Werre Epstein and Maxwell guilty of sex trafficking of minors? Yes! Without doubt!
Were they predators? Yes! Without doubt!
Were there people involved with Epstein and Maxwell who should really have known better? Yes! Without doubt!
But the story has metastasized from what is known to become a collection of lurid articles of faith depending on your political leanings.
Under the MAGA-Alex Jones interpretation, it was meant to show that the liberal elites with their snooty educations and sanctimonious lectures were nothing but arrant hypocrisy as they were a huge cabal of pedophiles literally feasting on the blood or adrenochrome of actual children.
For the more far-left types it showed something similar though not quite as extreme about the patriarchy, typically people like Krauss, Pinker and Summers. Accounts vary on whether they consider each of them to be actual pedophiles, but they tend to emphasize a lack of concern about it.
Other far-left conspiratorial types see that as essentially true but they also connect it to some kind of Israel / Mossad-backed kompromat operation (Drop Site News certainly hints at that and their collaborator Glenn Greenwald seems to go all-in on that one - Ehud Barak was a friend so case closed!). I think this is also the interpretation of Whitney Webb who essentially sees all political behaviour and all assassinations as effectively a mass blackmail operation.
Oh, and anti-monarchists were pretty sure and many still are that this all implicated (former Prince) Andrew, and that he must be a pedophile.
And of course, the theory was that Epstein was murdered in his cell by the shadowy liberal elites or someone like that.
These tended to be the main theories and I think it is fair to say that most of the mainstream liberal -left were not particularly interested in the story for many years when MAGA were using it to imply all sorts of things about the Democrats and against scientists or liberals in general.
The weird thing was always that somehow Trump himself was at least as implicated as almost anyone and it was when he was president that Epstein died in his cell, yet somehow he managed to skate by in that world of deep dark conspiracy fashioning.
But what has really changed?
Now the liberal-left seems interested in the story and they tend to use the same methodology as the more conspiracy-minded right-wingers.
Go to a tranche of emails from Epstein, press Control-F and put in your favourite hate figure. Want to see what Dershowitz was up to? You can search his name. Chomsky… Bill Clinton… Bill Gates….
Of course in each case, nothing conclusive will come up, just some stuff that COULD be meaningful so you’ll have to fill in the blanks.
Ultimately though, I think a lot of the emails really just deflate the maximalist interpretations. They show that Epstein was pretty gross and almost certainly up to his neck in common or garden soliticiting of very young women. Where you go from there largely depends on how you see “sex work”. In recent years, there has been something of a fraught debate about whether sex work is inherently exploitative OR a perfectly respectable career option for young women.
The more “PC” or “progressive” approach tends to argue for the latter and some who disagree are derided as “SWERFs”. Yet sex work is very obviously going to favour youth, and very obviously going to bring young women into the orbit of creepy men who will often have a power advantage over them.
So where do we end up? With something like this:
Jeffery Epstein believed federal agents had knowledge of at least 20 girls between the ages of 16 and 18 that could implicate him in a potential federal sex trafficking investigation, emails obtained by the non-profit whistleblower organization Distributed Denial of Secrets and provided to Drop Site News show.
Epstein noted in an email to himself titled “priveledged and confidentail” that “as I see it the following is the summary of the situation. Though I required girls over eighteen, the results don’t reflect it. . .. The feds have spoken to , or know of ,girls between the ages of 16-18.IF we extrapolate…. we should assume that there are 20 girls in that age range,” adding “they will all claim topless massage ,plus.,that’s the bad news.”
Scummy behaviour exploiting young women who are above the age of consent in some but not all jurisdictions. Ultimately it is not really the type of story that has been “promised” by much of the reporting, either from the far right to the far left. It almost certainly won’t satisfy anyone who thinks that there must be something that totally implicates their personal political targets.
Of course, it is always possible that something might be there and there may be some surprises, like in that scene in Jaws where they cut open the shark looking to see if it is the one that ate the boy but all they find are some fish (expected) and a car license plate (which no one expected). But I predict that this will be more like when a lot of people imagined that Wikileaks would blow open the 9/11 inside job. We’ll see some embarrassing stuff for some, we’ll see some reporting of stories we already knew about but people had somehow forgotten but no all encompassing conspiracy.
And when we don’t the “investigation” will be denounced by many as a cover-up, and the claims that there is more, far more that the deep state/Israel/the Jews etc… are concealing and this story will find a new and even more deranged form.
www.muellershewrote.com