Two decades ago, a somewhat infamous July 2006 poll found that 51% of Democrats believed the Bush Administration either “assisted in the 9/11 attacks” or knowingly allowed it to happen.

These beliefs correlated with regular use of the internet to consume news and information, as opposed to more “mainstream” sources.

Age, therefore, was also a strong predictor: younger people were considerably more likely to believe the 9/11 theories, while older people were considerably less likely — consistent with who tended to use the internet at the time.

In the ensuing 20 years, though, almost everyone, regardless of age, now receives some or most of their news / information from online and/or social media. It’s become by far the most dominant medium in shaping people’s views about current events.

This has coincided with partisan polarization increasingly coming to be commingled with the most maximalist, online-fueled theories.

Case in point: a February 2026 poll found 91% of Democrats believed “Donald Trump is trying to cover up Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes” — 86% believed Trump was personally “involved” in those (unspecified) crimes.

This can be placed in the same rough continuum as a November 2018 poll which found that 67% of Democrats believed “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President.”

Don’t get the idea it’s a Democrat-specific phenomenon, though.

Relatively few Republicans (18%) believed the 9/11 theories in July 2006 — but this can be understood mainly as a function of the standard partisan polarization effects. Almost certainly, the numbers would have been flipped if, say, it was Bill Clinton still in the White House at the time, rather than George W. Bush.

In a February 2014 poll, 66% of Republicans stated their belief that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (A theory notoriously promoted, and later retracted, by Trump himself.)

This was after five or six years of mounting negative polarization against Obama. Just like Dems’ views on Bush and 9/11 had peaked in 2006, after roughly the same length of time for negative polarization to mount against the incumbent president.

And with Trump, it’s been over a decade of beating red-hot vitriol — Dems will believe almost anything negative about him.

So, in conclusion... happy 9/11.

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I didn’t expect to get sucked into such a Gloria Steinem rabbit hole, but there’s just too much irresistible stuff here, and the best time to surface it is while the reverential tributes are still coming in hot and heavy.

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Her official New York Times obituary is truly a boundless source of wonder. For instance, without a hint of irony detected, it reports that Steinem once famously titled herself “an entrepreneur of social change.” I find it difficult to imagine ever encountering anyone, regardless of sex, who would earnestly introduce themselves as such, and not feel a giant wave of sardonic disbelief and/or existential despair wash over me. “Good evening Ma’am, I’m an entrepreneur of social change. Make sure to follow me on LinkedIn.” But it’s ridiculous self-descriptions such as these that organs of mainstream American liberalism have decided to accept with total credulity when it comes to Savior Steinem. Because we mustn’t forget, per NYT, that she “helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.” How did she manage to finagle herself into all these vaunted “rooms,” anyway?

It certainly couldn’t have been by utilizing her uniquely penetrating insight, or impressive original thinking. Because if you survey enough of Steinem’s oeuvre, what may stand out the most is how banal, cliched, and uninteresting it invariably is.

Note: this observation is distinct from saying “I disagree with her.” It’s very possible for someone to have thoughts, opinions, and theories that one might disagree with, but still find edifying on any number of levels. In and of itself, disagreement is no good reason to peremptorily discard the work of others. A much better metric, I’ve found, is whether the work reflects originality — if any useful insights can be gleaned from it, or other kinds of value derived, above and beyond the narrow question of whether one might personally “agree.” But in Steinem’s case, it’s difficult to find much of anything that could conceivably fall into this category.

Here’s a telling example. In her latter years, she came up with a weird dogma about how “women of all races and men of color” share inherent political interests, and are implicitly in coalition with one another against the repressive monopolizing power of white men. This came to a head during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, when the two top candidates squaring off were a white woman and black man, and many vituperative debates ensued between their respective supporters. So as a seasoned Grand Poobah of the Democratic Party, Steinem saw fit to pronounce from on high how everyone should go about soothing these nasty intra-party tensions.

In February 2007, she rattled off one of her many timeless NYT op-eds, and repudiated what she called the “irrelevant debate” that was raging over the relative virtues of Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama. The idea was that all Steinem-minded Democrats should join her and vaguely embrace both candidates. This gave no insight whatsoever into how any Democrat should decide which candidate to actually vote for — kind of the whole point of a primary contest. As historical basis for her vague injunction, Steinem purported to reprise a well-known quote from the 1940s: “The parallel between women and Negroes is the deepest truth of American life.” This was supposed to resolve any consternation between Obama and Hillary supporters: both were equally suitable, Steinem insisted, given the “deep truth” of their intertwined destinies. She updated this dogmatic precept in 2019 to a newfangled “intersectional” platitude: “There’s no such thing as trying to uproot racism without also uprooting sexism, and vice versa.”

Ultimately, Steinem’s warmed-over 1960s pretensions to “radical” activism/critique were subsumed into the supremely boring prerogative of preserving internal Democratic Party cohesion. In the 2007 column, she made a slew of dubious empirical claims about this purported natural political alliance between white women and blacks. Maybe the actual “source” was just her own head? “White women have been more likely than white men to support pro-equality candidates of color, and people of color have been more likely to support pro-equality white women.” First of all — [citation needed]. Second of all — this is just a bunch of hooey, signifying nothing.

It’s not even that her argument, such as it can be ascertained, is necessarily wrong — though the NYT sure let her get away with a doozy of an unsourced statistical assertion. Still, one could theoretically imagine an argument along these lines that was at least compellingly rendered, or persuasively crafted, or which reflected some measure of novel observation/insight. But with Steinem, one finds over and over again that she really just churned out a steady stream of hackneyed tedium. Which then got received by Default Libs as though it were awe-inspiring wisdom — delivered from the sacred mountaintop of another intellectual dimension. If you take a cold hard look though, she seldom had anything interesting to say. (Which I would not reflexively say of all well-known “feminists” — whether or not I personally agreed with them.) At the very least, the caliber of her political/cultural “analysis” is nowhere near commensurate with the overblown effusive stature she’s granted by NYT obituarists and other disciples.

Mouthing weird platitudes to maintain Dem racial and sexual unity for purposes of party coalition management during a contentious presidential primary is not some profoundly radical endeavor, either — if anything, it’s more like a bland fundraising tactic. Because that’s ultimately what Steinem spent much of her life doing: soliciting donors to keep afloat her sprawling “women’s movement” NGO apparatus, which was running on reputational autopilot since the 1960s. Her “brand” was typically sufficient for deep-pocketed “friends” to keep forking over cash to continue this “work.” Circa 2007-2008, alienating or embittering half of the Democratic Party donor base would not have been productive to that end. So she authors this wholesome “unity” op-ed, on the pretense of some convoluted theory for why blacks and white women must unite to secure their alleged joint interests. This likely paid dividends in terms of her fundraising receipts; indeed, in an obituary pre-interview she gave to the NYT, just one year later in 2008, Steinem reflected on her “career” as a “writer, organizer, and fundraiser” — the latter almost certainly the most determinative facet of her day-to-day “work.”

Although it should be said that by 2016, she did decide to temporarily abandon her coalition-management impulse, and infamously ridiculed Young Progressive Women for overwhelmingly supporting Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in that cycle’s Democratic primaries. According to Steinem, the girls were only doing this because they were boy-crazy: “When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?’ The boys are with Bernie.” A backlash ensued, and she gave a thoroughly unconvincing “apology,” claiming she “misspoke.” But she never actually clarified what she supposedly “misspoke” about, or had regretted saying on the merits. It was another odd instance of Steinem playing the role of de facto cookie-cutter politician, who every now and then would make a “gaffe” she had to clean up. There was no good reason to think she didn’t actually believe the underlying point of her remark denigrating young women. After all, she’d basically said the same sort of thing before.

In 2000, she was dispatched around the country as one of the lead surrogates for the notoriously exhilarating Al Gore presidential campaign. In The Nation, Alexander Cockburn recounted a last-minute “carpet-bombing by flacks for Gore like Gloria Steinem” across the state of Oregon, where polls were looking increasingly precarious. (Indeed, Gore only ended up winning the state by a fraction of a percentage point over George W. Bush.) In this pre-election Dem crisis mode, Steinem was tasked with striding through university towns to hector college-age supporters of Ralph Nader, whom the Gore operation was worried (not unreasonably) could siphon off just enough votes to tip the election to Bush. On the campus of UCLA one day, Steinem scolded: “There is a reason why Nader’s support is overwhelmingly white and middle class and more male than female. It’s because these are the people who do not suffer as much if Bush were in the White House.” This wasn’t quite identical to her later “Bernie Bro” attack, but it was somewhere in the same ballpark — deriding young voters’ candidate preferences on the basis of their identity traits. UCLA’s student newspaper reported Steinem proclaiming that the 2000 election would perhaps be the “most important of her lifetime.” And this made it all the more troubling, in her mind, that “Nader disparages the women’s movement.” By election eve in November, she had the obligatory dire op-ed ready to go, and declared without reservation that “there has never been in my lifetime an election that was more important.”

Steinem’s self-description as “entrepreneur of social change” was apt here, because she had clearly mastered the “politically entrepreneurial” art of bloviating that every US election in which she had a personal/professional stake was “the most crucial election in my lifetime” (Bush vs. Kerry 2004). She once wrote in a fundraising appeal, “I want to alert you to an emergency” — with the “emergency” being the 1980 Senate election in South Dakota. She even managed the impressive feat of declaring much the same about the 1996 election — yes, the one between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, maybe the most objectively low-stakes presidential election in the past century, which she said was “the most crucial and frightening [election] in my lifetime.” This was in response to a student interviewer at the University of Iowa who had asked her: “What is the newest battle for feminism?” Her stock answer was always the same: comically inflate the enormity of every US election coming down the pike, as a service to her friends in the Democratic Party high command! Indeed, Hillary Clinton was just on “Morning Joe” today (September 10) reminiscing about how she’d been “fortunate enough to know [Steinem] over a lot of years… she was a great friend.” More than a “friend,” though, Steinem was a dedicated partisan functionary for the Clintons and every other conventional Dem figure — a key node in the party’s adjacent professional class network. It was from this vantage point that Steinem would launch into her five-alarm-fire haranguing whenever the next election approached, and invoke her Top Woman Leader credentials to lecture weary voters about the existential necessity of installing Dems to power.

“I’ve never, ever, ever, in my very long life, seen an election that is more crucial,” Steinem said of the 2016 election, even diverting some of her own fundraising prowess to the cause: “The Clinton campaign also is sending out a number of surrogates for fundraisers. Capricia Marshall, the former US Chief of Protocol, will headline a fundraiser at the Beverly Hills home of entrepreneur Victoria Jackson on Friday, with Gloria Steinem co-hosting. Tickets are $1,000 per person.” Albeit with slightly deflated enthusiasm, given that it was Joe Biden rather than Hillary, she still kept up the refrain four years later, dutifully announcing that the 2020 election was “the most important election in my lifetime, ever.”

This long-term banality even extended to what was supposedly her most fervent of all issues: abortion. After the Supreme Court overruled Roe vs. Wade in 2022, Steinem was summoned to Woman Oriented Podcasts to say things, such as that without abortion, “there is no democracy.” She bolstered this contention with the standard all-purpose historical parallel: “The first thing that Hitler did, as you know, when he was elected, was to declare abortion a crime against the state... Mussolini followed suit.” In addition to being historically inaccurate in all manner of ways, this also suggested a curiously half-baked worldview, and even a stunted grasp of the relevant policy debate. To posit that abortion is somehow interchangeable with “democracy” — and that any curtailments to abortion access is tantamount to Hitler — isn’t even a good argument in favor of abortion! And yet, these were still the words of wisdom sought by the Associated Press when the Supreme Court decision came down, because who else would they ask to opine on behalf of all concerned women. Steinem obliged by declaring there would henceforth be “no democracy” in the United States, due to abortion no longer being a protected “right” under the federal Constitution. Even though it remained readily available in jurisdictions such as the one Steinem had continuously lived in (New York) since the 1970s.

Her full June 2022 quote to the AP was as follows: “Obviously, without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy.” There is nothing “obvious” about the logic conveyed by that sequence of words. It’s really just a bunch of cliches strung together, which may sound superficially nice to certain readers who already spiritually agree with the “cause” or the “movement,” and don’t believe the topic of abortion requires any further thought. But most conspicuously: it’s not even a decent argument for preserving the legality of abortion! Assembling some buzzwords to galvanize the already-converted, stuck in some obsolete Ms. Magazine timewarp, is arguably counter-productive to efforts at pro-abortion persuasion.

But fine, she was pretty old by then, so maybe we give her a pass. What about her origin story?

Steinem’s reputedly landmark Ms. Magazine only came into existence as an insert of New York magazine, we learn from the NYT obituary, thanks to the largesse of an apparently licentious male named Clay Felker — an editor whom the NYT describes as “Ms. Steinem’s mentor.” We’re informed Felker once said he gave Steinem an early writing assignment (circa 1960) because she had “great legs.” In any event, Felker would go on to finance and promote the creation of Steinem’s media venture, which soon spun off into its own standalone magazine. Whatever exactly went on between Clay and Gloria — he aged 35 at the time of the “nice legs” editorial assignment, she aged 26 — it sounds like something that in the 2010s could’ve easily been denounced as “problematic,” and even warranted a presumptive “MeToo” excoriation. (“Mentorship”? Heh.)

And yet… so what if Gloria may have used her physical beauty to get ahead? We all have to play with the hands we’re dealt? I wish I had some “nice legs” to show off when I was 26 and trying to convince magazine editors to take my forlorn article pitches. Maybe they would’ve even funded me to launch a new publication altogether! So I can’t begrudge anyone making the most of their God-given assets. But at the same time she was receiving these apparent benefits, Gloria also bewailed her larger womanly plight, including in May 6, 1970 testimony before the US Senate that she’d been invited to give for some reason — not long before she’d been revealed as a CIA-subsidized “youth” activist. “During twelve years of working for a living,” Steinem lamented at age 36, “I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country” — such as exclusion “from professional groups,” and refusal of “writing assignments on so-called ‘unfeminine’ subjects such as politics.” But most damningly, she was “denied a society in which women are encouraged, or even allowed to think of themselves as first-class citizens and responsible human beings.” This was after 12 years subsisting as freelance writer in New York City, by way of her immersion in a media clique that for whatever its “unfeminine” faults, seemed to work out rather well for her in the end, despite the non-enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment.

For an account of Gloria’s blessed trajectory, we can look to a Publishers Weekly profile of her life and times from 1983. (One gets the sense that she might have been constantly profiled for being a person who was constantly profiled):

Another turning point, this one momentous not only for Steinem alone, came in 1972. She, Jane O’Reilly and others had tried unsuccessfully to raise money for a new, collectively run, slick feminist magazine. Clay Felker came to the rescue, offering to put up production costs–the staff would all work gratis–for a first issue of the magazine. In addition, New York’s 200,000 copy special year-end double issue would contain a 30-page excerpt from the new magazine. The first issue of Ms. itself, which contained over 100 pages, had a print run of 300,000 copies and came out in January 1972. “We called it Spring so that it could lie there on newsstands for a long time.” They needn’t have worried: within eight days all 300,000 copies of Ms. had been sold. The magazine was launched.

What a fortuitous spell of success! Even in an era where obtaining opportunities might have required women like Gloria to navigate a more openly “sexualized” workplace environment. She somehow found this success before she subsequently helped bring the term “sexual harassment” into the popular lexicon. Which may be a bit ironic, because if the “anti-harassment” strictures she would later champion had been in place at New York magazine in the 1960s, it may well have precluded her own advancement. She seems to have felt no particular need back then to catastrophize the “legs” remark from her older male superior — the same one who went on to enable the founding of her own proprietary media enterprise.

But fast forward to 2019 and Post MeToo, and Steinem was decrying the mere prospect of any workplace sexual tension on the grounds that it “turns work into prostitution; in order to continue to get paid you have to put up with this unwanted sexual attention.” Her own endlessly profiled life would seem to belie this simple assessment; perhaps her past allure as an attractive, resourceful young lady was something she was able to skillfully leverage? And why shouldn’t she have? It worked! Good for her! Again — there but for the grace of God go I.

For anyone who might be stupidly getting the wrong idea: no, none of this is to justify any legitimately crude/boorish male behavior that can cross the line into something legitimately “harassing,” or even at the far-extreme, predatory. But to pathologize any latent “sexual” undertone in or around a workplace as something that must be inherently woman-subjugating, and needs to be ruthlessly stamped out with HR bureaucratic dictates, or brute-force litigation, perhaps did not lead to the wondrous outbreak of “empowerment” that Steinem and her admirers seem to imagine it did. For the most part, rational adults of both sexes should probably be assumed capable to navigate any “sexual” dynamics that might arise without the whole thing having to automatically blow up into a soul-crushing fiasco. In the odd cases where there’s something genuinely abusive at issue — sure, other measures might have to be taken. But with more run-of-the-mill stuff, like the fateful “legs” comment to which Steinem was once shockingly subjected, it should tell us something that she apparently never thought it warranted a blistering “call out,” or internal reprisal — and may have even been something that she smartly used to her advantage. Indeed, her widespread depiction as a “pretty girl” in the 1960s and 1970s is framed by the NYT obituary as a degrading roadblock, but… it doesn’t seem to have blocked her off from much? Kind of… the opposite? Yeah, she was an attractive young woman! Great! This probably conferred her with certain advantages and disadvantages — likely weighed quite a bit more heavily toward the “advantages.” As Frank Sinatra once said: “That’s life.”

But it also may be useful context when pondering how implausible it seems that anyone could have actually looked to Steinem for incisive political insights. More plausible: people looked to her because she was “Gloria Steinem,” and therefore her utterances were accorded a presumed sagacity. Which stemmed from the grand “Leader of Women” accolade she was bestowed with early on — by men! That’s how her NYT obituary recounts it, anyway: With the rapid success of Ms. Magazine, “the male-dominated news media all but anointed Ms. Steinem as the [women] movement’s spokeswoman.” And she essentially just coasted from there!

Perhaps the only semi-interesting, or at least amusing thing I’ve come across so far about Steinem is that in 2009, our late financier friend Jeffrey Epstein was informed (by Ghislaine) about an upcoming reception for Manhattan DA Cy Vance — featuring none other than “special guest” Gloria Steinem. Ghislaine asked Jeffrey what his thoughts were about this event. Did he even care? “No,” Jeffrey replied, without elaborating. Steinem later claimed after Epstein’s death that she always “thought we should have a street demonstration” in front of his estimable townhouse, located just a few blocks away from her own stately brownstone on the Upper East Side. But she strangely never got around to it.

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By my count, the New York Times has published at least 20 articles, columns, videos, podcasts, or other “content” on the glories of Gloria Steinem since her death September 2. The latest is entitled “Keep Lighting the Torches That Gloria Steinem Lit.” You’d think they would eventually run out of ass-kissing cliches, but the supply has clearly not yet been exhausted. Bathe for long enough in this hagiographical whirlpool, and you’ll find plenty of analysis of things like her “glamour” and clothing choices — “the bell bottoms, hip-slung belts and bodysuits were merely weapons in her battle,” we’re told — but I can find not a single mention anywhere of Steinem’s formative contribution to perhaps the most absurd, calamitous mass-hysteria outbreak in modern American history. Namely the starring role she once played in the “Satanic ritual abuse” craze, which I documented at some length earlier this week.

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Part of my research entailed trying to track down an original version of the Steinem-contrived Ms. Magazine cover story of January/February 1993, which purported to relay an anonymous woman’s first-hand account of extreme early childhood sex torture — perpetrated on her by a secret Satanic cult when she was just four or five years old. The cover art is easy enough to find, but the article’s full text proved a bit trickier. Luckily enough, I discovered a full copy had been preserved, of all places, by the Montana state legislature. What’s the backstory there, you ask? How did this triumph of “feminist” journalism wind up in Montana government repositories? Good question! Glad you asked.

Other materials in the archival packet reveal the bone-chilling article was submitted via mail to State Representative Marjorie Fisher (D) on February 4, 1993. The big explosive issue of Ms. Magazine had just come out, and its infant decapitation cult novella scenes were causing a bit of a national splash. Montana lawmakers had already taken interest in the alleged “Satanic ritual sex abuse” sweeping the land with impunity, and a public hearing was in the works.

So to aid their investigation, the Steinem-engineered horror story was enclosed in a letter sent by someone named Randall E. “Randy” Mills, who described himself as a longtime reporter for numerous well-reputed Montana newspapers, as well as a longtime operative/staffer for various well-regarded Montana elected officials. His employment at the time was said to be “writer/researcher” for the Montana branch of the AFL-CIO — though he contradictorily added that he’d been unable to work for the past two years, due to his newly-surfaced memories of savage child sex abuse, as well as the “traumatic” levels of therapy he’d been undergoing to cope. My educated guess: the latter was likely the more proximate cause of whatever troubles were bedeviling Randy. After submission of the letter, he traveled to the State Capitol on March 3, 1993 to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee himself. There, he insisted to the gathered lawmakers that among other things, he “once was a very functioning person.” Until…

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Gloria Steinem died on September 2, at age 92. As any upstanding citizen would, I made sure to promptly click over to the New York Times to read her mammoth obituary in quiet, somber remembrance. Like many NYT obituaries of prominent individuals, this one clearly had been written to near-completion well before her death. Even in the universe of prewritten NYT obits, however, you could tell Steinem’s was of especially high priority. Because to the NYT, this wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill “prominent individual” — indeed, an adjective of far awesomer proportions would surely be needed to describe her. Perhaps like “towering,” or “trail-blazing.” Certainly, this obituary was one that would’ve gone through round after round of careful tweaking and polishing, to make doubly certain its final form properly captures the life, achievements, and legacy of a figure so venerated (by the NYT). Steinem was also a resident of the Upper East Side for decades, an affluent and well-connected cultural liberal, and a stalwart partisan supporter of the Democratic Party. So, basically a dead-center bullseye to the NYT’s core demographic. But above all else, of course, she was the “Personification of the Women’s Movement,” as the obituary’s final headline boldly proclaimed. One could scarcely imagine the NYT bestowing a more sacredly honorific title to anyone, for any reason. No doubt this made ensuring the grandeur of the eternal tribute all the more vital.

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As the obituary opens, we learn that Steinem “wrestled with a lack of self-esteem,” notwithstanding the steady confidence she always exuded in her passion for barrier-breaking activism; she was also “insecure about her looks.” Thus we are already invited to understand Steinem as a complicated, multi-dimensional figure, who defied any simple synopsis. She was able to conquer these surprising yet humanizing self-esteem issues, we’re told, with her courageously soul-baring 1992 book, “Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem.” If one surveys the contemporary reactions to this book, interestingly enough, one will find it was widely derided, and sometimes outright mocked, by the mainstream reviewing press. Even the NYT bemoaned Steinem’s newfound emphasis on “personal change” as signifying her displacement of concrete political reform with “self-help” mumbo-jumbo. The book’s recommendation is that women should set about bettering themselves and their collective condition through individual self-improvement exercises, such as yoga breathing and painting. The NYT reviewer speculates a crass financial motive might be behind it, noting the book was likely to accelerate an already-worrisome trend of “women’s sections shrinking in bookstores” — while the bulging “recovery/self-help” sections are “pushed ever closer to the cash register.” The clear implication was that Steinem had merely seized a tempting cash-grab opportunity, and shamelessly so, since it entailed hawking gobbledygook “healing elixirs” to the pliable female masses, in a gimmick this (female) reviewer pilloried as having “the taste of failure.”

But if the book was really just a cynical ploy for money, one would have to concede it was a huge, smashing success. “Revolution from Within” clocked in as number-one hardcover nonfiction title of February 1992, according to Publishers Weekly, and remained atop the NYT best-seller chart until the following September; the mass-market reading public was clearly not deterred by the scorn uniformly heaped on the book by disgruntled (and mostly female) reviewers, in almost every high-profile media property. Newsweek, for instance, carried on the theme of inferring that Steinem must’ve just wanted a quick payday. “Self-help books sell like crazy, especially among women,” the reviewer wrote, “and Steinem’s has everything: goddesses, guided meditation, directions on how to find the child within, dream diaries and droplets of wisdom from a range of sources including the Gnostic Gospels and Koko, the talking gorilla.”

Wow — this book sounds really dumb!

You might think, then, that some appreciable accounting of Steinem’s widely-ridiculed pivot to bullshit psycho-babble would make an appearance in her big authoritative NYT obituary. But it only gets the most passing of mentions, and mainly in reference to the “disappointment” the book was vaguely said to have engendered among a certain segment of Steinem’s “natural allies.” Nothing about her slide into woo-woo blather is extrapolated as grounds for reasonable skepticism of her larger body of work, or her overall political project. Instead, we get a succession of formulaic sops to her tenacious leadership of “the movement” — of “women,” that is — and how, against all odds, she became this history-making icon who refused to ever relent, even in the face of adversity, and even though “the movement” she led was “repeatedly declared passé” during her lifetime.

“Nevertheless, she persisted,” obituarist Katharine Q. Seelye proclaims, totally unironically. I would have loved to bear witness to the editorial process whereby it was determined that inclusion of this cute little slogan, in the NYT’s own voice, was entirely journalistically apt. If asked, I probably would’ve advised that in lieu of such witless cliches, the NYT might instead use the space to memorialize, for posterity’s sake, that Steinem received a whopping $700,000 advance from Little, Brown (in 1987 dollars) for her “self-help” slop manifesto. (Would be around $2.1 million today.) What inferences might be drawn from this, with respect to how Steinem went about monetizing her vaunted status as Nation’s Top Woman Activist? Certain inferences might not be the most flattering, and thus naturally would have no place in an obituary of such importance. Surely, now is not the time to give anybody the idea that it might be sensible to view the “legacy” of this individual with just a tad more critical detachment.

Recognizing the inappropriateness of any rudely skeptical inquiry, we instead get the expected helping of laudatory bromides: while it’s true that women have made real progress in the past several decades, thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts / visionary leadership of Steinem, and all the nebulous “change” she inspired, it is nonetheless equally true that there is still so much work yet to be done. Because as Katharine Q. Seelye reminds us, “anti-female bias remains entrenched” — even in the year 2026. Curiously, this is stated as though objective conclusory fact, and the nature of these alleged “anti-female biases” is not elaborated with any precision. It might’ve just been meant as a figure of speech — one which any right-minded reader would naturally intuit as spiritually true. From there, they would go on to surmise how deeply necessary it must be for the NGO / grant-making / corporate philanthropic PR apparatus that blossomed around Steinem to carry on with its invaluable, irreplaceable “work” — even if only for nostalgia’s sake. The reader is left guessing what specific “work” of Steinem’s led to which specific improvements in the wellbeing of half the human population, and the smattering of examples that do get cited can sometimes have a bit of an awkward twist. We’re informed that one of Steinem’s most storied claims to activist fame is that in the 1960s, she “marched with Cesar Chavez, the head of the United Farm Workers.” For many years, this was a perfectly pleasing bullet-point on her resume — that is, “until reports emerged in 2026 [in the New York Times, of course] that he had sexually abused girls and women.” Womp womp.

But all that stuff is child’s play (pun intended) compared to the obituary’s most glaring omission: the no-joke, not-even-funny-anymore foray Steinem once made into hyper-depraved theories of “Satanic ritual sex abuse” — the hysteria around which had gripped the nation in the 1980s and 1990s, and which Steinem was instrumental in popularizing/validating, as it coincided with her own highly profitable pop-psychology endeavors. Indeed, the strikingly central role she played in fomenting this nutcase hysteria should have alone been enough to make the tone of any eventual obituary at least 85% condemnatory.

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For instance: Did you know that Gloria Steinem was one of America’s foremost proponents of the “Satanic child sex abuse” hoax — which wrought such utter devastation, and on such an epic scale? By subjecting hundreds of innocent people to false prosecution for the most grotesque imaginable claims of child sex torture? With many of these wrongfully condemned made to languish in prison for decades? And countless more informally accused, with similarly catastrophic consequences? Families torn apart, reputations torched, small mom-and-pop businesses bankrupted, communities devolved into absurd paranoia and mob reprisal — all cheered on by Steinem, in conjunction with the standard array of credulous and lazy media, unscrupulous lawyers, NGO activists, over-zealous prosecutors, lowest-common-denominator politicians, fake “experts” of various stripes, and so on. Yes, that’s right: to a strangely under-acknowledged extent, it was none other than the dearly-departed Steinem who personally riled up this wholesale lunacy, using her “Number One Feminist” credentials to give it an air of legitimacy within sections of respectable liberal opinion.

Her contribution was quite significant, as mass hysterias are most potent and enduring when they achieve a critical mass of diverse ideological backers, to avoid being pigeonholed as the peculiar obsession of any one political or cultural faction. So there was Gloria Steinem, right in the mix, alongside fearful Christian Conservatives and “tough-on-crime” lobbyists, instructing the broad public that “belief” in the hidden omni-presence of demonic child rape rings was of such profound importance not just for elements of society that might be anathema to NYT readers, but for the hallowed “women’s movement” as well. To the right-wing religious zealots, Satanic sex predation manifesting most visibly at public child-care facilities was supposed to be emblematic of the decline in traditional family structures, and how this invariably leads to horrific moral debasement. For the cops and prosecutors, it showed far more taxpayer funds needed to pour into their coffers, so they could vigorously perform their most solemn duty — “Protecting the Children” from vile new threats in this ever-dangerous world. And for Steinem, it was part and parcel of women’s liberation: child sex abuse flowed ineluctably from the terrors of male supremacy, and so by recognizing the staggering prevalence of coordinated child sex abuse networks, the oppressive hold of men over the social order could be dislodged. Which would intrinsically benefit the collective interests of women. This was the logic by which “Satanic Panic” could be embraced so fulsomely by Steinem, as the latest strategy to keep the momentum going from the 1960s-era “movement” she pioneered, well into the 1990s. Steinem once proposed that if the 60s had been the era of “exploring Outer Space,” the 90s were set to be “the era of Inner Space,” with women harnessing the power of their “mind body connection” to access memories that had otherwise been lost in their subconscious, regarding ritualized rape atrocities.

In addition to setting forth this quasi-theoretical framework for “Satanic Panic” writ large, Steinem also played a direct role in what became the most notoriously well-known fiasco of the entire saga: the “McMartin pre-school” travesty. Her role remains curiously under-appreciated. You almost certainly won’t be reading about it in any of the gauzy homages that have littered the NYT and similar precincts since her death. But let it be known: when deluded angry mobs in Manhattan Beach, California insisted on ransacking an abandoned pre-school to search for the underground child sex torture tunnels they were sure must exist, this was in no small part the handiwork of Ms. Movement Leader herself. Little children had been coaxed by egregious adult interlopers into imagining and semi-articulating their purported victimization in these subterranean sex chambers, which unleashed a surreally protracted nightmare that destroyed lives, squandered public resources, and reverberated across the entire country. Similar debacles were replicated everywhere you looked in Anytown USA.

In that best-selling opus “Revolution from Within,” published right at the apex of the deranged McMartin frenzy, Steinem denounced those who had “refused to believe children” telling these “stories” of bizarre sex crime — whether “extremes of sadism,” or the newly-understood scourge of “so-called ritual or cult abuse.” Finding such “stories” facially implausible was no longer any excuse for a conscientious adult. Steinem made these confident pronouncements as though an enormous body of evidence had just emerged confirming the unassailable reality of demon rape gangs, hidden where you’d least suspect them, as reported by pre-schoolers. (Who’d been induced to relay these “stories,” of course, by morally-panicked adults galvanized by the likes of Steinem.) She gave particular credence to increasingly common rumors of “torture and killing of animals to frighten children into silence” — an exact trope that figured heavily in the McMartin mania. When the formative “allegations” in that case first surfaced in 1984, Eyewitness News of Los Angeles led its evening broadcast with a mortifying news bulletin: as many as 60 children, aged roughly two to five, had notified authorities that they’d been “keeping a grotesque secret,” and day after day were being “sexually abused and made to appear in pornographic films while in the preschool’s care.” This included “being forced to witness the mutilation and killing of animals” to terrorize them into silence. Or in other words: precisely the sort of hallucinatory tale that Steinem would later celebrate in her 1992 best-seller was finally being “believed” and acted upon — even as she cautioned, of course, that there was still much work to be done in terms of her belief-maximizing agenda. However, these once “incredible”-seeming crimes being recognized by “authorities who are now beginning to believe children” was hailed as a major stride forward for the women’s empowerment “movement.”

“We’re not letting go because we want the children to be believed,” a father of one McMartin pre-schooler told the Los Angeles Times in April 1990. Groups of parents had organized yet another “archeological dig” to search for the underground sex torture chambers their children had purportedly identified. Not only were these addled parents echoing Gloria Steinem’s rhetoric nearly verbatim, they were being funded by her. Yep: according to the after-action report produced by lead “archaeological investigator” E. Gary Stickel, the crazed communal digging adventure was made possible thanks to a “generous donation from Gloria Steinem.” (Precise amount unknown, but matched by an excitable group called “Mothers Against Sexual Abuse.”) As the Steinem-subsidized search heated up, an LA Times journalist paid a visit one day and observed hordes of parents “digging frantically.”

A previous “dig” had been attempted in 1985, when a group of rogue parents showed up with a backhoe and began scouring for animal sacrifice remains, on the basis of testimony their five-and-six-year-olds were interrogated into providing. The effort quickly ballooned into a full archeological excavation, sponsored by the Los Angeles County prosecutor’s office. Much to everyone’s shock and dismay, however, no sex torture chambers were uncovered. Certain factions of locals remained unpersuaded, though, and refused to budge from their conviction that the toddlers’ imaginations had represented the absolute truth, after elaborate fantasies were cajoled out of them by crank government-subsidized therapists and others. Consternation mounted, and by 1990, an even more audacious “archeological investigation” was prepared. Intended as far more comprehensive than the prior haphazard attempt in 1985, the plan this time was to penetrate the concrete floor of the school itself, and excavate all that lie beneath, in one last climactic search for the mythical sex torture evidence. Claims of unclear origin had long circulated that McMartin staff systematically slaughtered the children’s beloved class pets right in front of their eyes (rabbits, birds, cats) to frighten them into submission, as a warning that they’d better not tell anyone about the secret trapdoors in their classrooms that led to the underground molestation bunkers.

What makes Steinem’s role in this lunacy all the more striking: 1990 was relatively late in the lifespan of the whole ritualized sex abuse craze. Plenty of people had figured out by then that they might’ve gotten a bit carried away at the height of the freakout, after so many sensational tales of Satanic sex crime had not been borne out by evidence. With the McMartin case in particular, skepticism had grown as the related criminal prosecutions dragged on for seven years — with no proof ever emerging of the wild headline claims that initially got everyone so worked up. By the time Steinem wrote her check for the secondary “archeological dig,” the trial of two supposed ringleaders of this demonic sex abuse syndicate, preschool proprietors Peggy and Ray Buckey, bloated into the longest and most expensive criminal proceeding in the history of the United States. In January 1990, Peggy was finally found Not Guilty on all counts, following years of shambolic legal torment. Ray was also found Not Guilty on nearly all counts, but the jury deadlocked on a handful of others, so the damned thing still wasn’t officially over yet. Even though the outlandish maximalist fantasies that had animated such fury in the mid-1980s had mostly died down. But this apparently did nothing to dissuade Gloria Steinem, nor quell her enthusiasm for the April 1990 search, nor stymie her subsequent endorsement of “ritual/cult abuse” in the 1992 chart-topping book. After all, “believing the children” was a principle she dare not compromise. She thus aligned not with casual low-information “ritual abuse” believers who might’ve read a supermarket tabloid or watched a daytime TV show, but with the hardest-core faction of radicalized “activist” dead-enders.

The “dig” concluded in May 1990, and alas, no child sex torture tunnels were discovered, which must’ve been upsetting to Gloria. By July, all remaining charges against Ray were dismissed, and the legal agony was finally over. No one was ever convicted of anything in the whole freakish disaster, nor was any serious evidence of any child sex crimes ever yielded. It wasn’t like this outcome should’ve been hard to foresee by anyone who took the time to study the case rationally. But again Gloria Steinem raised her fist in defiance. The “scientific report” she funded for the failed archeological excavation of a pre-school in Southern California was published in 1993. Also in 1993, the famed proprietary magazine she founded, still near the peak of its circulation, published this:

So… here we have what appears to be a McMartin-aged child, caught in a disturbing serpent abuse vortex, with Satan and/or his top demon lieutenants thrashing off to the side, their menacing tongues pointed in the child’s direction. This cover art was deemed to be of such lasting cultural value that the original print was preserved in the Library of Congress, bearing the caption: “Anita Kunz’s compelling cover design references the magazine’s harrowing article on ritual child abuse perpetrated by a satanic cult. By making a frightened naturalistic child the focal point in a nightmarish red and green color scheme, Kunz dramatizes the vulnerability of children to horrific danger posed by such groups.”

WTF? Gee, thanks Gloria!

The article itself is credited to someone writing under a pseudonym, who for all we know could’ve been Steinem herself. “Elizabeth S. Rose” is claimed to be “a free-lance writer currently working on a novel about ritual abuse. She lives with her husband in the southeastern United States.” Whoever this person is, “she” starts off by announcing she was once “involved in a generational satanic cult and had been ritually abused in that cult setting.” After struggling through an exceedingly unclear definition of what “ritual abuse” even is, the author then drops a real whopper: “I personally witnessed the murders of two children, one of whom was my baby sister. These deaths were a direct result of satanic ritual sacrifices.”

It apparently never occurred to Gloria Steinem or her Ms. Magazine cohort that these child and baby murders could theoretically be investigated by the relevant authorities, and the sadistic culprits apprehended, if the events described really took place, and the writer really was a first-hand witness to the crimes. Or maybe this thought did occur to them, and they decided to cover their tracks by making the article elusively “anonymous,” to avoid getting caught up in any bothersome legal technicalities, while still peddling the rancid hysteria they wanted to peddle.

The writer claims her “otherwise ordinary middle-class family” participated in a secret Satanic cult; they would travel every Saturday night to a cabin in the woods for unholy ritual gatherings. She says her “most intense involvement” in these activities occurred when she was “four to five years old,” and she is able to recount remarkably vivid, sophisticated memories from such a tender young age. “Numerous sermons were devoted to woman’s place in Satan’s world,” she says. “We were told that because Eve had accepted the fruit from the serpent, women were inherently more wicked and evil than men, and so more capable of carrying out Satan’s work.”

Shortly after her “induction” to the cult at age four, the author claims she was forced to watch her newborn baby sister be savagely decapitated. “The sacrifice was followed by a communion ritual, during which human flesh and blood were consumed.” She claims she tried to alert her Vietnam Vet father about what was going on, but he dismissed her, assuming it was just her four-year-old imagination run amok. So she did not speak of these cult experiences for the next 25 years, until approximately age 30. An informed reader might surmise that what we’re dealing with here is a classic case of “recovered memory” syndrome, where adults suddenly claim to have unearthed extreme, florid sex abuse memories suppressed from early childhood — a trend all the rage in the early 90s, thanks to the advocacy of figures like Steinem. (It’s even making a comeback today, with “Epstein Survivors” also claiming to have exhumed long-lost memories of sex crimes many years or decades after the fact. And wait till you hear about the March 2026 “dig” of the former Zorro Ranch in New Mexico…)

The author writes: “Dissassociation [sic] and repression of memories make disclosure very difficult. The victim may not have conscious awareness that abuse took place. If memories do emerge years later, descriptions of the rituals are so bizarre that they are often discounted as untrue.”

Ding ding ding. (Maybe they were “discounted as untrue” for good reason?)

To rewind for just a moment…

Three years before the publication of this gruesome Ms. Magazine cover story, and days before all remaining McMartin charges were finally dismissed, Steinem appeared at a banquet in Minneapolis honoring some type of “women’s business development” non-profit thing. She was still busily promoting her “self-esteem” doctrine from “Revolution from Within,” which had just spent fourteen weeks at #1 on the NYT best-seller list. Likely brimming with even more self-esteem than usual thanks to this revenue influx, Steinem told the assembled women that they too should cultivate the kind of self-esteem she had, so they can equip themselves with the mental tools to successfully “rebel” against male-dominated power structures. She also took the opportunity to expound on her child and woman-belief theories, with a focus on new discoveries she’d recently made about the nature of memory.

She declared that one way to achieve this self-esteem revolution was for women who suffered “abuse or neglect” in childhood — or even “any kind of restriction” — to realize that “we can go back to the broken place and re-parent ourselves. We can go back to the child we used to be. Literally by re-visiting that child. By thinking through meditation or whatever process we wish to call it, of a time — anytime that we remember when that child was in need. Going back to that place as an adult. And sitting down next to the child. And waiting for the child to talk to us. And beginning to have a dialogue with that child.”

Through this unspecified “process,” Steinem says, “the most extreme cases of sexual abuse in childhood” can be pried out from the psyche’s deepest recesses. It may cause the woman “incredible torture and pain,” but this is necessary for the healing process — even if you don’t know what you’re supposed to be healing from yet. Do you currently lack any conscious recollection of early-childhood ritual sex abuse? Don’t worry, ladies: Steinem assures us that both children and adults often block the abuse completely out of their minds, by “creating people to whom this isn’t happening.” That is, they create multiple personalities — and no one personality need have any innate connection to the other, which enables the person to proceed through life for years or even decades entirely oblivious to the abuse their alternate-personalities suffered. (In 1993, Steinem narrated and was credited with providing the “idea” for a fever-dream HBO “documentary” entitled Multiple Personality Disorder: The Search for Deadly Memories, in which several people claim to have endured horrific child sex abuse, and constructed entirely new “personalities” so they could contract amnesia and forget about it.)

“The unconscious is timeless,” Steinem told the women who’d gathered for the business development function. “One can enter the timeless unconscious.” Through interior journeys such as these, Steinem reported, “sometimes marks of physical abuse return when the person returns to the persona of the child who has experienced the abuse, and welts and bruises re-appear on the body.” For example, “the mark of a hand slap” can re-appear on the body quite quickly, but then disappear altogether “after the person has changed to another personality.”

By this radically expanded conception of the unconscious mind, Steinem announced we are only just beginning to comprehend (circa 1990) the “vast numbers” of child sex abuse victims who’d been going about their lives completely unaware they’d been abused, until they encounter the long-repressed truth using these revolutionary self-actualization techniques. And things do appear to be getting better, she says, because the same people who might have once found such notions non-believable have been increasingly persuaded to “trust the stories of children” (like the McMartin pre-schoolers) — and even adults who claim to have only remembered “the covered-up abuse of their childhood” perhaps 20, 40, or even 50 years later. Thanks to these amazing breakthroughs, the true scale of the “vast numbers” of child sex abuse victims is finally being made plain.

“Each of us is a microcosm of the universe with all the same forces that exist in the universe,” Steinem declared. It’s unclear if a puff of purple smoke suddenly appeared as she made this statement. Or if a winged unicorn flew past the stage.

Back to the Ms. Magazine horror show of 1993…

As we read on, we glean some insight into what distinguished the “ritual abuse” fixations of Steinem and friends from other proponents of these theories elsewhere on the political spectrum. Though allied with religious zealots on the reality of rampant ritual child sex abuse, Steinem took a more “secularized” interpretation of its meaning and root causes. This can be seen in a summarizing statement by the article’s anonymous author, who proclaims:

The truth is that ritual abuse exists. It is hideous and devastating. It does not exist because some evil force is trying to gain control of the world. It exists because violence is perpetrated against women and children, and then passed on to the next generation. Ritual abuse is at the extreme end of a continuum of abuse. Generations of abusive behavior cannot be overcome simply by throwing a few perpetrators in jail. Society must take on the responsibility of finding a way to eradicate all kinds of abuse.

Which is to say: this systematic child sex torture was not the result of actual “Satan,” nor any other wicked supernatural force, but the intractable subjugation of women vis-a-vis men — a dynamic that also destined children to be brutally subjugated, although the causal chain linking these outcomes is not made entirely clear. Regardless, as ever, the ultimate villain and culprit is “male domination” — perhaps what one might call a kind of “Secular Satan” for this milieu. And only by equalizing gender relations more broadly could “Satanic” abuse ever be realistically curtailed. No specific remedies are offered for preventing “ritual abuse” as such. Which seems a bit odd, since the abuse the author describes is so distinctively monstrous, one would think that with some normal empirical investigation, measures could be devised to disrupt those particular monstrosities. But the aim of peddling this stuff to the Ms. Magazine readership was obviously never to get bogged down in excessively tangible details, as those might eventually be subject to corroborative evaluation, which could complicate the ideological ambitions of secular “ritual abuse” theorists. Locating the genesis of her claimed abuse in some “generational” trauma cult dynasty, passed down from one generation to the next in total secrecy, and totally invisible to outsiders, underscores the futility of even trying to empirically verify the claims; indeed, they’ve been crafted to expressly preclude this, with Ms. Magazine all on board. So the message of Steinem & Co. was that no one should trouble themselves with attempting to confirm any of the following:

My mother and my best friend were both raped as part of fertility rituals. The victim was strapped to the altar table in front of a ritual gathering and systematically gang-raped while the fertility rites were chanted. The purpose was to impregnate the victim. The resulting fetus was sometimes used in ritual sacrifice. Other sexual abuse includes the raping of young girls or infants. Both girls and boys may be sodomized or penetrated with symbolic objects, such as a crucifix, or with weapons. There can also be forced sexual contact with infants, animals, or dead bodies.

The unknown author leaves ambiguous whether she claims to have been personally sexually victimized by this heinous cult. Another strategic editorial decision, it would seem, to reduce any unwanted liabilities, legally or otherwise. (You can read the entire article here, if you really want — a copy was submitted to the Montana House of Representatives for some reason.)

After guiding us through this carnival of horrors from a standpoint of affected expertise, the ghoulish article finally concludes with a stirring call to action — this time conveyed in the institutional voice (i.e., Steinem) of the magazine itself: “If we want to stop ritual abuse, the first step is to believe these brutal crimes occur.” Seems sort of odd, don’t you think, that if Steinem and colleagues really wanted to establish the unimpeachable believability of these sickening abuse stories, they would give the all-important assignment to a mysteriously anonymized “novelist” — rather than, say, a competent journalist who could theoretically examine the issue with just a tad more factual rigor, and without hiding behind a silly pseudonym. It shouldn’t have been too difficult of a task, presumably, if the indisputable truth-value of these “beliefs” had already been so conclusively settled. In hindsight though, one can’t help but sympathize with the difficulties Steinem & Co. must have encountered, since the entire freakish narrative they were desperate to peddle turned out to be a giant hoax.

Astonishingly enough, Steinem never seems to have been chastened by any of this. She remained resolutely dedicated to the underlying cause for decades. I can find no instance of her expressing one hint of regret, or even being politely questioned on the matter, in the endless parade of interviews she gave to adulating journalists, celebrities, and activists. One early public-facing skeptic of “Satanic ritual abuse,” clinical psychologist Richard Noll, recalled being confronted at a conference by Steinem in 1990; she implored him to cease his unhelpfully skeptical ways. As late as 2017, she was still confidently reciting the same old mantras recycled from the McMartin days, like “Believe the children!” (direct quote), which she still took to go conceptually hand-in-hand with her overriding mantra: “Believe the women!” The occasion for Steinem to once again blurt out these banalities was the onset of peak #MeToo, when her wise counsel was sought by the younger women staff at Ms. Magazine, eagerly requesting her prognosis of that burgeoning “movement.”

Steinem also seems to have had zero remorse for championing a person named Bennett Braun, whose quack theories on “multiple personality disorder” and “recovered memory” she imbibed and repackaged for a mass audience in speeches, TV specials, and her best-selling “Revolution from Within” slop manifesto. “Many people kept this book in mind and sent ideas,” Steinem writes in the Acknowledgements section, “and others gave me access to new worlds that enriched it, especially Dr. Bennett Braun.” A decade later, Braun had his medical license suspended in Illinois, and agreed to a $10.6 million civil settlement with an Iowa housewife named Patricia Burgus, who had accused him of using his demented “therapy” methods to convince her “she possessed 300 personalities, ate meatloaf made of human flesh, and served as high priestess of a Satanic cult.” (The particular cult of which she’d been made to believe she was “high priestess” was said to have raped, tortured, and cannibalized thousands of children, including her own two young sons.)

By the time of Braun’s own death in 2024, he was being unreservedly excoriated in every major newspaper obituary as someone who “inflamed a Satanic Panic,” due to his outsized role promoting kook concepts that manipulated so many mentally disturbed people into confabulating fake sex abuse tales. Bennett Braun, Psychiatrist Who Fueled ‘Satanic Panic,’ Dies at 83, reads the headline of his decidedly unflattering NYT obituary. But no mention is made of the pivotal boost he received from Steinem. (Nor is Braun mentioned anywhere in her obituary.) If the central fact of Braun’s life by 2024 was that he “fueled” and “inflamed” the mass hysteria a few decades prior, there’s no reason this shouldn’t also be a central fact of Steinem’s life too — her platform was many orders of magnitude bigger than Braun’s could ever have been on its own, and it was through her that his insidious theories were disseminated to a mass audience (mostly women) under the guise of fostering “self-esteem,” and undertaking “a revolution from within.”

Did anyone ever bother to ask Steinem about the gigantic 1994 study conducted by the administration of her cherished Bill Clinton, which examined over 12,000 accusations of ritual sex abuse throughout the United States, and found not a single one — yes, zero — that could be credibly authenticated? (Presumably this would include the bone-chilling infant sacrifice scenes gorily chronicled in the 1993 Ms. Magazine article?) Steinem has featured in a constant barrage of reverential streaming service “documentaries” over just the past few years: Apple TV+, Dear…: Gloria Steinem (2020). Netflix, Live to Lead, “Gloria Steinem” (2022). HBO, Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print (2025). And so on. Netflix had a brand new one up and ready to go literally within hours of her death. For this aspect of her “life’s work” to never come up at all in any of it is truly insane. Especially since she always seemed to find the time to comment on slightly less pressing matters, such as her opinion that “young girls” nowadays are performing too much oral sex on their boyfriends: “I always say to them, what are YOU getting out of it? Hello?” Apparently, this was considered of far greater import than getting a response to critics like journalist Alexander Cockburn, who wrote in 1999:

In the coalition powering the satanic abuse persecutions feminists constituted a powerful component, most conspicuously in the form of Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine. How did feminism, a movement that grew out of the radical passions of the 1960s, navigate itself into this demonic alliance? Charges of perverse abuse of children seemed an inviting line of attack in the larger onslaught on patriarchy, sexual violence and harassment. Social workers and therapists — many of them feminists — became the investigators and effective prosecutors.

Somewhere along the way, a core tenet of Steinem’s widely-celebrated theory of female empowerment became the demand for reflexive “belief” — and not just in the “abuse” claims any woman might conceivably make, including via “recovered memory” extraction, but any claims that might ever be made by pre-school aged children! It’s almost too crazy to “believe” this actually happened. None of it was the children’s fault, of course — four-year-olds like to play “make believe,” have imaginary friends, etc., because it’s totally normal behavior at that stage of cognitive development! But so too can they be convinced of almost anything — even by fellow children, and ESPECIALLY by adults in positions of perceived authority. Those adults deserve blame for the ensuing destruction, aspects of which seem to be making a disturbing resurgence today. However, a large share of any blame allocation should be specially reserved for prominent figures who enjoy huge influential platforms, whether by merit or not, and for some ungodly reason decided to embark on a fanatical crusade to amplify, legitimize, and “believe” these twisted fantasies — the rest of society be damned. That’s Gloria Steinem.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE — COMING SOON IN PART TWO FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS

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DEAR SIR: I can understand why the concept of “dispassionate” reasoning would seem totally worthless to you. After all, you’re pretty much just a sentient bundle of crude, primal emotions — vengeance, disgust, rage, etc. — which you then pump out onto the internet, hot and raw, in the form of putative political opinions.

No need for any boring intermediary steps like “reason” to get in the way: just let those pulsating emotional sensations lead the charge. Which is roughly the thought process of an ape — but at least apes have the excuse of not having evolved any higher reasoning capacities.

Fortunately, your species has acquired these cognitive faculties — you’ve just chosen to de-activate them, because it’s always easier and more psychically gratifying to stick with unexamined emotional states.

It also tends to have the benefit of simplifying irksome, overly-complex issues — like what the facts and evidence show about a mother’s criminal culpability, or lack thereof, for the death of her three children under Massachusetts law.

So yeah — just barrel right ahead and aggressively ignore all that pointlessly complicated blather, since it might require a bit of “dispassionate” reasoning to sort through. And you’re good with just channeling your unmediated emotional feelings.

You’re convinced it’s more than sufficient to just fulminate how angry and upset you are that the three young children were killed. Wow, what a profound intellectual insight.

Congratulations: you’ve been able to emote a moral conclusion that literally no one (who’s sane) disagrees with, and which you were able to summon within the first two seconds of hearing about this case. Any further meddlesome details — legally, factually, scientifically, evidentially — instantly became 100% irrelevant.

All that’s required is for you to stay comfortably ensconced in that little “safe space” of unreasoned, unrestrained ape-like passion you’ve constructed. And let’s be honest: only a lib pussy fag simp would bother to think any harder about this issue, because it would mean having to tame their inchoate “passions” for a few minutes, and allow the more rational part of the brain to take over.

Ironically, what you’re exemplifying here is most often considered a classically “feminine” trait — but we’re all so very grateful to you, sir, because you have so vividly illustrated that males can be just as hysterical and irrational as even the most stereotypical, overwrought female: incorrigibly hostage to their own emotions, and self-righteously so, when they let themselves get worked up (or dumbed down) enough.

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What a wildly mendacious screed by Thomas Massie on the House Floor this week, calling for new Epstein-related prosecutions:

The only reason he’s able to pull this crap is because he knows he’s shielded by the Constitution’s “Speech or Debate” clause. Otherwise, he’d be sued for defamation — and rightly so.

Massie’s been thoroughly embarrassed over the past year, ever since the “Epstein client list” he was dramatically pledging to read on the House Floor never materialized. Strangely.

So to compensate, in the remaining several months he’s got left in Congress, Massie has apparently resolved to just stand there in front of the cameras whenever possible and proclaim that various people have committed prosecutable child-sex crimes. Based on supposed evidence that he still refuses to spell out with any candor or precision. Because virtually none of it would stand up to scrutiny.

As such, he continues to keep his charges purposely vague, and therefore perfectly tailored to low-information “viral moments” — fulminating like some courageous truth-teller to impugn a bunch of powerful-seeming persons as pedo-sex criminals.

That he even has the gall to do this after being caught in February 2026 defaming a bunch of random men as child-sex perpetrators — despite these men having no association whatsoever with Epstein — is astonishing. (Massie and his cohort Ro Khanna never even had the basic decency to apologize to the unsuspecting individuals they horrifically slimed.)

To take just a few examples of Massie’s most recent mendacity:

• Contrary to his repeated intimations on the House Floor and elsewhere, Leon Black WAS extensively investigated by the Feds over allegations of heinous child-sex offenses — allegations which turned out to be totally fabricated. (See my two-part series in May 2026, HERE and HERE.) Massie would presumably know this if he’d ever actually bothered to read the “Epstein Files” he loves bloviating about so much. But he’s still remarkably ill-informed about the actual contents of his precious “files.” (By the way, does he still maintain that Epstein is currently alive — despite the crystal clear photos of Epstein’s dead body that Massie evidently also never bothered to view in the “files”?)

• Similar to his pompously over-confident rants about Leon Black, Leslie Wexner was ALSO already investigated by the Feds, and similarly deemed to have no complicity in any pedo-sex crimes. Wexner even gave five hours of highly clarifying testimony to the House Oversight Committee earlier this year, which Massie has clearly also never bothered to take the time to review. Even the leading “victim” lawyer, Bradley Edwards, with whom Massie has otherwise COLLABORATED on the Epstein Files Transparency Act (and now, successor legislation) has stated publicly there are no grounds to implicate Wexner in any criminality.

• Massie insinuates that there’s something suspiciously “convenient” about Jean-Luc Brunel dying in a French jail in 2022 — but he also “conveniently” fails to mention that the sole accuser whose claims landed Brunel in that jail, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, retracted key allegations against him in 2021, just like she would end up doing with so many of her other lurid “child sex-trafficking” fantasies.

• Lapo Elkann? That’s a new one. To my knowledge, there’s never been a shred of an allegation made against this person of sex criminality tied to Epstein. Which would be odd if he’s actually guilty of something, since he’s a wealthy businessman, and there’s every reason to suppose such allegations would’ve been aired SOMEWHERE by this point — without Massie needing to debut them in the House of Representatives on September 1, 2026.

• Eduardo Teodorani-Fabbri? Appears to be just another random exotic-sounding name Massie decided to throw in, despite a total absence of any known evidentiary basis for doing so.

• Declaring as established fact that Prince Andrew “committed sex crimes in the United States too,” as Massie does, is laughable — and based solely on the wholly uncorroborated (as the DOJ itself found in 2019) and widely-retracted claims of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, along with her band of profit-seeking lawyers, who’re still hard at work continuing to monetize VRG’s massive trail of confabulations, 16+ months after her reported death.

(This brief overview of the mendacities contained in Massie’s floor speech is non-exhaustive, obviously.)

In short: another absurd, pathetic display by Massie — who’s an increasingly desperate individual, it seems, and ran back to DC to deliver this mendacious little diatribe the minute the House re-convened from August Recess.

If nothing else, Massie has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that he has zero qualms about shredding due process when it suits him politically, despite all the years he spent pontificating as some uniquely principled renegade “libertarian.”

God help us if he and his own gang of co-conspirators are really plotting out some sort of new electoral “movement.”

UPDATE: Massie is now running around claiming that the sex crime accusations he hurled on the House Floor against 14 named individuals are based on secret evidence he’s purportedly received from secret sources. So much for “transparency,” I guess?

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The prosecutors of Lindsay Clancy argued in an October 26, 2023 arraignment hearing that she “did not feel love or connection” toward one or more of her children — aged five, three, and eight months. They repeated this characterization of Lindsay’s unthinkable callousness all the way up to the start of her trial last month.

Also in that 2023 hearing, they claimed Lindsay did not really “slit her wrists,” and that she strategically “slid” out the window during her purported suicide attempt. The only reason she wound up paralyzed, they argued, was because she stupidly did not realize the ground would be frozen on a cold January night in Massachusetts. So her attempted suicide was fake, essentially, and this proved her malicious, premeditated, murderous intent.

In their July 27 opening statement at trial, the prosecutors declared Lindsay killed her three children because she was “selfish,” “controlling,” and “manipulative” — and she’d simply decided that she “no longer liked the life she thought she wanted.”

But as the trial progressed, a mountain of evidence emerged flatly contradicting the overwrought, arrogant, disparaging depictions of Lindsay the prosecutors had sought to convey. Not a single witness gave a shred of validation to their character-maligning efforts. Rather, each and every one of them did exactly the opposite. Her former husband, her former husband’s parents, every friend / acquaintance / medical provider the government could possibly muster — literally all of them unanimously said they had never known Lindsay to be anything other than a normal, caring, attentive mother.

So to salvage the maximally-vindictive charges they’d been so bizarrely invested in pursuing for three and a half years, the prosecutors finally changed course today. At closing arguments, they announced they are “not denying” that Lindsay “loved her kids” a great deal. They also admitted there is “no dispute” that she was “suffering from mental illness” at the time of the homicides.

That was the desperate last-minute pivot they decided to go with — despite the PROSECUTORS THEMSELVES being the ones who had previously “disputed” all of the above. Including at earlier stages of the grotesque livestreamed show-trial they insisted on convening. In their opening statement, they would allow only that Lindsay may have been “dealing with mental health issues” at some point “prior to the murders” — as though she was of perfectly sound mind during the “murders.” (NOTE: They should NOT have even been allowed to describe the homicides as “murder.” Whether the homicides constitute “murder” is literally the very legal question that the JURY is supposed to be deciding! As the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ruled, it is wholly “improper” for prosecutors to describe a homicide at issue as “murder” before jurors.)

Also conceded today by the prosecutors: there is “no dispute” that Lindsay legitimately attempted to kill herself. Which must mean everyone’s supposed to conveniently forget that their OWN EXPLICIT DISPUTE OF THIS VERY DETAIL is what guided their entire prosecutorial theory since 2023. Maybe if they had just made these concessions upfront, they wouldn’t have wasted untold time and state resources vigorously exacerbating such a terrible tragedy. Because aside from them, no one with any direct personal stake in the matter — namely the bereaved father — wanted a gory month-long inquisition beamed out on the internet for all to gawk at. The one time he ever talked to the media, in June 2024, Patrick Clancy said: “I wish there was a plea deal, and it was just done with.” Because he was convinced “I wasn’t married to a monster — I was married to someone who got sick.”

But the Plymouth County, Mass. DA’s office had other ideas. They insisted on inflicting the maximum retributive punishment on Lindsay, which required hauling Patrick to the courthouse and making him relive in graphic detail the moment he discovered his dead children’s bodies. They played his 911 tape, so everyone could hear him screaming in anguish. They dangled the children’s clothes in front of the jury, as though which onesie the baby was wearing when he was strangled to death was crucial information for assessing Lindsay’s criminal culpability. They flaunted around the autopsy photos of the children’s mangled corpses. They even had the strangulations re-enacted in a twisted exhibition. And then, as their arguments were systematically undermined, they grew increasingly desperate, and turned to a vulgar tangent on Catholic theology — trying to coax Patrick’s mother into saying Lindsay committed a “mortal sin,” and will thus burn in hell. Which was clearly a last-ditch attempt to guilt-trip any devout Catholics who might be on the jury. Invoking religious dogma in this manner is obviously forbidden, and the prosecutors were swiftly rebuked by the judge. But then they did it again.

This grisly taxpayer-funded fiasco was entirely avoidable. There were obvious commonsense ways to go about legally resolving such a tragic situation, without turning it into some kind of lurid retribution spectacle. That it turned out this way was the result of concerted, discretionary, and POLITICAL decision-making by a particular set of public officials. It was never about these officials just neutrally “doing their jobs.” Indeed, the US Supreme Court has defined the “job” of a prosecutor as follows:

The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the two-fold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor — indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.

Lindsay Clancy’s prosecutors fail this test in spectacular fashion. They are so beyond vile, it’s actually shocking. ADAs Jennifer Sprague and Shanan Buckingham, as well as their elected DA boss Timothy J. Cruz, need to be removed from office immediately, professionally and socially shunned, and prevented from ever holding any position of public authority again. They are despicable scumbags.

UPDATE: I’d somehow missed this…

It’s truly crazy how deranged these prosecutors are. After finally conceding today that Lindsay did in fact love her children, was mentally ill at the time of the homicides, and legitimately attempted to kill herself — all of which they had based their entire theory of the case on DENYING for the past three and a half years — Jennifer Sprague then concluded her closing argument with yet another incoherent pivot at the very last minute, declaring: “She left them discarded on the basement floor like broken toys because she was done playing the game.”

WTF? What the hell does that even mean? This woman is sick. And she’s backed by the punitive power of the state! Not only does Jennifer Sprague need to be removed from office ASAP, she should be expelled from polite society. Rarely has someone ever deserved to be “cancelled” so richly. Not for making a dumb tweet, but for such utterly abominable conduct as a public official.

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I wanted to give you a quick preview of an event I attended last week.

It was a very peculiar event. But in its own way, glorious.

It might be the only thing started by the Biden Administration that has been enthusiastically carried over by the Trump Administration. (Maybe with the exception of the Ukraine War. Just kidding. Sort of.)

It was something called the “Anti-Human Trafficking Symposium” — proudly hosted by the Department of Homeland Security, in beautiful Arlington, Virginia, mere steps away from the Pentagon. This year’s triumphant tagline: “Action is the Solution.”

That’s right! No more words, people! We need “action.” To deal with this shockingly pervasive problem of “trafficking,” which despite being so omni-present, is also somehow far too imperceptible to ever be spotted with the naked eye. And, strangely, always seems to need to be manufactured by lavishly funded sting operations. So you must attend these endless seminars, trainings, and “symposiums” to have any hope of apprehending the conceptually fluid nature of “trafficking,” because it’s simply not something you’ll ever be able to grasp as a mere mortal.

As mentioned, this event was technically sponsored by the Trump Administration.

I’ve got a question for you, fellas.

What would you say if I told you the Trump Administration is hosting “symposiums” that feature the following:

• Literal “safe spaces”

• “Lived Experience Experts”

(They even announced their own new acronym, “LEEs,” which we were lucky enough to be educated about the existence of)

• Books, hot off the presses, on what “trafficking”-related lessons we can all learn from the Epstein Files

(Don’t worry, I made sure to grab an exclusive copy. Review forthcoming! How could I resist a Trump-subsidized NGO explanation of the true meaning of Jeffrey Epstein?!?!)

And that ain’t even the half of it, fellas.

Wait till you hear about the Hollywood-style feature film I was told is currently in the works: an original blockbuster thriller on “trafficking.” Produced in association with the Trump Administration. Hell yeah! Key thematic elements will reportedly include: a sinister mythological “island,” from which all the ghastly trafficking originates, and a devious female “Madame,” who enables the main trafficking villain. Perhaps with a sprinkling of some ritual child sacrifice? Does any of this sound familiar? I’ll have to leave you in suspense for now. (And no, I am not kidding about any of this. It gets much crazier.)

STAY TUNED!

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A few further thoughts, following up on my article published Sunday night:

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If you only watch or listen to one thing from the ongoing Lindsay Clancy trial, which has now enraptured the entire internet, I strongly recommend making it this:

Dr. Phillip Resnick is probably the nation’s leading forensic psychiatrist expert on “filicide” — the killing of a child by their own parent. It’s an extremely rare phenomenon, but one that does occur often enough that somebody’s gotta be an expert on it. (I don’t use the term “expert” flippantly, either. Modern society is replete with obnoxiously fake “experts.” But if Resnick is not a legitimate “expert” on this topic, we might as well say no one can ever be an expert on anything.)

Now in his late 80s and still quite lucid, Resnick has been a witness for both the prosecution AND defense in many high-profile cases over the years. He’s helped the government convict Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, and James Holmes. He’s also worked for the DEFENSE of numerous MALE defendants whom he assessed to be psychotic when they committed heinous crimes — such as John du Pont, who killed Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz in 1996, and John Salvi, who opened fire on two abortion clinics in 1994. On account of their psychosis, Resnick argued, these men bore diminished criminal culpability for the acts they concededly took.

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Resnick was also once a consultant for the defense of Andrea Yates, the woman whom a Texas jury found “not guilty by reason of insanity” in 2002. Yates had come to believe she was possessed by Satan, and that she’d been commanded to drown her five young children in a bathtub, so as to spare them from eternal hellfire and damnation.

If you’re around the same age as me, you’re probably at least vaguely familiar with the outlines of the Andrea Yates case. I still remember it dominating cable news and tabloid magazines 25 years ago — and provoking an unhinged national “conversation” that was eerily similar to the one raging right now with Lindsay Clancy. Although the current iteration is of course wildly magnified by the TikTok’d, tweetified, podtarded-ization of everything. Whatever recollections of Andrea Yates you may or may not have, I’d recommend taking a few minutes to read this 2007 journal article authored by Resnick, in which he provides a concise summary of all that transpired — it’s full of astonishing and, yes, highly disturbing detail, much of which I know I’d personally forgotten, if I’d ever known at all. (Even better to read if you were too young to be cognizant of the associated media frenzy.)

Andrea Yates was by all accounts an intelligent, well-adjusted woman throughout the duration of her life. She’d been valedictorian of her high school class, president of the National Honor Society, and captain of her swim team. “Upon completion of her B.A. in nursing, she became a highly regarded nurse at MD Anderson Hospital in Houston.” At age 29, she married a NASA engineer, and soon had her first child. Then another, and then another. After child number four, she began to develop disturbing psychiatric symptoms. Namely, she started to believe her body was being infiltrated by Satan, who was trying to goad her into killing her children. So in order to save them, she reasoned it was necessary for her to kill herself instead. She made two attempts — first by overdosing on medication, then by slitting her own throat. Neither attempt was fatal; she was hospitalized after each. For reasons that are not exactly clear, she was discharged relatively quickly to outpatient treatment, which she then ceased when it was decided she was “feeling better.”

Apparently, this was right around the time her husband decided he wanted a fifth child, despite warnings that Andrea’s “postpartum” psychosis was very likely to recur. After the fifth child was born, their only girl, Andrea started to descend into full-blown catatonia. She was hospitalized two more times. The psychosis manifested with more alarming, overt paranoia than the first round; she became convinced that TV commercials for candy were directly addressed to her, and condemning her for feeding the children too much candy. She thought her house was bugged with hidden cameras to monitor what a horrible mother she was. She thought her mother-in-law had cameras installed in her eyeglasses, to keep her under additional surveillance. And then, perhaps most critically, she came to believe she was now fully and irredeemably possessed by the one true Satan, and that she alone had been chosen — out of every other human on Earth — as his singular earthly vessel for doing evil. Resolved to spare the children from Satan’s wrath, which she inferred they’d be inevitably stricken with by virtue of their wicked maternal connection, Andrea decided she had no other choice but to send them all to heaven.

As she drowned each of the five children in the bathtub, her oldest, a seven-year-old boy named Noah, was the only one who managed to put up a bit of a struggle. Nearing death, he was able to briefly lift his head out of the water, and cried out: “I’m sorry Mommy.” After Andrea drowned the six-month-old baby girl, named Mary, she nestled her tiny dead body into the arms of her five-year-old son, John — by then also dead — because he’d been such a good big brother to Mary. Andrea believed John would protect his baby sister in heaven. So she lay the two beside one another in bed, to await the afterlife together. Also on the bed were their dead brothers Paul, age four, and Luke, age two. The oldest boy, Noah, was left floating in the bathtub.

After drowning her children Mrs. Yates called 911 and requested that a police officer be sent to her home. She then called her husband, Rusty, and said, “It’s time,” referring to the biblical prophecy in Revelations [sic] about Armageddon. When the police arrived, Mrs. Yates told them, “I killed my kids,” and led them to the room with her four dead children.

Mrs. Yates believed that Satan was within her and tormented her and the children. She thought that after she drowned her children, she would be arrested and executed. She indicated that Satan would be executed along with her. She believed it was right to drown her children because she wanted to save their souls and didn’t want them to be “in Satan's hands.”

If you must, at least try to suspend disbelief for a moment, and stipulate that Andrea Yates really did believe these delusional things: that she was genuinely in the throes of an extreme psychiatric episode, and was emphatically convinced that the only way she could perform her sacred motherly duty was to kill the children. Is this really the sort of tragedy we should want to flippantly conflate — legally, ethically, politically, and otherwise — with a prototypical cold-blooded first-degree murder, like, say, Bryan Kohberger’s notorious alleged slayings of the four college students in Idaho? (I only say “alleged” because he recently moved to rescind his guilty plea.) Those killings, whoever did them, plainly required a premeditated and morally depraved intent, along with calculated planning, and had to be executed by someone with enough soundness of mind that they could sneak into the college kids’ house undetected, escape, and then flee the area. Conversely, it should go without saying that no sophisticated planning is required to drown a baby in a bathtub. Dr. Resnick says that in his clinical judgment, Andrea Yates had become engulfed by a full-blown psychosis, and in such an extreme delusional state, had reasoned herself into the fervent conviction that if she didn’t kill her children, they’d be destined to “burn in hell” for the rest of time. Therefore, as a loving mother, it was her profound obligation to do whatever was necessary to rescue them from this fate.

Resnick further opined that Andrea “did not conceal her homicidal plan because she knew what she was doing was wrong” — meaning she thought it was RIGHT, contrary to what the prosecution’s expert witness had sought to argue, as the government was attempting to convict Andrea of capital murder, which carries the death penalty, and requires that certain elements of criminal intent be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But because “Mrs. Yates believed that she was defeating Satan by taking her children’s lives,” Resnick writes, “and saving their souls while they were still innocent,” the homicidal acts she committed could not be said to legally comport with first-degree murder. In other words, while young children may sometimes be killed under the most tragic of circumstances, including by their own mother, society rightfully does not treat the offending acts as qualitatively identical to other forms of homicide. Even so, the government tried to argue that Andrea’s concealment of her plans served to demonstrate the requisite criminal intent. Resnick countered that Andrea concealing the plans had an explicable logic within the parameters of the psychosis: she thought if she revealed these plans, it would tip Satan off, and her goal would be thwarted, because Satan would then make her kill the children of his own volition, and she needed to kill them so they would be sent to Heaven rather than Hell.

While a bit more theologically florid than any comparable beliefs ascribed to Lindsay Clancy, a similar theme has emerged in her case — Lindsay also did not go around openly announcing plans to kill her children, and the government is alleging this proves the malicious forethought of first-degree murder. But like Andrea, according to Resnick, Lindsay’s reasons for this intent-concealment were explicable per the internal logic of her psychosis. She did not want to trigger a situation whereby police, social services, or some other agency/individual would have cause to intervene and take the children away, because she believed it was her own solemn duty to protect them. And protecting them required that they be strangled to death with exercise bands. Delusional as it may be, the logic is internally consistent within her extreme psychotic state. Resnick also added that far from faking, exaggerating, or “malingering” any symptoms, Lindsay sought to downplay and minimize the severity of her condition, so as not to create alarm, because she did not want to be separated from the children. Bear in mind: “psychosis” need not mean that someone loses all executive function, or collapses into a total babbling stupor. Lindsay was still able to reason, carry out some routine tasks, and even plan future acts — such as the homicides — notwithstanding her worsening state of psychosis. Same with Andrea.

Another parallel between the two episodes:

Mrs. Yates made no effort to hide her crime. Her delusional belief that TV cameras were monitoring her did not stop her from killing her children in her home. Immediately after the killings, she called the police, remained at the crime scene, and requested to be punished.

Mrs. Yates had no alternative motive to take the lives of her children other than the psychotic belief that she was saving their souls. She was a devoted mother. She stated in her audiotaped confession on June 20, 2001, that her children were not developing correctly. She added that she was not mad at her children because they had not done anything wrong.

Likewise, I don’t understand what alternate motive all these ragefully embittered guys online are trying to impute to Lindsay. Why exactly do you figure she would’ve killed her three children, if not out of a genuinely “psychotic” belief that she too was actually saving them? What else could she have possibly gotten from this? Fame? Fortune? Freedom? Please. Her life is effectively over at age 36 — whatever verdict in the trial is ultimately rendered. (It could come within days, so buckle up for an even bigger nuclear-explosion of poorly-informed vitriol.) Zero evidence has been presented for anything other than her dire mental condition as the proximate cause of the tragedy. Lindsay does differ from Andrea in that instead of immediately calling the police to confess, and requesting to be punished, as Andrea did, Lindsay attempted to kill herself afterwards. (In accordance with what the voice inside her head had instructed her to do, as expert witnesses for both the prosecution and defense have testified.) This sequence of events does not suggest any willful scheme to cover up the crimes, or to conceal her own culpability for committing them. Hence, her lawyer is seeking a verdict of “Not Guilty By Reason Of Insanity,” or as it’s technically called in Massachusetts, “LACK OF CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY.” The criteria for which are:

If the Commonwealth has proved the elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt, the Commonwealth must also prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was criminally responsible at the time of the alleged offense. Under the law, a person is not guilty if they lacked criminal responsibility when they committed the offense. This is sometimes referred to as not guilty by reason of insanity. There is no burden on the defendant to prove that they lacked criminal responsibility.

This really shouldn’t be that difficult to grasp: you can rationally conclude Lindsay “lacked criminal responsibility” under this framework, without somehow “defending” or “excusing” the homicide of three little children. Which is so maddeningly obvious, it shouldn’t even need to be said. Claiming that anyone who points out the mountain of mitigating evidence as to Lindsay’s criminal culpability must be Defending/Excusing child homicide is just the cheap deflection of a scoundrel — typically someone, I’ve found, who for some reason really aggressively does not want to know, much less seriously grapple with, the actual facts of this extremely sad situation. Which is… the whole point of having a trial in the first place. Plugging your fingers in your ears, and declaring the only thing you need to know is the thing anyone can learn in half a second — that she killed the children — is so puerile. It’s the kind of thing little kids do when they don’t want to hear any uncomfortable or disconcerting information that might challenge their unexamined assumptions. Little kids have a perfectly valid excuse, though: they lack the maturity and cognitive capacity for multi-dimensional adult reasoning. But on this matter in particular, it’s striking how many ostensible adults — overwhelmingly men, I can’t help but notice — just revert to a kind of childlike emotional obstinacy. And they’re somehow really proud of themselves for this, like it proves their innate superiority, rather than their crude and lazy infantilism.

I had no desire to get especially engaged in this Lindsay Clancy issue. I’d found it peripherally interesting, and would occasionally listen to some trial excerpts, but it’s ultimately just one criminal trial in Massachusetts. However, the public response has gotten so twisted and disturbing over the past week, I’ve found it difficult not to engage. And I have to say: I can’t remember any issue in the past ever compelling me to do what I’m about to do: make sweeping categorical statements addressed to one specific sex. I usually hate those kinds of pompous generalizations.

But really, FELLOW MALES — at least those of you bloviating the loudest on the internet — you’ve really gone out of your way to earn “our” stereotypical reputation on this one. Like you enjoy exhibiting a painful lack of basic conscientiousness, or yeah, “empathy” — which I’m told is now some kind of cuss word among a certain online set. Don’t worry though; civilization is not going to collapse under the hormonally feminized weight of “suicidal empathy” just because mitigating details about a defendant’s criminal liability are recognized. I find it amazing how many males are so angrily unwilling to look at this case with any degree of impartiality; they’ve somehow come to think that it’s a referendum on “women” in general, or how women are “never held responsible” for anything. What? If that’s what you’re really set on extrapolating here, it’s your own bizarre problem — it’s got nothing to do with the actual facts and evidence of the case, which overwhelmingly show Lindsay Clancy lacks criminal culpability for first-degree murder, under the laws duly enacted by the state of Massachusetts. Why does this make you so mad? Figure out some other venue to resolve your pent-up emotional issues; I’ve never seen “men” as a class react more crudely and “emotionally” to anything.

Did you ever think that humanity evolved with two sexes for a reason? And maybe there are certain classically “feminine” traits like “emotional awareness” and [shudder] “empathy” that can provide some useful insights into the human condition? Just as the more “male-coded” traits can do, like “dispassionate logic,” “facts over emotion” and so on? (YES, PEOPLE, I’M NECESSARILY MAKING POPULATION-WIDE GENERALIZATIONS, AND AS SUCH, THEY MAY NOT STRICTLY APPLY TO YOU PERSONALLY, OR YOUR OVERLY EMOTIONAL MALE FRIEND, YOUR COLDLY LOGICAL FEMALE NEIGHBOR, ETC.) Maybe these sex-associated traits can even nicely balance each other out, at least if you’re not obsessed with waging some stupidly vindictive Culture War against half the human race?

Don’t worry ladies: I definitely have some critical observations I could share about your collective reasoning tendencies as well, but that can wait for another time, because it’s the guys who are really beclowning themselves on this one. And I’m only making these categorical statements about “guys” vs. “ladies” because I’ve genuinely never seen any other issue line up so uniformly along a sex-based binary. Which unto itself is kind of disconcerting, as there’s no particular reason why a person’s inborn sex ought to be so determinative in shaping popular attitudes around this thing. But here we are.

“SMITE THAT DASTARDLY WOMAN AND HER ANNOYING TIKTOK DEFENDERS” is not impressive reasoning, fellas. If your only reaction to the harrowing outlier tragedy of Lindsay Clancy is to just snarl with animalistic fury at this beleaguered woman, and demand — countervailing evidence be damned — that she be locked up for life in prison, or as many men (but almost zero women) seem to crave, executed on the spot — that’s not an impulse borne of any considered moral judgment. No, sorry, you don’t get the moral highground because you’re willing to declare it’s bad for mothers to kill their babies and toddlers. Yeah, we know. Thanks. Literally no one who’s sane disagrees with that; it’s barely even worth saying. It’s not some brilliant insight you attained by any faculties of higher reasoning. You’re simply taking your base visceral disgust — already shared by the entire non-insane human population — and then letting the rage flow into dictating every subsequent legal, ethical, and political consideration that is attendant to this matter. Which is not some impressively defiant moral stand — it’s just a tantrum. Maybe it feels cathartic on some level, especially when layered onto some weird psychosexual resentments you’re vicariously wanting to satisfy, to stomp around thundering that the only acceptable outcome here is for the tragedy to be compounded even further, and for the punitive power of the state to be enlisted to carry out your gorilla-brained retribution fantasies. Thankfully, humans have evolved such that (in theory) they can activate modes of reasoning to transcend these instinctive, guttural urges of disgust, rage, bloodlust, etc. — and our brains allow us to achieve understandings not strictly aroused by our unreasoned emotional sensations. Because really, bro? Does it make you feel good to aggressively avoid developing any more complicated thoughts on the subject, because you’d rather just fulminate KILLING CHILDREN BAD — as if that’s some brave insight. Congratulations, you’ve bloviated a truism that literally no one (who’s un-psychotic) could possibly disagree with. Where can we subscribe to your newsletter?

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Dr. Resnick wrote in his article: “No crime evokes more intense feelings than a mother killing her own children.” Hard to argue with that — especially looking at how the entire internet has exploded over Lindsay Clancy, and in such depressingly blithering fashion. I knew something unique was going on when my extremely normie sister, who follows little or no news, announced last weekend that she was voraciously following each day’s developments in the trial. Given these unusual levels of normie interest, of course the typical bozo pundits will waste no time reducing it to another dumb Culture War slugfest. Good for “engagement” I guess, but bad for collective sanity. And it’s funny, because unlike so many other high-profile “cultural” issues in recent memory, this one definitely does NOT fit into any kind of standard Culture War template. By any stretch of the imagination. I know I am personally getting tons of thankful messages from women of virtually EVERY political persuasion — including plenty of RIGHT-WING women — as well as totally apolitical women. And sure, yeah, lib women too. These women have all united to praise me for appearing to be one of the vanishingly few males out there with any appreciable public profile who seems to “get it”? Which is nice, I guess, but also pretty sad? It wasn’t some conscious goal of mine, at all. As best I can access my own mind, I’ve used the same basic method to evaluate this issue that I would for anything else. Lindsay’s the defendant here, in case you forgot, and the government is the one claiming it has the necessary evidence to convict her of a particular grievous crime. My general disposition to sympathize with “the accused” remains unchanged. But apparently this is seen as revolutionary now — especially in contrast with all the tough-guy online blowhards who can barely rub two brain cells together, and think anyone who disagrees on Lindsay being a sadistic murderous maniac must either be a hormonal female hysteric, or a pathetic male “simp.” In other words, they can only think in terms of moronic internet cliches. So, since I’m not parroting the awfully-argued theories of the Plymouth County, MA District Attorney’s office as to Lindsay’s purported criminal culpability, I must only be doing this because I suddenly want to pander to stereotypically female sensibilities. Like it’s some some sudden calculated self-promotional gambit on my part — and for what purpose, exactly? To what end? Who the hell knows anymore. (The most common answer, I gather, is that I’m a “hope she sees this” guy — meaning I want to date Lindsay or something.) Gentlemen, you’re so right: I’m sure the same women who happen to temporarily appreciate my refreshing-for-a-male takes on Lindsay C. will be thrilled to learn my views on Jeffrey Epstein, politically-contrived “rape” scandals, “sex trafficking” scams, and so on. (Views which of course I have zero plans to arbitrarily revise.) I know this is hard to wrap your shriveled little heads around, but maybe, just maybe, all I’m doing here is once again seeking to engage in honest reasoning, to the best of my ability, grounded in a maximally rational assessment of the available facts and evidence. Maybe… that’s it? And there isn’t some devious ulterior motive to divine?

Amusingly enough, I posted the below tweet while heading out to another “anti-trafficking” symposium last week — an event at which I subsequently spent the entire time marveling and snickering, per usual, at the latest absurd frontiers in the collossal “anti-trafficking” racket. (More on that later…)

I truly thought this was a fairly innocuous observation, but people went berserk. It really does just strike me as straight-forwardly sensible, though? Retaining some humility as to the physical and mental impacts of pregnancy, which only one sex in the human species (not mine, by chance) is able to undergo? What’s the problem, bros? It would probably also be a good idea to retain some humility about what it’s like to live in rural China, or what it was like to live in the 15th century, or various other life experiences to which we cannot personally relate. So too with phenomena you are biologically precluded from ever undergoing? And no, this doesn’t mean you are forbidden to have an opinion on how child homicide should be penalized in the United States. It doesn’t mean you need a uterus to comment on the Lindsay Clancy trial. Don’t be stupid, please.

But... I have to say, it does seem like there’s a big signal in the noise to be gleaned here when like >95% of humans who have child-bearing capacities are utterly mortified by the brutish and dismissive reactions to the Lindsay trial, which so many gung-ho male persons have made sure to showcase lately. Perhaps because the child-bearers among us believe, justifiably, that these dumb-dumb male reactions reflect a really crass and off-putting arrogance about the legitimate turmoils that pregnancy can unleash on women’s minds and bodies? Notwithstanding that it’s still a necessary process for species propagation? I don’t know why any male would somehow take offense to giving this mysterious (to us) domain of human biology some measure of reasonable deference/accommodation. After all, fellas, you were also born via pregnancy! As will any offspring you may care to breed. So it might be worth taking seriously when near-unanimous groundswells of women, including MANY with no discernible reason to embellish, are vehemently trying to convey that they see in Lindsay someone who could very conceivably have been them — or their sister / friend / whomever — and not because they’re all homicidal freaks who want to kill their three-year-olds, for Christ’s sake. But because it’s scarily easy to imagine a scenario where their pregnancy-induced chemicals start misfiring, and they’re having these intrusive thoughts of harming their children, and they’re begging for help, and they’re trying to get treatment, and it’s not working, it’s only making things worse, and they don’t know what to do, and they’re terrified, and they literally try to institutionalize themselves, but they’re also embarrassed, because they don’t want everyone to think they’re a bad mother, but they also REALLY don’t want social services or police to come and take their young dependent children away, so they just kind of try to compartmentalize for awhile, and say they’re starting to “feel a little better,” when they know it’s actually the opposite. And they deteriorate further and further, until the unthinkable happens. What makes it so scarily relatable is precisely that Lindsay was NOT some open homicidal lunatic. What’s scary is how thoroughly normal she was. (Her whole family/friend network, too.) She had no dark secrets, no crazy drama, no conflict with her husband/mother/colleagues — nothing. And yet, she still found herself beset with this sudden-onset spell of an extreme aberrant psychosis that culminated in the most horrifying of all possible outcomes.

I don’t feel like I’m sharing any profoundly incisive intellectual discoveries here. I’m mostly just reciting the basic facts and evidence established by the trial. So while it’s nice to have all this newfound support from all you lovely ladies, I also find it moronic that the following should even be regarded as any sort of inherently woman-exclusive point:

DEAR FELLOW MALES! As you know, I’ve never felt the need to address you all collectively before, because to do so would usually imply a kind of sneering self-importance. (Who would purport to be addressing half of the entire human population, as though they somehow have unified group-wide interests by way of their genitalia?) You’ve forced me to make a one-time Substack exception, though, because the night-and-day contrast between the male/female reactions to this whole Lindsay thing is about as extreme (and almost entirely uniform) as any I’ve ever seen. SNAP OUT OF IT, DAMMIT!

Like it or not, there’s only one half of the species that incubates the baby in her body for nine months. You fellas just inseminate. I don’t see this as a “battle of the sexes” issue? Why are the sexes even “battling” at all? How foolish! Males and females can have distinct biological needs, wants, and impulses by nature of their intrinsic physical features, without that needing to pit male and female against each other in some tedious unwinnable “battle.”

I’ll also just note that despite “women” in general tending to have a less favorable view of my reporting/commentary on other hot-button issues as of late, the people whom I most frequently consult with in private about all this stuff are… WOMEN! That’s right! Probably like 8 times out of 10, it’s women who I am chatting with behind the scenes about the latest goofy “rape” fiasco or whatever. I really do feel bad for all you bitter guys out there who genuinely seem to have never had an interesting/edifying relationship — or even conversation?!?! — with an intelligent and well-grounded female, so you’ve been led to believe they’re all just nightmarish hormonal basket-cases who can’t ever be reasoned with about anything. It’s nice to have platonic female friends and advisors! You just get a different dynamic with ‘em than you do with fellow males. I’d probably never give a male friend a gift, for instance, but I’ve given female friends gifts. Because it’s nice. (“MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT!”) And who wants to talk to other dopey men about “emotional” or “relationship” issues, if ever a need to discuss such things may arise? Women are way better for that!

Anyway, back to Lindsay Clancy — she was forensically evaluated by Dr. Resnick for many hours, after which he concluded that she was “frankly psychotic” at the time she killed her children. Having developed five descriptive categories for “filicide,” Resnick concluded that Lindsay committed what he calls “altruistic filicide” — that is, she sincerely believed, in her delusional state, that she was compelled to kill her children out of love, not animus. “She was obsessional about caring for her children,” Resnick says. It’s eerily reminiscent of Andrea Yates, even if their respective psychoses had different expressive features. Yates didn’t try to kill herself after the drownings, perhaps believing she had accomplished her principal task of delivering the children from Satan’s eternal torment. Her psychosis was also more outwardly infused with the grandiose religious themes, although a witness who testified at the Lindsay trial on Friday did report that when she took Dawson, her three-year-old boy, down to the basement, wrapped an exercise band around his neck, and then strangled him to death, she vocalized the words “Go with God.” This same incantation was repeated as she went on to asphyxiate Cora, her five-year-old girl, and then Callan, her eight-month-old baby boy, whose birth is what appears to have been the catalyst for Lindsay’s ultimate psychotic descent.

Call me a “simp,” call me a pussy, call me whatever — I’m just not going to concede that it’s remotely rational to want to punish this poor, broken woman any more than she already has been. Because the punishment’s going to continue for the rest of her life, regardless of whether she ends up in a state-controlled psychiatric facility or a state-controlled prison. (Or even if she’s eventually granted some kind of release down the line.) I guess I’ll have to join up with her “simp” former husband, whose own children she killed, and her heroic male defense lawyer, and agree that as to her criminal culpability, the elements for “first-degree murder” are nowhere near satisfied. According to Dr. Resnick, who I can’t fathom had any reason to lie on the stand for the first time in his life at age 88, Lindsay committed the homicides while in a literal “dream state,” and she believed she was following the commands of the voice inside her head, which had told her this was her last chance to save the children, by killing them and then herself. To end their suffering, as a result of her purported motherly failures — a marginally more secular version of what Andrea Yates had also delusionally envisioned.

“Men and women are different!” we are often cantankerously told. And OK, sure, fine! That’s true as far as it goes! In light of this, here’s one notable “difference” I’d like to propose: in these extremely rare instances where a mother kills her own young children — the very organisms she spent nine months carrying inside her own body — the sensible default assumption is that she must have been in a state of genuine delusion. Like, that is something I am comfortable just presuming, if only from a pure evolutionary standpoint. Because when a mother-on-child homicide happens, particularly with very young children who are still physically dependent on the mother, something has gone so gravely, anomalously wrong with the natural order of things, it seems like the absolute least plausible explanation is that the woman made a sane, considered decision to strangle or drown her own babies. Maybe there are some even more freakishly rare cases where this has in fact happened, but in the main, I’m OK just assuming the woman must have been genuinely psychotic. Of course, verifying it would require gathering the requisite evidence, which has been more than satisfactorily done in Lindsay’s case. But as to that baseline assumption: I’m only applying it to women. “BECAUSE MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT.” And it’s just not an assumption that can be made anywhere near as intuitively about men who kill their children. Sorry, fellow fellas — we didn’t grow the organisms in our bodies for nine months. So we’re not entitled to the same presumption women get on this one. Don’t get upset though, it’s just another straightforward commonsense “difference” between men and women. No?

All you macho men out there who just want to taunt “Lindsay defenders” on the internet are, as usual, unwittingly defending the government, because that’s who is currently trying to throw her in prison for the rest of her life. As if any public interest is somehow advanced by that outcome. Or as though keeping her confined to a state psychiatric facility, likely in perpetuity, is some abominable miscarriage of “justice.” Frankly, I don’t believe this prosecution ever should have been brought at all. The vastly more merciful course of action would’ve been to simply take whatever money was spent on this travesty and pave a road, plant a tree, fly a kite — anything. Because holy shit.

The trial has been truly horrible. Not “horrible” in a way that might be unfortunately necessary, and we all just have to grit our teeth and get through it, because some higher civic purpose is being served. Much to the contrary: Massachusetts taxpayers are no better off for these baby/toddler slayings being recounted over and over by the weeping emergency responders, or the bereaved former husband, or the anguished grandparents. No societal good has been gained from the gruesome images of the children’s strangled corpses being displayed to the now emotionally-ravaged jurors. What’s the point of all this? The DAs have probably botched the case anyway, rendering the whole spectacle even more gratuitously unnecessary. If some guys on the internet get to experience some exhilarating vicarious bloodlust, I’m not sure that’s an adequate public interest. “Deterrence,” you say? Give me a friggin’ break. You can’t seriously think any government entity needs to “deter” the mothers of America from killing their own children, by stressing to them that this is really bad, and really strongly against the law? What world do you live in? Do you suppose that Lindsay would have been “deterred,” if only she had learned the legal lessons of some televised court proceedings? Maybe the whole point of “not guilty by reason of mental illness or mental defect” is that she was in no state to be “deterred” by anything tethered to reality?

Vague aspirations of “deterrence” are likely no match for the “command hallucinations” Dr. Resnick said Lindsay was experiencing, whereby she believed that her motherly obligation was to kill the children, to save them from suffering, and then kill herself. By all the evidence that’s been presented — including from the apparently “simp” former husband, who’s been her most consistent “defender” since the day the tragedy occurred in January 2023 — Lindsay was a completely normal, loving mother. There’s no reason whatsoever to think this wouldn’t have continued, but for her cognition going into free-fall. She literally thought her brain was being physically destroyed — a perception almost certainly exacerbated by the ridiculous cocktail of heavy-duty medications she was prescribed. Not a shred of evidence suggests that she ever exhibited any signs in her entire life that could’ve been seen as leading indicators that she had any predilection to carry out a child homicide coverup scheme. Her husband 100% refutes that notion, her husband’s parents refute it — every friend, acquaintance, family member, and medical provider has refuted it. None of them say anything other than that Lindsay cared deeply for the children, and would have never dreamed of harming them. Indeed, she never did harm them prior to the killings. No abuse, no spanking, no nothing. She had no conflict with the husband, whom she loved and admired.

It’s really weird, and even depraved, that so many people out there apparently feel a need to believe Lindsay was a vicious pre-meditated murderer who secretly hated her own children, and wanted them dead for some selfishly malignant reason that’s never been articulated. So what, she could be “child free” again? And then do what, exactly? Sit in a room, staring at the wall, paralyzed from the waist down, and spend the rest of her life haunted by the knowledge of what she did? Yeah, sounds like a great time.

“She’s a cold-blooded killer” makes zero sense. You’d kind of have to be r*tarded, or perhaps unable to regulate your own emotions, to believe it. I realize guys on the internet think they know better than everyone who has ever known or evaluated Lindsay, but I’m still not sure on what grounds they base this smug certainty — other than some warped desire to win a moronic Gender Battle online. Yeah, I’m aware there are some women on TikTok who have made some dumb claims about the case, which is not surprising; anything that gets popular in that demographic always gets sucked into their True Crime Podcast Netflix Soap Opera fandom vortex. So some of them have apparently speculated that the former husband was secretly responsible for the killings, because he was having an affair, or whatever. Sure, fine, who’s ever making those trashy videos is obnoxious. But why are you orienting your own view of the case in opposition to some gossipy nonsense on TikTok? That’s really the paramount principle at stake here for you? So incensed are you by this stupid short-form video content, you’re going to snidely declare that Lindsay must have faked her suicide attempt — even though Dr. Resnick, et al., have uniformly assessed it as genuine? (It’s amazing how cavalierly some people can spout that they just know, with total unwavering certainty, that this woman who slit her own neck and wrists, then jumped out a window and paralyzed herself, was diabolically “faking” it. Sure thing, tough guy.)

In sum, no, Lindsay Clancy is not someone the government ought to be making a whole self-righteous show of condemning as a first-degree murderer — a specific crime for which specific elements must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutors have woefully failed to do so, despite the three and a half years they’ve had to investigate this case. If and when a “Not Guilty” verdict comes down, expect the boneheaded male rage-baiters to go even more nuts, because it’s never really been about the facts or evidence. Just the surrogate Culture War fight that everyone’s always looking for some excuse to open another front in. For my part, I’d rather stick to the Constitution, which you may have heard affords due process to all citizens, even alleged perpetrators of the most tragic acts — including those who concede they committed the acts, but nevertheless maintain they are not guilty by reason of insanity. Because they were in the depths of a medically demonstrable psychosis. Hauling this woman off to a prison cell, rather than a psychiatric ward, accomplishes precisely nothing except additional sorrow, in a saga that could not possibly need any less of that. Maybe a certain segment of men would find this outcome to be sadistically pleasing, but that empty hit of euphoria will last about five minutes, and they’ll swiftly move on to the next emotionally stunted fixation. The three children will still be dead.

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Max Miller, now widely referred to as the “embattled” Republican Congressman from Ohio — since he’s been facing a crush of calls to terminate his 2026 re-election campaign and/or resign from office entirely — was supposed to be appearing at a rally today, August 10, in Strongsville, OH. Joining him on the bill was supposed to be Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), whom Miller had frequently cited as a valued woman colleague continuing to vouch for him, despite the torrent of “allegations” he’s been inundated with: namely, that he physically abused his former wife, Emily Moreno, and even more shockingly, assaulted their two-and-a-half-year-old child, causing the toddler to fracture her collar bone.

The scheduled rally was canceled a few days ago. For what reason, you ask? Organizers claim an avalanche of “threats” of an unspecified nature had made holding the rally “untenable” — a determination they insist had only been arrived at after careful consultations with law enforcement. Despite this unfortunate outcome, local Republican officials seized the chance to spin the cancellation into a dramatic partisan rallying cry; it was intimated that the terrifying “threats” had somehow originated with George Soros, AOC, and the usual cast of diabolical left-wing characters. “They may have forced us to cancel Monday’s event, but they have not canceled our movement,” the organizers declared. “They will not silence us.”

If the stated reason for this sudden cancellation seems a bit dubious… well, that’s probably a sound intuition. Because the chairman of the Strongsville GOP, Shannon Burns, did not provide me with any specifics whatsoever about the purported “threats” that necessitated shutting down the rally, nor any insight into how they could have been of such a frightful magnitude that the safety of two sitting members of Congress, plus members of the public, could not be assured by Ohio public safety officials. Burns instead directed me to Miller’s office for more info, which in turn also said it had nothing.

The apparent dearth of evidence illuminating these supposedly cataclysmic “threats” is understandable, because I am reliably informed the whole explanation was a total charade — a bogus cover story, concocted to conceal the real reason for the cancellation, which no one involved seems particularly eager to publicize. Here’s what happened: Anna Paulina Luna, who is usually quick to fire off showy denunciations based on rumors of personal-life impropriety, however groundless, had reportedly become “uncomfortable” over the latest insane “allegation” hurled at Miller: that he disseminated a “CSAM” image of his own daughter. It was a photo of the toddler child with her shirt off.

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Let’s be 100% clear right off the bat, please: only a sicko would ever have even the slightest notion that this totally innocuous image could possibly constitute “CSAM” — the recently-updated federal government term for “child pornography.” Yeah, I saw the image myself, because I was simply scrolling through the Dropbox files Miller posted August 2, which contained volumes of evidence related to the dispute with his former wife, Emily. Some of those materials predictably dealt with claims that he’d inflicted physical violence on their young daughter. So it was not surprising to see an image of the girl having a mark on her collarbone examined, in which she happened to have her shirt off. But because I am not sick in the head — or at least, not in this way — I never would’ve dreamt of imputing anything sexually explicit to the image, which again, is of a freakin’ two-year-old with her shirt off. (There was no “genitalia” visible, despite what her mother’s sleazy lawyers suggested.) The only way for the image to be described as anything remotely in the realm of “CSAM” would be for the describer to have some seriously depraved motive: whether a deviant sexual impulse to sexualize toddlers, or as seems to be the case here, a desire to opportunistically capitalize on some sick stretch of an argument to wield in an increasingly explosive litigation / PR battle. Because what better way to further villainize Miller than to put out the claim that he’s such an irredeemable psycho, he would manufacture and distribute child pornography featuring his own toddler daughter. We’ve really reached rock bottom.

So no — by any rational conception, the image was not “CSAM.” Which is a designation that at least nominally requires an image to be “sexually explicit.” This image wasn’t even in that universe, and again, to even suggest such a thing is genuinely repulsive. But that didn’t stop Congresswoman Luna from professing sufficient “discomfort” that she apparently felt obliged to drop out of a scheduled political appearance with Miller. Which meant a flurry of GOP operative underlings had to contrive a phony excuse for why the rally was being canceled at the last minute. (Luna did not respond to a request for comment.)

This episode is only the latest example of how the Max Miller affair has become so pernicious — but as usual, not for the reasons 99.9% of the media and political class has been screeching about. Because what’s truly pernicious is the radical expansion of the “allegation escalation” vortex, that is, the process by which some kernel of an “allegation” about the personal-life wrongdoings of some public-facing individual can be transmogrified, virtually overnight, into the most grotesque “allegations” imaginable, particularly in a turbo-charged political environment — and better yet, when some obscure election law deadline is coming up. It’s probably not a coincidence, dontcha think, that the apparent deadline for Miller to drop out of his Congressional race and be replaced by another party-chosen Republican was this afternoon, August 10. Miller had always been adamant that he was not dropping out regardless, and seemingly confirmed this today as the deadline came and went — although Ohio election law is extremely convoluted as to what the precise deadlines for acceptable ballot-replacement are. (Try wading through this mess of statutory gobbledygook.) In any event, a flurry of righteous concern-trolling op-eds in the New York Times and elsewhere, demanding that Miller honor the deeply important deadline and defenestrate himself ASAP, did not achieve their intended objective.

We saw something very similar happen earlier in the summer, albeit with a considerably different outcome: the Democratic Party handles such ordeals with far more hyper-reactive, unforgiving ruthlessness than its Republican counterpart. For reasons that are interesting to expound. The differences of course must begin and end with the Republican coalition still being structured around the daily whims of Donald J. Trump, and if Trump hasn’t called for someone’s humiliating ouster, that will keep a lid on any collectivized denunciatory outburst. Internal GOP consensus for some alleged wrongdoer to resign or withdraw remain overwhelmingly (but not 100%) dependent on Trump. Whereas the Democrats have no comparable shot-calling figure, so its party infrastructure is less hierarchically distributed, and functions more like a decentralized network of mad-scrambling hysterics that coalesce organically into ritualistic condemnation the minute any “allegation” of sufficient gravity is conjured.

Max Miller, unlike recent Dem casualties Platner or Eric Swalwell, has not been accused of rape. Indeed, the “allegations” against him are not so much “sexual” as they are about his alleged proclivity for sadistic interpersonal violence. But the allegations basically put him in the same category of public disavowal anyway, as if he were an alleged rapist, because the demanded retribution is approximately the same warp-speed vaporization — fueled by the usual aversion to engage in any dispassionate assessment of the relevant facts and evidence.

Although publicly non-committal about Miller’s fate, Trump was reported to have privately phoned him last week and opined he’ll probably now have a tough time winning re-election, in light of the accusation-tornado unleashed by his former wife and her PR-minded lawyers. This tepid treatment by Trump created a bit of an atypical vacuum in the Republican Party ecosystem, with the void marginally filled by Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), who just happens to be Miller’s former father-in-law. Bizarrely, the media has decided to elevate Moreno as an authoritative commentator on everything allegedly wrong with Miller’s behavior and personality. We’re told in a NYT column that Senator Moreno triumphantly “broke his silence” last week — like he should be given a Profile in Courage Award or something — because he finally went out in front of the cameras and publicly excoriated Miller, declaring him unfit for office, on account of his allegedly terroristic treatment of Moreno’s beloved daughter Emily, and their two-and-a-half-year-old child.

The way this whole saga has been portrayed, pretty much everywhere in media/political circles, has been totally maddening. I really did not even want to get involved, frankly, because I can only stomach so many of these endless “allegation” cycles. But then I was stupid enough to actually read through the Dropbox repository Miller and his lawyers made available — replete with court records and copious other primary source evidence. Which I realize is silly stuff for journalists to bother reviewing before they make flamboyant pronouncements on a matter of public import. But as I unwisely scrolled through the material, I couldn’t help but notice a wealth of highly pertinent details that were being completely omitted from the outrage-saturated media cacophony. Sigh, I thought to myself — here we go again.

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The prevailing representation of Emily Moreno as a conclusively victimized and battered woman, who is merely trying to escape her former husband’s wrath for the sake of herself and her child, just seems straightforwardly wrong. Or at least, not nearly as clear-cut as the first-blush media treatments have led the public to assume.

NOTE: This does not mean Miller hasn’t ever done anything wrong in his personal life, or that he hasn’t caused his former intimate partners to become upset at his behavior in certain instances. But I’m sorry — things are just not black and white in this fallen world, and everyone should be immediately suspicious whenever a black and white moral caricature gets gleefully blasted out for public consumption. Especially if it stems from a heated divorce and custody dispute — as though it’s EVER defensible to just parrot one side’s unvetted narrative in such matters. Here, it’s only made worse by the fact that this is all taking place in such a blatantly POLITICAL context — a wildly escalating feud between two newly embittered Ohio political fiefdoms: Miller and Moreno. Skepticism would be called for even if one of these “sides” did NOT include a sitting Ohio Senator, who last week set about cajoling his Senate colleagues to presume the credibility of his daughter’s torturous tale, with his own fatherly comments added, so they’d join him in demanding that Miller self-immolate his career and reputation. These unusual add-on political factors make it truly insane for the media, or any minimally rational observer, to be so hyper-credulous about the lurid details the Moreno father/daughter combo have pumped out, along with their team of leaking lawyers.

In the absence of Trump taking any kind of decisive position on Miller’s fate, Senator Moreno is now playing a kind of surrogate “leader” role, which has a particular purchase with his colleagues in the Senate — a body largely predicated on informal customs of collegial deference and decorum. And so it was that Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) broke his own “silence” August 6, calling on Miller to stand down, based on what Husted took to be the presumptive veracity of the narrative advanced by his trusted same-state colleague, Emily’s dad. Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT) then followed suit, going so far as to declare Miller “a degenerate sociopath” — because Sheehy apparently saw a tweet thread from the Mother Jones reporter who’s been leading the charge against Miller. That’s some classic “strange bedfellows” for you. What seems eminently doubtful is that Sheehy took the time to examine very much of the voluminous court files and investigative records before rattling off his brutal public verdict on Miller’s psychological state. Other GOP figures of note have also called for Miller’s withdrawal, but it’s a less uniformly frantic party-wide consensus than would almost certainly be the case if something like this had gone down with a Democrat.

Worth underscoring is that even as the heat on Miller had been building in recent months, until last week he stood accused of no sexually predatory behavior per se — only interpersonally abusive behavior toward his former wife and young daughter. Which would be bad enough on its own, of course. But then the accusation train left the station, and by last week it escalated to an almost incomprehensible extreme — the claim that he put “CSAM” material of his own toddler daughter out on the internet. Such an insane allegation goes way, way beyond anything that might have arisen out of a messy custody/divorce fight that got progressively hyperbolic over time. “CSAM” is the kind of thing that can get somebody ostracized for life, and thrown into prison for decades. In fact, that’s exactly what Miller’s former father-in-law, a SITTING US SENATOR, Bernie Moreno, has expressly called for: that anyone who disseminated, or perhaps even viewed the offending image of his granddaughter with her shirt off, should be charged with felonies and locked up. Which means at the very least, this Senator is calling for Congressman Miller to be prosecuted, and not just for any old criminal violation, but one of the worst offenses anybody can ever commit, as far as the median member of the public is concerned: producing and distributing child pornography. With the added gobsmacking detail of Miller supposedly child-pornographying his own two-year-old toddler. Seriously: try to think of anything more vile an elected official has ever been accused of doing! And… it’s total friggin’ nonsense!

TO REPEAT: There was no “CSAM.” That’s just an outrageous and preposterous lie. An image of a toddler girl with her shirt off, having a mark on her neck examined pursuant to a state welfare agency’s investigation of potential abuse claims — which ultimately absolved Miller, by the way — is absolutely not CSAM by any stretch of the imagination. Because there was nothing at all sexually explicit about it. You’d have to be a sick freak to even have the faintest inclination otherwise. So what’s really freakish is for this poor little girl’s own mother and grandfather — a US Senator — to “sexualize” her in this way, as nothing more than a gross cheap-shot to use against her “embattled” father, whom they are embroiled in an increasingly vituperative legal confrontation with. Emily Moreno’s lawyers are the ones who put the crazy “CSAM” charge out there, suggesting that the photo in Miller’s Dropbox file “could be considered” CSAM. Which is priceless weasel wordage — there are no rational criteria by which the image could be classified as “CSAM.” If I’m repeating this point too much, that’s because it really does bear repeating. But of course, the precise legalities were irrelevant for Emily Moreno’s lawyers, whose intent was obviously just to toss out another sick “allegation” into the already-whirling media frenzy, and then sit back with smug satisfaction as Miller gets pilloried not just for the original domestic violence stuff, but now for being one of the most disturbing predators in America — one who’s so world-historically wicked that he’d knowingly circulate child pornography of his own daughter on the internet. Bernie Moreno then repeated this nonsense claim in a Senate hallway scrum, and bam, the accusatory frenzy gets dialed up to a crazy new crescendo. Remember: when in doubt, whip up a Pedo Panic.

Even with this wild evolution of the claims against Miller, he hasn’t resigned or dropped out. Which does tell us something instructive about the Republican vs. Democratic coalitions. Pray tell, what good did capitulating to the drop-out brigades do for Graham Platner? (Anyone remember that guy?) Well, here’s what it got him: “rapist” branding in perpetuity, as any remaining political support structure he might have had vanished in a split-second. No one was supposed to notice that the fatal accusation emerged just days before the Maine statutory deadline for Democrats to install a party-selected replacement, which they have subsequently done. As far as I know, there haven’t been any updates in the past several weeks as to whether the Platner rape-accuser has gone to law enforcement, even though the purported 2021 rape would be well within the statute of limitations for Maine authorities to prosecute. Hmmm.

Again, in Miller’s case, he wasn’t even initially accused of rape, or any kind of sexually violative conduct at all, really. But he might as well have been — because in the current political/media climate, every potential private-life impropriety gets glommed together in the same vortex of nastiness. And that was even prior to the preposterous “CSAM” claim. The initial “allegations” only pertained to Miller’s allegedly wrongful conduct with intimate-partner women, which is phenomenologically similar enough to “rape” in terms of how it gets publicly transmitted and processed — the dreaded R-word doesn’t even have to be expressly invoked to carry the same nebulous connotation. Then upon the absurd addition of the “CSAM” charges, Miller became saddled with a monstrous dilemma: capitulate to the drop-out commands, or even the indirect nudging by Trump, and he’d wind up branded indefinitely not just as a wife-beater and child-abuser, but a child pornographer. Of his own child. Try recovering from that in the public mind. Despite his refusal to capitulate so far, the “CSAM” stench is already a huge problem, notwithstanding its utter substantive falsity — case in point, the hysterical Congresswoman Luna aborting their planned rally.

I’ve also seen evidence that Senator Moreno was privately imploring Republican county chairs in Ohio to repudiate Miller, although none seem to have done so — which, for one thing, is another window into the divergent dynamics between the Republican and Democratic coalitions. Because if this were a Dem allegation frenzy, we all know no one would have even had to ask any of the relevant party operators to automatically renounce — the fevered renunciations would’ve already been flying fast and furious. Like a naturally occurring cosmic explosion. Conversely, these GOP local officials found themselves in a more ambiguous predicament, because if they did publicly call on Miller to drop out, and he continued to refuse, they could thereafter be obliged to continue providing campaign resources to a Congressional candidate whom they had denounced for allegedly despicable conduct. Which might be a tad awkward. On the other hand, even if they might have privately wanted Miller to drop out, there was no real mechanism for effectuating this, other than to exert pressure through various public and private channels, such that Miller would be made to drop out of his own volition. Which he always maintained was not gonna happen. So for these hapless GOP operatives in the Cleveland suburbs, it was damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

All the while, nobody was ever supposed to notice that Emily Moreno is not just Miller’s beleaguered former wife, much as that might make her a more sympathetic figure in media depictions. Please do not observe that she is also an adult political operative in her own right, and with that, has a variety of potential political incentives that may be motivating her conduct in this allegation-frenzy. Or that her motives might be heavily intertwined with that of her Senator Father’s career. Which should be painfully obvious. But for some reason, it’s considered very rude to point out that Emily is not just a helpless traumatized mother, but the chairman (not chairwoman?) of the Cuyahoga Republican Party, a trustee of Ohio Right to Life, as well as numerous other sinecures she’s largely gained by dint of her prestigious GOP familial connections. (Whatever the hell the “Deputy Director of State Action” at the America First Policy Institute is.)

Emily may not be entirely wrong that her former husband has various unpleasant character traits, but for the media and political system just to credulously parrot the “allegation escalation” shitshow she’s unleashed is completely bonkers. It’s one thing for a reasonable person to conclude that Miller might be a bit of a hothead, and maybe not someone you’d recommend your own daughter / sister / female friend go out with on a date, given the turmoil that always seems to spill out into public view regarding his romantic activities. But that’s a million lightyears away from assaulting his own toddler daughter, and disseminating “CSAM” images of her — both utterly baseless garbage. Even if Daddy’s Little Girl (Emily) has been able to get the Senior Senator from Ohio to amplify these ridiculous claims.

“I sent my daughter, granddaughter, and wife out of State to a secure place until such time as they feel safe,” Senator Moreno said last week. This makes zero sense, not least because Miller retains full shared custody of the daughter — meaning she stays with him on a regular court-approved basis. This routine has not been changed, and Miller will soon retrieve the daughter again as normal. However, since nobody bothers to look at the actual boring details, Senator Moreno can blurt out this crazy assertion that he is paying for Emily, Ruthie (the daughter), and his own wife to flee the state of Ohio or something, as if remaining within the state’s borders would be intolerably dangerous. What was gonna happen — Miller would do a mass shooting or something? It’s just so stupid. Miller might not be the optimal boyfriend or husband, and he might even have a volatile temper, among other less-than-desirable characteristics — but what the hell are we even talking about here? Suddenly he’s the Pedo Ted Bundy? Within a few days, his daughter will be dropped back off to him per court order, notwithstanding the loony threat-inflation Senator Moreno is rambling about, and which the media just dutifully repeats.

Some “serious” right-wing commentators have even called for Miller’s expulsion. Recall, the same threat was made against Eric Swalwell last April, albeit more formally — that is, if Swalwell didn’t immediately resign from Congress because of the mounting accusation vortex, an actual legislative resolution was being prepared to expel him. This tactic has almost never been used in American history: since the founding of the Nation, a grand total of six House members have ever been expelled for anything, and half are Confederates expelled in 1861 for literally waging insurrectionist war against the Union. Not once has any Congressperson been expelled for some sexual or private life impropriety. Although in fairness, the House did markedly lower the threshold for expellable conduct in 2023, when it utilized this extremely rare power to throw out George Santos. (Which, it should be said, Max Miller vocally supported at the time.) Santos’ expulsion-worthy offenses included lying about playing on his college volleyball team. (Really.) And yeah, Santos might’ve been a schmuck, and even a fraudster, but there’s a reason why expulsion had never been used so capriciously before: he hadn’t been convicted of any crime when he was expelled, only indicted by that point, and so his expulsion created a new precedent whereby from 2023 onwards, no dispositive evidentiary burden need be met for alleged criminal conduct to justify expelling a Representative who’d otherwise been duly voted into office by their constituents. Hence, in 2026, the expanding expulsion threat has been leveraged against Swalwell, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX), and now Miller to try to browbeat them into submission, and compel them to resign on their own accord. Only Miller has withstood the pressure so far.

But it gets even crazier in his case, because not only has Miller never been convicted of a crime related to this deluge of “allegations,” and not only has he never been charged, and he’s actually been cleared — multiple times! — by various government agencies that investigated his conduct, including the Bay Village, OH police department and the Cuyahoga County Division of Children and Family Services. Both of which investigated Miller following claims by Emily Moreno that he’d done very bad things to both her and their daughter. Emily’s claims were found unsubstantiated by the relevant authorities. You’d think this minor exonerating detail would be emphasized just a tad more in the ensuing coverage and commentary, but no, of course not. Because it’s supposed to be beyond obvious that Miller should either be expelled, bludgeoned into resignation/withdrawal, or perhaps face some other terrible punishment yet unknown. Which could even include severe criminal consequences, given what Senator Moreno declared should happen due to the non-existent “CSAM.” So once again, we have “allegations” being treated as unassailable fact, and uncritically broadcast by the media — while actual investigative findings by the authorized state agencies are just steadfastly ignored. Go figure.

Other details deemed irrelevant in the Miller uproar:

• Months after the most scandalous incident of marital abuse against Emily allegedly took place, which has been trumpeted all over the media as inarguable proof of Miller’s depravity, Emily is on record saying to Miller directly, QUOTE: “I don’t think you would ever hurt me physically.” She does claim to have been hurt by Miller “emotionally,” which may be a telling insight into the situation. But as to any physical abuse, she’s extremely clear in her statement that this never took place. The pertinent verbal exchange, from August 2024, is on audio recording — no one has to paraphrase it, or purportedly recall what was said years later. It’s right there for anyone to hear in plain English. The allegedly abusive incident that has dominated so many headlines and social media screeds is that Miller supposedly attacked Emily in June 2024, while they were still married, by dousing her with boiling hot water. Yet two months after this alleged mortifying abuse, Emily is on record saying Miller would never hurt her physically. Which would presumably have to mean she did not regard the “boiling hot water” incident — whatever may have happened there — as tantamount to any physical abuse at all.

• In a May 2026 court hearing, Emily Moreno effectively admitted that she was involved in leaking false information to the media, by way of a Daily Mail article that falsely claimed Miller had psychotically hurled a pot of boiling hot water at her in the famed June 2024 incident. Accompanying this headline-blaring claim is a photo of Emily appearing to display her injuries.

  

• A casual internet user scanning this article would infer that Emily’s accompanying photo was meant to exhibit the brutal injuries she sustained from the incident.

  

• We’ve since come to learn there was no pot of water at all, only what Miller describes as “horseplay” with a running-water faucet. (Emily also acknowledges the use of a faucet, rather than a “pot.”) And the accompanying photo had nothing to do with any hot water attack. It’s very possible that whatever precipitated the June 2024 incident was emotionally troubling to Emily and/or Miller; it appears to have occurred during a period of escalating marital strife. Nonetheless, by all available evidence, there was no “pot of boiling hot water” ever chucked at her, even though this claim was blared screamingly across the media. And by her own effective admission, Emily was involved in propagating that falsehood. Furthermore, Emily herself said in the months after the incident, as shown by the August 2024 audio recording, that Miller had never physically abused her, and she had no fear that he would physically abuse her. In October 2024, she also made a sworn statement to the Cuyahoga County court that Miller had never physically harmed their daughter, and she had no reason to believe he would ever do so. (Emily left Miller on August 1, 2024, moving out of their shared domicile without advance notice to him, and Miller filed for divorce shortly thereafter.) If the Miller/Moreno fracas is going to dominate US political “discourse,” why are these details being completely left out?!?!

• Also notably left out: that the court-appointed forensic psychologist mediating between Miller and Emily, who happens to be a woman, testified in a May 2026 deposition that the barrage of recent media reports promoting graphic new claims of Miller’s abuse were “greatly exaggerated.” That was the under-oath judgment of the person whom the courts had named to keep tabs on both Miller and Emily, and make recommendations as to the proper care of their daughter. The “greatly exaggerated” media reports subsequently spiraled into even more heinous allegations (“CSAM,” etc.) even though Emily effectively admitted having a role in facilitating the leak of the original false reports — almost certainly orchestrated through her lawyers. Not that much speculation was ever necessary, because how else would the mirror selfie of Emily end up distributed to tabloids, if not by her having some role? (The photo even says “Copyright Emily Moreno” at the bottom!) She’s the one who took the friggin’ photo of herself. Asked what might explain this latest round of allegation-escalation, the forensic psychologist noted relations between Miller and Emily had grown “significantly more contentious” in the two-and-a-half months leading up to May 2026, for reasons related to Miller “running for re-election.” Huh. Maybe that’s got something to do with the whole way this thing has unfolded. Just maybe. Since, you know, Emily is also a professional political operative working with her father, the Ohio Senator, and they’d sure like to have her ex-husband out of the picture. Because his continued presence in Congress is probably a big headache.

QUESTION: If absolutely none of this Miller-favorable information ever gets mentioned in any of the boisterous media coverage around the “abuse allegation” saga, what exactly are we supposed to make of that? Why should we be taking any of this at face value? Couldn’t we even preliminarily infer that Miller is the actual aggrieved party? You know, since he’s the one being berated with fabricated smears, the most appalling of which is that he’d be so depraved as to create and distribute “CSAM” featuring his own toddler daughter. NOTE: this wouldn’t preclude also inferring that Miller has got some serious problems with his personal life dealings. You could even say that Ohio voters would be entitled to infer that the distraction has gotten so ridiculously out of hand, it’s now consuming way too much of his time as an elected official, and thus impairing his ability to focus on things like policy-making and constituent services. A voter could thus reasonably conclude he should be voted out of office. But for God’s sake, the guy is now being threatened with expulsion — and lifelong reputation-destruction — thanks to a cycle of allegation-escalation that now has him widely believed to have physically assaulted his two-year-old daughter, despite being exonerated for this by every government entity that’s investigated, and most outrageously, that he’s committed “CSAM” felonies related to the daughter. Who is two-and-a-half years old.

This is just repugnant. It can’t be allowed to stand, if we want to retain any semblance of a rational political and media culture. Which, yeah, may be a lost cause at this point. But even so, c’mon, Miller’s been accused by his former father-in-law of CHILD PORNOGRAPHY CRIMES — I just have to keep repeating this unseemly fact for emphasis — and Senator Dad Girl’s nonsensical rants about it are being given mindless credence. I guess just because he’s another elected official from the same party and state? Even if Miller himself isn’t dropping out, colleagues he’d previously been on good terms with are dropping out of joint events, because who wants to be within twelve football fields of anything even allegedly associated with “CSAM”? (It doesn’t help that Anna Paulina Luna is already a longstanding hysteric on “trafficking,” Epstein, etc.) Senator Moreno’s rolling commentaries are treated with total credulity by pundits, as though he’s some neutral arbiter, rather than the dad and political patron of one of the media-leaking litigants in an out-of-control custody dispute. Sen. Moreno has even inserted himself as an active participant in the custody brouhaha, since he’s the one who, as of early August, personally went to retrieve little Ruthie from a hand-off by Max, in a police station parking lot, supposedly because it was too dangerous for Emily to go herself. And Emily isn’t just Bernie’s benighted daughter, which on its own would be enough to cast massive doubt on the impartiality of his assessments — she’s also one of his seasoned political operatives. Meaning they obviously have conjoined political interests, as well as the obvious familial ones. But please, nobody mention any of that.

Here’s the usual annoying qualifier: you don’t have to like Miller at all politically (I never did) to find this whole fiasco abominable.

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I had an article at Unherd over the weekend about the “adult grooming” crisis that has shaken the International Criminal Court to its core — almost certainly neutering it for the foreseeable future, and perhaps even delivering a final death blow, both to the ICC itself and “international law” writ large.

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Irrespective of whatever one thinks about “international law,” or the mechanisms purporting to enforce it, that the institutions under its umbrella can be held hostage by this convoluted “allegation” chicanery — and in the case of the ICC, paralyzed for several years before self-immolating into oblivion — should probably not be greeted as any sort of cheerful outcome. Because the demolition of the ICC on these grounds will have done nothing to illuminate any fallacies of “international law,” or accomplish anything else that’s remotely constructive. Instead, it will only validate and accelerate the pathologies that gave rise to the “allegation” mayhem in the first place, which means the formula could soon be replicated at a more cherished institution near you, likely in some freshly mutated form.

My personal view: the only real “solution” to reverse this shambolic trend would be to cultivate an ethos whereby such utter nonsense as an “adult grooming” crisis is treated with the open ridicule it deserves, and not coddled every step of the way, whether by bureaucrats throughout the chain of command professing their “deep concern” (almost certainly fake), or journalists granting specious anonymity to the alleged adult grooming survivor. Without a robust political and cultural counterweight — unbowed by mealy-mouthed platitudes that virtually everyone involved does not actually privately believe — this bubble of hyper-sensitive official moralism is never going to be popped.

Based on the gap that plainly exists between what people profess to believe in public about this stuff, and what they actually believe in private, there is enough of a potential constituency out there for some emerging sanity-caucus to insist on some version of the following: anyone who participates in the manufacture of sole-crushing, institution-wrecking “allegation” frenzies — where no clear sexual misconduct is even alleged, and the only misconduct even being vaguely alleged exists exclusively by reference to the latest recalibration of abstruse “power dynamic” theory — should themselves be viewed as abusive, manipulative, wasteful of finite resources, and almost psychotically selfish.

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Yesterday I went to the annual Human Trafficking Summit convened by the Attorney General of Ohio. Something so crazy happened that I almost wonder if I should even write about it. Like, I may just need to take some time to let it marinate in my brain for awhile. The main reason I’ve been going to more and more of these “trafficking” events is because I’m trying to ascertain if/how the last year’s worth of national uproar over Epstein has influenced the broader “anti-trafficking” movement — particularly in terms of legislative proposals, law enforcement techniques, and any new revisions to overall “trafficking” theory, which is always in flux anyway, as “trafficking” deliberately lacks any stable definitional criteria. That’s why the stuff labeled trafficking today bears virtually no resemblance to the stuff the public was told constitutes “trafficking” when the first major federal “trafficking” law was enacted 25 years ago.

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“Epstein” tends to be more a subtext at these events than anything that’s been overtly planned as a discussion topic. Usually, to figure out if there’s some Epstein-related nexus to uncover, I will have to proactively probe for connections, rather than just passively consume the agenda’s offerings. As I meandered my way to Columbus, Ohio on Wednesday, I started to half-wonder if trekking out to this “summit” was even going to be worth it; deciphering anything that might be Epstein-themed would probably be a bit of a stretch. Boy, was I wrong. I couldn’t have been more wildly, dramatically wrong. I should get on my knees and give thanks to the heavenly father above that I had the intuition to go to this “summit,” and overrode my late-stage reservations about whether it would be worth the hassle. I’m still in a bit of an awestruck stupor over what actually transpired.

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A consortium of International Women’s Whatever NGOs put out a frantic statement in advance of the vote scheduled for July 24 to oust Karim Khan as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). No such vote had ever taken place before in the history of the ICC, founded only in 2002, and no prior prosecutor had ever been removed. Hardly anyone seemed to understand the inscrutable bureaucratic vagaries of the process that led to this vote — or who would even be voting, and under what authority. But according to the NGO Ladies, what really mattered was that a strong and decisive verdict be resolutely delivered, because at issue was not “genocide,” or “war crimes,” or other matters generally seen to fall within the ICC’s more typical purview. Rather, it was “non-consensual sexual contact” — allegedly perpetrated by the Chief Prosecutor himself. Even worse, the feisty NGO women reminded us, Khan had allegedly inflicted these unthinkable acts on a “junior staff member.”

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Left unmentioned in the strident statement: this “junior” victim was actually 37 years old at the time of the claimed infractions. And a working legal professional, with a Master’s Degree, who boasts that she “completed the Bar in England and Wales” nearly a decade ago — though whether this means she’s accredited to practice law is left ambiguous. Notwithstanding, the statement warned that “survivors of sexual violence” the world over were watching very closely to see how the ICC would resolve this problem — perhaps the most existentially threatening problem in the Court’s relatively short lifespan. Because should the opaque ICC governing mechanism fail to ensure proper “accountability,” the repercussions would be profound: survivors everywhere re-traumatized, “international law” itself imperiled.

Relevant stakeholders were thus put on notice “not to lose sight” of what this whole thing was really “about” — securing justice for the junior victim in her late 30s, yes, but as a proxy for all “survivors of gender-based crimes.” This meant stakeholders should avoid any needless distractions, such as, hypothetically, attempting to discern precisely what “misconduct” was even being alleged, or what definition of “non-consensual sexual contact” was even being asserted by the alleged victim. Dwelling on such considerations could unduly complicate matters.

Khan’s termination was soon to be voted on by something called the “Assembly of States Parties,” a nominal “legislative body” almost no one on Planet Earth has ever heard of, much less be able to explicate its apparent authorities. Which we are told include “management” and “oversight” of the International Criminal Court. OK. Any of the 125 signatory countries to the ICC may therefore send delegates to cast votes in this mysterious “Assembly,” and could take part in the ad hoc “special session” declared for July 24.

These enigmatic voters would’ve been under considerable pressure to plug their ears during the big “exclusive” CNN interview released July 16, in which we finally get a glimpse of the mythical “victim.” When she does drop some hints of what her definition of “non-consensual” might be, it’s probably better if prospective voters change the channel. Christiane Amanpour, who scored the “exclusive” sitdown, made sure to affect an air of “Solemnly Inquisitive, yet Survivor Sensitive” — presumably in accordance with various HR guidelines. At one point, she carefully asks the 39-year-old junior victim to please address the repeated categorical denials of her alleged abuser, Mr. Khan, that any sexual misconduct ever took place.

“There’s many ways in which I can answer this,” replied Sarah — identified only by her first name, for unspecified reasons, probably to do with “safety” — who affected her own studied posture of “emotional ticking time-bomb, but just barely holding it together, for the greater good.”

Sarah went on: “The first thing that I would say is that there is no way for something to be consensual when you have such a power disparity.”

Sooooooo… let’s get this straight. Because the ICC Chief Prosecutor was the “boss of all bosses” at the ICC, according to Sarah, it was inherently impossible that he could ever have engaged in any consenting sexual activity with her — a fellow legal professional in her late 30s — regardless of whatever behaviors she may have displayed at the time of the activity. That’s the theory Sarah waited 26 months to unveil on CNN; the “accusations” are said to have been first “disclosed” in May (April?) 2024, when she “had a breakdown” in the ICC office, and concerned colleagues rushed to her aid. By July 2026, the theory of consent she’d developed is that our professional adult victim could have literally sworn an affidavit to the gods of international law, declaring “I hereby consent to this forthcoming sexual activity,” and it still would have been non-consensual, because… something something “power dynamic.” OK. Lol.

Before proceeding any further, can we briefly pause to ponder who ultimately possessed the real “power” in this “dynamic”? Because yes, sure, it’s facially true that 39-year-old Sarah was subordinate to 56-year-old Karim, in terms of the relevant employment structure — she as a mere “Associate Legal Advisor” working out of his office, he as the Big Bossman Chief Prosecutor leading the global charge against Putin and Netanyahu. At the same time, here are some additional “power dynamics” that might be worth some fleeting consideration:

• Sarah enjoyed rigorously-enforced anonymity for the duration of the 2+ year ordeal she unleashed — until July 16, 2026, when she had the red carpet rolled out for her by CNN producers. And even then, despite appearing on camera for a 46 minute interview, CNN made the executive editorial decision that it would be “only identifying her by her first name, at her request.”

• What was the basis for this “request”? What was the journalistic rationale for acceding to it? Who knows! Who cares. Here’s one thing we do know: this was certainly not a luxury Mr. Karim Khan was ever afforded. He’s been called every name in the book since the “accusations” first started percolating, and then were leaked to likeminded journalists. (The NYT also inexplicably agreed to Sarah’s “condition” that she would only be quoted by her first name in an article announcing she’d finally “broken her silence.”)

It didn’t take too much intrepid investigative journalism to figure out the full name of this 39-year-old legal professional, so I went ahead and tweeted it out a few days ago: Sarah Hishan. Wow, I can’t imagine the grave re-victimization she must be suffering now because I have non-consensually posted “Hishan” in addition to “Sarah.” Sure hope I don’t end up in The Hague!

If you’d like, you can learn more about Sarah’s background by consulting a 2025 academic tract entitled “The International Criminal Court: Legal, Policy, and Political Challenges,” where she is thanked in the acknowledgements — by her (gasp) non-anonymized name and job title — for all she supposedly did to assist editor Richard H. Steinberg understand the “challenges” facing the Office of the Prosecutor, led by Mr. Khan, with whom Sarah so closely worked. (Notably, her “accusation” odyssey had already been in full swing by the volume’s publication date.) If anyone’s interested in purchasing the eBook for $214, let me know what specific “challenges” related to Ms. Hishan found their way into the text. Or perhaps email Professor Steinberg at UCLA Law School and inquire if he plans to issue a revised edition anytime soon, in light of newly revealed “challenges.”

When all was said and done, the reputed beneficiary of the “Power Imbalance,” Karim Khan, wound up professionally extirpated, personally humiliated, privacy thoroughly infringed, tarred with scandal-maximizing media leaks — which he was largely prevented from refuting, due to the maddeningly indecipherable ad hoc procedures of this bizarre international bureaucracy. And to top it all off, he was suspended from the Bar of England and Wales. Meaning he cannot practice law in his country of birth, on account of his presumed liability for “sexual misconduct” offenses. The list undoubtedly goes on. So maybe that’s worth bearing in mind as we contemplate the contention that it was Khan who wielded insuperable “power” in the situation.

The official evidentiary record has essentially all been concealed from public view, perhaps due to some sacred principle of “international law” we mortals lack the ability to comprehend. So the only real primary source we have to go by is Sarah’s recent CNN interview. I can’t exactly say I would “recommend” watching this interview. Just like I wouldn’t recommend watching someone being executed by lethal injection. You might learn something, but don’t do it for pleasure. Anyone who might consider watching Sarah’s interview should first acclimate into the right mindset. Here’s very much the wrong mindset: expecting to get the one thing “normies” might foolishly assume they’d be getting if they tuned in to such an interview. That is: lots of concrete detail about what specific “sexual misconduct” Sarah is alleging she endured. Because what we mostly get instead is a televised version of the famed June 2026 NYT expose that set into motion the spectacular downfall of a certain Maine resident.

I can pretty much just copy-and-paste from my description of that NYT article. What CNN fundamentally did here was give Sarah Hishan a sort of weird therapeutic self-realization forum, and invite her to “emotionally reconstruct and narrativize her past experiences with Platner Khan, creating a psychological profile from which the NYT CNN could purport to divine a pattern of his ‘unsettling’ ‘rageful, boundary-crossing’ behavior.”

We learn a great deal in the interview about Sarah’s “subjective emotional recollections of certain interactions with Platner Khan,” such as that when she made her initial “disclosure” in 2024, she was “exhausted” and “extremely emotional.” Which sheds some partial light on how it came to pass that one day a male colleague discovered her “visibly distressed,” and deputized himself to submit some sort of complaint on her behalf, to some inscrutable bureaucratic entity called the Independent Oversight Mechanism (IOM). Alright. Good info.

But again, most people who’d voluntarily watch this CNN interview for some reason would’ve likely assumed that the main reason they’re watching is to hear expounded for the first time — in a thrilling “world exclusive” — all the juicy details of the “sexual misconduct” which had been kept under wraps since April/May 2024. However, Sarah does just about everything but offer tangible details of her purported victimization. Instead she zigs and zags all over the place, weaving out a heavily emotionalized first-person narrative that she and CNN evidently decided the rest of the world needed to participate in. Here’s her full answer when Amanpour asks her to respond to Khan’s emphatic denials:

The first thing that I would have to say is that this did not happen in isolation. This was an environment where we were always on the move. There was always a crisis because that is what happens at the court, you have to deal with multiple things. And it’s also very emotional work that you’re doing. Mr. Khan himself, in my experience, was a very reactive individual. And he could go from being fine and collaborative, to angry, for example, at criticism in social media. And that would be this rage. And so, you kind of always felt like the ground was shifting under you. And there was a — I have no other way to describe it, but an escalation of attempts. And so, that escalation was happening in this environment, where you are trying desperately to almost emotionally regulate Mr. Khan. And as I would describe it, the point of the physical nature of it. But it didn’t start that way. Because it was kind of like encroachments on the boundaries slowly, not just physically, but emotionally as well.

Pray tell, what advanced degree in NGO studies do I need to acquire in order to decipher, based on the above collection of words, what “sexual misconduct” this woman is actually alleging she was subjected to?

As the interview meanders along, it becomes clearer and clearer that the crux of the claimed “misconduct” is rooted in whatever novel interpretive paradigm Sarah has constructed, met with solemn affirmation by Amanpour, according to which, in light of the purported “power disparity,” everything that might’ve taken place between Khan and herself — whether sexually or even “emotionally” — hath been decreed “non-consensual.” As though this judgment was handed down by the Supreme Heavenly Magistrate of International Law. Pressed gently to elaborate just a bit, Sarah goes on to say:

SARAH: I will give you two examples. One is there was a point in time when I said to Mr. Khan that if this continued, I was afraid that I might do something to myself.

AMANPOUR: So, you had suicidal thoughts?

SARAH: I never used that word internally, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. And Mr. Khan understood fully. He was actually very kind in that moment. And he said, I would never want you to harm yourself. And he stopped. I would say about two or three weeks, but that was worse. Because prior to that, it was like being a zombie or being in a fog. But in those two or three weeks, I was really hopeful, because he wasn’t retaliating against me. The work was happening. And so, I thought it was done. And that’s all I ever wanted for it just to be finished. And then it started again. And so, the crash was even worse.

(emphasis mine)

Huh? What is “this”? What is “it”? Why doesn’t our esteemed CNN interviewer ask these seemingly basic followup questions? We still have hardly any idea what the heck Sarah’s even talking about, beyond some supplemental info about her troubled emotional state, which has kind of been established already.

Absent further clarification, here’s one possibility a viewer might infer about the potential meaning of “this” and “it” — how about, “consensual adult relationship”? Which… unsurprisingly… this woman came to experience as emotionally taxing in certain ways? Perhaps… because… she was married at the time? …with a child? Just throwing a crazy theory out there. (Khan was also married.)

So in other words, a thing happened that extremely commonly happens among consenting adults, for better or worse, particularly in close-knit workplace environments that are “very emotional” and intense (as Sarah describes it). A certain feeling arises between male-female colleagues, whatever their existing marital status and… there you have it. No great puzzle here, really?

Object all you like to marital infidelity on ethical, religious, practical, or other grounds — but it’s simply not “sexual misconduct” in the way most commonsense people would have recognized the term, at least if they haven’t yet been educated on the latest frontiers in uncontrolled concept-creep, and therefore may not be aware of how easy it’s become to re-categorize and re-frame a limitless range of behaviors as “sexual misconduct,” “sexual assault,” or even (drumroll) rape. In the very recent past, “having an affair with a co-worker” would have never been widely viewed as something intrinsically violative. Buckle up though, and flip that antiquated attitude upside down, because as of July 24, 2026, a brand-spanking-new precedent has been enshrined in the annals of “international law.”

As we move along here, bear in mind that through a giant game of international media “telephone,” Karim Khan just spent the better part of the past two years being publicly branded as someone who stands credibly accused not just of hazy “misconduct,” but of “sexual assault”:

L’Orient Today — October 28, 2024: “Faced with accusations of sexual assault and abuse of authority, International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan denied the allegations”

Wall Street Journal — May 10, 2025: “ICC Set Plan to Charge Netanyahu Just After Prosecutor Was Accused of Sexual Assault”

New York Post — May 14, 2025: “ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan asked a woman who accused him of sexual assault to drop charges so he could issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”

The New Yorker — October 5, 2025: “The accuser has told the U.N. investigators that Khan sexually assaulted her in his office”

The Guardian — March 22, 2026: “Inquiry into sexual assault claims did not establish that chief prosecutor’s actions amounted to misconduct, judges advise”

Reuters — April 2, 2026: “ICC member states have voted to pursue disciplinary proceedings against Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan after receiving reports regarding sexual ​assault allegations against him, two sources briefed on the matter told ‌Reuters”

The Australian — June 19, 2026: “The court’s oversight body found sexual assault allegations against Karim Khan were credible”

The Times (UK) — July 17, 2026: “The woman who accused a British KC and chief international prosecutor of sexually assaulting her during a work trip has revealed her identity for the first time”

Washington Post — July 24, 2026: “Shortly before requesting the warrants in May 2024, Khan was accused by a staff member of sexual assault”

Al Jazeera English — July 25, 2026: “Khan was removed from office over sexual assault allegations”

Yet despite this deluge of condemnatory media, by no rational metric could what Sarah Hishan alleged in her lengthy open-ended CNN interview be reasonably characterized as anything close to “sexual assault.” She herself never once uses that term throughout the 46+ minute video therapy session, even though her support-sister Christiane Amanpour introduces the interview by intoning: “We do want to warn you that the accusations you hear may be triggering, especially for survivors of sexual assault.” And then Amanpour concludes the interview by giving out the toll-free number of the “US Sexual Assault Hotline.” (It’s 1-800-656-4673 if anyone reading this Substack has been inadvertently “triggered.”)

According to secret evidence Amanpour says she received, a witness told investigators sometime in the past two years that they “directly asked” Sarah if she was ever “raped” by Khan. And by way of response, Sarah “looked down, sighed, and shrugged.” So that’s apparently some disconfirmative evidence — otherwise concealed from the public, except for Amanpour’s leaked paraphrase — suggesting that when Sarah was asked contemporaneously if she endured the closest available corollary to “sexual assault,” she said nothing, and “shrugged.” OK.

Here’s her explanation to Amanpour for this odd behavior: “Throughout everything that has happened, I haven’t placed a label on anything. One, because I am not a lawyer in this. Even though that’s my profession. It’s not my place to label anything.”

Uh… really? She’s a lawyer by profession, but “not a lawyer in this,” and therefore it’s “not her place” to put a “label” on anything she claims happened to her? Well, that’s her prerogative I guess, but it’s curious that her own refusal to “label” things didn’t stop the screaming media headlines from freely affixing the most incendiary “labels” — namely “sexual assault,” sometimes interspersed with “sexual misconduct” or “sexual abuse,” I guess depending on the random whims of the journalist that day.

Sarah explains that aside from her self-imposed lawyerly disqualification, there is also another reason for her label-aversion, and it’s “a little bit more personal. If I would put a label, whatever that label is, I’m not sure how I can get through the day. And I have had to play multiple roles in this. And I’m also a mom. So, I have to function. So, it has been easier for me.”

I guess that roughly translates to: “It would be emotionally burdensome for Sarah to apply any discomfiting labels to the conduct she alleges she was victimized by, and which spawned a series of events that has now thrown the entire International Criminal Court into possibly unsalvageable disarray.” This is the evidentiary standard that “international law” is now gonna use going forward, as a matter of precedent, to designate somebody a presumed sexual assaulter? Which Karim Khan has most definitely been designated; the vote last Friday by 82 ICC member-states to oust him does nothing if not perceivedly vindicate the impression that he really must have committed assault, misconduct, rape, or [fill in the blank].

Just asking questions here: but what’s one possible way one might try to rationalize a consensual yet adulterous sexual relationship, to oneself or others, in the event that this relationship comes to be viewed (by you) as embarrassing or lamentable in some fashion — you don’t want your spouse or work colleagues to find out, because you fear they’ll think poorly of you? Well, apparently one thing you can do as of July 2026 — if you’re a professional adult woman in her late 30s, anyway — is re-classify the regretful relationship as having come about through some vaguely illicit process of “monthslong grooming.” That’s how the media outfit known as “DropSite News” bizarrely chose to describe the Sarah/Karim relationship dynamic on May 10, 2025, when Sarah was still fully anonymized, in a bombshell scoop that journalist Alice Speri was intrepidly able to “confirm”:

Drop Site has confirmed that the woman’s accusations were far more serious than what has been revealed so far, and include what she described to colleagues as monthslong grooming, psychological coercion, and sexual advances, which eventually escalated into “unwanted” and “coerced” sex that lasted nearly a year and continued even after she told Khan that his conduct had left her suicidal.

It would be interesting to go back and review whatever journalistic “confirmation” methods are in use over at “DropSite,” because for one thing, the claim that Sarah ever told Khan “his conduct left her suicidal” has now been disconfirmed by none other than Sarah herself. Whoops. (And just a quick clarifying Q. — How exactly are sexual relationships supposed to be initiated nowadays, other than by “sexual advances” one or another party chooses to initiate, and which the advance-receiving party can either accept or reject?)

Numerous other details also stand out in the historic DropSite report, such as Alice Speri relaying that “according to several people,” Khan and his supporters were orchestrating a shameful “smear campaign” against the purported “victim,” then unknown, today mercifully known to be sweet Sarah. These disgraceful “smears” portrayed Sarah as “unstable” and “with a distorted view of reality.” There couldn’t have possibly been an ounce of truth to any of this, according to DropSite — which must’ve “confirmed” its conclusion through an impeccable process of journalistic verification, located somewhere in the deep recesses of Ryan Grim’s lady-believing brain. (After all, Grim’s a bigtime believer in the likes of Tara Reade, Whitney Webb, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Maria Farmer, Christine Blasey Ford, Lisa Bloom, etc. — why pump the brakes now with Sarah Hishan?)

One of the funniest things ever is that this gravely serious DropSite report ended up getting cited by — wait for it — Israel, which DropSite otherwise algorithmically programs its content against at every conceivable opportunity. Any fleeting indicia of Israel coming within twelve emails of Jeffrey Epstein is insinuated as proof that Epstein must’ve been running some massive child rape operation at Mossad’s command. In a November 17, 2025 appeal brief submitted by Israel to the ICC, challenging the arrest warrants Khan sought against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the momentous “Drop Site” article is referenced a hilarious 25 times — more than any other news source! Gilad Noam, the Attorney General of Israel, relays that “an online journalistic platform called Drop Site” had helpfully reported “significant new details about the sexual misconduct allegations” against Khan, and this should cast extreme doubt on the veracity of Khan’s requested arrest warrant. Indeed, he argued, Khan must be disqualified from any further ICC proceedings against Israel in light of DropSite’s report that he tried to “smear” Sarah McVictim by disgracefully questioning the accuracy of her reality-perception capabilities. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

(Netanyahu has been gloating since Khan’s ouster, of course, telling Fox News viewers that Khan has now been “completely exposed” for his “sexual crimes.”)

As perversely comical as all this is, from my perspective, the best part of DropSite’s contribution to the silly saga was definitely their pretension to be reporting that “far more serious” accusations were made against Khan than had been previously known at the time. Among these extraordinarily serious accusations: that Khan had mired Sarah in a depraved “monthslong grooming” campaign. Apparently no one in the DropSite editorial crew had the slightest flicker of doubt that a professional adult woman in her late 30s claiming she was “groomed” — over the course of many months, by a fellow adult legal professional — was as supremely super “serious” as any “accusation” could ever get. Grim & co. must’ve openly wept while they guided that little bombshell through their fiercely independent adversarial editing process.

“Seriously” though: this must be some kind of joke? The profoundly disturbing “sexual abuse” scandal (as DropSite described it) which has now culminated in a possibly fatal death blow to the International Criminal Court as a whole… is a scandal fundamentally about lawyer-on-lawyer “grooming”? Humble request: Can “DropSite” please add a sitcom laugh track to their website interface, to have on standby for the next time they purport to be weighing in on any matters of such “serious” nature?

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More to the point: it’s wild how rapidly “grooming” has been rocketed through the concept-creep wormhole, and can now just be casually used to encompass whenever an adult kinda feels bad about something that went on sexually / romantically / emotionally. This is so many light-years beyond what had previously been the uncontroversial normative conception of “grooming” that it’d be really funny if it wasn’t so dark. (OK, it’s still funny.)

See this 2018 journal article by retired FBI agent Kenneth Lanning, who’d spent decades as the Bureau’s point-person for investigating “child molesters.” In the article, Lanning sets out to systematically delineate the elements of “grooming,” since he’d noticed the term seemed to be exploding in popularity, and taking on usages so radically removed from what he’d previously understood as its accepted definition: when legitimately predatory adults employ certain behavioral techniques to habituate actual children into becoming receptive to their illicit sexual advances. Lanning writes:

Although increasingly used, there is still much confusion and disagreement over the precise meaning of the term grooming. It does not have one official, legal, mental health, or even lay definition. Anyone using the term, therefore, should clearly define it and consistently use their definition. Especially problematic for a clear understanding of communication are common terms with a wide range of possible definitions — all correct but often different. The term grooming has become one of these terms. To make this problem even worse, there is essentially no real difference between the definitions of the terms seduction and grooming.

I define grooming/seduction as the use of nonviolent techniques by one person to gain sexual access to and control over potential and actual child victims. The grooming or seduction process usually consists of identifying preferred or acceptable child targets, gathering information about interests and vulnerabilities, gaining access (i.e., sports, religion, education, online computer), filling emotional and physical needs, lowering inhibitions, and gaining and maintaining control (i.e., bonding, competition, challenges, peer pressure, sympathy).

At bottom, Lanning says, “grooming” is essentially interchangeable with “seduction.” The sole reason the term “grooming” can be rightly applied to adult-on-child scenarios is because it’s obviously considered illicit for any adult to ever sexually “seduce” a child. When children are “groomed,” he says, it’s typically by a “process” featuring some combination of “kindness, attention, material enticement, special privilege, and coercion.” But when it comes to adult-on-adult relations, according to Lanning, these very same “processes” may be employed! Which would be considered classic “seduction.” Because in his experience, predatory adults who set about “grooming” children do it in much the same way that adults set about “seducing” one another! “Between two adults or two teenagers,” Lanning says, “it might be considered part of dating.”

BINGO!

Unfortunately for anyone who may have bothered to think about it for two seconds, now engraved forevermore in the canon of “international law” is that conventional techniques of adult romantic seduction may be freely conflated with adult sex pests “grooming” vulnerable children. Thus, international prosecutorial bodies can be validly consigned to years of soul-sucking turmoil over “adult grooming” accusations. The media has played its usual role in facilitating this moral mania overhaul, refracting “adult grooming” to a lay audience with the offending conduct remade as “sexual misconduct,” “sexual assault,” and inevitably — just give it a few more weeks — “rape.”

Maybe on principle, the ICC deserved to be pummeled into crippling dysfunction, or maybe even eliminated entirely — a very good argument could be made! — but why does this always have to be done for the stupidest possible reasons, which solve nothing, and only intensify the salience of the stupidest possible pathologies — coming soon to a more favored institution near you!

That the basis for all this mayhem should’ve been the myopic personal drama of one troubled woman — whose proximity may have caused a lapse in Khan’s judgment — is truly remarkable. Particularly if you force yourself to sit through the only on-record account she’s known to have given of her Khan-related struggles. Perhaps because it’s tricky to synthesize “grooming” into a concise CNN-ready soundbite, the sole tangible instance of sexual interaction she ever really articulated in that interview is one that allegedly took place during an ICC mission to Colombia, sometime in 2023 or 2024, when she would’ve been 36 or 37 years old — during which she at some point wound up inviting Khan to her hotel room, and promptly climbed into bed with him… whereupon… she recounts… “I felt Mr. Khan sort of scooch over in the bed. And he started to put his hand down my leggings to grope me — to put his tongue in my ear. And I didn’t move an inch. Even when I remember, I think his fingernail must have caught my skin. I didn’t flinch — nothing. I just was still. Now, when you take that one incident alone, if you believe someone to be asleep, that is not consent. You cannot consent to that.”

Somehow my initial intuitions about the sheer stupidity of this story were not nearly cynical enough. Because if this is really the defining incident we’re supposed to believe implicates Khan as a serial perpetrator of “non-consensual sexual contact”... and not just because of the overarching “power dynamic” problem, which Sarah maintains rendered all their sexual activity non-consensual anyway, but because in this special episode, she claims she had been “pretending to be asleep,” though she was not in fact asleep. But because Khan must have somehow believed she was asleep, he surely must have known her consent could not be granted — even though she admits she was awake? This is the most egregious example of abuse / assault / misconduct / whatever she was able to confect after thinking about it daily for over two years? This is what makes Karim Khan not just an unwitting transgressor of the latest newfangled “consent” strictures, but a willful and conscious sex assailant? WTF? Am I the one being “gaslit” here???

At this point, let us cast our minds back to October 27, 2024, when the Guardian came out with one of the first public reports that a dreaded “accusation” cycle had commenced:

According to a document seen by the Guardian, the accusations against Khan, 54, include unwanted sexual touching and “abuse” over an extended period. They include an alleged incident in which he is said to have “pressed his tongue” into the woman’s ear. Khan denies such allegations of misconduct.

Omitted from this initial tone-setting report was some potentially illuminating context: that the ear-licking survivor — by her own eventual telling 20 months later! — had been voluntarily lying in bed beside Khan at the time, after she’d accepted him into her upscale Colombian hotel room, located one floor below his, on the stated premise that she was going to take a nap, and he would join her for this nap. And then her ear was mortifyingly licked.

Might’ve been some clarifying context for readers. Oh well.

One of the few moderately useful questions Amanpour managed to ask during the tediously long-winded Sarah interview was the following, thanks to a copy of the top-secret report(s) Amanpour was magically able to obtain:

AMANPOUR: Can I point some things out then, in this idea of — did he think it was consensual? You’ve explained exactly why that couldn’t be possible from your point of view, of course. And afterwards, according to the report, he would ask you whether you were comfortable or uncomfortable with anything he was doing. In other words, after you had these experiences that you allege, he would then say, of course, you’d — I’m paraphrasing, you’d tell me if you’re uncomfortable. Is that correct?

SARAH: He would sometimes mention that, or ask me that question. But if you know Mr. Khan, he’s not expecting a response from you. Mr. Khan does what he wants. And I, again, go back to that moment where I clearly told him, if this continues, I might harm myself.

OK… so… on at least some occasions, Sarah acknowledges Khan would expressly ask her if she was “comfortable” with everything that was going on. Amanpour did not inquire if Sarah had ever responded affirmatively, which might’ve been a solid journalistic followup, since the whole impetus for this interview was ostensibly to detail the “unwanted” and “coerced” sexual contact Sarah’s alleging she’d been ravaged by. Which according to the fearless DropSite crew, “lasted nearly a year, and continued even after she told Khan that his conduct had left her suicidal.” So what about the indeterminate number of months prior to her purportedly telling Khan that she felt bad — perhaps if not “suicidal” — or as she put it to Amanpour, that if “this” went on any longer, she might “do something to herself”? Here’s another potential High IQ journalistic followup: at any time during the nearly full year that she was regularly engaged in these seemingly quite frequent liaisons with Khan, did she ever respond in the affirmative to his proactively-made overtures seeking verbal confirmation of her comfort? I guess we can only speculate.

Actually, scratch that. For your own safety and comfort, it’s probably best not to speculate. Because some NGO thing called “Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice” has already answered all the questions we could possibly have, declaring that the ultimate answer lies in the ICC’s toxic workplace culture, which would’ve made catastrophically unbearable any of Sarah’s adult grooming travails, since the ICC is so well-known as a “rigidly hierarchical institution,” in which injustices like adult grooming are enabled and excused. What a truly hilarious way to describe this clearly walking-on-eggshells / hanging-by-a-thread quasi-prosecutorial entity, headquartered in the Netherlands, brimming as it must be with European Unionized gender-sensitive Liberal International Order types. It’s always the culturally liberal institutions whose dissidents on the lower rungs of the “hierarchy” end up denouncing as the most viciously repressive institutions of all! Reminds me of George Floyd Summer, when 26-year-old digital media staffers would bombastically pout on Twitter that their left-liberal journalism organization was actually Ground Zero for the most savage repression in Modern America. Their editors and peers would then be required to ritualistically validate these grievances, no matter how hallucinatory or ideologically blinkered, even though the pouters were never going to be placated regardless. Some ICC intern could declare tomorrow that the ICC is actually a “grooming gang,” and everyone who’s culturally or institutionally adjacent would have to nod in remorseful agreement.

One might reasonably ask: OK, so what really went on with this whole ICC shitshow? Because it couldn’t really have been all about an “adult grooming” kerfuffle… right? Of course, it’s tempting for a certain cohort of online commenters to immediately leap to the “Israel did it!” conclusion. Which increasingly explains everything that ever goes wrong anywhere. At least in this instance, Israel-related shenanigans are not some freakoid fever-dream — the Netanyahu arrest warrant sought by Khan, and the backlash this engendered, clearly did play some role in the overall shitshow chronology. And there was never any doubt that Israel would swiftly exploit whatever vulnerabilities might surface in the ICC operation — just like any defendant would do, frankly, if the person or agency trying to prosecute them had vulnerabilities exposed. But there was no way for Israel to surreptitiously engineer what was obviously the paramount factor here: an institutional culture in which “accusations” are just never going to be handled rationally. Whether it’s the ICC, or other places with broadly similar cultural profiles (see: Democratic Party, affiliated NGOs, myriad interlocking EU satellites) where at minimum, the default expectation should be that no matter how trivial or crazed the “accusation,” it will inevitably spiral out of control. Maybe on occasion there can be miraculous exceptions, and the damage can be somewhat contained, but as a baseline assumption, you really just have to brace for the maximally irrational outcome. And when you add in the extraneous political stuff — like, say, a Maine Senate Race ascribed with big national import, or god forbid Israel/Palestine — forget it. Just throw in the towel, go into hiding, kill yourself, etc.

An examination of the recent institutional record shows that even preceding Khan’s tenure, which started in 2021, the ICC’s culture was deemed so menacing to women that an urgent directive was issued — by some interchangeable entity that’d been tasked with issuing such directives, and was comprised of literal self-described “Experts,” who proclaimed:

Decisive action needs to follow the ASP’s and Court’s commitment to ensuring gender equality and providing a welcoming environment for all individuals affiliated with the Court. The Experts make a number of findings and recommendations throughout the Report addressing gender inequality, particularly in senior positions, through measures relating to elections, recruitment, working environment, training and professional development. Targeted interventions for gender equality should be complemented by gender mainstreaming. Attention should further be given to ensuring the dignity, wellbeing, safety and inclusion of LGBTIQ+ individuals in the Court’s working environment. The Experts welcome in this regard the ICCQ, an informal sexual and gender diversity network at the Court. In pursuing these goals, the Court should make use of dedicated focal points on gender issues, and sexual and other forms of harassment, best practices and expertise of specialised external partners, such as UN Women and dedicated NGOs.

One can only imagine the discussions that must go on at the “informal sexual and gender diversity network” that apparently exists in or around the International Criminal Court. Surely whenever some controversy arises, it’s met with a sober and deliberative conflict-resolution process, carried out in accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order or an appropriate Dutch equivalent. Surely, there is no steadier or more reliable “network” to which ideas for “best practices” could be outsourced.

We’re led to believe this 2020 investigation had to be urgently launched because previously, the ICC HQ was a cesspool of hyper-aggressive sexual impunity, with “bullying and harassment” allowed to run rampant, in large measure because of what the Report describes as “a certain lack of gender balance” at the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) — even though “the gender distribution in the OTP appears to be close to 50/50.” Because notwithstanding this near-perfect “balance,” there remained “almost a complete absence of women in senior positions — which is a general issue across the Court.” Does anyone want to take a wild guess at what gender the next Chief Prosecutor will be, once she/her/they emerges from the wreckage of the Khan demolition? The Report continues:

The Experts heard many accounts of bullying behaviour amounting to harassment in all Organs of the Court, though particularly in the OTP. They also heard frequent complaints that the culture of the Court’s workplace was adversarial and implicitly discriminatory against women. They heard a number of accounts of sexual harassment, notably uninvited and unwanted sexual advances from more senior male staff to their female subordinates. Female interns seemed to be particularly vulnerable to such approaches, underlining the extent to which this phenomenon, not just at the Court, but in business, government, law, academia and many other professional environments around the world, frequently has more to do with power relationships than with mutual attraction.

“Implicitly discriminatory”? Well, that should be a cinch to eradicate! Probably just need a few more bureaucratic tweaks. “Adversarial”? You mean like… in a courtroom? Also, sorry to belabor the point, but isn’t the whole reason why “sexual advances” are generally initiated because sexual interest may not have been explicitly “invited,” but still might be prospectively welcomed, and so once the advance is made, the recipient can either accept or refuse it, depending on whether they deem it “wanted” or “unwanted”? Eh… nevermind.

BUT WAIT… THERE’S MORE… UGH… SUBSCRIBE FOR PART TWO, COMING SHORTLY, WHICH WILL BE PAYWALLED. YES, SORRY, YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO PAY ME FOR SLOGGING THROUGH THIS BULLSHIT

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Thanks to all who came out last night for the “Great Epstein Debate.” It looked like a packed house to me. Somehow, I ended up losing per the Oxford-style debate format. I found this pretty amazing, at least per my own subjective perception of the quality of the arguments, which I grant is extremely biased in my favor, given that I’m the one who delivered my argument. I might have to self-interestedly attribute this outcome to the persistence of the “moral panic” itself! I was also told that fewer “libertarian autists” were in the audience than is typical. Whatever though — the people have spoken!

One of the organizers told me the debate was not “live-streamed” due to technical issues, but it was video-recorded, so it should be released relatively soon by Soho Forum/Reason.

In the meantime, below is the opening statement I more-or-less delivered last night, with some improvisation throughout. Along with a few other notes/thoughts I jotted down in preparation.

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Your final friendly reminder that this debate is happening tomorrow night! What a fabulous way to celebrate Bastille Day.

I realized I have some “comped tickets” available, so if you are a “PAID SUBSCRIBER” and would like a “comped” ticket or tickets, send me an email/DM or leave a comment here. If you are not a “PAID SUBSCRIBER” and would like a “comped” ticket or tickets, please become a “PAID SUBSCRIBER” and send me an email/message or leave a comment here.

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