain? How do we process death?

The priest at the funeral yesterday was not particularly helpful in this regard. A good priest—and I suspect this is true of any religious leader of any faith—possesses a certain quality that we may call holiness, or gravitas, or wisdom, but which is really, I think, a talent for guiding us through the grieving process.

But Father X is not a good priest.

My mother doesn’t like the guy. My brother despises him. He was described to me as phony, venal, more concerned with the temporal than the spiritual. For example: some of the parishioners at the church collect food for the needy. Until distributed at the shelter, the cans of corn and beans, the boxes of pasta and cereal, the bags of rice, are stored in the garage at the rectory. But Father X—who took over the parish two years or so ago, replacing a truly great priest—requisitioned the garage, significantly reducing the storage space for canned goods, so he could park his gleaming new Tesla in there. You know, what Jesus would do.

And one wouldn’t begrudge a man of God his little luxuries, if he were good at the job. But Father X is not, as I witnessed at first hand. He simply doesn’t have the knack. Sure, he’s got the vestments, the chalices and crucifixes and incense (too much incense; I was afraid I’d have an allergy attack). But he lacks the sine qua non of a good priest.

When he came into the wake on Friday afternoon, we had all been there for two hours, bidding adieu to the great man who is, or rather who was, genealogically my first cousin once removed, but also, and more importantly, my godfather. We were thirsty for spiritual guidance; Father X was simply unable to provide it. He rambled on too long, and he kept babbling about heaven—not as if we were children, which would have been bad enough, but as if he were a child. He made a point of disclosing the exact location of heaven. Above the stars. Look up and see heaven. If you go high enough. He sounded like a not terribly creative grown-up trying to explain to a fervent five-year-old believer in Santa Claus precisely where the North Pole’s toy factory was. It was weird. And I don’t think it made anyone feel better.

The way my mom’d described him, I expected someone sinister, even diabolical. But Father X is just insipid.

There was more of this ineptitude at the funeral—his bungling attempt at a eulogy, his clumsy proselytizing for Catholicism (to an audience almost exclusively comprised of Italian Catholics, lapsed or otherwise), and the childish, almost creepy fixation on heaven. My godfather deserved better. Fortunately, his son—my second cousin; my father’s godson—saved the day, delivering a rousing eulogy befitting of the gregarious, larger-than-life man in the casket. (When the pallbearers wheeled the coffin into the church, one of the little kids in attendance asked, innocently and loudly, “What’s in the box?”)

My wife thinks wakes are morbid: the open casket, the rosary beads around the hands, the dead body dressed up and made up and closely shaved. Objectively, she’s probably right. But I find that the entire procession of events—the wake, the funeral, the cemetery, the gathering after—are very effective at helping process death.

Between the Inquisitions and the Wars of Religion, and, more recently, the misguided antiabortion propaganda and the abominable pedophilia scandals, Catholicism doesn’t have the greatest historical track record. It’s indefensible, really. Which is why I’m no longer a practicing member of the Church.

But I’ll say this: no one does death better than Catholics. That’s a hill I will—quite literally—die on. The reason the Church was so popular in the early days is because it promised a dignified burial of the dead, even for the poor. Death was always the Church’s calling card. And they’ve had two thousand years to refine the formula. Built into the itinerary is time to weep, time to laugh, time to be silent, time to speak, time to gather together, time to be alone, time to pray, and time to contemplate the eternal mysteries. Funerals, after all, are for the living. The program is so well-constructed that it is—and after yesterday, I know this to be true—priest-proof.

Sitting in the cavernous old church—the church my family has attended for five generations now; the church I was baptized in, on Super Bowl Sunday 1973, in the presence of the man now lying in the casket; the church my (dead) grandparents got married in, 80 years ago this Tuesday—my mind wanders. I think about my father (whose birthday is the same day as their wedding anniversary: March 3rd). I think about my grandparents. I think about the long march of time and how memory fades. I think about my failures and shortcomings and selfishness. I think about how what we euphemistically call “God’s plan” is nothing more than randomness. I don’t think about Donald Trump or the Ayatollah or boutique doctors performing medical procedures on Jeffrey Epstein’s dining room table.

And I think about my own mortality. My grandmother had a lot of siblings; there are a gaggle of first cousins, the ones still alive approaching 80; my godfather was the oldest of his generation of first cousins, just as I am the oldest in my generation of second cousins. My father is three years dead, my godfather is now dead, and at 53, I am nearer the end of the journey than the beginning. In the tortuous TSA line of life, I’m one step closer to taking off my shoes and walking through the metal detector to the great airport terminal in the sky.

How do we process death?

The oligarchs seek eternal life. We poked fun of this on the show on Friday. Peter Thiel, obsessed with the Antichrist, consumed by greed, determined to live forever. Where is the wisdom in that? One line in the new Dracula movie stuck with me: “Death,” Vlad says, “is a privilege granted to you by God.”

Hamlet has it right, seems to me—“to end,” he says,

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.

If good priests stage-manage mourning in the moment, timeless wisdom is the province of the poets. I think of “Aubade,” by Philip Larkin:

The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” which I only know from Four Weddings and A Funeral:

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” by Thomas Gray:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nabokov, the opening lines of Speak, Memory—not technically a poem, but just as poetical:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

Eliot’s “Burial of the Dead,” the opening of The Waste Land:

I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

And the epigram that opens the poem, the line from Petronius’ Satyricon:

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεîν θέλω.’

which Eliot translates as

I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.”

See, now that is wisdom. Peter Thiel must have skipped English class at Stanford that day.

A dear friend lost someone recently, is grieving. Looking for one poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, I found another—one I’d never read before—and, blown away by it, reduced to tears by it, stunned by its genius, I sent it to her.

Now I share it with you, Dear Reader (and will resist the temptation to suggest that the poem can be read as a eulogy for the United States itself).

This one requires no detailed analysis, no translation from the Latin and the Greek. I recorded myself reading it out loud, because sometimes it’s better to listen than to read:

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

To that, I have nothing to add.

May everyone who died in what was a cold and brutish February—my godfather, my friend’s loved one, the scores of Iranian schoolgirls Trump and Bibi just killed—rest in peace.

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ICYMI

Fantastic show on Friday. We went a bit long, but when the great Jeb Taub is our guest, it’s time well spent:

Here’s the fake ad, animated by Chunk:

PROGRAMMING NOTES

I am on the road later this week. There will be a new piece on Tuesday, and possibly something on Friday, but (probably) no “Sunday Pages” next week and nothing next Tuesday.

Photo credit: Yours Truly. The cemetery, yesterday.

Here is a transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning, it is 5.30 a.m. in the morning of Friday, February 27th. The last weekend of February, thank God. Too much snow, too much cold, too much tension in the air, frankly. Not gonna bother talking about the State of the Union because we know what the State of the Union is. The State of the Union is that we have a president who is prepared to go to war with Iran to prevent files leaking out that show that he’s a rapist of children.

That’s not even a lie. That’s the state of the union. That’s where we are right now. And I feel like what’s happening now is everything is ratcheting up. And it feels like a game of chicken between the forces of despotism, with Trump establishing a full-on dictatorship without question—that’s on one side—and on the other side, the Epstein Files threatening to undo him and end his presidency.

So we have these two sides coming together, hurtling towards each other. Which one is gonna win? Who’s gonna play chicken first? Because once he’s an absolute dictator, we’ll never see anything about the Epstein Files. And once the true nature of Trump’s crimes are revealed, he will be done. Even the people in Congress who are protecting him now will have no choice but to remove him.

So I want to talk a little bit about what that means.

On the despotism side, there’s been a number of really terrifying reports and coverage about how Trump is trying desperately to subvert the voting process. He knows he can’t win a fair election. He’s already doing everything he can with voter suppression. They’re bending over backwards to try to pass this quote unquote “SAFE Act,” which is anything but, which will screw up the ability for a lot of people to vote, make it harder for people to vote—probably the people that will vote that it be the hardest for are Democrats or people who will vote against him, which he knows. So he’s all in on that. The Supreme Court is all in on that. All of those things are well-documented.

David Daley wrote a great book about John Roberts and his entire career of basically clawing away at the Voting Rights Act, and that’s where we are now. We have a Supreme Court—a rogue, reactionary, fascist Supreme Court—that’s enabled all of this. So we have that.

And then we have reports coming out that Trump—this is from the Washington Post— that Trump wants to basically federalize the election processes. Right now, the states are responsible for determining how people vote in each state and administering the voting. Trump wants to take that away. Because he can’t cheat unless he has control over it.

And it goes without saying that once he has control of it, he’s going to win by some margin and declare victory and that’s gonna be it. He’s not even gonna need Elon Musk this time. But the crazy thing is, ABC News reports that Mike Flynn, Pat Byrne (the guy who was Maria Butina’s lover and in on this the first time), and Mike Lindell of My Pillow of Fame—these are people that were trying to come up with ways to subvert the vote back in 2020, you may recall. Giuliani was also in on that plan back in 2020, December of 2020, that basically the whole J6 thing spilled out of that, right? To try to use any means necessary to keep Trump in power.

Well, fast-forward to now. The same thing is happening. know, Gal Suburban was on my podcast on June 3rd, 2022—almost four full fucking years ago—talking about this, about Executive Order 13848, which was issued by Trump.

And it’s an order to protect the voting from foreign interference. And the Director of National Intelligence is supposed to present a report to Trump after the elections where the Intelligence Community has done an assessment about whether or not there was foreign interference in the previous election.

So, you know, the Director of National Intelligence is Tulsi Gabbard. I don’t know who she’s working for, if it’s the cult leader guy from Hawaii or if it’s Putin or what, but she ain’t working for the American people. We know that. So she presumably would submit some sort of report that Trump would read and use as a pretext to impose his own will on the election process to “protect” it.

And in the original plan, as Gal explains and Jim Stewartson explained, again, back in 2022, was to use the National Guard to seize the voting machines. Now it would be ICE, I think, that would seize the voting machines, because now he has his own secret state police; he doesn’t have to worry about the National Guard. So he wants to do that.

And then in this original plan, he was going to task USAID with counting the votes. Of course, Elon Musk has gutted USAID. And the person nominally in charge of that now is, I believe, Marco Rubio. So those are two—in Rubio and Gabbard—hideous traitors, some of the worst traitors that have ever betrayed the country, those two people.

So this is coming. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is what’s happening. This is being reported in the Washington Post and ABC News. This is what they’re doing. This is what they’re trying to do unless we stop them.

That’s the first thing.

The second thing is the war with Iran. Most of the air capability in the United States is in the Persian Gulf right now. I’ve looked at some of these military sites and it’s terrifying how much muscle we have, military muscle, within striking distance of Iran. And some of these military writers are saying that we never move this much into place like that unless we’re gonna do an attack.

I think Trump is just itching to hit Iran. I think Pete Hegseth is just itching to hit Iran. And right now the only thing preventing it is probably the generals who don’t want to because it’s crazy and unnecessary. As much as it would be great to topple the Ayatollah and liberate the Iranian people from this horrible person—it would be ironic in some way if we liberated the Iranians and they actually did greet us as liberators, because I think they actually would, unlike in Iraq—that’s neither here nor there. Trump doesn’t give a shit about that. He doesn’t care about the Ayatollah cracking down. Of course, the Ayatollah has threatened to release the Epstein files if he attacks. And I’ve also read, and I don’t know if this is true, that Bibi has threatened to release them if he doesn’t attack. So he’s between a rock and a hard place with Iran.

But the point is, this guy might go to war. And once he’s at war, if there’s a real war, then all the rules change. All the rules change. Then Trump is a war-time president. He’ll argue that we shouldn’t even have elections because we’re at war and bring up Zelenskyy and whatever thing he’ll try to claim—even though we had the election of 1864. We had every election during World War II. We have elections during war in this country, but he’ll try to claim otherwise. So that’s a big deal.

This tariff thing, I mean, it’s kind of a joke because the Supreme Court shot it down. They said Trump’s tariffs are unlawful, illegal, he’s not allowed to do them. But then Trump responded with, “We’re gonna put on more tariffs!” Like, no, man, the court said you can’t unilaterally impose tariffs. And Trump’s response is to unilaterally impose tariffs.

Now, I don’t know how the mechanism of this stuff works, but if he’s just ignoring the Supreme Court and his minions in the customs office, which I think is under the purview of Noem, that basically means that we have no more rule of law in the country, right? So that’s bad.

And then he’s just stealing stuff. He’s just looting the treasury. He’s looting it in these unbelievable ways. Just pouring money out of, stealing money from us, lots of money. For him and his disgusting children and God knows who else, who else he owes money to or whatever—these horrible oligarchs who are helping him. Really, it’s gonna take a lot to cleanse the country of these people when all is said and done. There’s not enough sage in the Midwest to do what needs to be done.

So that’s the one train coming down the track, right? That’s the train of despotism coming down the track.

On the other side, we have the Epstein Files, which are not going away. Epstein Files are not going away.

We know he’s in the files. We know there’s stuff in the files about him that’s bad. That’s “duh,” okay? He wouldn’t be moving heaven and earth to redact his name and prevent them from coming out. He wouldn’t have put Pam Bondi in the Department of Justice—and that other guy, Blanche, was his defense attorney—otherwise. These people are there to protect Trump. Kash Patel is there to protect Trump…and I guess get drunk with hockey players. What a pathetic spectacle that was, but we don’t even need to talk about that.

We know there’s stuff in there. The only question is: what it is, how bad it is, what’s he hiding? There’s been a lot now of things trickling out. The FBI was investigating an allegation about Trump from the 80s. The girl was 13 when she was allegedly raped by him. Epstein was involved. Nina Burleigh and Katie Chenoweth had the scoop on that:

American Freakshow

"Protect Source"

Here at the Freakshow, like everyone else, we sift through the millions of pages in the Epstein files with an eye for the elusive Trump connection, some proof behind the long-circulating rumors about his participation in the frolics Epstein arranged for himself and his coterie of wealthy ogres…

Read more

21 days ago · 131 likes · 14 comments · Nina Burleigh and Katie Chenoweth

There’s still the Katie Johnson stuff. There’s other things in there that we don’t know.

And I’m sure there’s a lot of things in there about money and other things. It’s not just the sex trafficking horrors. It’s also money, and Epstein’s ties to foreign governments, and probably stuff around the election of 2016, because there’s a lot of chatter in there between Epstein and Bannon and Peter Thiel and these other people about that election. Talking to the Russians…it’s just that there’s a lot of weird stuff in there that we haven’t even scratched the surface of.

And then there’s also, as I wrote about this in my Epstein piece about what it could possibly be, the fact that there’s the files—and I didn’t even put this in my piece this week about Lutnick because I wasn’t sure of it, but Dave Troy posted it, so therefore it’s accurate. The Epstein Files between 1999 and 2001 are being suppressed.

Those are the emails and the files that you can’t find. Now, gee, I wonder what happened in those years? Well, the 2000 election happened, which was a catastrophe, and obviously 9/11 happened. And the people who were characters in 9/11 have resurfaced during the Trump years. Coincidence, maybe, but it seems to me that people have stuff to hide around that and we need that to come out.

And then there’s two other things where we know Trump gave depositions.

UpstateNY, my friend on Blue Sky, sent this to me. There was supposed to be a deposition by Trump in August of 2009 by Brad Edwards in that Ghislaine Maxwell / Epstein case. And apparently he never went to the deposition, but he had a chat with Edwards about it—and then totally redacted about what they talked about.

So what did they talk about? I don’t know. We may never know. But the point is Trump was in the crosshairs for that. We know he was being investigated with these other sex crimes, because of the information coming forward.

And then Senator Wyden today released this thing that the DEA was apparently investigating Epstein about some drug case years ago that Trump maybe was also involved with. So there’s all kinds of stuff that Trump is actively being investigated for that we don’t know about.

That’s the stuff with the Epstein Files.

You know, every week we learn something else that’s a little bit closer to Trump, but not close enough. And again, these two trains are coming together. Which one is going to veer off the tracks first depends…you know, no pressure, but the future of our country and our democracy depends on what happens now.

The one takeaway that I have is that there’s a lot of people in the country now that actually do know stuff and aren’t legally allowed to tell. You’ve got people at the DEA, which I just mentioned. You have people in the DOJ. You have people in the FBI. You have people in the CIA. You have foreign intelligence people. You maybe have some journalists. You definitely have some lawyers. All of these people know things that would put Trump away. They know, all of them know, things. And they’re not allowed to say. Even the FBI that were doing the redactions, right? People know stuff and they’re just not allowed to say, because it’s illegal, it’s unlawful, it’ll screw up a future court case, whatever it is.

Guys, there’s no more rule of law! The rule of law is dead. It’s dead. The Department of Justice is being run by a lackey of a mobster. We have a mobbed-up criminal Kremlin asset in charge of the country who has installed his muscle men in all of these positions of power. He’s ignoring the Supreme Court, which he owns anyway.

I mean, where is the rule of law? They’re building concentration camps right now! They’re building concentration camps! You know, they’re occupying cities with the secret state police. What do you think is gonna happen?

You come out and say what you know or we’re doomed. It’s that simple. So if you’re sitting on something and you’re one of these people, we need to know what it is. And you don’t have to come to me. There’s still journalists out there that’ll publish this. There’s still good journalism happening. There’s plenty of outlets that will publish this. Even the New York Times would if it was the right kind of thing. Go, find people, find journalists that you trust. Even go to the BBC or whatever, The Guardian. It doesn’t have to be in this country. We need this stuff to come out. People need to come out and tell us what’s happening.

The idea that we’re protecting the norms, this Merrick Garland read of things, has failed. It failed during the Biden administration and it continues to fail. There are exceptions that we have to make to this stuff. And now is the time of the exception.

LB has been calling for the release of the Confidential Informant files, the FBI files on Trump, for 10 years now. Release those files, leak them, or talk about them or something. There has to be something. There has to be something.

Because if we don’t have something, what’s going to happen is he’s going to steal the election and that’s gonna be it—if we even have an election. So the situation could not be more dire.

You know, not to ruin your weekend or anything, but this is where we’re at. This is what the state of the union is. And unless we act—and by we, I mean people in the know…

You have citizen journalists—I don’t know if I like that term—investigators, researchers who are independently, and without getting paid in most cases, combing through these files, trying to find stuff. Meanwhile, the people who know things are just sitting around like, “I can’t say anything because of the norms.” Come on, man, give us a hand, for fuck’s sake, you know?

Your job is to protect us. It’s not to protect yourself. That’s how it is. If you didn’t want to take risks like that, you shouldn’t have been in the job in the first place.

So that’s my soapbox for today.

Now, I’m pleased to announce that I have a podcast today featuring Aaron Tracy and his excellent podcast, which is called The Secret World of Roald Dahl, the children’s book author, who led such a fascinating life. And it’s a really interesting, fun conversation that we have. And it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any of stuff.

So if you want to listen to people talk about the podcast, you can do that. No Trump discussion. And then if you want to listen to his podcast, it’s quite good. I recommend it. It’s available everywhere.

So I’ve got that for you. And then tonight on The Five 8, we’re just going to talk about Epstein stuff. We’ve got Jen Taub coming on. I know we don’t like to announce the guest, but I think it’s OK to announce the guest. Jen Taub’s coming on again to talk about Epstein stuff, and that’s basically what we’re going to talk about. So check us later at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on YouTube.

I don’t know. The weather’s getting warmer. Spring is coming. You know, what did Shelley say? “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” I hope so. Fate of the nation depends on it. But I think we shall prevail.

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Golden Ticket: The Hidden Life of Roald Dahl

You’re familiar with his books: Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, James & the Giant Peach, The BFG, Matilda. But how much do you know about their author?

Greg Olear speaks with Aaron Tracy about his excellent new narrative podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl. They explore Dahl’s fascinating life, his impact on children’s literature, and the complexities of his character, including his anti-Semitism. The discussion also delves into the evolution of storytelling through podcasts, the crisis of masculinity, and the ongoing debate of separating art from the artist.

Aaron Tracy is the founder of Parallax, the award-winning audio company. His debut audio drama, The Coldest Case, a thriller starring Aaron Paul, is the most successful Audible Original of all time. He teaches creative writing at Yale University. The Secret World of Roald Dahl, on iHeart Media, is his first narrative nonfiction podcast.

Listen to Aaron’s podcast:

https://www.listentoparallax.com/shows/secretworldofpodcast

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“If Trump saw value in dumping Howard and ending the Epstein noise, he’d do it. We’re just not there yet.”
—Former Trump campaign official to POLITICO, February 10, 2026

I. The Attacks

Although he’d been the head of the “very sharp-elbowed”1 financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald since 1991, and a familiar figure on Wall Street for years before that, Howard Lutnick did not enter the wider public consciousness until September 11, 2001.

Certainly that’s the first time I’d heard of him. There was Lutnick on the news programs, with his receding hairline and puppy-dog brown eyes and reassuring Long Island accent, sharing his tale of unimaginable woe.

Cantor Fitzgerald occupied the 101-105th floors of One World Trade Center—six floors higher than where, at 8:46 am on the morning of 9/11, a hijacked American Airlines commercial flight smashed into the building. Six hundred fifty-eight of the company’s 960 employees died, including Lutnick’s brother, Gary. Only dumb luck had spared Lutnick—September 11, 2001, was his son Kyle’s first day of kindergarten at the exclusive Horace Mann School.

At a moment when the city was reeling, struggling to make sense of what’d just happened—the initial shock beginning to wear off, replaced by grief and anger and puzzlement and survivor’s guilt and mournfulness; but also, on the other hand, an overwhelming feeling of love and compassion and desire for communion I have not experienced before or since—Howard Lutnick gave voice to what many of us were feeling. He may have been a ruthless chief executive, a titan of Wall Street, but at the end of the day, he was a New Yorker, like the rest of us. His pain was our pain.

On September 13, 2001, Lutnick sat down for an emotional interview with Connie Chung. He cried a lot—who could blame him?—but he got through it.

This is what he said about his brother Gary’s horrible death:

My brother was on 103rd floor. He worked for me. He worked at Cantor. And he called my sister just after the plane hit and he told her that—he said that the smoke was pouring in. He was stuck in a corner office. There was no way out, and the smoke was coming in, and he’s—he’s not good, and things are not good, and he’s not gonna make it. And he just wanted to say that he loved her, and he wanted to say goodbye, and tell everyone that he loved them. And then the phone went dead. So while I’m the head of the company, I’m trying to help my 700 employees who are missing their loved ones, I’m just another one of them. Just another one of them.

“Normally,” Chung picked up the storyline, “you would’ve been in your office on…the 105th floor, and yet you didn’t go in early that morning because of a critical decision you made.” Lutnick took the cue:

My little boy—I have a five-year-old, and it was his first day of kindergarten at Horace Mann. So I took him for his first day of big-boy school. And because of that I was late getting down to the office, and therefore I wasn’t in the building. I was on my way to the building instead….

Lutnick went on:

I saw the building on fire, so I didn’t go in. But I stood—I stood at the door off of Church Street where they were flags there, and I stood at that door, and people were coming out, and I was yelling at them, you know, to run and get out. And there were police sort of around me, yelling at people, telling him to get out. And I would ask them what floor they were coming from, what floor they were coming from. Someone would say 55 and I’d scream, “We have 55!” Because I kept wanting to get up the building and get people out. Employees were on 101 to 105, the top floors of Number One World Trade Center, which they now call the North Tower, so how high was the highest number you got to. I got to the 91st floor, and I knew if I got one employee—that if one person came down from that floor, than I knew there had to be others—there would be others behind them. There will be others going out other doors, and that would be good.

But I got up to 91, and then I heard the sound. It sounded like another plane was going to hit the building, but it didn’t sound like it was far away, it sounded like it was right where the ceiling is above us. It was so unbelievably loud. Then someone screamed out, “Another one’s coming!” So I just turned around and ran. And I was running….

It was Number Two World Trade Center collapsing. So I’m standing underneath the building like an idiot. And I start running, and I’m trying to get ahead of the smoke. And then the smoke comes around the corner by Trinity Church, where I ran, knocks me down underneath the truck. And I’m sitting there in this black—the black is black that can ever be. I reached up. I tried to see if I could see. And I took my hand and I put it up and I actually touched my eye, because it was so much smoke, and I couldn’t even see my own hand. I couldn’t see my hand. I could feel the particles in the air, they were like this big. I could feel them going in. I wasn’t—I couldn’t think to like pick up my shirt and put—I was just sitting there thinking, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe by standing there I died.” So I just start walking, I just start walking straight, I just walk straight, and I just keep walking straight.

And I called my wife four hours later. She was hysterical crying. And so I understood why it took lots of people a long time. I’m a pretty together person, and four hours, I walked. I just walked north. I just kept walking….

All of that resonated with New Yorkers—especially, for me, the part about the aimless walking. By 10 am on 9/11, everyone was out in the street on what was, weather-wise, an absolutely gorgeous late summer day. There was nothing to do but walk. People in lower Manhattan were scurrying uptown, away from Ground Zero, while people further uptown—like me, who watched on my boss’s TV at the AP’s offices at 50 Rock—were drawn downtown, to try and help. The bridges and tunnels were all closed. The subways didn’t run until later that afternoon. Cabs drove around in circles. It probably took my wife and I four hours to make it home to Astoria.

At the end of the interview, Lutnick beautifully articulated his compassion for his lost employees and their families:

I don’t know of a single one of my employees who got down [from the top of the tower]. Zero. Zero. And it’s really sad, but I think we’re all pulling together with the view—we want to make things happen for them. We need to take care of them. We need to figure out how to take care of them, and give them more. And take care of them. I think it’s gonna be a different kind of drive that I’ve ever had before. It’s not about… It’s not about my family. I get to kiss my kids. I get to kiss my kids tonight, but other people don’t get to kiss their kids, and I just have to help them.

And I think what’s amazing, and I think it’s amazing, there are 300 people, they lost all their friends; they lost a person to their left, they lost a person to their right, and they call me up, and they say, “I want to go to work.” I say, “Why do you want to go to work? Let’s just go to funerals.” They say, “No, no, I want to go to work. I can’t stay home. I can’t stay home. I have to work. I have to do something.” And so they actually wanted to try to figure out how to be in business. It’s unbelievable. It doesn’t make any sense, but the reason they want to be in business is because we have to make our company be able to take care of my 700 families. We have 700 families… I just can’t say it I can’t say without crying….

I just tell them, “Look, I’ll answer any question, any question you want about it, but I lost my brother, and I’m in no different position than you are. I’m not any different. I’ll just tell you everything I know.” But I get to say to everybody, so they believe me, that when I say we are doing everything we can to find their kid, but they know that I do not look for my brother. I wouldn’t go to any hospital or get anybody to go to any hospital and say, “Find Gary Lutnick for me.” Because I go with an employee list. I say, “Here’s my list of everybody I got. Find somebody on this list. I don’t care who they are.” If we find someone on this list, and then I get to call them, and I get to give somebody else some hope. Some dream. Maybe—maybe they get to kiss their kids. It’s… I’d love to find my brother. But I’d love to find their brother or their wife or their husband or anything. Anything.

And I watched that interview, and I thought, “Jesus. This poor guy. He’s heartbroken, he’s devastated—it’s written all over his face—but he’s doing all the right things. Good for him.”

After that, I didn’t think about Howard Lutnick for 25 years—until his old chum Donald Trump nominated him as Commerce Secretary.

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II. The Files

Lutnick is now 64 years old. He’s grown a beard, which neatly offsets the receding hairline, and the streaks of gray in his salt-and-pepper hair become him; he looks more distinguished now, professorial. Financially, he’s done very well for himself. He has a personal net worth of $3,000,000,000—give or take a few million. And he still speaks in the affable, heart-on-his-sleeve manner I remember from the Connie Chung interview.

Only now, we know that he’s a world-class gaslighter. If lying were an Olympic sport, he’d be partying with Kash Patel in Milan. Even in a West Wing ensemble that includes some of the most shameless, fork-tongued liars on the planet, Lutnick stands apart; he is the Meryl Streep of mendacity.

Case in point: In October of last year, Lutnick told Miranda Devine of the New York Post, on her “Pod Force One” podcast, about his first visit to the home of his next-door neighbor, Jeffrey Epstein—from whom he’d (indirectly) purchased his stately manse (of which, more later).

This made headlines for an anecdote he shared, which struck me in the moment as a story Lutnick’d told many times and delights in telling. Here is the Post’s synopsis:

The 64-year-old cabinet secretary said Epstein himself showed off his notorious “massage room” while giving Lutnick and his wife a tour of the infamous East 71st Street townhouse after the couple moved in next door to the since-disgraced financier in 2005.

“I say to him, ‘Massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?’” Lutnick recalled. “And he says, ‘Every day.’ And then he gets, like weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘And the right kind of massage.’”

Lutnick said he and his wife quickly excused themselves and left Epstein’s home, “and in the six to eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”

When asked by Devine whether Epstein’s rich and powerful associates—including the likes of Prince Andrew and Microsoft founder Bill Gates—“could hang around him and not see what you saw, or did they see it and ignore it,” Lutnick responded, “They participated.”

“They get a massage, that’s what his MO was. ‘Get a massage, get a massage,’ and what happened in that massage room, I assume, was on video,” the commerce secretary went on. “This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever, blackmailed people. That’s how he had money.”

Again, Lutnick seemed completely sincere in that interview—and especially convincing because, in bringing up the subject of Epstein at all, he appeared to be touching the third rail of the Trump White House.

The thing is, that story? It’s complete horseshit. He and his wife, Allison Lutnick, were so put out by that “disgusting man” that they [checks notes] visited the creepy pedo on his private Caribbean rape island.

And as I’m hardly the first to point out, Howard and Allison Lutnick both mention the ages—and in her case the genders—of the various children to this notorious child sex trafficker, whom Lutnick claimed to have repudiated years earlier.

Huh.

When asked about this discrepancy during a recent Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Lutnick copped to “probably about 10 emails connecting me with [Epstein] over a 14-year period. I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with that person, okay?”

“That person”—whom he addressed, in those emails, familiarly, as “Jeff.”

Lutnick added, for good measure, “My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies. I had another couple… they were there as well with their children, and we had lunch on the island…for an hour. Then we left with all of my children, with my nannies and my wife, all together. We were on a family vacation. We were not apart.”

One last time, for the people in the back: “The only thing that I saw with my wife and my children and the other couple and their children was staff who worked for Mr. Epstein on that island.”

The word “staff” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, but even so, that’s almost certainly the truth.

But at this point, after a full year of rapid-fire lies, why should we believe a word Howard Lutnick says? Especially when, as Jamie Bonkiewicz pointed out on X, one of the creepy rubber masks that Epstein had decorating the sterile walls in what appeared to be a dental room of his compound on Little St. James bears a striking resemblance to a certain Commerce Secretary:

Does that prove anything? No. But it’s not a good look for Lutnick.

III. The Aftermath

On December 10, 2001, the features writer Meryl Gordon, who is a professor of journalism at NYU, wrote a profile of Lutnick for New York magazine. The Cantor Fitzgerald CEO had had an eventful, up-and-down three months, punctuated by his ill-fated decision on September 15—less than a week after the attacks—to suspend the direct deposits of his still-missing-and-presumed-dead employees. You know, the ones he’d wept for so passionately on TV literally two days earlier.

Gordon writes:

Who is Howard Lutnick and what is his greater purpose? These questions are part of our public need, both empathetic and voyeuristic, to plumb the depths of his company’s tragedy. For Lutnick embodies much about New Yorkers on September 11. He started that day a Wall Street buccaneer, a hugely successful, legendarily aggressive striver who was personally worth as much as a half-billion dollars. By the 13th, he’d become the accidental survivor who was crying on Connie Chung about how it felt to lose so many people and to run for his life. By the 15th, he was the Dickensian villain who’d cut off the widow’s mite, the paychecks of the dead, to assure the bankers of his sangfroid. By October 10, he had announced a munificent and detailed financial plan for the families. By then, not many people knew what to believe about Howard Lutnick.

That remains true. There was then, and is still, something Jekyll-and-Hyde about Howard Lutnick. With this guy, we get the full spectrum—all 88 piano keys. He can project deep empathy and compassion…while at the same time gaslighting the American people on behalf of some of the worst humans to ever walk the earth. As Gordon put it, 25 years ago,

All the elements of his personality are out there: He’s likable, he’s irritating, he’s furious that his motives are being challenged, he pushes people hard but then teases them, he’s smart and self-aware yet also in denial. “It’s not sad here. It’s not sad here. It’s not sad here,” he insists of his current workplace, a remark that makes his co-workers affectionately roll their eyes. But in the next moment, he’s overcome by sadness. He’s a man who keeps going forward because forward is the only direction open to him.

What to make of this now, a quarter century later?

It is true that Lutnick continued to call and visit the families of his employees who died that day. It’s true that, as Gordon reported, “Lutnick’s financial package [for the families] is relatively good: ten years of health insurance rather than five; a share of 25 percent of the partners’ profits over a five-year period—a total package worth at least $100,000 per family.” It’s true that he set up and endowed a charitable foundation—the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund—and put his sister in charge of it.

It is also true that on Lutnick’s watch, Cantor Fitzgerald sued American Airlines for negligence—because on 9/11, AA failed to [checks notes] prevent its plane from being hijacked. Which seems, to me, like a dick move.

Dick move or not, Cantor won a $135 million settlement from AA in December 2013. The lion’s share went to the firm’s partners. As best as anyone can tell, no one pocketed more of the settlement money than Howard Lutnick. As Fox News reported at the time:

Speculation in the firm suggests Lutnick took anywhere from $15 million to $25 million from the settlement. A spokeswoman for Cantor would not deny he was entitled to receive millions of dollars, and neither she nor Lutnick would deny the speculated amount.

“All of the money for the business interruption recovery relating to the American Airlines case went either to strengthen and support the overall business, or to the over 600 Cantor Partners, precisely proportionate with the exact stake in the company, Mr. Lutnick included,” the spokeswoman said. “For five years, Cantor’s Partners provided 25% of the firm’s profits to the 9/11 families, a total of at least $180 million, in addition to ten years of health benefits.”

Lutnick declined to comment.

A senior executive at Cantor said the manner in which the settlement was distributed, including the chunk of money Lutnick received, is entirely appropriate since Cantor never promised family victims a portion of the money in the first place. The executive described the case against American Airlines as a “business interruption lawsuit” since Cantor’s offices were destroyed in the attack, meaning it was appropriate for the company to keep the money.

Both Lutnick’s decisions to halt the missing employees’ paychecks and to pocket so much of the AA settlement money remain a sore subject for many of the Cantor Fitzgerald 9/11 families. And it leaves the rest of us scratching our heads.

How can one man be Ebenezer Scrooge before the ghosts visit and Ebenezer Scrooge after the ghosts visit, simultaneously?

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IV. The Allegations

» Old Stuff

Founded by Bernie Cantor after the Second World War, Cantor Fitzgerald acquired a reputation as a shady firm when Howard Lutnick was still in diapers. As the New York Times explains:

At first, the firm designed sophisticated tax strategies for Hollywood stars like Kirk Douglas, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Clint Eastwood. Later, Mr. Cantor’s clients included Meshulam Riklis and other brash conglomerate-builders of the 1960’s….

As far back as 1974, Cantor Fitzgerald paid $265,000—a substantial amount in that era—to settle an S.E.C. case charging that it had participated in a scheme that defrauded investors of $9 million through a mutual fund. The firm denied wrongdoing, saying it settled the case to avoid the expense of litigation.

Lutnick charted a similarly sketchy course after taking the helm:

The firm, without admitting or denying wrongdoing, was disciplined by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1994 for record-keeping violations in connection with investigations stemming from the Treasury auction scandal at Salomon Brothers. And Mr. Cantor raised some eyebrows by hiring Peter DaPuzzo, who in June 1992 had paid $100,000 and agreed to a brief suspension to settle a New York Stock Exchange complaint arising from the manipulation of the price of Conagra shares in 1990 while he was at Shearson Lehman Brothers. Mr. DaPuzzo neither admitted nor denied any wrongdoing.

More recently, one of Cantor’s subsidiaries, Cantor Gaming, “entered into a non-prosecution agreement and agreed to pay $16.5 million in penalties and forfeiture to the federal government to resolve a criminal investigation into the company’s past involvement in illegal gambling and money laundering schemes.” In that scheme, one of the firm’s employees, Michael Colbert, pleaded guilty and went to prison.

And last year, the firm’s Irish subsidiary ran afoul of European regulations and was fined by the Central Bank of Ireland:

Cantor failed on a number of occasions to report identified suspicious transactions that may have indicated market abuse to the Central Bank. Cantor failed to put in place effective governance arrangements to detect and report suspicious orders and transactions that may have indicated market abuse. Cantor also failed to consistently document its analysis as to whether it considered certain orders and transactions to be suspicious and failed to consistently escalate suspicious transactions internally – during a period of over 6 years between March 2017 and June 2023. Cantor has admitted to the breach.

In the grand playing-in-the-gray scheme of Wall Street things, all of that is small potatoes, to be fair.

But the sins of Cantor Fitzgerald past pale in comparison to the new disclosures in the Epstein Files—allegations that Lutnick was personally working with Jeffrey Epstein, laundering money for the Russian mafia.

» Whistleblower

The whistleblower—his name is redacted, but let’s call him Mr. Simons—was a former employee of Cantor Fitzgerald and BGC Financial, a subsidiary of Cantor that provides voice and brokerage services (“BGC” stands for Bernie Gerald Cantor, the parent company’s founder). He held a Series 30 license and was the head of a division that handled regulatory compliance. If Mr. Simons is who I believe he is, he’s still very active in the financial services industry, the head of a boutique firm. In short, he’s not some crackpot.

On two separate occasions, Mr. Simons contacted the FBI to report shady shit. In October of 2020, he called the Bureau’s tip line and told the feds that he’d “uncovered fraud, money laundering, Ponzi schemes, and regulatory breaches by [BGC] and CF, so he became a whistleblower. [BGC] and CF received large fines and there are ‘live cases’ still occurring in the United Kingdom.” This is according to the FBI’s Guardian Complaint Form, headlined “Alleged Money Laundering by Howard Lutnick via BGC Financial and Cantor Fitzgerald.”

The document continues:

Further investigation by [Mr. Simons] linked Howard Lutnick to illegal activities with JP Morgan, Russian Hedge Funds, and other senior executives in the financial business.

[Mr. Simons] has documented proof showing money laundering and Ponzi schemes by Lutnick via offshore shell companies, liquid funding, and real estate brokerage firms. [BGC] is using a “global Ponzi share” scheme involving over 3,500 BGC employees who are forced to contribute 10% of their earnings into the scheme.

Liquid Funding is the name of Jeffrey Epstein’s primary offshore company—which the FBI officer writing up the report seems not to have known; hence the lowercase letters.

Lutnick is deeply rooted to the royal family and has multiple high profile and celebrity connections. Lutnick claims to be a philanthropist, but is merely using his charities as a “smokescreen” for his illegal activity. Many of the individual involved in Lutnick’s charities have criminal breaches against them.

[Mr. Simons] believes he has supporting documents which could link Lutnick to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell and Sarah Ferguson, a royal family member, host events called La Dolce Vita Parties, where high profile celebrities and executives contribute large donations to attend. The donations are linked to causes involving children. Lutnick made “huge donations” to these events. Epstein also sold Lutnick a house for $10 dollars through a trust fund, which was then sold for millions shortly after prior to the money going overseas.

The part about the house being sold for ten bucks is, technically, true. But it’s not as red-flaggy as it seems, as Crain’s explains:

In 1992 Sam Conversion Corp. sold 11 E. 71st St. [Lutnick’s house, next door to Epstein’s at 9 E. 71st St.] to the 11 East 71st Street Trust for “ten dollars and other valuable consideration paid by the party of the second part,” records show. Martha Stark, former commissioner of the city Department of Finance, told Crain’s that the $10 figure is a placeholder used in many real estate sales—a holdover from a period when the value of property transactions was not publicly disclosed.

The available materials do not show whether the two corporations exchanged any larger sum. But the sale documents identify Epstein as the vice president of Sam Conversion Corp. and a trustee of the 11 East 71st Street Trust, and both entities used the same Columbus address linked to [Les] Wexner. Wexner did not respond to a Crain’s query about his stake in either the corporation or the trust.

Four years later the 11 East 71st Street Trust—still with Epstein listed as trustee—sold the property to the Comet Trust, again for “10 dollars and other valuable consideration.” Unlike the previous deed transfers, this one makes note of the real estate transfer tax paid on the sale: $86,800. From this, Stark extrapolated the true sale price was $6.2 million….

In 1998 Comet Trust sold 11 E. 71st St. to Lutnick, again for “10 dollars and other valuable consideration.” The real estate transfer tax payment came to $106,400, from which Stark estimated the actual price to have been $7.6 million.

On the very day of the sale, Lutnick took out a $4 million mortgage on his stately new manse. You know, as one does.

But back to the whistleblower complaint.

When the FBI officer who wrote up the Mr. Simons report ran it through the Bureau’s Sentinel and Guardian databases, he found “26 results in the NY division case files including restricted closed case no.:272D-NY306108, Serial 204, concerning money laundering and control file case no.:194-NY-C277070-B, Serial 392, concerning a RICO violations/real estate scheme.”

Curiously, the officer notes that “[q]ueries were not conducted on Epstein and Maxwell due to the sensitive nature of the case.” Huh.

A follow-up 302 report was filed three months later. In that document, Mr. Simons elaborates on his allegations, claiming that BGC Financial and Cantor were

well known for money laundering. CANTOR FITZGERALD had a history of crime. Senior officials have spoken about [how] the money laundering occurred. PARABRIDGE INTERNATIONAL SERVICES (PIS) was an affiliate of [REDACTED FIRM] and CANTOR FITZGERALD. PIS was where payroll passed through in addition to the money raised on charity days. They were part of the compliance division. [Mr. Simons] thought there were illegal wire transfers involving PIS. PIS was associated with DEUTSCHE BANK accounts in Singapore and Hong Kong. CANTOR FITZGERALD was paying brokers from foundations in other countries through PIS. PIS had hired an ex DEUTSCHE BANK CEO as Global President. The Panama Papers connected CANTOR FITZGERALD to shell companies.

I have found nothing whatsoever on Parabridge. Every search brings up only the FBI documents.

HOWARD LUTNICK (LUTNICK) ran everything and he maintained a very small circle. LUTNICK instructed all of the fraud being committed. He used philanthropy as a smokescreen for illegal activity. CANTOR FITZGERALD was not doing well pre-9/11. After the events of September 11, 2001, CANTOR FITZGERALD was doing well. CANTOR FITZGERALD couldn’t afford people’s salaries and then was able to hire people and give people opportunities.

CANTOR FITZGERALD ran a global charity day in New York and London. They invited high profile celebrities to come in and join staff on the trading floor for the day. The charity day revenue was raised through the trades placed that day and employees gave up their salaries for the day. Brokers are paid on commission, and [Mr. Simons] advised if CANTOR FITZGERALD was stealing the entire global revenues for the charity day, brokers couldn’t earn their commission, even if they did not participate in the charity day. Charity days raised $9-10 million each year, and [Mr. Simons] thought it was strange it raised nearly the same amount every year. Brokers were not given tax relief for the loss of revenue on charity days.

PIS handled all the funds raised in the United Kingdom on charity days and the associated wire transfers. [Mr. Simons] advised the day of the charity day trading would shift if the publicized day was not a successful trading day.

The allegations of charity fraud seem specific enough to warrant further investigation. Then there’s the dodgy real estate deal, which we’ve already covered:

LUTNICK was a neighbor of JEFFREY EPSTEIN (EPSTEIN) in the adjoining property at 11 E 71st Street, New York, New York. LUTNICK bought the property for $10 through a trust. LES WEXNER (WEXNER) and EPSTEIN owned the building. LUTNICK bought it in a very roundabout way from EPSTEIN.

We should note that, while it’s now common knowledge that Epstein and Lutnick were neighbors, that wasn’t the case five years ago, when this report was filed. The bit about Wexner’s apparent involvement, distant as it was, also seems to be right on the money.

[Mr. Simons] advised there was a relationship between LIQUID FUNDING and executives at BEAR STERNS. When BEAR STERNS collapsed, the executives moved to [REDACTED COMPANY] or they went to a Russian hedge fund.

This part is absolutely true; the “relationship” between the two was Jeffrey Epstein himself.

BGC INTERNATIONAL was involved in crime and money laundering. BEAR STERNS had hundreds of subsidiaries in 2018. BGC INTERNATIONAL was the parent company of many of these subsidiaries to include JP MORGAN CHASE and BLACKROCK. BGC PARTNERS made subsidiaries all over the world to include Delaware, Cyprus, and Malta. BGC INTERNATIONAL used many of the same intermediaries as INTER JURA, which was associated with PAUL MANAFORT. RENAISSANCE CAPITAL was another company they were associated with.

It tracks that JP Morgan Chase would have been involved in Epstein’s shady financial dealings; their Number Two, Jes Staley, was one of Epstein’s closest associates, and we already know about the $1 billion-plus in suspicious transactions the bank filed after Epstein’s death. (Renaissance Capital is owned by Robert Mercer, a prominent Trumpworld figure in 2016, but someone we haven’t heard boo from in quite some time.)

Mr. Simons “thought the money being laundered through CANTOR FITZGERALD and BGC INTERNATIONAL was from the Russian Mafia. That was what senior people in the trading market thought.”

The senior people, in my experience, are usually right.

It could also have been money made by CANTOR FITZGERALD through the frauds they were committing. AUBIN SECURITIES was associated with banned Russian entities.

Christopher Aubin was charged by the SEC last year of stealing money from his company’s investors.

LUTNICK gave SARAH FERGUSON (FERGUSON) office space above CANTOR FITZGERLAD [sic] in New York for the CHILDREN IN CRISIS (CIC) charity. GHISLAINE MAXWELL (MAXWELL) and FERGUSON would attend Dolce Vita Parties which raised money for CIC and STOW SCHOOL. CIC no longer existed.

Sarah Ferguson, of course, is the former wife of the former Prince Andrew.

There’s a lot there to unpack. None of it strikes me as implausible. And it is unclear if the FBI followed up with any of this.

» SPAC-man

In December 2024, Cantor paid a $6.75 million civil penalty to settle charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission that the firm caused “two special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) that it controlled to make misleading statements to investors ahead of their initial public offerings (IPOs).” SPACs seem to be the prevailing vehicle of choice for sneaky wealth managers to move money around. Epstein was certainly aware of them. I regard any mention of SPACs with suspicion.

Perhaps the proximity between the announcement of Lutnick’s Cabinet selection (November 14, 2024) and of his company’s SEC’s charges and settlement (December 12, 2014) might provide clues to some questions that, in my mind, remain unanswered:

Why did Trump choose Lutnick? And: why would Lutnick, a 64-year-old billionaire CEO of a major financial firm, even want to be Commerce Secretary? Doesn’t that seem like a demotion? Like, how many Secretaries of Commerce can you name? Why is he here at all?

Or, as Meryl Gordon wondered back in December 2001: Who is Howard Lutnick and what is his greater purpose?

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V. The Conspiracy Theories

There’s a lot of disinformation circulating on social media about Howard Lutnick. I’d like to address some of that now, to debunk certain sticky conspiracy theories that, ultimately, only serve to obfuscate the truth.

» Dumb Luck

I have been unable to confirm that the first day of kindergarten at Horace Mann in 2001 was September 11th, as Lutnick claims. Sometimes kindergarten starts later than the other grades, to ease the little ones into the routine; that may have been the case here. Also, even if the official start date was earlier, September 11th may have been Lutnick’s son’s first day of “big boy school.” Furthermore, Lutnick announced to the world why he was late on Connie Chung; if he were lying about that, one of the disgruntled Cantor widows would likely have called him out by now.

Edie Lutnick, Howard’s older sister, is an attorney who in 2001 maintained an office on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center. She, like Howard, was not yet in the office when the attacks happened, because her first client that morning rescheduled the appointment. This seems fishy at first blush. But remember, it was at 8:46 am when the first plane hit; a lot of people all across the city were not yet in their offices at a quarter to nine, myself included. If the attacks happened half an hour later, exponentially more people would have been killed. Nothing about Edie’s activities and behavior since 9/11 suggests anything suspicious; quite the contrary.

» Put Options

A number of “put options” were placed on United Airlines and American Airlines stock in the weeks leading up to September 11, 2001. The final 9/11 Committee Report addresses this in footnote #130:

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options— investments that pay off only when a stock drops in price—surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10—highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation. The SEC and the FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, working with the FBI and other government agencies, conducted what we’re told was a thorough investigation on the matter, tracking down and interviewing the individuals who made the big trades. This is from the SECs supplemental report:

With respect to options trading, Table 1 sets forth the volume of contracts traded in UAL and AMR during the period August 20, 2001 through September 10, 2001.

An investment adviser registered with the Commission and based in the United States purchased 2,000 UAL October 30 put options on September 6. That trade constituted 96 percent of UAL put option volume for the day.

We interviewed both the CEO of the adviser and the trader who executed the transaction. [Note: the FBI also interviewed these two.] We also reviewed account statements for the adviser. Both the CEO and the trader stated that they manage several hedge funds and have a total of $5.3 billion under management. Both also stated that they make the investment decisions for the accounts they advise (and that they do not accept client recommendations. They said the 2,000 contract purchase was part of a series of transactions they had effected in airline related securities. They were bearish on the airline industry due to several factors, including recently released on-time departure figures, which suggested planes were not carrying as many passengers, and recently disclosed news by AMR reflecting poor fundamentals.

As part of its strategy, the adviser sold short 1,800 shares of AMR, 8,700 shares of Continental Airlines, and 18,500 shares of Delta Airlines on September 6. The adviser sold short an additional 3,800 shares of Delta on September 7 and 10, and 500 shares of Northwest Airlines on September 10. On September 10, it purchased 115,000 shares of AMR, believing the price reflected recently released financial information and sold short 117,000 shares of UAL.

The SEC report identifies the Goldman Sachs employee—the “influential airline industry analyst [who] lowered his earnings estimates for several major airlines” five days before the attacks—as one Glenn Engel, but does not disclose the names of the “CEO of the adviser and the trader” who purchased the put options. That’s a little bit sus, for sure, but it might just be that Engel gave the SEC permission to be named and the others did not.

In any case, the CEO is not Howard Lutnick. Cantor Fitzgerald did not “manage several hedge funds” or “have a total of $5.3 billion under management” in 2001; although it has since expanded its suite of services, at that time the firm dealt primarily in government securities. If there’s compelling evidence that Lutnick purchased put options on the two airlines, I have yet to see it.

Tellingly, Mr. Simons, the whistleblower, accused Lutnick of all manner of financial misdeeds—but says nothing about pre-9/11 put options. That the “put options” narrative is being amplified by RT, the Russian state news service, is further indication that there is no there there.

» Tariff Windfall

Contrary to popular—and my own—belief, Cantor Fitzgerald is not poised to make bank from the Supreme Court’s ruling torpedoing Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs. Semafore’s Liz Hoffman explains the confusion:

Wired reported in July that Cantor was among the Wall Street firms pitching a financial product tied to the outcome of the Supreme Court case. It cited an email sent by a Cantor salesman that said the firm had “already put a trade through representing about ~$10 million” of tariff-refund rights “and anticipate[s] that number will balloon in the coming weeks.” Two Democratic senators called for an investigation and the CEO of one of the country’s largest import-logistics firms amplified the story….

Cantor did consider the product—which has existed for years and was a humming trade on Wall Street during Trump’s first-term tariff push—but decided against it after weighing the political sensitivities, according to a senior banker familiar with the matter.

A Cantor spokesman said the salesman “erroneously” believed that the firm was likely to greenlight the business, then went out looking for the other side of the trade. “Cantor Fitzgerald has never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs,” he said. “Any report suggesting otherwise is completely false.”

This doesn’t mean the firm now run by Lutnick’s sons hasn’t profited bigly during the Trump Redux. Indeed, in 2025, Cantor Fitzgerald generated over a billion dollars in revenue—its best year ever. This isn’t just dumb luck; as Hoffman writes,

Cantor has clearly benefitted from its ties to Lutnick, becoming a big underwriter of deals aligned with the administration’s crypto, AI, energy, and national security agenda. As the lead banker to, and investor in, stablecoin company Tether, it holds billions of dollars of Treasury bonds, which has brought criticism from Bill Ackman and others about a conflict of interest. (Trump’s pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates would make existing bonds more valuable.)

And maybe I’ve answered my own question about why Lutnick wanted the job.

To paraphrase Mel Brooks: It’s good to be the Commerce Secretary.

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VI. The Silence of the…

Who is Howard Lutnick and what is his greater purpose?

Twenty-five years later, we still can’t answer that question. We still don’t know what to believe about the guy—what’s real and what he’s pulled out of his ass.

When Lutnick appeared with Connie Chung two days after 9/11, I took everything he said at face value. We were all so traumatized, and he seemed so sincere. But now? After watching him lie so effortlessly for a solid year? On behalf of a treasonous Nazi rapist who is clearly evil and working for our adversaries? A billionaire who shamelessly lied about bringing not only his children, but his friends’ children, to a notorious pedophile’s rape island?

You’ll excuse me, but I now doubt every word that’s ever come out of Howard Lutnick’s mouth. For all we know, that interview was the pièce de résistance of a world champion deceiver. That’s how far my faith in him has fallen. I no longer give Lutnick the benefit of the doubt about anything.

True, you’d have to be a serial-killer-level psychopath to lie, under those circumstances, on national TV, about that. But knowing what we know now…are we sure he’s not?

In this little snippet from Lutnick’s Connie Chung performance, which made me cry at the time…

I wouldn’t go to any hospital or get anybody to go to any hospital and say, “Find Gary Lutnick for me.” Because I go with an employee list. I say, “Here’s my list of everybody I got. Find somebody on this list. I don’t care who they are.” If we find someone on this list, and then I get to call them, and I get to give somebody else some hope. Some dream. Maybe—maybe they get to kiss their kids. It’s… I’d love to find my brother. But I’d love to find their brother or their wife or their husband or anything. Anything.

…he’s basically saying, “If I could find just one, if just one was still alive, I’d have some closure, and know I’d done something good.”

That framing sounds familiar—because it echoes lines delivered by another “H.L.” whom Donald Trump greatly admires:

You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs. And you think if you save poor Catherine, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the lambs.

You know which Trump idol said that?

The “late, great” Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal Lecter, as everyone but Donald Trump knows, is a fictional character. How much of Howard Lutnick is also a fiction?

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Photo credit: Official portrait.

Dear Reader,

A Prince, brother to the King, awakens on a festive day that promises much revelry, only to find policemen at his door, whisking him away to jail (or gaol, I suppose, because this happened in England). The arrest blindsides the Prince. He’s a grown man, after all, not some ambitious up-and-comer who’s a legitimate rival for the throne. And he simply cannot fathom how the King would permit this to happen.

I speak, of course, of Clarence, the kindly and naïve brother of Edward IV, whose undeserved arrest is merely the first phase in the fiendish plan by another of the King’s brothers, the deformed and diabolical Duke of Gloucester, Richard, to take the crown for himself. After the eponymous royal’s opening monologue, in fact, the first character to speak in Shakespeare’s Richard III is Clarence:

RICHARD
Brother, good day. What means this armèd guard
That waits upon your Grace?

CLARENCE
His Majesty,
Tend’ring my person’s safety, hath appointed
This conduct to convey me to the Tower.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is no Clarence, any more than Charles III is Richard III. Nor is he being held in the Tower of London (unfortunately). But Shakespeare could just as easily have been writing about the former Prince Andrew (the quondam Duke of York, born in 1960) as King Edward IV (of the House of York, born five hundred years earlier) when he penned the opening lines of the play—a victory speech given by Richard:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York,
And all the clouds that loured upon our House
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Because here today in the United States, it really is the winter—literally and figuratively; our discontent is loud enough to be heard across the ocean; and the fall of our current “son of York,” Jeffrey Epstein’s buddy and Virginia Guiffre’s abuser, was glorious indeed, bringing a ray of sunshine to an otherwise bleak and dismal February day. There are plenty of clouds still louring upon our (White) House, to be sure. Nevertheless, I will take the “W.”

It is satisfying, is it not, to picture the scene: constables at the door of his well-appointed manse, Andrew sneering at the Thames Valley Police before slowly realizing he has no choice but to accompany them. He’s huffing and puffing, yowling and berating: indignant, insolent, making the officers wait as he barks instructions at some or other much-abused servant. And then the head officer says…

I beseech your Graces both to pardon me.
His Majesty hath straitly given in charge
That no man shall have private conference,
Of what degree soever, with your brother.

…just like in the play. Certainly Mountbatten-Windsor might have responded as Richard does: “We speak no treason, man.”

That Andrew was arrested on February 19th, his birthday, is a particularly Shakespearean touch.

Like all of Shakespeare’s history plays, Richard III is based on real events. On April 1, 1483—Easter Sunday—King Edward IV fell deathly ill. Of what infirmity, we still don’t know. Poison, perhaps from the Lancastrians, his rivals in the Wars of the Roses, is one theory, widely believed at the time. Syphilis and apoplexy are other candidates. Whatever the cause, he died eight days later, aged 40.

That extra week of life enabled the King to add codicils to his will. The most consequential was the clause naming his younger brother, Richard, Lord Protector of his two sons: 12-year-old Edward, the soon-to-be King; and Prince Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, who was nine.

Upon his brother’s death, the Lord Protector secreted his young nephews to the Tower of London—then more of a palace than a prison—to await young Edward’s coronation, scheduled for June 25, 1483.

That was the last anyone saw of the two brothers.

On Sunday, June 22, a corrupt theologian, Dr. Ralph Shaa, gave a fiery sermon in which he revealed that, due to a (completely bogus) charge of bigamy, the late Edward and his wife, Queen Elizabeth (not that one), were never legally married. This meant that young Edward and Richard were illegitimate, and thus ineligible to take the throne.

As a pre-teen not yet formally crowned, the new King had little opportunity to push back against the libel. A spineless Parliament—full of the Chuck Schumers and Mitch McConnells of the Middle Ages—passed the Titulus Regius soon after, legally declaring the dead King’s sons ineligible, and naming the Lord Protector the new sovereign. Gloucester took the throne as Richard III.

No one knows what happened to the “Princes in the Tower.” It is almost certain that they were murdered, a theory supported by the discovery, many years later, of two small skeletons found buried beneath a staircase leading to the White Tower—although there were persistent rumors that the brothers somehow managed to escape, and were living in a sort of 15th-century witness protection in France. The mystery was, and still is, perfect fodder for historical fiction.

To us, in 2026, this is all ancient history. For Shakespeare, it was much more recent. Just 11 decades separate the disappearance of the Princes and the penning of the play; it would be like me writing about the end of the First World War. The bones, meanwhile, were not unearthed until 1674—almost 70 years after the Bard’s death.

Not that he required more evidence. Shakespeare was already convinced that Richard had had his nephews murdered. His play would do much to perpetuate that conspiracy theory, which was never definitively proven.

But it is Richard III, and not Richard III, with which we are concerned today.

Richard III contains my single favorite line of iambic pentameter in all of Shakespeare. At the end of the play, on the field of battle, the King has been thrown from his steed—a fall both literal and figurative. Understanding that the end is near, Richard cries: “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

One imagines Jeffrey Epstein expressing similar sentiments, as his life was strangled out of him. And I cling to the hope that, sooner rather than later, the gaggle of nihilistic amoral oligarchs now running the world will be similarly thrown from their proverbial saddles. Oh how I yearn for Elon Musk, for Peter Thiel, for Jared Kushner, for Donald Trump, to have their “My kingdom for a horse!” moments!

I’ve never been good with identifying the various subsets of irony (dramatic, verbal, situational, cosmic, and Socratic, Google informs me, as well as whatever Alanis Morissette uses in that ridiculous song). I can’t tell you which of these ironies we’re looking at here, but man. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think? Shakespeare manages to distill the irreconcilable conflict between wealth/power and mortality into nine words—or, rather, five words, with three of the five occurring thrice: A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

A few weeks ago I re-watched the Ian McKellen Richard III film, which transposes the 1480s action to the 1930s, imagining Richard as more of a fascist dictator than a British monarch, right down to the Nazi-inspired boar insignia on his flag.1 It’s a wonderfully creative take on a 400-year-old script—and more timely now, alas, than when it was released in 1995. The film also manages to cook down one of Shakespeare’s longest plays to a brisk 104 minutes, making it easy to both follow the plot and differentiate between this or that bewiggèd member of the aristocracy.

During the first few acts, we sympathize with Richard. He is deformed, after all, his left arm useless. He is no ladies’ man—although he later demonstrates a smooth facility with seductive words—and has not yet taken a wife. His brothers seem genuinely to like and trust him. But to what end? He is an afterthought, incapable of enjoying himself, now that the soldiering is done. Wine, women, and song have no appeal to him. So he sets in motion a plan—as he explicitly tells us in Act One, Scene One—of seizing the throne:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determinèd to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate, the one against the other…

Richard’s machinations are often described as “Machiavellian.” But I think “Stalinesque” is a better descriptor. As Shakespeare presents him, the man is a medieval serial killer. He eliminates anyone in his path—brothers, brothers-in-law, nephews, other dukes and earls—without a second thought. Usurpation is usually a bloodbath, true. But usurpers are also generally outsiders. Richard remorselessly kills his own kinsmen, innocents all. And for what? To unhappily wear the crown and inspire the full-throated loathing of his people.

With his hold on power tenuous, the new King becomes increasingly paranoid, more and more desperate to maintain his hold on power. He kills Clarence, his older brother; the death of Clarence brings on the malady that claims Edward IV. He kills Rivers, his brother-in-law. He kills noblemen and bishops. He kills his wife, Anne—whose husband he’d killed during the last war—with the aim of marrying his brother’s daughter, Elizabeth, and thus securing the throne:

Murder her brothers, and then marry her—
Uncertain way of gain. But I am in
So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.
Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.

He is helped in his bloody plot by the loyal Lord Buckingham. But even the cold-hearted Buckingham draws the line when Richard demands the death of his nephews—the “Princes in the Tower.”

The King loses his shit, raging at Buckingham, and then finds a hit man, Tyrrel, willing to do the deed:

Why then, thou hast it. Two deep enemies,
Foes to my rest, and my sweet sleep’s disturbers,
Are they that I would have thee deal upon.
Tyrrel, I mean those bastards in the Tower.

The murder of the Princes—both of them children, not yet teenagers—is a turning point in the play. Shakespeare recognized that, while his audience would happily watch a few debauched royals meet their Maker, they, like Buckingham, would not stand for the slaughter of innocent children. Buckingham refusing to go along with that part of the plan is all of us condemning the King. (And yes, Buckingham, too, winds up getting killed.)

But just in case we missed the point, Shakespeare has Richard’s own mother, the Duchess of York, denounce her son, in no uncertain terms:

DUCHESS
Art thou so hasty? I have stayed for thee,
God knows, in torment and in agony.

RICHARD
And came I not at last to comfort you?

DUCHESS
No, by the Holy Rood, thou know’st it well.
Thou cam’st on Earth to make the Earth my hell.
A grievous burden was thy birth to me;
Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;
Thy school days frightful, desp’rate, wild, and furious;
Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous;
Thy age confirmed, proud, subtle, sly, and bloody,
More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred.
What comfortable hour canst thou name,
That ever graced me with thy company?

Then, the icing on the cake:

My prayers on the adverse party fight,
And there the little souls of Edward’s children
Whisper the spirits of thine enemies
And promise them success and victory.
Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end.
Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend.

Richard waves off his mother’s curses. He is dead-set on consolidating his power, as he tells us:

The son of Clarence have I pent up close,
His daughter meanly have I matched in marriage,
The sons of Edward sleep in Abraham’s bosom,
And Anne my wife hath bid this world goodnight.
Now, for I know the Breton Richmond aims
At young Elizabeth, my brother’s daughter,
And by that knot looks proudly on the crown,
To her go I, a jolly thriving wooer.

The Breton—that is, the native of Little (as opposed to Great) Britain, or Brittany, in France—called Richmond is Richard’s rival, a legitimate claimant to the throne who has overthrow on his mind. And while there are many words we can use to describe the King at this moment, jolly and thriving are not among them; if Richard really thinks himself either of these things, he has clearly lost his marbles.

Richmond advances; the armies will soon enjoin in battle. Richard is confident that his side will prevail:

Go, muster men. My counsel is my shield.
We must be brief when traitors brave the field.

The night before the climactic clash, Richard has a terrible nightmare. The ghosts of all the many humans he has killed—and we are reminded here of just how long that list is—appear before him, cursing him in the same way: Despair and die! Let thy soul despair!

The King wakes up in a cold sweat, his heart pounding in his chest, alone, afraid—and feeling, perhaps, despite himself, the pangs of conscience:

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue; it is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no. Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie; I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree;
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all “Guilty, guilty!”
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die no soul will pity me.
And wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?

One can imagine Donald Trump muttering these words to himself after the ghost of Epstein haunts his sleep—except that unlike a Shakespearean protagonist, Trump has no soul, no conscience, and no ability for introspection.

But what of us? We have seen Trump at first hand harming children—whether kicking his disabled nephew off the family’s health insurance (a move Richard III would have admired for its creative savagery), or sanctioning a secret state police that kidnaps children and transports them far away from home, or cutting aid to impoverished nations and condemning their children to death by starvation, or giving succor to the butchers in Moscow and Tel Aviv who brutalize the children of Ukraine and Gaza—or, as alleged many times in the Epstein Files, personally raping and killing children just as young and just as innocent as the Princes in the Tower.

Collectively, we have waited too long to take action—we must be brief when traitors brave the field—but there’s nothing to be done about that now. But it’s not too late.

As the political leader who stood by Richard thick and thin, Lord Buckingham represents the GOP House and Senate. Will the Republicans (who these days are all, ironically given the party’s name, monarchists) draw the line at the horrific abuse of children, as Buckingham did? If not that, what would it take for them to repudiate their grotesque and evil king? Will they ever come back to the light?

Richard is determined to win or die trying. Once awake, he dismisses the nocturnal message his subconscious delivered unto him:

Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls.
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
March on. Join bravely. Let us to it pell mell,
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.

The President is almost 80 and has been consumed, of late, with his own mortality. He keeps openly wondering if he will get into heaven—as if heaven is some sort of celestial Mar-a-Lago, a Cloud 9 Board of Peace, where writing a check of the right size can secure admission. But if a Day of Judgment comes for Donald Trump, his money won’t save him. No amount of kingly horse-trading will atone for his grievous and abominable sins. Only hell awaits him.

One day, Dear Reader, this regime will fall. One day, the country will be past this. One hundred and ten years from now, perhaps, some genius playwright will produce a play about our current strife. Five hundred years from now, if Trump is remembered at all, it will be as a colossal failure, a corpulent and stupid man, a vassal of the Kremlin, who hastened the fall of the American Empire.

And today? If we can take solace in anything stateside on this discontented winter morning, it’s that King Donald I, like King Richard III, was made miserable by his attainment of the summit. There is no creature loves him, and when he dies no soul will pity him. He will be replaced, it’s true, by JD Vance—no Breton Richmond (who succeeded Richard III as Henry VII, and founded the House of Tudor). No creature loves Vance, either—with the possible exception of the Widow Kirk, who strikes me as profoundly mentally ill.

By now, Trump must know how most of the world feels about him. Why else would he choose not to go to Milan for the big hockey game, as he’d originally planned? He must hear the boos. He must feel the loathing and the disgust, the shame and the humiliation. Shame serves his life and shall his death attend. The striking down of the tariffs this week, among other things, was a thunderous blow to his ego that may, with any luck, prove fatal.

Despair and die! Let his soul despair!

Despair, from the Latin dēspērāre, meaning “to give up all hope.” Dante, who died 300 years before Shakespeare, writes similar words above the entrance to hell: Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Despair and die! Let his soul despair!

When Trump breathes his last, there will be some who go easy on him, as we tend to do with the recently deceased. Obituary writers will temper his myriad faults with his positive attributes—if they can find any. Certainly there will be morality police on social media tsk-tsking anyone who dares to celebrate the death of another human being, however wretched, however depraved, however monstrous.

Despair and die! Let his soul despair!

I will not be among the temperers. When it comes to Trump, tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was the Columbia professor Bruce Robbins, author of Who’s Allowed to Protest?

Photo credit: Still shot from Richard III (1995).

And here is a transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning, it’s 6.30 in the morning on Friday, February 20th.

We are heading into, next week, the State of the Union address that Trump will deliver. And let me just preempt that by explaining what the State of the Union is. The State of the Union is that the president rapes children. That’s the State of the Union.

We all know this. Everybody knows it. The truth is starting to very slowly come out. And so many things have happened in the last couple of weeks on the Epstein files front. So many different revelations that I feel like—you know in the cartoons, where there’s the dishes are falling off the the hutch and the guy is trying to catch all the dishes and eventually the dishes catch up to him and he collapses on the floor? Well, Trump is probably not the most nimble catcher of plates anyway, and he’s got really small hands. So…

What’s happening now is, lots of different openings on the front in the Epstein-Files war, right? And I talked about this a little bit on the show, The Five 8 1/2, which I did with Lisa Graves and Nadine Smith on Wednesday.

But I want to just hammer it home again, because there’s a lot of different things going on. First of all, the revelation that—I think it was Jamie Raskin who said that Trump’s name is mentioned over a million times in the Epstein-Files. That’s a number that people kind of just brush off. “Yeah, a million times, okay, whatever, Trump is a millionaire, whatever.”

A million is a lot, as I discussed in my little short video from yesterday; it’s basically like four very long novels put together, if every single word in all of those novels were replaced by the words “Donald Trump.” It’s a lot of mentions, it’s a lot of mentions. So the idea that this guy is somehow not involved is just—it’s just clearly not true. Objectively, it’s just clearly not true.

We have Ted Lieu, representative Ted Lieu, basically saying the words out loud. The president alleged to have raped children in the files. There’s allegedly videos of the president raping children. That’s what we have here. We have a president who raped children—and who helped his good buddy, Jeffrey Epstein, traffic the children from Mar-a-Lago, which we already know that’s true. We already know that’s true.

I’ve been saying this for months, that the best possible thing that we can say about Trump is that for a decade and a half, he was best friends with not one, but two of the most notorious child sex traffickers of all time, and helped them, and allowed them to use his Mar-a-Lago club to source and traffic the girls that they raped. That’s the best thing we can say about Trump. And now it appears that it was actually, as we all have been saying all along, a lot worse than that. So there’s that.

Gloves are off for Howard Lutnick. I’m gonna write about that on Tuesday. I’ve got two long pieces that are like three quarters of the way done. So I think the Lutnick one will be ready for Tuesday. So be on the lookout for that.

Amber Woods, who’s been doing excellent work on Substack for many months now, is plugged in with the survivors, has a lot of good sources, has been talking about Great St. James, which is the other island that Jeffrey Epstein owned near Little St. James, which is actually bigger, hence great as opposed to little. Now she’s revealing there’s all kinds of data centers there and fiber optic table and all kinds of weird shit going on there, technically. What does it all mean? Who knows?

in New Mexico, they’re gonna now go search the Zorro Ranch. It’s a bipartisan state effort—these lawmakers have come together and said, “No, we gotta get to the bottom of this.” What’s going on on Zorro Ranch? There’s now many allegations about bodies being buried there—literally bodies being buried there. We really have to get to the bottom of this and find out what’s happening.

And it doesn’t speak to the guiltlessness of the Zorro Ranch activities when the couple, Brice and Karen Gordon, who were for years in charge of maintaining the property, just vanished, went to ground. They’re from New Zealand. I don’t know if they’re back in New Zealand or what, but it’s not good when the people who are supposed to be there just suddenly vanish. That’s probably a clue that maybe bad things have been happening on the property.

And then, you know, we wake up yesterday, after the Wednesday show, and Prince Andrew, on his 66th birthday, is arrested. The brother of the King of England is arrested. Now, from a historical standpoint, the King having his brother the Prince put into the Tower of London is not actually that unusual. But it hasn’t happened apparently in 400 years, I think I was reading. So this is a major, major seismic event potentially.

And Andrew is also accused of spying—not just the Epstein rape stuff. He’s accused of spying—i.e., giving information to Epstein that Epstein shouldn’t have had. Which also Kathyn Ruemmler apparently—she’s the woman who was the attorney at Goldman Sachs and before that worked in the Obama White House as I believe chief counsel. She also apparently was giving Epstein intelligence that Epstein shouldn’t have had—so, spying allegations.

The contours of the network are starting to be more and more distinct. Easy to see. Now Trump is... I mean, does he really think that going to war with Iran is going to make this go away? Like, that’s going to prove that there’s nothing in the files? You’re going to go to war with Iran to prevent the country from releasing tapes of you raping children—you think that’s gonna convince people that you’re not guilty? I mean, it’s just ridiculous.

One more point I want to make. I made this point on the Wednesday show, but I kind of blurted it out on Wednesday, so I wanna say it again here: I want to reclaim the term conspiracy theory.

Because what was going on with Epstein and his buddies—with Trump and all these other people—was absolutely a conspiracy. I think that’s pretty clear now. We see this secretive cabal of super rich pervert weirdos who were in some way really controlling world events—which is the underlying premise of all quote-unquote conspiracy theories.

But there clearly was a conspiracy going on with Jeffrey Epstein. It involved Jeffrey Epstein. It involved Donald Trump. It involved Prince Andrew. It involved Ehud Barak. It involved the Kremlin. It involved other intelligence agencies, the Saudis. It involved MBS. It involved that guy from Norway, Jagland. It involved Steve Bannon. It involved Peter Thiel. It involved Ian Osborne. It involved Howard Lutnick. It involved a lot of people. Larry Summers, Harvard University, Alan Dershowitz. So many people were involved in this. It was a conspiracy.

And we don’t know what exactly the conspiracy was doing and how exactly it was organized. There’s lots of details that remain unknown. So what we’re doing is, we are creating theories about the conspiracy, i.e., conspiracy theories.

That’s what we’re doing. And if you’re not engaging in conspiracy theory right now, you know, involving the Epstein files, then you’re not paying attention. So I want to reclaim the term conspiracy theory and I want to call what they’re doing as what it is, which is Trump fan fiction. That’s all that it is. When Scott Bessent goes on the shows and talks about how great the economy is or, you know, somebody like Pam Bondi saying, “Trump never did anything wrong.” That’s not even a conspiracy theory. It’s a fucking lie.

And it’s fan fiction—the fan fiction that Trump, who in this fantasy is dressed like Rambo, and he’s going in there to, you know, uncover the child sex trafficking ring and bring Epstein to justice. That’s not true. That’s bullshit. It’s fan fiction. It’s Trump fan fiction.

And I can think of nothing more pathetic than engaging in Trump fan fiction, which is what the GOP now has been reduced to. So I want to reclaim the words conspiracy theory. I want to encourage everybody to engage in conspiracy theory with regards Epstein, because unless we’re trying to figure this out, nobody’s going to figure it out. Certainly the media is not going to figure it out. Are they? I mean, I don’t know. We have to figure it out. And we’re doing a good job of figuring out. There’s a lot of really good independent researchers out there, and citizens journalists, trying to get to the bottom of this and really killing it.

And that’s what’s happening right now. The entire nation is a nation of conspiracy theories and theorists. And that’s the way it should be right now—because this was a conspiracy, a conspiracy so vast and so terrifying that the President of the United States, comma, a serial rapist of children, comma, is threatening to go to war with Iran to prevent the disclosure of his crimes.

This is horrifying, but it also speaks to how far along we are and how close we may be to the truth fully coming out. And I don’t wanna say, “Oh, Trump’s losing,” or anything like that, because I made that mistake in 2018 and 2019. I’m not gonna make that mistake again. But none of this is good for Trump.

And we’ll see what the Democrats do on Tuesday with the State of the Union, if they can come up with something more clever than holding up a sign. Maybe they should just text everybody to give them five bucks during the State of the Union?

No, what we should do is what Cheri Jacobus has been saying all along to do. They should do a simultaneous, you know, counter-programming of the State of the Union— like the Kid Rock did for the Bad Bunny show—and just talk about the Epstein files. That’s it.

And I don’t even know if anybody should be in the room, but if they are in the room, as soon as Trump starts talking, everybody should get up en masse, turn around, and leave. Show him their backs, like Pam Bondi showed the survivors her back. Because that’s all that this serial rapist of children and liar and thief and mobster and Kremlin asset deserves.

And with that, I leave you. Have an excellent weekend. Until next time, we shall prevail.

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TONIGHT at 8pm ET

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Replace every word in Anna Karenina, The Decameron, Ulysses, and Moby-Dick with the words “Donald Trump,” and you have some idea of what being mentioned over a million times looks like.

Thanks to Josh Walkos for the tip, and h/t LB for alerting me to it.

Coupla things:

• The DOJ videos are redacted. The faces and bodies of all of the innocents, whether minors or adults, are covered by big black rectangles.

• Even with the redactions, I found some videos that disturbed me because of their extreme creepiness, and what they implied: a young teenage girl in a bikini, practicing strutting like a model; an even younger girl playing with a puppy; someone brandishing a flogger (which you can barely make out because of the black square); Epstein sitting at a desk while a gaggle of teenage girls gather in front of him; way too many teddy bears. I am not sharing any of those clips here.

• There are a lot of surveillance videos of MCC, the NYC prison where Epstein died, some of them hours long.

• Most of the videos are shot in locations I did not recognize.

• When I can hear the (adult) women talk, they speak in heavily-accented English. One video has two Russians, a man and a woman, thanking “Jeffrey” profusely.

I hesitated making, and posting, this video, but I decided that, as the Epstein material will come out eventually, the potential news value outweighs my reluctance to be a voyeur. Someone might notice something here that is important. And as I said up top, there’s nothing here they wouldn’t show on the evening news.

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Here is a transcript, edited for clarity:

Yesterday I was sent a video clip from a tech guy who figured out a bypass for some of the Epstein files.

So I’m sitting on the couch, actually I’m watching the basketball game, and I type one of these things in and the first thing that comes up is, boom, this grainy black-and-white video. And it’s obviously surveillance footage, from a room where the people in the room don’t know that the cameras are going. And I thought, “My God, this is probably what he’s been filming all this time.” He had people come and wire up all of his properties years and years ago. And they probably had this, you know, kind of low grade, low res, black and white surveillance style footage. Makes it very hard to see anybody or anything, at least what they showed us in these files.

So I started to collect some of the videos. And none of them, I should say upfront, are horrifying or violent or anything like that. They’re not, I hope, triggering. Otherwise, I wouldn’t show them. But I think taken together, maybe they’re worth something and have some news value. So I just wanted to show you a glimpse of what I saw so that you know what’s in there.

There’s also, I found just random stuff. Like, there’s men in the videos that I don’t know who they are or what they’re doing or what their purpose is or how they are connected. And probably just some of the videos are not even relevant. I know there were at least a couple that I saw that had porn URLs stamped on them, which are just things that he probably downloaded that he liked, and don’t have any meaning other than that.

There were a lot of videos of real estate, where people were going through these kind of nice apartments, clearly in New York City. And I wonder if they’re the apartments that Mark Epstein owns, at least in name, where some of the trafficked women lived. But I don’t know. It might just be—I have no idea what—what it means or what it is.

Most of the videos are redacted. I should say also, anybody that’s a minor in these videos, they have a black rectangle over them and you can’t see anything, which is good. So you’re not going to go in there and just be bombarded with images that you don’t want to see. And again, I wouldn’t share them otherwise.

So there seems to be a lot of videos of these girls kind of—some of them take the videos themselves, some are selfie videos; some of them, someone’s filming them, probably him, we assume—and it seems like he’s training them to be able to present themselves in the way that he wants. You know, how to walk and all that stuff. I don’t know. It’s really creepy, and I’m not gonna share any of them beyond just a few heavily-redacted ones so you get a sense of what’s there.

And every once in a while you can hear something, somebody say something. But mostly it’s just random images, random clips. Most of them are shorter than 10 seconds. And I don’t know who put them together. I don’t know what order they’re supposed to be in.

The other takeaway about this is how beyond frustrating it is that our federal government, the FBI, for years has known about this, for years went around collecting information. I don’t know when they took these files initially. I mean, it was a long time ago. He died in 2019. You know, he’s been gone a long time, and we’ve had six years now of doing this, and we still don’t have any investigation into the men. We don’t have any—any facts, really; any presentation of these files in a way that makes sense.

It’s just dribs and drabs. It’s being released a little bit at a time, piecemeal, but it’s not even like piecemeal like it’s a TV show. It’s as if there’s 8,000 different TV shows and they’ve spliced and diced them all into these little sections. And that’s what they show you, so that none of it makes sense.

And it’s just really frustrating to me, and sad. So many people are out there doing really good work, trying to uncover this stuff and figure out ways to see what we want to see and get to what we want to get to, which is the truth.

But we shouldn’t have to be doing this, man. It’s just not fair, you know? We pay the government to do stuff. We pay the FBI. We pay all the salaries. We pay the Department of Justice to investigate this stuff and to bring these people in. And to subject everybody over and over and over again to the unpleasantness and the trauma, the triggering—it’s really…it’s evil, is what it is.

I mean, if we had a functional justice system, we wouldn’t have to be doing this. These people would already be in jail. They would already be tried. We would know what they did without having to go through all the evidence ourselves. Not that we’re not going to continue to go through the evidence and make sense of it all, but it’s not fair.

And it pisses me off, on so many levels. It’s not fair to the survivors, who have to re-live their trauma every time that something comes out like this. Every time there’s a new trench of these files released, it’s a traumatic experience for these women. So it’s not fair to them, certainly.

It’s not fair to, you know, law abiding citizens. It’s not fair to all the citizen journalists who are out there trying to make sense of it all. And it’s not fair to justice. You know, it’s just not. These are evil men who did evil things, and they need to be punished. And I want them to be punished without having to participate in the explanation and the investigation. I think that’s not too much to ask.

Nadler during the Pam Bondi hearing said to her, “What’s going on with the investigation?” And that’s when she sort of lost her mind, because there is no investigation. Nothing’s happening. It’s just a waste of time. Blanche and Bondi and Patel are just kicking the can down the road. That’s what they’re there for.

And I don’t know what we’re going to find in these videos, but the things that I’ve seen released so far? There’s nothing here that’s incriminating or…anything, really. It’s just—it’s a lot of weird music in the background, and creepiness, but not anything actionable. Not anything we haven’t learned before or didn’t already know. Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of girls around, and he was really creepy towards them. We knew this already. I don’t need video evidence of it. I already believe it.

But it does make it seem more real when you see just how many of these videos there are, how many different people there are that were involved and just the length of time that it went on.

So I wasn’t sure—I’m still not sure if I’m even going to show this, but I feel like the newsworthiness of it outweighs the concern. You know, I’m like, I don’t know. I feel voyeuristic even looking at these videos.

But what am I gonna do? What else are we supposed to do? Like, it’s not my fault, or your fault, that we’re reduced to this. It’s the fault of the government for not doing their fucking jobs. And if they did their jobs, none of this would be necessary.

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Dear Reader,

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, as his reputation suggests, was indeed “one of history’s most reviled men,” as L.T. Woodward, M.D. writes in his introduction to the 1964 English-language edition of Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue. Sade was the most extreme of extremists, “branded a pervert, a pornographer, a corrupter of virtue, and a madman.”

And yet Sade was also indisputably a product of his time. Born in Paris in 1740, he bore witness to political, economic, and social changes—radical, abrupt, volatile, confusing—the likes of which had not, to that point, been experienced anywhere else in the world. The morality (or, rather, the lack thereof) that permeates his oeuvre, while odious and over-the-top, is fundamentally no different than what one finds in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, published in 1782 by his contemporary Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, or in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, written 80 years later but set during the French Revolution. It’s the same harsh world: The commoners are miserable, the men of wealth and power are monstrous, no one can be trusted, virtue is in short supply, and the hardships of daily life—of avoiding starvation, illness, criminality, sexual assault, debt, conscription, prison, and violent death—engender a brutal, dog-eat-dog mentality, where Madame Thénardier is the norm, and where, pace the Queen, one would count one’s blessings if one had cake to eat.

I wonder if Donatien Alphonse François would be so infamous, and so reviled, if he’d been the Marquis de Bagé-le-Châtel, or the Marquis de Dreux-Brézé, or the Marquis de Lusignan-en-Agenais, and not been bequeathed the monosyllabic, easy-to-pronounce, double-iamb name that the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his groundbreaking Psychopathia Sexualis (1888), appropriated and gave to the mental disorder characterized by sexual arousal from the infliction of pain on others. Bagé-le-châtelism, dreux-brézéism, and lusignan-en-agenaisism do not flow so readily off the tongue—in German, French, or English—as sadism.

Because the thing is, Sade’s novels are not very good. As Simone de Beauvoir put it, in her famous essay 1953 “Must We Burn Sade?”, “Even his admirers will readily admit that his work is, for the most part, unreadable; philosophically, it escapes banality only to founder in incoherence.”

No argument there. The 120 Days of Sodom, Sade’s first published novel, is exactly as the title suggests: four solid months of debauchery that gets duller and duller the longer it goes on. Justine—first published in 1791, two years before the beheading of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—is patently ridiculous. The title character, who goes by the name Thérèse for some reason, is orphaned and thrown out of her house at age 12. Insisting on keeping her virtue—i.e., on not prostituting herself—the poor girl stumbles from one unthinkably horrible situation to the next, suffering mental and sexual abuse at the hands of, among others, a gang of thieves, a wealthy businessman, a cloister of monks, and the judge who will decide if she should be put to death for crimes she did not commit, as well as any number of abusive women who betray her at the first whiff of danger. At the end of the novel, when Justine/Thérèse finally arrives at the relatively safe space that is the home of her estranged sister Juliette, she is struck dead by a bolt of lightning—as if even Sade has become tired of the whole enterprise.

When I read Justine 30-some-odd years ago, I was not shocked by, and did not recoil from, the novel. Most of it I found mid. My overall impression was that it was more preposterous than anything. “That would never happen,” was my assessment. It just seemed so excessive that it had to have been meant as a joke.

As pornography, Justine somehow manages to be simultaneously unnerving and boring. One gets the sense that Sade—a troll if ever there was one—was more interested in getting a rise out of his readers than exploring the dark side of eroticism. For every paragraph of “sadistic” activity, there are full chapters of philosophical, theological, and ethical debate. Because like ancien régime Peter Thiels, the men who are Justine/Thérèse’s abusers enjoy listening to themselves talk about Very Deep Subjects.

For example, here is Coeur-de-fer—the head of the pack of thieves, and probably the least horrible man she will encounter in her travels—pushing back on Justine’s appeal to Virtue, which she claims that even brigands yield to (boldface mine):

[O]ur criminal fraternities are not by any means sustained by Virtue; rather by self-interest, egoism, selfishness; this eulogy of Virtue, which you have fabricated out of a false hypothesis, miscarries; it is not at all owing to virtuousness that, believing myself, let us suppose, the strongest of the band, I do not use a dagger on my comrades in order to appropriate their shares, it is because, thereupon finding myself all alone, I would deprive myself of the means which assure me the fortune I expect to have with their help; similarly, this is the single motive which restrains them from lifting their arms against me.

Now this motive, as you, Thérèse, perfectly well observe, is purely selfish, and has not even the least appearance of virtue; he who wishes to struggle alone against society’s interests must, you say, expect to perish; will he not much more certainly perish if, to enable him to exist therein, he has nothing but his misery and is abandoned by others? What one terms the interest of society is simply the mass of individual interests unified, but it is never otherwise than by ceding that this private interest can accommodate and blend with the general interest; well, what would you have him cede who has nothing he can relinquish? And he who had much? Agree that he should see his error grow apace with the discovery that he was giving infinitely more than he was getting in return; and, such being the case, agree that the unfairness of the bargain should prevent him from concluding it. Trapped in this dilemma, the best thing remaining for this man, don’t you agree, is to quit this unjust society, to go elsewhere, and to accord prerogatives to a different society of men who, placed in a situation comparable to his, have their interest in combating, through the coordination of their lesser powers, the broader authority that wished to extract from the poor man what little he possessed in exchange for nothing at all.

But you will say, thence will be born a state of perpetual warfare. Excellent! Is that not the perpetual state of Nature? Is it not the only state to which we are really adapted? All men are born isolated, envious, cruel, and despotic; wishing to have everything and surrender nothing, incessantly struggling to maintain either their rights or achieve their ambition. The legislator comes up and says to them: Cease thus to fight; if each were to retreat a little, calm would be restored.

I find no fault with the position implicit in the agreement, but I maintain that two species of individuals cannot and ought not submit to it, ever; those who feel they are the stronger have no need to give up anything in order to be happy, and those who find themselves the weaker also find themselves giving up infinitely more than what is assured them. However, society is only composed of weak persons and strong; well, if the pact must perforce displease both weak and strong, there is great cause to suppose it will fail to suit society, and the previously existing state of warfare must appear infinitely preferable, since it permitted everyone the free exercise of his strength and his industry, whereof he would discover himself deprived by a society’s unjust pact which takes too much from the one and never accords enough to the other; hence, the truly intelligent person is he who, indifferent to the risk of renewing the state of war that reigned prior to the contract, lashes out in irrevocable violation of that contract, violates it as much and often as he is able, full certain that what he will gain from these ruptures will always be more important than what he will lose if he happens to be a member of the weaker class; for such he was when he respected the treaty; by breaking it he may become one of the stronger; and if the laws return him to the class whence he wished to emerge, the worst that can befall him is the loss of his life, which is a misfortune infinitely less great than that of existing in opprobrium and wretchedness. There are then two positions available to us: either crime, which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy. I ask whether there can be any hesitation, lovely Thérèse, and where will your little mind find an argument able to combat that one?

This is a bleak, coldblooded, sad take on human nature. But it is a take. Sade here is removing the veil from what he considers the falsities of polite society, and showing us how people really are, what they really think, what truly motivates them. Is he right? No. Because there are human beings who are not wired that way, who are virtuous, who do seek the common good. Jean Valjeans do exist. But he’s also not wrong. Nor is he afraid to say—to publish!—thoughts that most of us would never even admit to having.

That is what made him dangerous. The philosophy professor Alistair Welchman, in his Sade essay “Differential Practices,” writes:

If today some enjoy the luxury of finding a number of these polemics quaint blasts against something long-forgotten—who cares about the moral value of virginity any more?—it is nevertheless surprising how relatively few these cases are, and how quickly Sade moves on to attacking something that is still constitutive for us. There is little that is acceptable in Sade; he rails incessantly against every basis of sociophysical organization. To reject Sade is a condition of (social) survival. It is therefore no surprise at all that his works have been burned, that he was understood as an implacable enemy by ancien régime, revolutionary Republic, and Empire alike and incarcerated by all three, and that he was almost universally execrated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What is surprising—perhaps incomprehensible—is his rehabilitation in the twentieth.

I don’t know that Sade has been rehabilitated, exactly. But his books remain in print, continue to sell, are still being read. There is something there, certainly; some ugly truth that Sade, and Sade alone, does not flinch from looking dead in the eye.

As the Epstein files continue to trickle out, we see that the depravity of the ruling class—the same sort of men of power and wealth who populate Justine—is no less depraved for happening two centuries later, during the fall of the United States rather than the fall of France. Sade describes a dark, cruel world where such heartless men sate their odious and disgusting sexual desires in private, in the seclusion of their castles, their monasteries, their estates—the Zorro Ranches and Little St. Jameses of 18th century France. The only thing that’s different is the language.

This youngest one of the girls was scarcely ten: pretty but irregular features, a look of humiliation because of her fate, an air of sorrow and trepidation.

The second was fifteen: the same trouble written over her countenance, a quality of modesty degraded, but a bewitching face, of considerable interest all in all.

The third was twenty: pretty as a picture, the loveliest blond hair; fine, regular, gentle features; she appeared less restive, more broken to the saddle.

The fourth was thirty: she was one of the most beautiful women imaginable; candor, quality, decency in her bearing, and all a gentle spirit’s virtues.

The fifth was a girl of thirty-six, six months pregnant; dark-haired, very lively, with beautiful eyes, but having, so it seemed to me, lost all remorse, all decency, all restraint.

That’s a throwaway passage from Justine, which is mostly narrated by Justine/Thérèse. But it could just as easily have come from one of the released Epstein emails.

Similarly, this monologue, given by one of the monks who have imprisoned Justine/Thérèse, may as well have been written by Alan Dershowitz, or any of Epstein’s other attorney friends, arguing away his execrable acts:

Curiously enough, so long as it is merely a question of trifles, we are never in the least astonished by the differences existing among tastes; but let the subject take on an erotic tincture, and listen to the word spread about! Rumors fly, women, always thoughtful of guarding their rights—women whose feebleness and inconsequence make them especially prone to seeing enemies everywhere about— women, I say, are all constantly trembling and quivering lest something be snatched away from them and if, when taking one’s pleasure, one unfortunately puts practices to use which conflict with woman-worship, lo! There you have crimes which merit the noose.

….It should not, in my opinion, appear any more astonishing to see a man introduce singularity into his libertine pleasures than it should appear strange to see him employ the uncommon in any other of life’s activities. Once again, in either case, his singularity is the result of his organs: Is it his fault if what affects you is naught to him, or if he is only moved by what repels you? What living man would not instantly revise his tastes, his affections, his penchants and bring them into harmony with the general scheme; what man, rather than continue a freak, would not prefer to be like everyone else, were it in his power to do so?

It is the most barbarous and most stupid intolerance to wish to fly at such a man’s throat; he is no more guilty toward society, regardless of what may be his extravagances, than is, as I have just said, the person who came blind and lame into the world. And it would be quite as unjust to punish or deride the latter as to afflict or berate the other. The man endowed with uncommon tastes is sick; if you prefer, he is like a woman subject to hysterical vapors. Has the idea to punish such a person ever occurred to us? Let us be equally fair when dealing with the man whose caprices startle us; perfectly like unto the ill man or the woman suffering from vapors, he is deserving of sympathy and not of blame; that is the moral apology for the persons whom we are discussing; a physical explanation will without doubt be found as easily, and when the study of anatomy reaches perfection they will without any trouble be able to demonstrate the relationship of the human constitution to the tastes which it affects.

Ah, you pedants, hangmen, turnkeys, lawmakers, you shavepate rabble, what will you do when we have arrived there? What is to become of your laws, your ethics, your religion, your gallows, your Gods and your Heavens and your Hell when it shall be proven that such a flow of liquids, this variety of fibers, that degree of pungency in the blood or in the animal spirits are sufficient to make a man the object of your givings and your takings away? We continue. Cruel tastes astonish you.

As I read Nobody’s Girl, the Virginia Roberts Guiffre memoir, a few months ago, I immediately thought of Justine, and realized that my original assessment of the novel—“That would never happen!”—was naïve and wrong. Because it did happen. It happened in my lifetime, and in my country.

Guiffre is a modern-day Justine: an inherently virtuous and good person who found herself, by a series of cruel twists of fate, stumbling from unspeakable sexual and mental abuse at the hands of one abominable man to the next—a succession of frying-pan-to-the-fire horrors. And despite all of that, she never lost her essential goodness. Justine, a work of fiction, struck me as ridiculous; Nobody’s Girl, a memoir, is unfathomably sad.

Sade’s sexual tastes did tend toward what we now call BDSM. Even in an age when society underwent massive changes, when a lot of the old rules were thrown out the window, he took things too far. He was a hedonist and a wastrel. His father more or less wrote him off as a bad seed. He was constantly in debt, and when he had money, blew through it.

In 1763, at the age of 23, he married Renée-Pélagie Montreuil, the eldest daughter of a wealthy family. This was done to placate his father; he was not in love with Renée-Pélagie, and later carried on a torrid affair with her younger sister. After the nuptials was when, as L.T. Woodward, M.D. tells us, “his true career of perversion began:”

He began to visit houses of prostitution, hiring girls who would allow him to whip them…. One of these orgies evidently got out of hand, for it is recorded that on October 29, 1763, Sade was imprisoned for “great excesses” committed at a brothel— the first of a series of jailings that would ultimately force him to spend twenty years of his life behind bars…. He went to Paris…lived with an actress, and acquired a flamboyant reputation as a whipper and beater of women.

These excesses came to a head in 1768. On Easter Sunday of that year, the 28-year-old Sade lured an impoverished sex worker, Rose Keller, into his home, locked her up, and subjected her to the kind of abuse that his name would later come to signify. She escaped; she went to the police; Sade was arrested, charged, and imprisoned. This became a notorious scandal, but he was released after seven weeks in jail.

More despicable incidents followed, as Sade pushed the boundaries of acceptable behavior—even for debauched noblemen. As Simone de Beauvoir explains:

Sade fled to Italy, but [his mother-in-law] Madame de Montreuil, who had not forgiven him for having seduced her younger daughter, lay in wait for him. When he got back to France, he ventured into Paris, and she took advantage of the occasion to have him locked up on the 13th of February, 1777, in the château of Vincennes. He was brought to trial and sent back to Aix and took refuge at La Coste, where, under the resigned eye of his wife, he embarked on an idyl with his housekeeper, Mademoiselle Rousset. But by the 7th of November, he was back again at Vincennes, “locked up behind nineteen iron doors, like a wild beast.”

Behind iron doors he would remain. Sade was imprisoned at the Bastille until just a few days before it was stormed, when he fortuitously managed to be transferred—although his belongings there were looted, and some of his writings lost.

But for all of that ugliness, Sade was not the cold monster of the type we read about in the Epstein files. In the Republican era, he turned down a “a governor’s post in the provinces, a post that would have enabled him to torture and kill to his heart’s content,” Beauvoir tells us. But it was during his brief stint as a Grand Juror that he showed himself to possess a quality not associated with him: compassion.

With the chance to legally exact revenge on the family of his mother-in-law, whom most men would have blamed for his being imprisoned as long as he was, Sade did nothing of the sort. He acquitted them all. Beauvoir writes:

Does anyone suppose that he “liked blood” the way one likes the mountains or the sea? “Shedding blood” was an act whose meaning could, under certain conditions, excite him, but what he demanded, essentially, of cruelty was that it reveal to him particular individuals and his own existence as, on the one hand, consciousness and freedom and, on the other, as flesh. He refused to judge, condemn, and witness anonymous death from afar. He had hated nothing so much in the old society as the claim to judge and punish, to which he himself had fallen victim; he could not excuse the Terror. When murder becomes constitutional, it becomes merely the hateful expression of abstract principles, something without content, inhuman. And this is why Sade as Grand Juror almost always dismissed the charges against the accused. Holding their fate in his hands, he refused to harm the family of Madame de Montreuil in the name of the law. He was even led to resign from his office of president of the Sectiondes Piques. He wrote to Gaufridy, “I considered myself obliged to leave the chair to the vice-president; they wanted me to put a horrible, an inhuman act to a vote. I never would.”

This sort of human decency is conspicuously absent from both the roster of Epstein associates and the current members of Trump’s Cabinet. Epstein displays his deficiency in almost every leaked email. Trump once kicked his disabled nephew off the family’s health insurance, as revenge—among countless other similar, petty misdeeds. Elon Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government, his cuts literally bringing death to hundreds of thousands of people without a second thought. Pam Bondi refused to even look at the Epstein survivors in the room behind her, let alone apologize—not out of fear, but out of utter lack of empathy. The ICE Gestapo roaming the country display this savagery, this rejection of “every basis of sociophysical organization,” as Welchman puts it, every day—and their grotesque acts are championed by Greg Bovino and Tom Homan and Kristi Noem and JD Vance and Trump himself.

Reading Justine today, I wonder if its purpose was not just to shock, not just to push the boundaries of what was socially acceptable, but to reveal something. Was Sade doing what Mozart did in The Magic Flute, disclosing the secrets of freemasonry? Or what some critics claim Stanley Kubrick was doing in Eyes Wide Shut, telling us about elite sexual exploitation? Was he trying to warn us what these outwardly-respectable men were really up to, behind closed doors? He would have known; he was one of them.

The men in Justine are uniformly awful. But the book itself, curiously, is narrated by the eponymous woman of virtue. We see everything through her eyes. For all the horrors in those chapters—and there are many—it is also clear that Sade sympathizes with Justine/Thérèse, respects her, begrudgingly admires her passion for Virtue. This, I believe, is why it has endured. Can the novel, generally regarded as an ode to depravity, also be read as a condemnation of these maleficent men?

Simone de Beauvoir again:

Actually, whipping a few girls (for a consideration agreed upon in advance) is rather a petty feat; that Sade sets so much store on it is enough to cast suspicion upon him. We are struck by the fact that beyond the walls of his “little house” it did not occur to him to “Make full use of his strength.” There is no hint of ambition in him, no spirit of enterprise, no will to power, and I am quite prepared to believe that he was a coward. ….The fact that Sade was at times capable of extravagant boldness, both out of rashness and generosity, does not invalidate the hypothesis that he was afraid of people and, in a more general way, afraid of the reality of the world.

He was right to be afraid.

One last thing to remark upon: Sade was sent to prison numerous times for his “great excesses” with Parisian sex workers. On each occasion, his victims went straight to the police; on each occasion, the police believed what they were told and arrested him; on each occasion, he wound up in prison. In other words: when women accused him, they were believed; and Sade faced real consequences for his actions.

Here in 21st century America, tragically, and to our great national shame, this is not the case. None of the sick débauchées who visited Little St. James and the Zorro Ranch, who attended “pedophile balls” (as Tina Brown put it) at the Upper East Side mansion, who flew back and forth in the company of children on the Lolita Express, have been charged with crimes related to their depravity—not one. Our own, homegrown marquises, guilty of far worse than the crimes of Sade, remain at large. One of them, by Epstein’s own admission the worst of the lot, is, once again, the President of the United States—and the Venn diagram of his current advisors and people in the Files is almost a perfect circle.

It is said that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and Donald Trump are sadists—that their actions are sadistic. They are not. It does a disservice to Sade to characterize them that way.

What they are is much worse.

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ICYMI

With LB off for the week, I hosted the show solo, with my guest Nina Burleigh, who was outside on the street in NYC:

Photo credit: Cover of the 1964 Lancer Books edition of Justine.

Early Thursday morning New York time—and noon in Italy—I sat down with the author and economic sociology professor Brooke Harrington to talk offshores, Epstein, boiling frogs, and, as she put it, “Jackass played as a global game among the richest and most powerful men in the world.”

(Note: I had to divide this video in half because Substack kept kicking out the full version. Sorry for the inconvenience.)

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Early Thursday morning New York time—and noon in Italy—I sat down with the author and economic sociology professor Brooke Harrington to talk offshores, Epstein, boiling frogs, and, as she put it, “Jackass played as a global game among the richest and most powerful men in the world.”

Below is a transcript of some highlights of our discussion, edited for clarity.

(Note: I had to divide this video in half because Substack kept kicking out the full version. Sorry for the inconvenience.)

Planet of the Apes

Greg Olear (GO)
I was thinking about how this whole thing, the whole Epstein thing with the trafficking of the young girls and the rapes and all that, is sort of part and parcel with the patriarchy, in a lot of ways. Like, it’s almost like if you distill the patriarchy to its barest, most disgusting elements, that’s what you have left.

And I wonder if that resonates with you at all, that interpretation. And if you think that on some level, maybe, the Epstein stuff coming out now—because it’s clearly coming out now, whether they want it to or not—is it maybe the death rattle of the patriarchy? Is the patriarchy something that we can now smash, because the truth is coming out?

Brooke Harrington (BH)
I think there is this trait in a lot of human beings that only understands human society, human interaction, in terms of dominance relations. It’s a really impoverished way of being a human being. But you can see that for some people, it appears to be that the only way they can relate to other humans is, “Am I above you or below you? And if I’m below you, or even on the same level as you, I have to strive to trample you underfoot.”

And that is their only way of understanding what it means to like be in connection with other humans. And you’d feel sorry for them, if they weren’t so goddamn dangerous, especially with money in their hands….

When I look at primate studies of like chimps versus bonobos, I think that some people are just born more like chimps—and that includes some women as well as men. And chimps really seem to interact with each other on the basis of dominance hierarchies. If they have a conflict, they just beat the shit out of each other until one of them dies or withdraws. Whereas others of us are more like the bonobos. The bonobos resolve their conflicts by cuddling up, even having sex. They have a much more egalitarian kind of society, and they just generally seem to be happier than the stressed-out agro chimps. But the kind of society we’ve created, especially in the corporate world, rewards chimps. It rewards chimp dominance behavior: “Crush those beneath you, scale the ladder.”

And going back to JD Vance, he does seem like the kind of guy who is fully bought into the prospect that one day he can be the dominant chimp of the group. And he’s just biding his time, until his turn comes.

But Trump is really good at those kinds of dominance relations. And you can see that one of the ways in which he is broken, and many of his followers are broken, is that he has no alternative way of perceiving the world or interacting with the world except, like, “Me on top or me beneath. And if I’m beneath, I’m gonna kill you to get on top.” And that’s what this whole “I am your retribution” tour is in his second term.

And obviously some of his followers eat that up. I don’t know if that’s even inherently the patriarchy. Patriarchy builds on it. But my real fear is that that’s just built into a lot of people, no matter what the form of social organization is. And what non-patriarchal societies do is, they exile those people. They’re like, okay, you want to be like that? Go live on your own. Elephant troops do that to unruly young male elephants.

GO
Poor JD Vance is not ever gonna be the lead chimp….

BH
And that’s one of the only sources of hope I have, because nobody but nobody is willing to lay down their lives for JD Vance. And if he becomes president through whatever means, 25th amendment, or if Trump dies for some reason, all of a sudden you’re going to see a bunch of Republican Congress members grow a spine and oppose him because everybody hates him. So that will fracture the MAGA coalition better than any protest.

Get in, the Water’s Great

GO
I’m wondering what your sense is, because you also have a different perspective— because you’re abroad, and you can see how normal people are. Giorgia Meloni is a right-wing politician, but we would love to have her here. We should be so lucky.

What’s your sense of this, looking at the United States from across the pond? How screwed are we, do you think?

BH
I think the frogs are at a full rolling boil, and many of them are just doing the backstroke.

I’m thinking of my MAGA relatives who are still up on Facebook posting about, “Well, if they didn’t want to get rounded up by ICE, they shouldn’t have been illegals.” They just parrot these thought-stopping clichés from Fox News, and nothing seems to be able to break through their bubble.

Or the breakthroughs that do occur—like when a lot of white male gun owners who were Trump supporters saw Alex Pretti executed, you know, disarmed and then executed, that they identified with him. And I’m like, “Okay, good, we’ll take it.” But the process of attrition from MAGA is way too slow.

And I think Trump is doing to America what he’s done to the US court system for decades, which is he’s running out the clock so that he can’t be held accountable for anything. And I’m afraid that the damage that he is doing, and that he will continue to do, cannot be reversed. Like, we can’t magically make the East Wing of the White House reappear or the Rose Garden. I pray to God that he doesn’t get his greasy mitts on the National Parks, because if he starts selling off prime real estate in the Grand Canyon and Glacier, like, there’s also no undoing that.

And that’s nothing compared to all the lives he has taken, those precious, irreplaceable lives, and the reverberations their deaths will have for generations in their families. It’s almost—it’s hard to count the devastation.

And I’m just astonished at the extent to which so many of our fellow frogs are still like, “This is fine, everything is fine.” Like, what is it going to take? I really don’t know what it’s going to take for them to say it’s not fine.

GO
We had a plague and that didn’t work. I mean, if the plague doesn’t work, I don’t know what would work

Shame, Status, & the Reputational Economy

BH
One of the things people get confused about with Trump and other wealthy people is they say, “Clearly these guys have no shame.” And that’s true in the sense that shame is premised on the idea of a shared moral code. And clearly there is no more shared moral code here. Or these rich guys evaluate their status in terms of their ability to violate it. So you can’t have shame and participate in that kind of status competition.

However, this understanding of the wealthy men forgets about a related phenomenon, which is status. They care a lot about status and reputation. So what they want is other people’s respect and deference. And when they don’t get it, they get very upset.

Think Alan Dershowitz going on this personal jihad against the poor pierogi dealer in Martha’s Vineyard. Some guy selling pierogies at a farmer’s market declines to do business with Alan Dershowitz. And instead of just taking his lumps and walking away, Dershowitz turns it into this sort of multi-week self-owned fiasco in the media— filming it, threatening to file charges. And, you know, it degrades him. But this is also the guy who in Trump One was whining publicly about not being invited to certain parties on Martha’s Vineyard because he was associated with Trump. And that is a big clue about what these guys care about.

Think also in Trump One, Sarah Huckabee Sanders being denied service at a restaurant and making a huge deal out of it rather than walking away quietly. That is a status offense and they really, really care about it. Putin cares about this. Remember after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, some European orchestras were refusing to play Tchaikovsky, or some of Putin’s associates were denied entry to Italy to enjoy their villas in Lake Como? That’s what finally made Putin get in front of news cameras and talk about, you know, “Russia is being canceled, and all this woke shit is so unfair!”

It’s like, why would it matter to Putin whether European orchestras played Tchaikovsky? You’d think he had better things to worry about. But if you’re a rich guy, you care about status and deference. And this was a status insult to Russia. And therefore Putin had to stand up and defend against it.

So what’s going on in this world of the Epstein files. And what Epstein is trying to leverage and also protect with secrecy is the reputational economy of some of the most powerful men in the world. Not even necessarily the richest, but people like Noam Chomsky and Larry Summers, who are revered—or were revered—figures in their academic fields, but not necessarily particularly rich. But what they have is reputational wealth. They have social capital. And Epstein traded in that, in just the way he managed the financial wealth of some of his associates, like Les Wexner….

GO
…Maybe this idea of, you know, social injury is the way to come at these people. Because we’ve had, this week, Greg Bovino got thrown out of a bar in Las Vegas, which is hysterical to me.

BH
Exactly, exactly. And that is exactly what we should be doing more of,. because it’s legal, it’s free. And anybody who encounters these figures can participate. Like if you’re the server at a restaurant where some Trump administration official comes in, you can just refuse to serve them. You can walk off the job.

Now I’m not saying that that is easy. People have mortgages to pay and food to put on the table. But especially, you know, if you talk about it with the owner of the establishment where you work, and they have your back, then by all means, do it. Because it seems so simple. It seems like it couldn’t possibly hurt these people. But we are constantly getting evidence that it’s among the most effective weapons, these status insults against these fascist pedophile monsters. Perversely, they want and expect to be liked and deferred to, and denying them the liking and the deference— they regard that as a serious injury that requires a response on their part.

GO
I think it’s a good idea. And it reminds me of this thing I read. I don’t even know if this is a true thing, but somebody posted this on social media a couple of years ago where he was sitting in a bar and a guy came into the bar who was very nice, you know, sort of egregiously friendly. And he was wearing a jacket with insignia on it. And the bartender went over and said, “Get the fuck out of here.” And the guy was like, “Well, I’m not doing anything.” He’s like, “I know what the signs mean. Get out.”

So the guy left, and the guy sitting there asked the bartender why this had happened, and he said, “That’s a Nazi insignia there. Those are white supremacist Nazi symbols. So what they do is, they send their nice guy, their face-guy Nazi. And if you yield to him, he’ll bring a friend, and then they’ll bring another friend. And the next thing you know, it’s a Nazi bar—and we can’t have that. So you have to stop it dead in its tracks.”

And I feel like that’s the takeaway from that is, you know, here’s poor Scott Bessent at the wine bar trying to enjoy his wine, but don’t let him enjoy his wine. That’s the other thing you’re allowed to do. If you see these people, you’re allowed to give them a hard time, because it will ruin their dinner. You know, ruin their dinner. There’s nothing wrong with ruining somebody’s dinner.

BH
Yeah. And in case some listeners think, you know, that’s a fun hobby, harassing MAGA fascists, it actually has political impact. One of the reasons that Pinochet’s regime fell in Chile was that you can’t be a fascist unless you have supportive elites. And you can peel away the support of those elites by making the elites persona non grata, making sure that they can’t be admitted to the parties they want to be admitted to, that they’re not received in polite society. So basically, you make the cost benefit analysis very unfavorable to the elites who support the dictator. And that’s how you peel away the dictator’s support, and ultimately, the dictator falls.

It took about a decade for that to work with Pinochet. We won’t have to wait that long with Trump because he’s just clearly not in good enough health to hold up until, you know, 99 years of age. But it works. And you can tell that it works by how loud those hit dogs holler in the Trump administration.

GO
Yeah. Yeah. And they do. They do holler—and they shouldn’t be allowed to go anywhere ever again in polite society without being called out. You know, I don’t want to say the word “harassed” because that implies some illegality, but it’s not illegal to be like, “Hey, that’s that guy. He’s awful. Why are we allowing Nazis to sit here?” Like, Stephen Miller should never be allowed in a restaurant again, you know, comfortably.

BH
Yeah. Right.

GO
Which I think he knows. That’s why these people are holed up at military bases. So whoever the Door Dash driver is there—you know, be mindful. You know, it’s OK to bring the food late and cold.

Out, out—

BH
The pieces of the big jigsaw puzzle are coming together. And it’s horrifying. The picture is horrifying. And I expect it will continue to get even more horrifying as more and more pieces find their way out to the public.

And it’ll be useful to have real-time accounts like this, where historians have a record of people like us trying to work out what the bigger picture is. And I expect that I’ll be surprised not just by the depravity but by the extent of this network. You know, Jackass played as a global game among the richest and most powerful men in the world.

GO
There’s names in there we haven’t heard yet. That’s the other thing, I think. I have some suspicions about who might be in there. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens and what comes out. And hopefully, the flip side of all of this is that all of this evil can produce a response that will send it back from whence it came and hopefully destroy all the rotten institutions so much that they’ll have to be rebuilt in a way that we can ensure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen ever again.

BH
I hope so. A lot of people have been saying, “Nothing’s going to happen. It’s going to be like the Panama Papers.” But with the Panama Papers, the reason there weren’t a lot of prosecutions, and even fewer convictions, is because a lot of what happens financially offshore is technically legal. It shouldn’t be, and it’s clearly immoral. But it’s hard to prosecute when someone hasn’t broken the law.

Child sex abuse is a whole different animal in this respect. You can’t really wiggle out of that, especially if there are tapes. The only attempts to wiggle out of it that we’ve seen have been efforts that have really backfired spectacularly, like saying, “Well, you know, the girls were 15. They were practically adults. What’s everyone getting so worked up about?” Yeah, who was it? Megyn Kelly was trying that one, and that went over like a lead balloon.

And now that more and more evidence is getting out of children who are nine, 10 years old being involved in this, that takes that deflection completely off the table. There’s a lot less wiggle room to escape accountability among these elites in the Epstein files than there were in the Panama Papers.

My fear is that we’re going to get another Gerald Ford type response of, “Let’s turn the page and heal the nation by pretending none of this ever happened.” And we know how that turns out. And I hope there will be enough anger and uprising in American civil society that we don’t let them turn the page and allow the complicit to escape accountability.

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Brooke Harrington is an Economic Sociologist studying the offshore financial system and the professionals who run it. Her research addresses inequality, both political and economic, as well as globalization and the professions. Since 2007, she’s focused on the offshore financial system, which she studied from the inside after spending two years earning a wealth management credential; that was followed by six more years traveling to every region of the world, interviewing and interacting with practitioners in 18 offshore centers.

The full piece is here:

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Tonight, I will fill in for Nadine Smith on The Five 8 1/2. Please join me and Lisa Graves LIVE at 8pm ET.

Thanks!

Zahltag, Zahltag, Zahltag—
die Zeit der Strafe fängt erst für ihn an.
—Die Toten Hosen, “Zahltag”

The Germans have an expression: Der Zahltag rückt näher. The literal translation is “payday is getting closer,” which sounds like a welcome proposition. But the actual meaning is neither innocuous nor positive. Colloquially, Zahltag means “Day of Reckoning”—one of those rare occasions when, even in English, the two nouns demand capital letters.

For those on the wrong side of the karmic ledger, Zahltag is not a happy development. Der Zahltag rückt näher means “The Day of Reckoning is coming soon.” Or, to put it in the Godfather terms our mobster president is more familiar with, Zahltag is basically the day that Michael Corleone settles all the family business.

On September 29, 2014, the Tom Brady-led New England Patriots got blown out by the pre-Patrick Mahomes Kansas City Chiefs, 41-14, evening their record to 2-2. The team played like shit. This was not a Super Bowl contender.

Facing the press pool after the game, Coach Bill Belichick1 was asked about the humiliating loss. He answered every question with some variation of “We’re on to Cincinnati,” the Cincinnati Bengals happening to be the next opponent on the schedule: Why did the team play so badly? We’re thinking about Cincinnati. Does Tom Brady need more help? The only thing we care about now is Cincinnati. What can you tell us about the lackluster effort on defense today? On to Cincinnati. And so on, for ten more minutes.

Immediately, the phrase entered the sportswriter lexicon. “On to Cincinnati” means to forget what just happened, to never look back, and to focus all the attention on what’s coming down the pike.

In 1933, Germany bestowed dictatorial powers upon a hateful, angry, antisemitic psychopath. Six years later, Nazi tanks rolled into Poland, kicking off the Second World War.

For a few years, Hitler’s army seemed invincible. By the summer of 1941, Germany held most of the Continent. Britain was reeling, the Soviets and the Nazis had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, and the United States clung to a short-sighted policy of neutrality. These circumstances allowed Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to slaughter on a mass scale not seen since the days of Genghis Khan. From 1939-45, Hitler—and, by extension, Germany—was directly responsible for the deaths of some 29 million human beings, including six million Jews exterminated in the Holocaust.

On October 5, 2014, New England walloped Cincinnati, 43-17. The Patriots would win 10 of their last 12 regular-season games, and go on to beat the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX.2

By the spring of 1945, Hitler was dead. The war in Europe was over. The Germans had lost. The concentration camps were liberated, revealing to the world the unfathomable depths of Nazi depravity.

Zahltag had come for the German people.

This “payday” began with the Nuremberg trials. In the decades since, Germany has made a sincere and concerted effort to take responsibility—and, insofar as it can ever be possible, to atone—for the abominable crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazi regime.

In Europe today, the politicians named in the Epstein files have suffered actual consequences. Government officials have resigned in Slovakia, in Norway, in Sweden, in Great Britain. Hell, Keir Starmer might have to step down as Prime Minister—not because he is named in the files, but because he appointed someone who is: creepy Epstein crony Peter Mandelson.

For those disgraced individuals, Zahltag has come.

In the United States, we don’t do Zahltag. We turn the page on our national crimes as quickly as possible. We don’t charge felonies when misdemeanors will do, and we don’t charge misdemeanors when we can impose a small fine and a warning. Our country’s twin original sins—the Native American genocide and the institution of slavery—have never been adequately confronted, let alone atoned for.

Americans seem to believe that if we just don’t talk about our sordid history, then that history doesn’t exist. (In a related story, the Trump regime is actively attempting to prevent schools from teaching about the betrayal, the slaughter, and the forced migration of the indigenous population, as well as anything to do with slavery. Donald may as well be saying, “The Civil War? There were good people on both sides.”)

This let-‘em-off-easy attitude persists. We welcome the Confederate traitors back into the federal government with open arms. We end the occupation of the South before securing the safety of Black Americans. We allow institutional racism and sexism to fester. We let JFK and LBJ off the hook for Vietnam, and Nixon and Kissinger off the hook for Cambodia. Ford pardons Nixon. Bush père pardons the Iran-Contra conspirators. Obama ignores the war crimes of Bush fils and Cheney. Biden installs the useless Merrick Garland at the DOJ—and even after the insurrection and the Musk-influenced 2024 election, sits cozily by the fireside with the head insurrectionist and Kremlin stooge, playing nice-nice, as if all is well.

This is how it goes, in the United States of “On To Cincinnati.”

Trump, his inner circle, and his ICE Gestapo may be Nazis, but they have a long way to go to catch up to Hitler. I don’t want to suggest that the current American strain of Nazism is equivalent to the Third Reich, in terms of the misery, cruelty, and mass death perpetrated on humanity. It’s not. But we are certainly goose-stepping down that swastika-lined path.

The tide, however, might—might—be changing. The headlines these past two weeks all center on various manifestations of the Trump regime’s evildoing: the ICE Gestapo’s illegal occupation of Minnesota, flagrant thwarting of the Bill of Rights, outward displays of cruelty, kidnapping of children, and extrajudicial execution of innocent people; the brazen corruption of Trump, his family, and his cronies, enriching themselves in ever-more-staggeringly unlawful ways; an audacious attempt to sabotage the election process; and the unfathomably awful revelations in the Epstein files, which have leaked out in dribs and drabs, like Chinese water torture.

It all adds up. And the whole of the Trump Redux evil is greater than the sum of its malignant parts.

There is today a convergence of criminality—every bad thing everywhere all at once: amoral men and women of great means and influence, in league with Jeffrey Epstein and his child sex trafficking network; obvious Kremlin assets; social media influencers paid by god knows which hostile foreign power; West Wing masterminds commanding a marauding army of thugs and goons; election saboteurs; plunderers, looters, and thieves; war criminals, giving succor to Putin and to Bibi, murdering men in fishing boats, deploying horrible new weapons, ordering the invasion of other nations; ultra-high-net-worth appeasers who capitulate to Nazis rather than risk their vast fortunes; enemies of democracy; destroyers of our venerable institutions; serial rapists of children—and a media ecosystem that gaslights, and lies, and covers up the regime’s crimes, and trust-washes the criminals, with Renfieldian alacrity.

It’s hard to process, because it’s so overwhelming.

And the crimes! So many crimes! We have national security crimes, sex crimes, financial crimes, health crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against justice, crimes against the climate, crimes that threaten the very survival of the human race.

Broadly, however, what these are are crimes of betrayal. Trump and Epstein and all of their co-conspirators—from Peter Thiel and Rupert Murdoch to Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem; from Elon Musk and Jared Kushner to Howard Lutnick and Steve Bannon; from Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg to the corrupt Justices of the Supreme Court—have betrayed us. As John Keegan writes in his Churchill biography, “To the Nazis, legality and fair play were symptoms of democratic weakness that they gloried in affronting.” That applies here.

These people are traitors, full stop. I have been using that word—traitors—for almost ten years now. Because it is subjective, and also because there is no more accurate way to describe them. “The traitors,” I used to write regularly on Twitter, “are easy to spot.” And these people are all traitors. Every last stinking one of them. They are traitors to our country and the free world. They are traitors to our national security. They are traitors to our children. They are traitors to the health of the nation. They are traitors to the economy. They are traitors to the value of the dollar. They are traitors to our natural resources. They are traitors to the climate. They are traitors to women. They are traitors to people of color. They are traitors to the LGBT community. They are traitors to poor, lower-middle-class, middle-class, and upper-middle class white people. They are traitors to the most vulnerable. They are traitors to legal immigrants. They are traitors to “dreamers.” They are traitors to Afghan nationals who helped us fight the Taliban. They are traitors to refugees. They are traitors to our allies. They are traitors to our treaties and international agreements. They are traitors to our soft power. They are traitors to our hard power. They are traitors to 342 million people living in the United States. They are traitors to me, and you, and my family, and yours. They are traitors to the Constitution. They are traitors to the very spirit of the nation, its animating force, its first principles—to truth, justice, and the American way.

And for what have they betrayed us all? For power, to sate their sadism and cruelty; for wealth, to throw still more gold on their glittering, mountainous stores; and for lust, to rape pubescent girls and boys with impunity. They want to brutalize brown and Black people, add to their already-vast fortunes, hoard all our natural resources, and fuck 13-year-olds. For those depraved ends, they have sold out the country, and the free world, and the entire human race. And anyone who doubts this, at this point, is either living in denial or applying for a job at CBS News.

This is, or should be, a Zahltag moment in the United States. Meanwhile, Trump and his co-conspirators are desperately flooding the zone with some MAGA version of “On to Cincinnati.”

I don’t know if we are in a battle for the soul of the nation, as Joe Biden once said. I don’t know if nations have souls. And if they do, I’m not sure ours wasn’t lost long ago.

What I do know is that if there are no consequences for what these Trumpist villains are doing now—and for the evil that Epstein and his cabal of rich and powerful perverts have wrought for decades—there is no coming back.

If we “On to Cincinnati” this, the United States is doomed.3

Another thing I know: neither the Justice Department nor the FBI nor the judicial system is functioning adequately enough to handle the level of Zahltag required to get us out of this mess. The “norms” that Merrick Garland fought so stubbornly to preserve evaporated on January 20th of last year. His bought-and-sold successor at the DOJ is Trump’s personal fixer, his Michael Clayton. The Bureau is run by a perjuring fame whore. The lower courts have stood their ground admirably, but they are simply not equipped to deal with what’s coming. And we cannot risk Roberts, Alito, Thomas & Co. putting their fat thumbs on the scales; indeed, any purge of evildoers must include the corrupt co-conspirators on the Supreme Court, who have enabled all this madness, as they guzzle $200 bottles of wine on some oligarch’s private jet.

Nor can we stand for members of the second Trump Cabinet to line up like lemmings before some Alex Acosta 2.0, to rat out their cohorts in exchange for immunity, en route to a fat podcast deal with a deep-pocketed organization that should know better. No effing way. Not this time. Our Zahltag cannot be handled in the usual manner.

The question is: What to do about it?

In any other country, at any other historical period, the traitors would be tried, found guilty, and put to death. That’s what happened at Nuremberg, and I don’t think anyone shed a tear about the capital punishment back then. Time was, we even did this sort of thing here in the United States—as the Lincoln conspirators FAFO’d.

That is obviously, and perhaps regrettably, not an option now. As badly as I’d like to watch a livestream of all of the traitors walking a long, narrow plank into a live volcano, we must not fall prey to our baser instincts.

I have a better, more humane proposal:

Congress passes a law I call the “Act of Betrayal.” This will lay out exactly how the Trump traitors are to be tried—and who will sit in judgment, so we avoid the bloated Supreme Court traitors rigging the system. Perhaps there is a “Truth & Reconciliation” component, as in South Africa after apartheid—although I don’t want any of the “big fish” traitors to wriggle out of the hook of justice.

The Act of Betrayal will establish “traitor tiers.” Just like we have Class A felonies, we will have Class A betrayals. Because not all traitors are created equal. Mike Johnson, for example, is clearly a disgusting and oleaginous traitor, but he’s also clearly not as bad as, say, Stephen Miller.

And the Act of Betrayal will mandate the punishments—which will fit the crimes.

The most suitable consequence for the amoral, nihilistic oligarchs who have betrayed the country is asset forfeiture. We have to take their money. All of it. It’s ill-gotten wealth, and it doesn’t belong to them. So if and when we convict, say, Peter Thiel of Class A betrayal, for working with Jeffrey Epstein and the Kremlin to install Trump in the White House, he gets to choose: life imprisonment at Gitmo, or asset forfeiture. And when he opts for the latter, we leave that sweaty Nazi with $192,000—the median net worth of an American household—and seize the rest of his fortune. Every last dime, every last crypto coin, every last share in every last Silicon Valley start-up.

Given the disgusting wealth of some of these traitors, asset forfeiture under my proposed Act of Betrayal could gross almost a trillion dollars—money that could then be allocated to education, healthcare, disease control and prevention, and the restoration of USAID.

I mean, just look at this grotesquerie:

As my boss would say, that’s real money!

Sure, there would be pushback from the oligarchs, from their slick attorneys, from powerful lobbyists. Members of Congress would be reluctant to betray the betrayers who are their donors. We would be accused of being Communists, or Marxists, or whatever word scares enough American idiots in their MAGA focus groups.

But it’s not like asset forfeiture is some wild idea. We already seize the assets of convicted mobsters and drug lords. Why should traitors not be subjected to the same fate? Did the Union not seize property belonging to disgraced Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and build Arlington Cemetery upon the grounds? How is this any different?

As we approach the 250th birthday of the United States, the country is at a crossroads. The American experiment is sputtering. Either we take action, or we perish as a nation.

Der Zahltag rückt näher is the wrong tense. It’s more like Der Zahltag ist gekommen—the Day of Reckoning has come, is here. We have to make certain that the Zahl is great enough to save our national soul.

Cincinnati is named for the Society of the Cincinnati, the country’s oldest patriotic organization, which is itself named for the Roman statesman Cincinnatus—who became a dictator. And dictatorship is exactly what we’ll get, if we “on to Cincinnati” this.

Der Zahltag ist gekommen. What are we going to do about it?

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Photo credit: Donald Trump, Laconia Rally, Laconia, NH by Michael Vadon, July 16 2015, over a photo of a massage room in the Epstein files.

Dear Reader,

Winston Churchill was, like Lincoln before him, and like Zelenskyy after him, one of those unlikely figures who seemingly come out of nowhere to play the leading role in which history cast them—as if born to fulfill a singular destiny; as if FedEx’d straight from the mailroom of Providence.

All three men displayed incredible gravitas, but were also quite funny. All three were brilliant writers. All three presided over great wars against seemingly invincible foes, leading their respective nations through the darkest of hours with grace, wisdom, honor, patience, resolve, and moral certitude.1

Unlike Lincoln, but like Zelenskyy, Churchill was not a nobody. From his exploits as a war correspondent in South Africa and Sudan, he was a household name by the turn of the 20th century. His books were best-sellers. He’d served in prominent roles in Parliament: Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Exchequer. He’d also been a solider in an active war zone, and understood what battle really entailed. In Britain, he was a known commodity.

Unlike Lincoln, who was 52, or Zelenskyy, who was just 41, Churchill was relatively old when he first took office; he was already 65 when he became Prime Minister, succeeding the humiliated Neville Chamberlain in May of 1940.

With regard to geopolitics, Churchill could see the chessboard more clearly than most of his contemporaries; Paul Morphy had nothing on him. Years before the Archduke was killed in Sarajevo, he correctly predicted how a major European war would play out. He loathed the Communists from the jump, and understood exactly how monstrous Stalin was, even as he was joining forces with him to beat Germany. And when most of his countrymen were either underestimating Hitler or attempting to placate him, Churchill, who reviled the “Austrian house painter,” not only warned against the threat the Nazis posed to Britain’s national security, but immediately saw the futility of appeasement. “An appeaser,” he once remarked, “is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

Not that Churchill got everything right. He’d flamed out during the Great War, with his ill-advised Dardanelles campaign an infamous disaster, and spent most of the 30s “in the wilderness.” He was reckless. He was accident prone. He didn’t have any close friends, and spent too much time (in the sage opinion of his wife, the indispensable Clementine) with cronies and scoundrels. He was racist. But for all his faults—and there were plenty—he was indubitably the right man for the job.

And the job he was the right man for? It sucked. Remember when Obama was elected, and The Onion ran the headline “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job?” This was orders of magnitude worse. Churchill became Prime Minister in May of 1940, as the British forces were being evacuated, en masse, from Dunkirk. The Nazis had already overrun Belgium and taken the Netherlands, and were well on their way to occupying France. By the end of June, with the French on the verge of surrender, Hitler and the Axis Powers controlled most of the continent.

Britain stood alone.

There was some talk in the House of Commons, where the appeasers had not yet learned the “crocodile” lesson, of making a deal with Berlin. Churchill wouldn’t have it. “If this long Island story of ours is to end at last,” he said, matter-of-factly, “let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” Talk about a mic drop! Like, how do you respond to that?

The thing is, in May and June of 1940, there was a good chance that that gruesome scenario would play out. Even with its armies spread out across Europe, Germany was far more powerful than Britain. A sustained Nazi air attack on London, followed by an amphibious invasion, would almost certainly succeed.

Basically, Churchill was talking out his ass.

The same was true on June 4, 1940, as Churchill delivered the first of two famous speeches—the “Never Surrender” speech—in the House of Commons. It ended like this:

I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government—every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Exactly two weeks later, with the Battle of France all but over, and with Britain bracing for imminent attack, Churchill again gave a speech in the House of Commons. He started with a survey of what was happening in the war. And he capped it off like this—with a final sentence for the ages:

The disastrous military events which have happened during the past fortnight have not come to me with any sense of surprise. Indeed, I indicated a fortnight ago as clearly as I could to the House that the worst possibilities were open; and I made it perfectly clear that whatever happened in France would make no difference to the resolve of Britain and the British Empire to fight on, if necessary for years, if necessary alone….

If Hitler can bring under his despotic control the industries of the countries he has conquered, this will add greatly to his already vast armament output. On the other hand, this will not happen immediately, and we are now assured of immense, continuous and increasing support in supplies and munitions of all kinds from the United States; and especially of aeroplanes and pilots from the Dominions and across the oceans coming from regions which are beyond the reach of enemy bombers.

I do not see how any of these factors can operate to our detriment on balance before the winter comes; and the winter will impose a strain upon the Nazi regime, with almost all Europe writhing and starving under its cruel heel, which, for all their ruthlessness, will run them very hard. We must not forget that from the moment when we declared war on the 3rd September it was always possible for Germany to turn all her Air Force upon this country, together with any other devices of invasion she might conceive, and that France could have done little or nothing to prevent her doing so. We have, therefore, lived under this danger, in principle and in a slightly modified form, during all these months. In the meanwhile, however, we have enormously improved our methods of defense, and we have learned what we had no right to assume at the beginning, namely, that the individual aircraft and the individual British pilot have a sure and definite superiority. Therefore, in casting up this dread balance sheet and contemplating our dangers with a disillusioned eye, I see great reason for intense vigilance and exertion, but none whatever for panic or despair.

During the first four years of the last war the Allies experienced nothing but disaster and disappointment. That was our constant fear: one blow after another, terrible losses, frightful dangers. Everything miscarried. And yet at the end of those four years the morale of the Allies was higher than that of the Germans, who had moved from one aggressive triumph to another, and who stood everywhere triumphant invaders of the lands into which they had broken. During that war we repeatedly asked ourselves the question: ‘How are we going to win?’ And no one was able ever to answer it with much precision, until at the end, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, our terrible foe collapsed before us, and we were so glutted with victory that in our folly we threw it away.

We do not yet know what will happen in France or whether the French resistance will be prolonged, both in France and in the French Empire overseas…. [W]e have proclaimed our willingness at the darkest hour in French history to conclude a union of common citizenship in this struggle. However matters may go in France or with the French Government, or other French Governments, we in this Island and in the British Empire will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people. If we are now called upon to endure what they have been suffering, we shall emulate their courage, and if final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gains, aye, and freedom shall be restored to all. We abate nothing of our just demands; not one jot or tittle do we recede. Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians have joined their causes to our own. All these shall be restored.

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’

I read this second speech last week—ironically, on the plane to Berlin—and tears flowed down my cheeks to the point where I started coughing phlegm and was afraid I’d embarrassed myself in front of the flight attendant. Later, in my Charlottenburg hotel room—within sight of the Memorial Church that the Royal Air Force bombarded during the Battle of Berlin, five years after Churchill said those words—I listened to a recording of it on YouTube.

Churchill didn’t sound like how I expected. He speaks with authority, but he doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t chew the scenery like some second-rate actor playing Coriolanus. He ends his sentences on a downward, rather than an upward, flourish. It’s all very matter-of-fact. Although Churchill was an extremely witty man in daily life, there is no humor here, no levity.

Nor does it sound like a funeral oration. Churchill knew what he was going to say, and he knew that what he was going to say did not require performative embellishment to make an impact. The speech he wrote for himself was, as is said of certain plays, “actor-proof.” The only word he really emphasizes is the “this” that precedes “was their finest hour:”

It’s no wonder these speeches resonated so powerfully with me, reading them in Berlin (of all places) in the winter of 2026. No one fought fascists more bravely and more relentlessly than Winston Churchill. He articulated a lot of what I’m feeling these days—the call of duty, the emphasis on liberty and justice, the resolve to cede no ground to Nazis.

There are so many brilliant turns of phrase in the speeches:

outlive the menace of tyranny

the odious apparatus of Nazi rule

we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills

Hitler can bring under his despotic control

great reason for intense vigilance and exertion, but none whatever for panic or despair

not one jot or tittle do we recede

the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands

the abyss of a new Dark Age

If we change two words, that first quote becomes, “If this long American experiment of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” Hear hear!

And I find that I keep repeating to myself, almost as a mantra, these seven words, which Churchill uses in both speeches:

…if necessary for years, if necessary alone…

Only now, on Sunday morning, with most of this already written, do I see that for the past nine years, without even realizing it—indeed, without having even read any of these wartime speeches before last week—I have been aping Churchill’s rhetorical style. First on social media and now here on Substack, I have been projecting, or trying to project, certitude, and unswerving confidence in our institutions, and our side’s moral superiority, and the belief that justice will win the day. The very name of this publication derives from the sign-off I inserted at the end of my long Twitter threads during the first Trump Administration—the (I see now) decidedly Churchillian phrase, “We shall prevail.”

On the plane, I read a short 2002 “Penguin Life” biography of Winston Churchill by the late British military historian John Keegan—a slender volume that had sat unopened on my bookshelf for probably 15 years. Winston Churchill is wonderfully written, in part because Keegan inserts just enough of himself to add important context. I highly recommend it, as a primer to the great and fascinating man.

From the Keegan book, for me, are two big takeaways. The first involves a mistake Churchill made. In South Africa a half-century earlier, he marveled at how the Boers, overpowered but fighting on their own turf, fought what is now known as a guerrilla war against the British. This was as effective as it was novel, and Churchill ever afterwards admired the Boers for their courage and ingenuity.

When Hitler came along, Churchill believed that the occupied nations of Europe might employ similar guerrilla tactics against the Nazis. But when they tried, it backfired spectacularly—because unlike the British in South Africa, the Nazis were soulless ghouls who were totally cool with atrocity for atrocity’s sake. As Keegan writes:

“We have remained decent men,” Heinrich Himmler would assure his fellow mass murderers in his notorious speech at Posen (Poznan) in October 1943; “decent men” were, to Churchill, either soldiers of the state or their principled guerrilla opponents. Rooted in public-school morality, he never anticipated the advantage that nihilistic amorality recorded his enemies—or that those who heeded his call to “set Europe ablaze” would pay a terrible price for doing so. The severity of the Germans’ repression aroused his most dramatic rhetorical strictures, but while the Nazis held the upper hand, his words counted for nothing against their acts.

Despite our Hitlerian president’s best efforts, the United States is not Nazi Germany—at least, not yet. But Keegan makes a crucial point. What has undermined our collective resistance to Trump—especially in Congress, where the likes of Schumer and Jeffries are still following rules of engagement that have not existed for at least a decade and a half—is a failure to grok that, to paraphrase US Weekly, “MAGA? They’re not like us.” Trump and his coalition of villains—Leonard Leo and his Opus Dei-adjacent ilk very much included—are amoral nihilists.2 They are impervious to shame. They are impervious to guilt. They merrily gun down innocent protesters, separate breast-feeding babies from their mothers, lie egregiously and with a smile, and, in the case of Trump and the rest of the Epstein perverts, violently rape trafficked children—as nihilistic an act as one’s imagination can conjure. In wartime, that soullessness is, as Keegan rightly points out, an advantage.

The other takeaway from the book is that words matter. I have been operating under this assumption for nine years now, of course, as futile as it often seems. The sword may be deadlier than the pen in a battle, but in a war, the pen is truly mightier. And we know this is so, because Winston Churchill proved it.

As the Nazis rode roughshod over the Continent, as the Luftwaffe bombed the Island, it was only a matter of time before Britain, too, fell. FDR was doing his level best, funneling munitions to our allies. But lend-lease was not going to cut it. To beat the Nazis, the United States had to enter the war. And in the early 1940s, something like eight in ten Americans preferred to sit on the sideline. Pearl Harbor changed that in a flash; but in the first eleven months of 1941, no one knew such a colossal military blunder was on the horizon.

Churchill and the British were waiting, in a sense, for a miracle.

Keegan writes:

What sustained Churchill, and the British people, during the second six months of “standing alone,” January-June 1941, now defies easy understanding. Bombing was killing thousands of civilians every month and burning out not only central London, but also the centers of the provincial cities Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast. U-boat warfare had reduced the individual’s diet to one egg and a few ounces of meat each week. Clothing was wearing out and could not easily be replaced. Fuel for domestic heating was harshly rationed, like every other commodity. Luxuries had disappeared; alcohol was hard to come by; only tobacco, judged essential to morale, could readily be bought. The war was dragging out into an apparently interminable and cheerless future.

Churchill privately confessed to depression.

And then the great military historian, writing a quarter century ago, answers his question:

Realities were, however, of less importance during the “standing alone” months than hopes and inspiration. The answer to the question of what sustained Churchill and the British in the darkest days is that it was his own words. From them, the people took hope and Churchill drew inspiration. Bad at many things, Churchill had early made himself a master of language, and it was through that mastery that his career and self-esteem had been nurtured. By the practice of speaking and writing, particularly the writing of a heroicized history of his own nation, he had built up a great reserve of imagery upon which he now drew to forge what would indeed prove to be tools of battle.

Churchill’s words did not only touch his people’s hearts and move the emotions of the future American allies: they also set the moral climate of the war. Hitler, a mob orator, spoke a little after 1939. When he did so, it was to utter threats and insults, glorifying aggression, deriding his enemies. Churchill, by contrast, avoided threats, condemned few.… Instead, he appealed to a commonality and nobility of sentiment that took liberty as its ideal and humanity as its spirit. He always spoke, moreover, as if the ideal of liberty, though particularly incarnate in wartime Britain, was shared by all who did not actively oppose it, in this way reaching out to embrace as allies, actual or potential, all those not on Hitler’s side.…

Churchill’s message triumphed. It is perhaps the greatest of all his achievements. In 1940 his words captured the hearts of his people. In 1941, and in the years that followed, his words drowned out the drumbeat of totalitarianism that had dominated the airwaves of the dictator years, revived belief in democracy among the downtrodden, inspired a new patriotism in the defeated, created a new confidence, and transmitted a promise of victory that was believed. Morally, Churchill set the agenda of the Second World War. Its realization determined, after 1945, the future of the world.

In other words, with little hope of Britain surviving, let alone defeating the Nazis, Winston Churchill spoke victory into existence. Furthermore, it is Churchill’s agenda, realized after the Second World War and continued for eight decades, that our current crop of Nazis is desperately trying to undo.

Words really are tools of battle, as Keegan suggests. And on that battlefield, nihilistic amorality is a handicap. On that battlefield, our side has the overwhelming advantage. The bad guys know this; that’s why they took control of social media and are taking control of legacy media; they seek to throttle our words, because they understand how powerful our words are.

Words matter. My words matter, your words matter. The words of our political leaders matter, as Zohran Mamdani has shown. The words of Bad Bunny matter, and Billie Eillish, and Jane Fonda, and Mark Ruffalo, and Bruce Springsteen. The words of the Epstein survivors matter. The words of the ICE victims and their families matter. The words of pastors and priests and rabbis matter. The words of teachers and professors matter. The words of our family members matter.

The size of our platforms is not important; the only thing that matters now is that we keep speaking up and keep speaking out. With our words, we shall fight on the (Palm) Beaches, we shall fight at the open houses and the school board meetings, we shall fight in the federal courtrooms and in the streets of Minneapolis, we shall fight in front of the ICE detention centers, we shall fight at whatever public spaces Peter Thiel and Scott Bessent and Greg Bovino dare to show their ugly faces. We shall fight, and we shall never surrender.

Can words really beat Nazis? Yes. Yes, they can. And I know they can, because that’s what Winston Churchill did.

Let us, then, Dear Reader, channel Churchill. Let us speak victory into existence. Let us say the words, and keep saying them, and let us believe them until they come true.

We shall prevail.

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ICYMI

A “neat” episode of The Five 8 on Friday, with a lot of Epstein discussion. LB walks us through the offshores database and shows how she tracked down Epstein’s money, ten years ago.

And the media this week is one of our best:

Finally, I was a guest on my friend Kimberley Johnson’s Start Me Up podcast:

Enjoy the Super Bowl! I’m rooting for the team whose owner is NOT in the Epstein files…

Photo credit: Yousuf Karsh. Churchill in Ottawa, December 30, 1941.

Here is a transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning. It is Friday morning, February 6th, 5:30 a.m. here in upstate New York. I wanna talk a little bit about the gaslighting that I’m seeing happening now, with regards the Epstein files, and Epstein in general, Epstein and Trump, all of it.

I feel like the United States public is at the point of realization where they’re like, maybe they’re 10, 11 years old, and they’re starting to realize that they’re a little bit too old to believe in Santa Claus anymore. That the whole story about Santa coming down the chimney and visiting every home on Earth in one night and knowing what presents to bring and all that stuff seems a little bit too far-fetched to be real. And meanwhile, all of the media—all of the movies, all of the songs—wants everybody to believe in Santa, wants Santa to be real. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus and so on. And that’s what I feel like is happening right now.

And let me explain what I mean. We’ve been gaslit for so long about Trump, about Epstein, about this elite group of people, who have so much wealth and so much power. And now the veil has been lifted, and we can see what really happens, what really went on.

And I think there’s two things at work here. First is that the staggering evil and depravity on display—the breadth of it, the depth of it, the horrific-ness of it—is frankly difficult for people to wrap their minds around. You’re like, “They didn’t do that. How could they do that? Nobody would do that.” Therefore it must not be true, right?

So they have that on their side. The fact that their actions are so abominable, so heinous, that any person with a soul would look at it and be like, “No, that can’t happen, that can’t be real.”

But these things are real. Epstein was real. And he was a depraved, sick person who trafficked girls and made his trafficked victims available to his wealthy—I don’t even want to say friends—his targets, basically: these men who thought that he was their friend. And meanwhile, he was videotaping it the whole time.

All of it is disgusting. The fact that these men would do this, would participate in this clearly illegal, clearly disgusting thing. The fact that Epstein would have organized it to begin with and then used it as blackmail. It’s all so seedy and nasty and awful. And then the people involved. I mean, there’s a lot of very wealthy, powerful, influential people involved, from, obviously, Donald Trump, who was intimately involved, I think, in the trafficking aspect of it, as far as I can tell, as well as the rape part of it, as far as I can tell, and I’m sure other things that are gonna come out down the line.

Elon Musk has lied about how much he knew Epstein and stuff like that, and he clearly was in there, at least meeting with the guy and emailing him and trying to get in on the parties. There was an email that had Musk trying to go to the island to take advantage of what was available there. And Ghislaine wrote him, “Yeah, we’re gonna shut down the island.” Because even these guys didn’t wanna hang out with Elon Musk.

You’ve got Peter Thiel, Bannon, Epstein working—Thiel and Epstein, apparently, according to the files, working with the Russians, with the FSB, with Russian intelligence, to fuck the 2016 election—in favor of Trump, obviously. To help Putin to knock down and topple the order of things, which in itself is purely evil.

Allegations against Leon Black—I know he’s not a guy people have heard of that much. He’s one of these wealthy venture whatever-the-fuck-it-is. What do these people do that’s useful for society anyway? They just ruin everything. The allegations about Leon Black are abhorrent, and I can’t imagine they’re not true. We’ve seen them over and over and over again. He’s been, I guess all we can say, he’s been “credibly accused.” Well, he’s been credibly accused by a bunch of different people. And he’s stood by Epstein’s side gleefully for years. So we can draw our own conclusions about Leon Black.

You got the British royal family. Prince Andrew was way up in there. And they’re starting to slowly…he’s not gonna have the titles anymore, and he’s not gonna have this anymore. Not enough, not enough. He really should be—at least have a trial about all of these things, so people know the truth.

So the depth and the scale of it all, I think, is mind blowing, you know? And we’ve been taught, in the United States especially, to believe that conspiracy theories are all lies, that they’re all bullshit, right? Starting with the Santa Claus conspiracy theory. Isn’t that a conspiracy theory? There’s this fat guy in a red suit. Children sit on his lap, he comes down the chimney. Society wants us to believe that. Well, that’s a conspiracy to lie, in a sense. It’s a benign one, but it’s still a conspiracy to lie. Anyway, we’ve been trained—and Kurt Andersen wrote a whole book about this called Fantasyland, that’s wonderful—we’ve been trained to look at these things with suspicion. And anytime we start to question the official narrative about anything, we’re trained to think, “No, no, I can’t do that. I can’t go there. I don’t want to be labeled a conspiracy theorist. I’m not Alex Jones. I’m not Glenn Beck. I don’t want to be one of these guys.”

You know, I haven’t written about things that I wanted to investigate more because it’s not worth it. You know, it’s just not worth the agony of it all. Sometimes when you are down that path, you get things wrong because you are known to be somebody that’s open to reporting about this stuff. Seymour Hersh, for example—I just watched the documentary about him, I think it was on Netflix, which was really good and interesting. And he’s done it. He did a lot of really great investigative reporting, and he got some things wrong. And that’s the nature of this, because the forces that are out there trying to muddy the waters and make us not know things—the cover-up forces are enormously powerful, enormously powerful.

Anyway, we’ve been taught, we’ve been trained, and shamed, in some cases, not to go there in our brains. What we have here with Epstein is not a “conspiracy theory.” It is a legitimate conspiracy. And talking about it out loud, even now, even in this video, even after reading all of this Epstein stuff and absorbing all this Epstein stuff for months and months—probably at the risk of my mental health, frankly—I still feel crazy talking about it out loud, because it seems nuts. It seems nuts.

“You know, there’s this guy that comes out of New York, and he doesn’t go to college, but he somehow manages to work his way into the the inner workings of all these different things. He’s in there with the bankers and he’s in there with the lawyers and he’s in there with the universities and he’s in there with the tech guys and he’s in there with the scientists and he’s in there with the arms dealers. He’s in there with all the hostile foreign intelligence services and all the friendly intelligence services. And he also, by the way, is a major, major child sex trafficker.”

That doesn’t sound like something that should happen. But it did. Why did it happen? We don’t know. And the forces are gonna try to prevent us from finding out. We may never find out. But it did happen. And a lot of people were involved. And the people that are involved in the United States, for the most part, suffered zero consequences. Zero. Maybe somebody’s wife won’t talk to them at the next Met Gala or something. Woo woo, who cares? There’s no prison time, there’s no charges, there’s no fines, there’s nothing. What’s gonna happen to Leon Black? Probably nothing.

So we’re faced with that.

And the files are coming out in dribs and drabs. They’re hard to search, the PDFs are annoying. It’s just—it’s not conducive to learning stuff. Like, every time one of these things drops, I have to stop what I’m doing and I go through. And I don’t go through meticulously, I just pick them at random and see what I can find. And I immediately, if I see something interesting, I screenshot it and I put it up on social media because somebody else might find it useful. And this is not healthy, you know?

The dribs and drabs release system is designed also to fuck with our brains. You know, it’s certainly hurting mine, because I can’t have any peace until this is all out and done. I mean, I could. I could ignore it, but that’s not what the purpose of this whole enterprise is, right? So I think that is also part of the gaslighting, you know, not just releasing the fucking thing in one piece in a way that makes sense. You know, here’s a file that’s all Leon Black. Here’s a file that’s all Ian Osborne. (That’s a name that nobody’s gonna talk about, but he’s in there a lot and I think probably is way more important than anyone realizes, but nobody’s gonna talk about that. We’re gonna focus on other people, most likely.)

So we have all of that. We’re all getting tired, we’re exhausting ourselves, trying to make sense of this. And the whole time there’s a very powerful voice in our head saying, “This sounds crazy. You sound bananas even talking about this as being something that’s happening in real life.”

But now we’ve also seen in Europe, across the pond, where the gaslighting about Epstein and certainly about Trump and Epstein isn’t nearly as pervasive, the Europeans are not treating it the way that we are. If somebody is mentioned in the Epstein files a bunch of times in a bad way, they resign. The guy from Slovakia, the foreign minister, whatever he is, resigned immediately. That’s a country that, you know, the president or prime minister, whatever the head of Slovakia is, is a Trumpy guy. Doesn’t matter. That guy resigned at once.

In Norway, you had a bunch of people. This guy, what’s his name? Thornebjorn Jaglund, who was the prime minister and other things, was very close with Epstein, apparently, based on the files. You know, he stepped down from whatever he’s doing now. The Crown Princess Mette, whatever her name is, is in there talking about Epstein. She’s issued statements.

In France, people have resigned. In the UK, Peter Mandelson, who they call the Prince of Darkness—appropriately, because he’s one of Epstein’s fucking friends. You know, he had to step down from certain jobs and now apparently there’s a criminal investigation into him. Which didn’t take long, know? Stuff came out and they opened a criminal investigation. That’s what you’re supposed to do with these things.

So we’re seeing the normal behavior in Europe. We’re seeing individual people behave with honor. We’re seeing governments actually open investigations. France opened an investigation. Norway, Slovakia. Lithuania is opening an investigation. Latvia is opening an investigation. Poland is opening an investigation. And that’s, I think, the big one. Tusk, who’s again kind of, you know, allied a little bit more with Trump than some of these other leaders, wants to know what happened. There were Polish girls, apparently, that were mentioned in these files that were taken from Krakow. And he says, we’re opening an investigation and we’re going to find out what the deal is with this. And he said openly that this appears to be—Epstein’s entire operation appears to be a KGB honeypot trap. And Epstein appears to be working for the Russians. This is a world leader in Poland saying this.

And let me tell you something. Unlike here in the United States, if people in Poland find out stuff about the Russians, they are not going to be afraid of them. They’re not going to kowtow. They’re not going to tiptoe around it. They’re going to come out with it. That’s just how it’s going to be over there.

So all of these European countries are behaving the way that normal countries are supposed to behave. You know, we’re like the little kids saying, “Well now, Santa Claus is maybe real.” And then we look over there and our 16 year old cousin is like, “What are you, high? No, it’s not real. Why would you even believe that? Why would you believe that?” And we’re opening up to the reality now. We’re seeing the reality in the picture and it’s starting to dawn on us. We’re also like Kimmie Schmidt at the beginning of The Unbreakable Kimmie Schmidt, which is a great show, where she’s in this underground bunker cult for years and then they rescue her and she comes out into the sunlight and everything that she’s known is wrong. And she has to kind of navigate what’s real, what’s not real, what’s true, what’s not true, what they told her, what they didn’t tell her, all that stuff. It’s a comedy, but it’s the same idea.

It’s like you have to basically stand back and question everything you know about reality and what you think you believe. I had that situation personally in my life when I had a break-up with my girlfriend in college. I think it was sophomore year. And I was so messed up after that that I really had to stop and tear down my belief system because I didn’t know what I believed anymore. I’m talking about politics now. I had to stop and re-examine and re-evaluate everything from scratch.

And I think that’s what the American people need to do now. And certainly here at PREVAIL, I am trying to help everybody do that. But I’m doing it at the same time. We’re all going through the same kind of process here of re-examining everything and starting at square one, with founding principles, and building on that.

I don’t think that there should be kings. I don’t think that there should be a cabal of rich billionaire oligarch assholes who run everything. I don’t think there should be billionaires. I think we should tax the fuck out of these people to pay for things that we need. I think that the allocation of wealth is disgusting. And I think that anybody that treats girls the way that these people treated them shouldn’t have any money at all, or any freedom at all—let alone the grotesque amounts of money that they have and the freedom that they enjoy. Even Epstein, when he got arrested, being able to come and go out of the prison, just thumbing his nose at it, is disgusting. Disgusting.

And of course we have Trump saying, “Well the files exonerate me. They prove I’m innocent,” or whatever he said. And you have Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, formerly Trump’s lawyer, saying, “We’re not gonna have any new investigations, we’ve looked through it, no new charges are gonna be filed based on the Epstein files information. There’s nothing there.” And then he said also, on TV, he said, “It’s not against the law to party with Epstein.” That’s what he said. This is the guy that’s supposed to be in charge of justice. In charge of justice! I really do want somebody to ask him that if, when he went to see Ghislaine Maxwell and interviewed her in the deposition that he did a couple months ago, if they hooked up. I seriously want somebody to ask him that, just to see how he’ll react and how he’ll respond. He is an awful, evil man. I mean, evil. At this point in time, at this point, after all that we know and all that we’ve done and all that we’ve lived through, to sit there and lie like that, when you have the power to actually do good…I don’t, I can’t even.

It’s hard for me to wrap my brain around why people would do this at all. It just doesn’t make sense. I can’t understand it. And as a novelist, I try to get into people’s heads that way and understand their motivations. And I try to have sympathy and empathy and all that and see things from other people’s points of view. I don’t understand their point of view here. I don’t get it. I don’t understand how anyone can behave this way. Unless they’re evil or crazy or both. Or just completely amoral.

I forget who was talking about amorality as opposed to immorality and that an amoral person—which is somebody that, as was once described of Epstein, has no moral compass—an amoral person is harder for normal people to understand than an immoral person. Because we understand the bad guy in the movie, who just wants to do evil. What’s harder to understand is the person who just has no scruples, just doesn’t care, just blows with the wind and has no compunction and sleeps well at night no matter what. I’m sure Todd Blanche sleeps fine at night. I’m sure Donald Trump does too. We like to say, “He’s gonna be shamed.” No, he’s not. He’s not gonna be shamed. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care.

So that’s where I’m at with this, and I feel like, looking at everything, we’re at a moment where it could be a moment of revelation here. It could be a “road to Damascus” moment for the American people. Will it be? I don’t know. I don’t know, because there’s still tremendously powerful forces that want this story, or the extent of the story, not to come out. Not to come out about Trump, obviously, but also about all the other people mentioned in there.

I mean, you look at the money that these people have, the money Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Bill Gates—the net worth if you total them is something like a trillion dollars! That’s a lot of money And who are we to fighting against that? Who are we?

That doesn’t mean that we’re gonna stop fighting or stop trying to arrive at the truth and understand what happened We’re gonna keep doing that until we know what it is that we’re dealing with here. And how we might be able to make it so that the people doing these evil deeds—I know that sounds sort of Biblical and Shakespearean, these evildoers, it’s a George W. Bush word, these evildoers. But how else to describe them? They are people who do evil, they are evildoers. Until the evildoers are brought to justice and experience consequences for what they did.

And that’s the part that burns me. I want to see consequences. We all want to see consequences. Not only because we want the justice to be served, but also because having consequences proves that this is all real. It proves that it’s real. It proves that the cult was just bullshit. It proves that no, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus.

Have a good weekend everybody. Check out The Five 8 tonight. We’re gonna be talking about the Epstein offshores. LB’s gonna take us through some of the offshore leaks shell game stuff, which is gonna be totally fascinating.

Have a good weekend and until next time: we shall prevail.

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A tale of princes, presidents, and predators.

We’ve seen characters like this before. They are uncommon but not unheard of. They emerge out of nowhere and Tom Ripley their way into the highest strata of society. They speak into existence their own importance. They are relentless in their quest for fame and fortune and power. They collect influential friends and amass vast wealth, for sport. Their background doesn’t check out, but no one seems to mind as long as the checks clear and the champagne flows. And then, one day, inevitably, it all comes crashing down.

Jay Gatsby is one such character. He came from nothing, traveled abroad, cavorted with criminals, built a fortune, went to great lengths to conceal the humble details of his past. He was decadent, but his tastes ran to the nouveau riche. He was interested only in himself. He believed the rules did not apply to him. He could be generous and charming, but beneath the veneer of old-sport respectability was insecurity, self-loathing, and rage. He lived the American dream and the American nightmare. He died a violent death. Gatsby is fictitious, of course, but the elements are all the same—and isn’t much of Epstein’s story also a work of fiction?

Epstein is a real-life Gatsby, but a poisoned Gatsby, a Daisyless Gatsby, a Gatsby without the green light, a Gatsby from hell. He is a magic trick inverted. Now you don’t see him, now you do. One day he’s just there, in the thick of it all, possessor of an opulent Upper East Side townhouse, the most expensive residence in all of Gotham. He could not have acquired such a signature property if he was not rich. That’s what everyone thinks, at least. That’s the rationale. If he lives there, he must be legit. Money can’t buy you everything, but it can certainly bring you the benefit of the doubt.

Rumors fly, but as with Gatsby, the rumors are little more than speculation. He’ a financier, is what the papers say. He must be very good at whatever it is he does. He must know how to play the markets. He must know how to invest. He must have the wealthiest clients in the world. He must be a magician with money. Rabbit from a hat. Now you don’t see it, now you do.

Even now, we don’t fully know the origin of the money. Was he the beneficiary of the largesse of his earliest patron, the garment industry magnate? Was he a new-wave Meyer Lansky, laundering vast sums for organized crime? Was he an arms dealer—or rather, a broker between arms buyers and arms sellers, a conduit to move money without detection? Was he a modern-day pirate, his entire fortune purloined from some secret CIA slush fund? We don’t really know. We may never know.

We do know about the posh mansion at 9 East 71st Street, just off Central Park, same neighborhood as Woody Allen and Bill Cosby. The townhouse is, essentially, a gift from the garment industry magnate: the underwear mogul, destroyer of healthy body images, prime mover of the insidious trend of female models to look less like voluptuous adult women and more like prepubescent boys. He and the garment industry magnate are close: intimates, some say, the same word used to describe the slinky wares the garment industry magnate has on offer. Pretty underage girls admire the young women (who look like younger boys) who model the underwear. He uses this as a recruitment tool. I can make you a model for my friend the garment industry magnate. I can make you famous. In the early years, the clumsy years, this is how he operates. He makes promises he has no intention of keeping.

He develops a persona. He hides behind a cloak of money and mystery. He eschews suits and ties for more casual clothes. He cultivates friendships with high-powered individuals at the top of their fields: scientists, attorneys, politicians, actors, writers. He throws dinner parties, salons really, where these individuals can meet and talk shop. The conversations are stimulating. That’s his primary function: to bring interesting people together and make everything stimulating.

The socialite, so-called, is on hand for most of these parties. She is with him all the time, but the nature of their relationship is hard to define. Are they boyfriend and girlfriend? Business partners? Just close friends? Journalists can’t decide, and no one cares enough to press the issue.

There are rumors, but the rumors are mostly speculation. He likes the rumors. The rumors cultivate mystique. There were rumors about Gatsby, too. They say he killed a man. What he will wind up doing is much, much worse, and can’t be articulated so simply.

[READ MORE]

A survey of the rich & powerful individuals who elevated Jeffrey Epstein, hired him, funded him, enabled him, befriended him, and/or partook of his services.

Jeffrey Epstein was not a self-made man. His success, especially in the early days, depended on the largesse of the rich and powerful men and women with whom he curried favor. He was an opportunist. His genius, if we can call it that, lay in cultivating and leveraging relationships with important people, both in the United States and around the world. He made himself indispensable to these individuals.

Along the way, he invented his own mythology. Epstein the genius. Epstein the intellectually curious. Epstein the financial wizard. All carefully crafted mythos. All bullshit.

Below is the real “Epstein list.” Not the men accused of raping and sexually abusing the girls trafficked by him and Ghislaine Maxwell—although there may well be a significant overlap on that odious Venn diagram. Here is a list, long but hardly exhaustive, of the individuals who elevated him, who hired him, who funded him, who enabled him, who befriended him, who partook of his services, and, in some cases, were his partners in crime.

Let me be clear, right up front, that the inclusion of the names below DOES NOT imply guilt of rape or sexual abuse or any other crime, and should not be construed as such.

With that said, it strains credulity to believe that all of these very smart, very successful, very well-connected people had no inkling of Epstein’s ephebophiliac predilections. Anyone who set foot in his mansion in New York or his house in Palm Beach could see it in the décor. And, like, he called his private jet the “Lolita Express!” None of these Ivy League graduates were familiar with Nabokov?

Epstein hid what he was doing, sure—but not so well that, when he pleaded guilty in 2008, those who knew him were not much surprised. One of his friends even wrote, in the “birthday book” Maxwell put together for his 50th birthday in 2003, a limerick on the subject: “Jeffrey at half a century / with credentials plenipotentiary / though up to no good / whenever he could / has avoided the penitentiary.” That’s nothing but a rhyming version of the old lewd joke that “15 will get you 20.”

How could they not have known? Really—how?

As Annie Farmer, one of Jeffrey’s first known victims, said at the Lawmakers and Epstein Survivors Press Conference last week, “For so many years, it felt like Epstein’s criminal behavior was an open secret. Not only did many others participate in the abuse, it is clear that many were aware of his interest in girls and very young women and chose to look the other way because it benefited them to do so. They wanted access to his circle and his money.”

Eternal shame on everyone who participated in this evil—or who looked the other way.

[READ MORE]

Ramble On: “The Epstein Files,” Season Finale
November 15, 2025

What will the release of the Epstein files reveal? What surprises might we be in store for? Here are some possibilities.

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The first installment of a mammoth Epstein Q&A, featuring Ghislaine Maxwell, Douglas Leese, Adnan Khashoggi, Robert Maxwell, Ehud Barak, Prince Andrew, Les Wexner, and much more.

Jeffrey Epstein is unknowable—by design.

Unlike the bombastic Robert Maxwell, his model if not his mentor, Epstein kept a low profile. For decades, none of us peasants had ever heard of him—and if we had, he was yet another reclusive “financier,” indistinguishable from the other eccentric UHNWIs who live in those Bruce Wayne mansions on Billionaire’s Row.

If not for Virginia Guiffre and the other survivors; the indefatigable Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown; and, of course, Donald Trump (basically the schmuck in Goodfellas who after being expressly warned not to flash his money after the Lufthansa heist bought the pink Cadillac and the fur coats), would we even be aware of Epstein’s existence?

For decades, the press all but ignored him. There was the “Bachelor of the Year” snippet in Cosmopolitan in 1980, the Landon Thomas Jr. feature in New York magazine in 2002 (Trump: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”), and a year later, Vicky Ward’s “The Talented Mr. Epstein” profile for Vanity Fair—shorn, at the eleventh hour, and over her vehement objections, of the bit about Epstein’s sexual abuse of the Farmer sisters, ostensibly because her editor didn’t think it was “earth-shattering” that Epstein was sexually abusing a 16-year-old.

Aside from the occasional mention in the New York tabloids, usually citing Epstein’s proximity to Bill Clinton or Trump, that was about it. There was so little about him in print that the Palm Beach Post reporter filing the July 2006 news story about his indictment for solicitation got him mixed up with another Jeffrey Epstein—one who wrote bad checks.

Even now, after God knows how many articles and podcasts and Michael Wolff media hits, what do we really know about Jeffrey Epstein? What can we say for certain?

• For many years, he and Ghislaine Maxwell ran an industrial-scale child sex trafficking operation.

• He was the “closest friend” of Donald Trump, who is currently moving heaven and earth to keep his activities with Epstein under wraps.

• His name was on JPMorgan Chase’s “Wall of Cash,” because he made the firm so much money.

• There were over a billion dollars’ worth of suspicious transactions on his accounts at JPMorgan Chase—and that was only one of the banks he regularly used.

• Dozens upon dozens of rich and powerful people—among them Larry Summers, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, Kathryn Ruemmler, and Jes Staley—remained in close contact with him, well after his monstrous sex crimes became impossible to claim ignorance of.

• Most of the rich and famous people in his orbit did not participate in sex crimes—as far as we know.

The child sex trafficking operation is so abominable, so unthinkably awful—and, critically, so well documented by the accounts of so many survivors—that it demands the lion’s share of the media’s attention. And rightly so. Release the files! Expose every last one of those monsters!

But for Epstein—and this is painful to write and ugly to contemplate—the sex trafficking was a sideline from his core business. Because there’s one more thing we know for certain about Jeffrey Epstein:

• Sometime between 1981, when he left Bear Stearns, and 1991, when he joined forces with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein went from being a rich dude to a wealthy dude. He leveled up.

Graydon Carter, Vicky Ward’s then-editor at Vanity Fair, justified the excision of the Farmer sex abuse allegations in that 2003 feature by telling her, “I think the money thing is more interesting.”

The money thing is not more interesting. The money thing, on the contrary, is intentionally boring. Half the reason offshores are so hard to unravel is because tracking shell company upon shell company upon shell company in tax haven upon tax haven upon tax haven is mind-numbingly dull. As the sociologist Brooke Harrington reports in her excellent book Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, “Even those who do specialize in this system sometimes use the term MEGO (My Eyes Glazeth Over) to describe it.”

So no, the money thing is not more interesting. But it is more important to understanding what Jeffrey Epstein really was.

[READ MORE]

The second installment of a mammoth Epstein Q&A, featuring Ghislaine Maxwell, Robert Maxwell, Semion Mogilevich, Bill Barr, Donald Barr, Les Wexner, Melania Trump, Jean-Luc Brunel, and much more.

Speaking of Robert Maxwell—if Ghislaine has some financial stake in CargoMetrics, it would not be the first time that a Maxwell family member made money from cutting-edge computer software that would be of interest to foreign intelligence agencies, organized crime syndicates, and terrorist groups.

Oh?

As Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon extensively cover in Robert Maxwell: Israel’s Superspy, her father, Robert Maxwell, was the exclusive salesman for PROMIS, a cutting-edge spy software.² This represented a sizable chunk of his income during the 1980s, the authors suggest.

Originally developed in the 70s for the Justice Department to integrate cases in the byzantine U.S. legal system, the software was purloined by Mossad, souped up, repurposed, fitted with a “backdoor,” and made available to Maxwell’s various and sundry contacts in the foreign intelligence services. In time, all of those spy networks ran PROMIS. (Mustn’t have a Cutting-Edge Spy Software Gap!)

But Robert Maxwell didn’t limit himself to spooks. As Thomas and Dillon explain,

In October 2001, a month after the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York and the attack on the Pentagon in Washington by al-Qaeda suicide bombers, it emerged that the man who controlled them, Osama bin Laden, had acquired a copy of the still highly secret PROMIS software.

The version of PROMIS provided to bin Laden came from a former FBI agent, Robert Hanssen. For years he had been a Russian spy inside the FBI. He had passed over the latest version of PROMIS to his handlers in Moscow. They had sold on a copy to Simeon Mogilevich for a reputed sum of $3 million. He had sold it on to bin Laden for an undisclosed price.

….

As Gail Kligman, a professor of Sociology and Director Designate of the Center for European and Eurasian Studies at UCLA, noted in a talk in 2005:

The collapse of communism that began in 1989 provided new resources—geographical and human—for the sex trade, increasingly incorporating women from Eastern Europe. One of the most striking images of the changes soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall was that of women lining the highways offering sex for sale. Political and economic liberalization as well as internal and international militarism created new opportunity structures and daunting economic uncertainties that produced both a demand for and a supply of sex workers in and from Eastern Europe. Most of these sex workers have been and are women and girls.

Robert Maxwell was, per Superspy, an avid customer in the Bulgarian sex trade on his frequent visits to Sofia. As I mentioned, one of his business partners in the years before his death in 1991 was Semion Mogilevich—who, as the FBI explains (boldface mine),

has been a transnational organized crime boss active for many years operating from Russia and various other countries. In 1995, the Russian Ministry of the Interior (MVD) identified Mogilevich as the boss of more than 300 criminal associates operating in more than thirty countries in Europe, Asia, and North America. Mogilevich’s criminal organization engaged in a wide variety of criminal activity, included murder, extortion, trafficking in women for prostitution, weapons trafficking, money laundering, bank and securities fraud, and, in numerous countries, the corruption of public officials.

Was Robert Maxwell’s involvement with Eastern European prostitutes not confined to his own personal pleasure? Was he also part of the Mogilevich sex trafficking operation? And if so, was his (hypothetical) stake in that sex trafficking operation Ghislaine’s real inheritance?

In other words, was the Epstein/GMax sex trafficking operation just an extension of a potential Mogilevich/RMax sex trafficking operation? And if so, might that have been a major source of Epstein’s income?

Because, again: there’s no evidence of Epstein engaging in child sex trafficking before he teamed up with Ghislaine.

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The third installment of a mammoth Epstein Q&A, featuring new Oversight photos, Russians, scientists, lawyers, bankers, properties—and, perhaps, an heir apparent

Was Epstein working for the Russians?

Jeffrey Epstein worked with the Russians, for sure. He wasn’t working for them. He also worked with the Israelis—specifically AMAN, the military intelligence unit once headed by his old chum Ehud Barak. But he wasn’t working for them. Nor was he working for MI6, or the Saudis, or the CIA (despite what he was telling women back in the 80s). I don’t think he had any allegiance to any one country, intelligence service, or person—other than himself.

Jeffrey Epstein was working for Jeffrey Epstein, just like Robert Maxwell was working for Robert Maxwell.

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The fourth & final installment of a mammoth Epstein Q&A, in which we ask: Why won’t Trump release the Epstein files? What’s he so afraid of? What could possibly be worse than what we already know?

We already know Trump is a serial sexual assailant. We know he’s an adjudicated rapist. We know he’s a felon, convicted on 34 counts. We know he’s a Kremlin stooge. We know he launders money for the Russian mob. We know he comes from the world of organized crime. We know he’s a rat.

We know he was best buddies with Epstein for at least a decade and a half—that he partied with him and shared an interest in underaged girls. We know he allowed Epstein and GMax to “steal”—his word—girls from Mar-a-Lago for them to traffic and rape.

We know all of that already. None of it has moved the needle. Part of the White House has fallen, but Trump remains.

We also know that whatever’s in the Epstein files is very very very bad—worse than any of the stuff we already know. That’s been trickling out in reporting by David Shuster and Allison Gill, among others.

We know there’s a push within the Bureau to disclose what’s in those files. We know this because Jason Leopold’s FOIA request about the FBI’s review and redaction of the Epstein files was cranked out in record time; it can take many months, and sometimes years, to get replies to FOIA requests, and many of them bring back little of value. Leopold got this one back in a matter of weeks, and it was enlightening.

Finally, we know that Donald Trump never wants the Epstein files to see the light of day. He’s genuinely terrified that what’s contained there will end his presidency. Why else would his lickspittle Kash Patel authorize $851,344 in overtime for FBI agents to redact Donald’s name from the documents?

So the question we have to ask ourselves is, hypothetically speaking, what could possibly be worse—I mean, like, orders of magnitude more damning—than what we already know? Because what we already know is awful.

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Morning thoughts on Epstein, Trump, banks, banking, financial scandals, and following the money

The dark ecosystem that created both Donald and Jeffrey: A conversation with Stephanie Koff about the world beneath.

Stephanie Koff, Jen Taub and I get to the bottom of the Epstein mysteries: his start with the intelligence services, the hidden meaning behind the email exchanges, Bubba, and much more.

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Child sex trafficking networks can’t operate without money. Epstein’s financial services were provided by some of the nation’s biggest banks. Here’s 12 things the banks teach us about Jeffrey Epstein.

The last time Mike Johnson, the Speaker [sic] of the House, spoke to Democrats about ending the government shutdown was on October 8—almost three full weeks ago. Since then, he has appeared many times on TV, lying so shamelessly, so egregiously, and so gleefully about his motives for grinding the legislature to a halt that you half expect the God he claims to worship to turn him into a pillar of salt.

One must be gullible’s-not-in-the-dictionary-level naïve, willfully ignorant, or actively stupid to believe that Johnson’s obdurate refusal to re-convene the House—with funding for SNAP benefits ending on Saturday! with American families preparing to starve!—is not related to the impending vote on the discharge petition to release the files related to the late child sex trafficker and so-called “financier” Jeffrey Epstein.

Let me put that more succinctly: At Trump’s behest, Mike Johnson has shut down the entire House of Representatives, during a moment of national crisis, rather than risk allowing the Epstein documents to come out. A recent former GOP Speaker is literally a convicted pedophile, yet somehow the current Speaker is even more all-in on covering up pedophilia.

Donald Trump is so confident in his own political impenetrability that he’s reduced the East Wing of the White House to rubble—but the release of the Epstein files scares the shit out of him, so much so that he is considering granting a pardon to Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Words fail to describe how bat-shit this all is.

The day after that last meeting between Johnson and Senate Democrats, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), in his capacity as Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, sent letters to four of the nation’s largest banks requesting records related to more than $1.5 billion in suspicious financial transactions flagged by said banks tied to sex trafficking crimes committed by Epstein and Maxwell.

The press release is instructive, and worth reading carefully:

The letters to JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America and Bank of New York Mellon come after Judiciary Republicans blocked Democrats’ attempts to subpoena these records on September 17 during the Committee’s hearing with Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel. When JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon heard of the efforts to seek documents from his bank, he stated that he “regret[s] any association with that man at all,” and that “what happened to those women is terrible.” These letters seek to take Mr. Dimon up on his words of contrition and ensure that JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and Bank of New York Mellon help Congress understand how Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their co-conspirators were able to use their banks to operate their international sex trafficking ring.

Under the Bank Secrecy Act, financial institutions are required to file Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) within 60 days of detecting transactions that raise red flags. Yet, all four banks with close financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein repeatedly failed to take timely action for years, potentially allowing his criminal activity to remain undetected.

“Financial institutions are often the first line of defense in detecting serious federal crimes, especially the ones that involve significant flows of money like sex trafficking. Flagging and detecting Mr. Epstein’s suspicious withdrawals may well have stopped his crimes years earlier and saved countless girls and women from a fateful interaction with the criminals Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and their co-conspirators. If you truly regret JPMorgan’s shameful association with Mr. Epstein, we trust that you will work with us to promptly produce these records and help us ensure that neither your bank nor any other American bank ever again enables and bankrolls a criminal sex trafficking ring like Epstein’s,” wrote Ranking Member Raskin in the letter to JPMorgan.

JP Morgan processed over one billion in suspicious transactions over the course of its fifteen year relationship with Mr. Epstein.

“For over fifteen years, JPMorgan turned a blind eye to evidence of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking. Senior executives at your bank helped Mr. Epstein open 134 accounts and processed over one billion dollars in transactions for Mr. Epstein, including after his 2008 conviction for soliciting minors,” wrote Ranking Member Raskin in the letter to JPMorgan.

Most of the coverage on Jeffrey Epstein has focused on his monstrous child sex trafficking operation—and rightly so. It is because of the courage of survivors like Courtney Wild and the late Virginia Guiffre, whose memoir came out last week, that we know as much as we do about his criminal enterprise.

But the child sex trafficking operation could not have run without money—lots of money. During his shadowy career in “finance,” Epstein somehow accumulated a fortune. He owned properties in New York, Paris, Palm Beach, New Mexico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He had a private jet. He had wealthy “clients” like Lex Wexner and Leon Black shoveling dough at him.

And, as Raskin’s letter shows, Epstein processed over $1,500,000,000 in transactions his banks flagged as suspicious—that’s more than a billion and a half dollars!—including the withdrawal of vast sums of cash he used to pay off his victims. The numbers boggle the mind, and hint at the scope and scale of the heinous enterprise.

Without the cooperation of his banks, this would not have been possible.

Of the four big banks, JPMorgan Chase is arguably the one with the most skin in the game. During his many years as a top executive with the firm, the disgraced banker James Edward “Jes” Staley, once the presumptive heir apparent to longtime CEO Jamie Dimon, developed what appears to be a close personal friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, which Epstein cultivated and manipulated to his advantage. This, I suspect, is why Dimon is singled out in Raskin’s press release.

In September, a month before Raskin’s letters went out, the veteran journalists David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg—who have been digging into Epstein’s finances for more than half a decade—published a lengthy investigative piece in the New York Times Magazine under the not-so-subtle title, “How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.” Raskin cites revelations in that article in his letter to Dimon, in which he requests JPMorgan to voluntarily turn over:

1. All documents and information related to any transaction identified by JPMorgan for further review, inspection, or discussion relating to Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, or any of their minor victims, whether or not eventually flagged, raised, or provided to federal regulators in any fashion;

2. All communications to or from Jes Staley, Mary Erdoes, and Justin Nelson related to Jeffrey Epstein;

3. All documents and records related to decisions relating to Jeffrey Epstein’s account, including but not limited to any discussions, meetings, or decisions made regarding whether to maintain Mr. Epstein as a client or suspend or cease the banking relationship;

4. All internal communications within JPMorgan and all affiliated institutions regarding Jeffrey Epstein, including but not limited to his investigation and conviction in 2008, potential institutional risk relating his banking relationship, or other compliance risks;

5. All internal risk assessments and due diligence reports for all Jeffrey Epstein- or Ghislaine Maxwell-related accounts or transactions; and

6. All communications with federal regulators or law enforcement agencies regarding Mr. Epstein or Ms. Maxwell from 1998 to present.

Unfortunately, because of the aforementioned pedophilia-simping by Mike Johnson and the other House Republicans, Raskin was unable to subpoena these documents. All he can do is ask nicely and hope for the best; Dimon is at liberty to simply crumple up the letter and toss it in the trash.

While we wait for JPMorgan to produce the requested documents, or Mike Johnson to re-convene the House, or Godot to show up, I thought it would be instructive to comb through the Times article, and other in-depth pieces about Epstein’s finances.

Here are 12 things the banks teach us about Jeffrey Epstein.

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Jes Staley, Jeffrey Epstein, and the making of the world’s largest child sex-trafficking enterprise.

Follow the money, and inevitably, you end up at the bank.

In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, that bank, more often than not, is JP Morgan Chase—or “JPEpstein Chase,” as I call it.

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Dimon SAR Forever: The “Wall of Cash” Memo
November 21, 2025

JPMorgan Chase is the subject of a damning report by the Senate Finance Committee’s senior investigator, who is looking into the bank’s long & prosperous relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

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Musings on Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, Evelyn Nesbit, and Jay Gatsby.

He was dashing, charming, talented, and brash: a self-made man of wealth and distinction, whose power and influence extended well beyond New York City. He lived there, in Manhattan, in a lavish but oddly decorated mansion. He knew everyone there was to know, and he used his social network to great advantage. Those who had not made his acquaintance wanted to, because to know him, to socialize with him, to befriend him, was to enter society’s inner sanctum, that most rarified of worlds, where sex, money, and power were all on offer, there for the taking.

But he had a secret—an open secret, among the well-heeled New Yorkers who traveled in that exclusive class: He liked girls. Young girls. And he preyed upon them, using his wealth, and his influence, and his preternatural powers of seduction to have his way with them. He was especially well connected in the world of fashion and theater. When he felt like it, he would help the girls who were his victims land modeling deals or plum roles in Broadway shows. This was a valuable tool for recruiting and grooming the girls he desired.

His fancy apartments were tailored to suit his debauched lifestyle. One of the vast rooms was painted dark green: walls, floor, ceiling. From the extravagantly high ceiling hung a swing, a child’s swing, the kind you see at a playground, but with a seat made of soft red velvet. He would use this to lure his victims in. Who wouldn’t want to swing on a red velvet swing inside one of the toniest residences in New York?

Dark rumors swirled around him like cigar smoke. Those in the know were also complicit, and thus had no great urge to spill the beans; those who suspected could only go on intuition and rumor—and it was easier to forget about it than to call him out. And so his predation continued, year after year after year, from one century into the next.

It was only after his death—such a violent, unusual, headline-making death!—that the full extent of his dissolution became known. And it became known to everybody. The public was curious, the press coverage was massive, and the massive press coverage only made the public more curious to know the answer to the question: How had he operated so wantonly, and for so long, without being detected?

One biographer explained: “The process of seduction was a major feature of his obsession with sex, and it was an inexorable kind of seduction which moved into the lives of very young women, sometimes barely pubescent girls, in fragile social and financial situations—girls who would be unlikely to resist his power and his money and his considerable charm, who would feel that they had little choice but to let him take over their lives… [he] would sometimes adopt the role of a paternal benefactor, and then would take advantage of the trust and gratitude that had been built.”

A famous writer—a novelist and essayist—denounced the pervert’s sociopathic habit of “eagerly and diligently and ravenously and remorselessly hunting young girls to their destruction,” and charged, with thinly veiled contempt, “These facts have been well known in New York for many years, but they have never been openly proclaimed until now.”

The name of the man who lured young girls to their destruction, and who died under such violent and unusual and headline-making circumstances, was, of course, Stanford White.

A lifelong New Yorker born in 1853, White was the most prominent architect at the famous firm of McKim, Mead & White, and the designer of some of Manhattan’s most recognizable buildings, including the old Madison Square Garden and the arch in Washington Square Park. He was also what at the turn of the last century was called a “roué” and is now called a “serial sexual predator.” Notoriously, he belonged to a secret cabal of rich, influential, and concupiscent New Yorkers known as the Sewer Club, whose libertine members regularly debauched themselves at orgies. White was the Dionysian figure at the center of the bacchanal, the dynamo of all of that depravity.

A full century before another man of wealth and mystery came along—also a sick pedophile with a swing in his Manhattan mansion!—there was Stanford White, with his red hair, his fine clothes, his quick wit, his boyish charm, and a mustache that looked like someone snipped off an entire horse’s tail and glued it to his upper lip. He was the city’s first Jeffrey Epstein.

[READ MORE]

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The photos are all from the Epstein files.

Dear Reader,

Last night I took a cab from Neukölln, where the coin show is located, to Charlottenburg, in West Berlin, a more upscale and historic neighborhood, where I planned to spend my last day in town.

The radio was tuned to a Top 40 station. The lyrics of the song were something like, “Hold me—hold me as if it were the last time.” Pretty cliché, as song lyrics go, but for some reason I thought about what he was singing—really thought about what it meant: what it would feel like to hold someone for the last time. And I could feel my eyes well up.

These days, it doesn’t take much to make me cry.

The song ended, and there were some commercials, followed by the news: all in German, of course, so I couldn’t understand what they were saying. What, I wondered, would the top news story of the day be in Berlin?

And then in the midst of all the German, there were English words that I recognized: Minneapolis. Violence. Trump. And I thought: This horrible man is inescapable. Everywhere people are talking about him. And still, the full extent of the danger seems to be beyond the grasp of too many Americans.

The window of my hotel room is equipped with a wide sill designed to sit on. Peering down at Budapester Straße below, I could see the ruins of an old church—the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, I discovered. It was commissioned in the late 19th century by the Kaiser—a Trump-like figure in many ways: a fake-tough, nepo-baby attention whore, incapable of self-reflection, whose utter ineptitude led to the collapse of the country. He named it after his grandfather. That he and his grandfather had the same name was, I’m sure, just a coincidence.

Designed in the neo-Romanesque style by the great architect Franz Schwechten, it stood for 50 years, as the city built up around it, as this part of town became a great cultural center. And then, during the Battle of Berlin in 1943, the Royal Air Force inadvertently bombed the church. Some of the walls were blown off, the stones took mortar damage, and the inside of the tower was destroyed. The ruins became known as the hohle Zahn, or Hollow Tooth.

After the war, it was decided to preserve the ruins, as a Memorial Against War. (That Kaiser Wilhelm II was arguably the individual most responsible for starting the First World War only underscores the point of the memorial.)

This morning I braved the single-digit-Fahrenheit cold, and the thin layer of sidewalk ice that even native Berliners have been slipping and falling on all week, to take a closer look at the ruins. You can still see the damage, including the blackened stone:

The church is smack-dab in the middle of the Breitscheidplatz, surrounded by the modern buildings of West Berlin—including the new church, designed by Egon Eiermann in 1959, built around the ruins.

From the time the church was constructed until 1947, the square was called Auguste-Viktoria-Platz. The name was changed after the war, to honor the memory of Rudolf Breitscheid, a Independent Social Democratic Party politician, economist, interior minister, pacifist, advocate for reconciliation with France, staunch anti-fascist, and member of the Lutetia Circle—the anti-Hitler Committee for the Preparation of a German Popular Front.

When the Nazis came to power in March 1933, Breitscheid fled to Paris. (Like Trump, Hitler was fond of petty gestures; for example, he stripped Breitscheid of his German citizenship in 1933, leaving him stateless, and had the University of Marburg revoke his doctorate a few years later.) When the Nazis took Paris, Breitscheid fled to Marseilles, hoping to find passage to the United States. Before he could get out, the Vichy police arrested him and turned him over to the Gestapo. He was sent first to Sachsenhausen, outside of Berlin, and then to Buchenwald, in which concentration camp he died.

His only crime was wanting to live in a country not run by Nazis.

Last night, my friend Gal sent me a video produced by the New York Times. Schoolmates of five-year-old Liam Ramos—read: young children—shared letters they’d written about ICE, and talked about Liam, who remains in custody in Texas. (A federal judge did rule that he and his father had to be released…but since when does the ICE Gestapo listen to judges?)

I watched it, and I couldn’t stop crying. Not because of the profound sadness of it all—the unfairness, the cruelty, the utter lack of humanity of the ICE agents and the Trump regime—but because I realized that the kids in the video were taking an enormous risk being filmed like that. They were putting themselves in danger. And in doing so, they were demonstrating far more courage than most of the grown-ups in the country.

To survive the Trump Redux will require bravery. It will require the courage of our convictions. It will require sacrifice. Not all of us will survive. There will be Rudolf Breitscheids—people of high character and unswerving moral principle fed into the Nazi killing machine. Indeed, there already have been.

The alarm bells are loudly ringing. If only enough people hear them. . .

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Photo credit: Yours Truly.