Birds aren’t real…
Is the Epstein client list?
Unnamed sources say I like conspiracies. That is a bold-faced lie which I categorically deny. I don’t like (m)any conspiracy theories, I love them. “The moon landing was faked,” “birds aren’t real,” “vegetables are good for you,” the crazier the better.
Conspiracy theories are great because they let you believe that someone in the government is competent. So, you’ll forgive me when I tell you that I’m becoming obsessed with the Jeffrey Epstein client list fiasco.
Note: for a guy with thousands of different interests and the attention span of a crack-addled Gen Z social media addict, “obsession” means I think about it for more than a minute a day.
I can’t remember when I first became aware of the case, but I know that things started to seem fishy shortly after he killed himself (wink, wink) on August 10, 2019. For those who didn’t vote for Trump because he promised to release Epstein’s client list here is a very brief overview:
No Charges Pre-2005: Despite allegations of abuse dating back to the late 1990s/early 2000s, no formal charges or arrests occurred before the 2005 Palm Beach investigation.
March 2005: Initial Investigation Begins - Palm Beach, Florida, police begin investigating Epstein after a mother reported that he sexually abused her 14-year-old daughter at his mansion. This marks the start of the first known formal investigation into Epstein’s activities.
Controversial Plea Deal: Epstein signs a controversial non-prosecution agreement with federal and state authorities, granting him immunity from federal charges and protecting four named co-conspirators and unnamed “potential co-conspirators.” The deal halts the FBI investigation and seals the indictment, preventing victims from being notified, in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta later claims he was pressured by higher officials, citing Epstein’s alleged intelligence connections.
August 10, 2019: Epstein is found unresponsive in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, hanging off the side of his bed. The New York City medical examiner and Justice Department Inspector General rule his death a suicide by hanging. Epstein’s lawyers, hiring pathologist Michael Baden, dispute the ruling, fueling public skepticism and conspiracy theories. A 2023 Justice Department report criticizes jail officials for negligence but reaffirms the suicide ruling.
Public Skepticism: Epstein’s 2019 death sparked widespread conspiracy theories, with polls indicating only 21–29% of Americans believed it was suicide, while many suspect he was murdered to silence him.
Post-Death Developments: Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested in July 2020, convicted in December 2021 of sex trafficking and related charges, and sentenced to 20 years in June 2022. Note: sex trafficking requires at least one criminal, one victim, and one client. No clients were identified during the trial.
These details should make any reasonable person feel skeptical about the official story. The world is full of crazy conspiracy theorists, but when 71-79% of the public think something is up, maybe something is up.
Throw in the story that two cameras outside Epstein’s cell malfunctioned, and another video was reported to be unusable due to technical issues and that two guards assigned to check on him every 30 minutes fell asleep and falsified records, and you start to wonder what the 21–29% of Americans who do believe it was suicide are smoking.
And yet, it gets better:
September 2024 - Trump announces on “The Lex Fridman Podcast,” that “he’d have ‘no problem’ releasing more official files related to Jeffrey Epstein if elected, including the late sex offender’s ‘client list.’”
February 2025 - U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi states that Epstein’s client list is “sitting on my desk right now.”
July 6 - The US Department of Justice and FBI conclude that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein did not have a client list. At the same time, a DOJ and FBI memo increased the number of victims from 36 identified in 2006 to “over 1,000.”
July 6-7 - The DOJ releases 11 hours of “raw” surveillance footage from the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York, where Epstein died, which shows no one entering the area where Epstein was housed, supporting the suicide ruling.
July 11 – An analysis determines that the hours-long footage, released by the DOJ was not “raw,” but “likely modified” using the professional video editing software Adobe Premiere Pro. In addition, a one-minute gap from 11:58:58 p.m. to midnight remains unaccounted for.
July 13-14 - The Daily Mail reports, citing anonymous sources, that Ghislaine Maxwell is willing to testify before Congress.
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
-- Mark Twain
That would have been great advice about 20 years ago. That won’t cut it anymore.
Not because the truth isn’t important. It is. No, the problem now is that no matter what the government says now, too many people are going to believe they’re still hiding something. You can’t prove a negative, as years of JFK assassination stories have shown, and this has the makings of becoming the 21st century's version of that JFK assassination.
The best the government can do at this point is to hold Congressional hearings and turn this clown car into a full-blown circus. Get it all out there and let people get it out of their system. At least the people who are capable of eventually moving onto something else.
Here’s the other problem. If we think logically - why not, crazier things are going on – there are only a few possible scenarios, each with questions that make them unlikely:
There’s nothing there. If there’s nothing to see, just release everything you have. It’s not like it will take a lot of time to redact the names of people who don’t exist.
Incompetence - Historic levels of incompetence. Always a possibility. There’s nothing here but they’re bungling it. If so, it’s the largest case of incompetence since the first little pig thought “ya, a straw house sounds like a great idea!”
Everyone is guilty – Democrats, Republicans, the doner class, everyone! You can call this the “they’re all dirty, greedy, scumbags” theory. To be honest, until about… looks at watch… 15 minutes ago this was my leading theory. However, it now looks like politicians in both parties have started pushing for “releasing the COMPLETE files.”
Trump is guilty – Trump has recently blamed the entire thing on Obama and Biden. So why the hesitancy to let Maxwell testify? You’re protecting two guys you hate? Does anyone really believe that, if there was real dirt on any of the people Trump hates, he wouldn’t pursue it to discredit them?
What’s the truth?
I hate to say this, but we may never know. It doesn’t have to be a brilliant conspiracy to discredit anything anyone says; it can simply be that you can’t prove a negative. If no one is found guilty, there will always be those who claim the truth is being hidden. Even if some are found guilty, the same will apply. If, for example, nothing in the files points to Trump’s involvement, some will claim it's just a cover-up.
"If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end, you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."
-- Hannah Arendt,
Or if you prefer:
They muddy the water to make it seem deep.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Pick your poison.
I don’t know the right answer, but I just posted on X suggesting this is 4D chess by Trump; “He's denying it so much so we get so motivated to push for it to be released everyday. He knows what he's doing.”
People believe what they want to believe. Arendt was partially right; lies do deprive people of the “capacity to think and to judge,” but she didn’t take the necessary next step, that it gives them permission to believe what they want to believe.
I still think “they’re all dirty, greedy, scumbags,” it just may be that some of these “dirty, greedy, scumbags” aren’t guilty in this particular instance.
Who is? Time may tell. All I can know with certainty is what people are on record as saying, and here’s one quote which may prove important soon:
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Everyone knows that Trump and Clinton were both besties with Epstein so it's not a partisan thing. In 2007 the US attorney in Florida (Alex Acosta, later Trump labor sec.) was told told to stand down because Epstein was intelligence. Only 2 people can do that: the atty general and the president. It's been going on under multiple presidents, whatever "it" is. Some are more creepy than others, Dershowitz being the creepiest.
Something that keeps bothering me about this whole thing is why are all the conspiracy theorists focusing on this event in particular. I can think of at least half a dozen events that clearly point to disturbing levels of maleficence but were almost completely forgotten after they had left the 15-minute tweeter cycle.
One notably example being pizzagate which was inspired by references to "pizza" and "cheese" in the wikileaks cables in contexts where it clearly wasn't referring to real pizza or cheese along with the creepy "spirit cooking" rituals the circle of people around Clinton were involved in and the creepy decor at Comet Pizza where they hung out. Then some guy with a gun showed up at Comet Pizza and this was taken by the media to be a "refutation" of the conspiracy theory even though that makes no logical sense, and all the energy got redirected into the Epstein files. One notably difference between the two conspiracies is that Pizzagate appeared to involve pre-pubescent children if both sexes whereas Epstein used almost legal girls.
More disturbingly notice how easily the elites are able to redirect conspiracy theorists onto the conspiracy of their choice.