Here’s an article I had published today at UnHerd on the latest upsurge of consternation around Graham Platner, who I suppose is on the verge of becoming, or has already become, something like a new household name for anyone minimally attuned to US political affairs. I admit I hadn’t followed the Maine senate race very closely until about a week ago. Of course, I’d occasionally see some flicker of controversy involving Platner, whom I knew had unconventionally ascended to presumptive Democratic nominee despite being a pure political novice. And of course, I am well aware of Susan Collins. One of the funniest outcomes of the 2020 election was that she sailed comfortably to victory over a much-hyped Democratic challenger, despite virtually every poll in the lead-up projecting Collins’ defeat. I guess I shouldn’t overstate my ignorance too much; I’m sure I’d read an article here or there on Platner’s improbable rise in the past couple months. But I hadn’t really done a proper “deep dive” on the main controversies animating the race.

The principal controversy I’d sporadically heard about was that Graham Platner apparently had some sort of “Nazi tattoo,” and claimed he’d only been recently informed that the tattoo was connected to Nazism. Whereupon, he got another tattoo to cover up the offending image. It occurred to me last night that I couldn’t recall ever seeing the actual tattoo. So I pulled it up, and saw this:

“Wait, really?” I thought. I had always kind of vaguely assumed the tattoo in question must be so obviously evocative of Nazis or Hitler that the average American would take one look at it and immediately know the connotation. Foolish naivety on my part. I’ll acknowledge, perhaps embarrassingly, that the symbol did not even immediately leap out to me as obviously associated with Nazism. While I’m far from the biggest World War II nut to ever exist, I do know a fair amount, including about Nazi Germany. But for whatever reason, I genuinely would not have recognized the symbol at first blush as Nazi-related. To me, it kind of just looks like a generic “skull and crossbones” symbol that one could imagine rabble-rousing guys in the military thinking looks cool. Someone should commission a poll to ascertain what percentage of Americans would proactively identify this as a “Nazi” symbol, because I’d guess the percentage would be quite low.

Anyway, Platner continues to be excoriated for his now-infamous “Nazi tattoo,” since he shamefully failed to consult the Anti-Defamation League “hate symbol” database before getting himself tatted up years ago. My take is that whatever the exact details of Platner’s tattoo folly, everyone should just relax in general about Nazi-related symbols, because they’re really not that big of a deal anymore.

One might retort: Hey, what about that big controversy over the past several years about a certain military unit in Ukraine, the Azov Battalion/Brigade/Regiment? Didn’t you used to complain that soldiers in this unit were routinely being spotted with Nazi insignia emblazoned on their uniforms, vehicles, and so forth? OK, fair question. It’s true that I would sometimes point out the prevalence of Nazi-type imagery among Azov fighters and followers, and I’d comment on various political tensions brought to bear by this conundrum: namely, that Democrats and left-liberals were deafeningly silent about the heavy arms being funneled to the seemingly Nazi-friendly unit, even though they’d otherwise be on hair-trigger alert to declare a blithering moral crisis anytime some schlub loosely affiliated with Trump or “MAGA” could be claimed to have exhibited a tenuous, theoretical affinity with purported Nazis.

The most subtle possible indicia of such Nazi-related offenses were vigorously monitored by Dems and likeminded busybodies, especially outfits like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League, neither of which would provide me with a comment when I asked them to weigh in on Azov supporters holding political rallies in the United States — see this 2022 article. No comment, they said, despite the ideological lineage of Azov being far more straightforwardly redolent of bonafide Nazism than most of the ticky-tack stuff we’d been instructed to freak out about multiple times a week in the Trump era. Infamously, the “OK” hand gesture was deemed at one point to be a nightmarish display of Literal Nazism. When contrasted with the decidedly muted response to the sudden adulation of Azov, which was not just receiving political and media plaudits, but armaments from US military contractors, the farcical insincerity of earlier Nazi-related freakouts was made too painfully obvious to not sardonically ridicule.

However, the article I wrote on the matter was principally a meta-critique of domestic American political hackery — that the moment a glimmer of purported Nazism was sighted anywhere, it would ordinarily be cause for the most spectacular sputtering meltdown, and yet when this far more tangible manifestation of purported Nazism appeared in the wild — Azov and its boosters — it could be simply ignored by the very same people who just got done telling us that ascendant Literal Nazism was a defining feature of American life. That was the thrust of what I was trying to convey in my article, as opposed to carefully analyzing the precise ideological contours of Azov, or drawing any firm conclusions about the extent to which Azov adherents circa 2022 could be substantively tied to Nazism.

In fact, I was skeptical that each and every fighter in that unit could be reasonably described as full-blown Nazi. That just didn’t seem plausible, notwithstanding the origins and/or founders of the group, who at one time were very explicit and unapologetic about their Nazi-adjacent ideological commitments. And even if the ideological forebears of Azov could be downgraded to mere “right-wing nationalist,” that still would’ve been more than sufficient for American liberals to have a frothing panic attack, except for the overriding political imperative at the time to Stand Unflinchingly With Ukraine.

That said, even though it became a popular talking point on Russia-supporting social media, and among Russian state actors, to uniformly condemn anyone and everyone associated with Azov as outright unambiguous Nazis, my intuition was always that this was probably not accurate. Groups that start out on the fringes, like Azov in 2014, inevitably “moderate” to some degree as they become more institutionalized and “mainstream.” Ukraine was seen as the vanguard for some grandiose defense of “liberal democracy,” and as such, one could imagine that new recruits with non-Nazi predilections were being increasingly drawn to Azov as of 2022. Furthermore, even well before the war, one of Ukraine’s state objectives was to join the EU, which would entail shorning itself of distasteful ideological elements, such as Nazism, thereby proving to EU chieftains that Ukraine had firmly embraced “liberal democratic values” or whatever.

So while it stood to reason that there were likely some factions of Azov who did espouse something akin to Nazism, it also stood to reason that other factions, and perhaps even the most rapidly growing ones, were not at all sympathetic to Nazism, and in fact would genuinely deplore being conflated with Nazis. Does this make the American pundits and elected officials any less clownish for having zero compunction about gifting Azov commanders with high-powered weaponry? Not really, because again, even the faintest whiff of Nazism would usually be enough for them to howl with the fury of a thousand Resistance Warriors. But as to the nature of Azov’s true ideological composition circa 2022, to me the reality was likely more ambiguous. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Now, one might reasonably ask: isn’t this whole “Nazi” angle a bit overblown? After all, in the U.S., that label gets blithely slapped onto anyone who’s slightly more right-wing than Mitt Romney. And it’s not an unfair point. The elasticity of the term “Nazi” has become so preposterous, and it was deployed so indiscriminately during the era of Trump, that one could be forgiven for having an urge to immediately eye-roll whenever they hear it uttered.

Here’s the point, though: in a prior political context, the purported existence of Nazis was supposed to prompt an earnest outpouring of shock, horror, and counter-Nazi mobilization. But in the current political context, the existence of Nazis is supposed to be carefully ignored — in service of what is now the superseding imperative, namely to “Stand with Ukraine.”

Because even if not every Azov fighter actively subscribes to full-fledged Nazi ideology — which is plausible — they would still resoundingly meet the media’s typical criteria for instant explosions of hair-on-fire condemnation. There are currently mountains of evidence, much of which was contemporaneously gathered over the course of the ongoing war, that Azov “defenders” at the very least physically adorn themselves with unabashed Nazi symbols. Examples of such symbols that have been recently observed on their uniforms include the Wolfsangel, the Black Sun, and even a crest of a division of the SS — the paramilitary organization of the actual, historical Nazis. You know, the ones commanded by Hitler who exterminated lots of Jews. If a bunch of Trump supporters were running around with these symbols stitched onto their clothing, do you suppose the U.S. media would be extra charitable in deciphering whether they really subscribed to Nazism?

Notwithstanding the meta-political points I was trying to make about Azov in 2022, I would’ve continued to maintain — then and now — that the knee-jerk moral mania around anything vaguely to do with Nazis is beyond tedious, and should no longer be legitimized. Sure, if someone really does venerate Hitler, or really wants to impose the governing program of the Nazi Party, that’s something I would personally object to on the merits. You could reasonably hold such views against a person politically. But the instant hysteria generated by any fleeting mention of “Nazi” is so trite and performative at this point, it’s tiresome. Nazi Germany hasn’t existed for over 80 years. Hitler has been dead for slightly longer. There is no Nazi-related emergency upon us in 2026, notwithstanding the occasional presence of political actors whose ideological lineage could arguably be traced back in some roundabout fashion to historic National Socialism.

But even if that genealogy is plausibly well-established in some cases… so what? You don’t have to agree with it! In fact, you are more than entitled to enthusiastically oppose it if you feel moved. But there is no longer need for the reflexive moral outbursts. Any putative concern about Nazi-related views in 2026 can be easily addressed through ordinary modes of political disputation, without a mandatory eruption of overwrought screeching — the same way that potentially objectionable views associated with liberalism, socialism, communism, conservatism, anarchism, or other ideological tendencies can be rationally addressed.

In light of this, I would argue that even if Graham Platner did vaguely know that the tattoo he got in 2007, while on leave from the military in Croatia, was in some roundabout sense associated with “Nazism,” it’s just not that big of a deal. It’s certainly not worth proclaiming as the central fact of his political identity or governing plans. Especially if there’s no good reason to suppose that he subscribes to a worldview that has anything to do with Literal Nazism. Because in Platner’s case, he almost certainly and conclusively does not. He seems to be a generically left-wing-ish guy who likes Bernie Sanders, but has also inhabited more masculine or even right-wing-coded cultural milieus — such as serving in the military — than is perhaps typical for the average “progressive Democrat.” (Which is probably part of his appeal to a certain segment of voters.)

So in other words, there is no sensible reason to believe, as far as everything I’ve seen, that Platner acquired the purportedly offensive tattoo in order to signify his own personal affinity with Nazism. Even if he knew all along, or eventually came to know, that the tattoo was aesthetically stylized in a manner reminiscent of Nazi symbology — so what? What is that supposed to demonstrate? Do you really think he’d get into office as a Democratic senator from Maine and start agitating for the extermination of Jews or something? Please. This is all just hackneyed political blather — a “liability” for Republicans, and probably some Democrats, to eagerly slam him for. But it just doesn’t matter that much on the merits.

I’d go so far as to say that even if he did hypothetically get the tattoo to signify some affinity with historic Nazism, that too would not matter all that much. Because I’m sorry — Nazi symbols do not contain any dark magical substrates, whereby anyone who’s ever displayed them is cursed for all eternity and forever frighteningly evil. I just don’t believe that, as much as I would substantively object to the imposition of a political program modeled on National Socialism. But it would still be moot in Platner’s case, because I think the most you could credibly argue is he might’ve been notionally aware that the “skull and crossbones” on his chest was aesthetically evocative of Nazi iconography, or perhaps had been appropriated by the Nazis — even as he himself never conceived of the tattoo as signifying his own personal support for Nazism.

If you gave him truth serum, I’d bet he would probably give a convoluted rationale along these lines for why he got the tattoo in the first place, and then kept it unperturbed for 18 years. I gather that lots of people end up getting tattoos to which they assign their own semi-private meaning. But explaining this “semi-private meaning” to the public is probably not something he’d be easily able to do in the context of a high-profile Senate race, so he cut his losses and got the thing blotched out last fall. Maybe he would’ve been better off just keeping it though, because the “cover-up” doesn’t seem to have dulled the controversy at all, and kind of just hobbles his ability to explain it convincingly.

I honestly can’t bring myself to care that much one way or another about whether Platner beats Susan Collins, or by extension, whether the US Senate is controlled next year by John Thune or Chuck Schumer. That’s just not something I envision myself getting overly exercised about, or psychically invested in. To the degree I am currently interested in the Maine senate race, it’s to document the deluge of propagandistic sleaze being pelted at Platner, with a nice assist yesterday from the New York Times, whose star correspondents Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer decided it was of paramount journalistic importance to survey Platner’s ex-girlfriends, going back to his 20s, and have them pontificate on his character traits.

The journalists additionally thought it was of utmost importance to have several of these chagrined “exes” emotionally reconstruct and narrativize their past experiences with Platner, to create a psychological profile from which the NYT could purport to divine a pattern of his “unsettling” behavior. Of supreme newsworthiness, evidently, is that a handful of these women recalled their past relationships with Platner could sometimes be “volatile” and “emotionally wrenching.” If this is super-newsworthy stuff, then as I proposed in the UnHerd piece, it’s only right that Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer also have their ex-boyfriends canvassed, and invited to share their recollections of any “volatile” or “emotionally wrenching” relationship dynamics they might call to mind from back in the day. This would undoubtedly give us all much-needed insight into the subtle influences permeating the political coverage of the New York Times — at least if they’re saying such information gives us crucial insight into the office-holding ambitions of Graham Platner.

Also of interest for my admittedly niche, peculiar purposes is that the Maine Senate race is poised to become yet another national bellwether of the Great Pedo Panic, with Platner having been predictably declared a pedo already, on predictably scurrilous grounds — because there are seldom any non-scurrilous grounds on which pedo accusations are flung as of late. His crime: having an account on the app “Kik,” which featured a profile picture of him shirtless and wearing a towel around his waist. The app is claimed to be disproportionately populated by vulnerable, underaged minors getting sexually preyed upon by adults, so the mere fact of Platner having an account is seen as adequate to call him a pedo. Despite zero evidence that he ever did anything sexually predatory with anyone of any age, much less children.

Republican polling firms have excitedly reported that when they test out the resulting attack line with Maine voters — that Platner has been caught patronizing an app known as a “paradise” for “child predators” — his favorability ratings unsurprisingly plummet. So we can expect to see this Pedo Panic trolling amplified at full blast for the next several months, as millions and millions of dollars pour into Maine, where the balance of power in the Senate could be decided. Lots of deep-pocketed donors are so very passionate about whether the chamber is controlled by John Thune or Chuck Schumer.

This agglomeration of slime hurled at Platner is outlandishly scummy, in my view, and so the race does merit some critical attention, notwithstanding my sincere lack of strong feeling one way or another about the desirability of his candidacy, compounded by my general apathy about which party obtains a majority in Congress. Not that I won’t be covering the midterms in some form — I inevitably will. I’m just saying that from the standpoint of my own personal preference, I simply do not care all that much about the ultimate electoral outcome. Even so, there will be plenty of insights to glean about the latest pathologies of US political culture, and so in that spirit, I guess I will be intermittently following the Platner/Collins race. Maine’s nice in the summer anyway!

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The Soho Forum Debate: Michael Tracey vs. Marcella Szablewicz

Resolution: The Jeffrey Epstein scandal has become a case of moral panic.

July 14, 2026

6:30pm

The Sheen Center

New York, NY

Eventbrite link

I have done several debates affiliated with the “Soho Forum” in the past, but this will be the first one to take place on the “main stage.”

When I was approached about doing it, I immediately expressed doubt that the organizers would be able to find anyone willing to debate me on the subject of “Epstein.” And then, to my surprise, they did in fact find someone. OK then!

It’s structured as a formal “Oxford-style” debate, with a winner declared based on audience participation.

If you are in the NYC area, or would like to travel to the NYC area in mid-July, I encourage you to come! (No, not to pack the debate hall in my favor — that wouldn’t work regardless, given how the vote-tabulation system works.) Feel free to get in touch if you think you might attend! I believe there is also a reception afterwards and so forth.

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It’s hard to imagine anything more blatantly disqualifying for an elected official than to falsely accuse random citizens of heinous child sex crimes, then once the citizens you’ve accused are confirmed totally innocent, not even have the decency to apologize — and instead blame others for your spectacularly egregious behavior. But that’s exactly what Thomas Massie has done for the past three months. So desperate was he to proclaim that he had discovered the mythical “coverup” he presumed must exist in the “Epstein Files” he’d so doggedly campaigned for releasing, that he and his cohort Ro Khanna couldn’t even take two seconds to properly contextualize the “files” they were knocking themselves over to screech about. And so they rushed before the cameras to declare, as Massie did, that these four men in New York City with zero public profile — who had absolutely nothing to do with Epstein — were “likely incriminated” in pedophile sex-trafficking crimes, the mere suggestion of which is enough to utterly destroy anyone’s reputation. Especially if you’re just a lowly auto mechanic or IT technician, like the men Massie wasted no time castigating. His buddy Ro Khanna then ran to the House floor and read their names aloud, like he was revealing some momentous government secret, and denounced them as “powerful men” the DOJ was shamefully conspiring to protect. Soon enough, Massie and Khanna were shown to have defamed these thoroughly “non-powerful” men as depraved child-sex criminals, but the two Congressmen proceeded to blame everyone but themselves. To my knowledge, neither Massie nor Khanna have ever bothered to apologize to the men. Instead, they both barrel forward with their stream of uninterrupted Epstein theatrics, as if they have absolutely nothing to be sorry about.

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For this and many other reasons, Massie richly deserves to lose his GOP primary race in Kentucky tomorrow. Which does not mean that those contriving to oust him deserve to “win.” As the tedious cliche often goes, “two things can be true at the same time.” Massie has plainly engaged in a host of discrediting conduct, which is more than sufficient to render a judgment that he is worthy of electoral defeat. At the same time, the crude donor-class intrusion into his congressional primary, now the most expensive in history at $36 million — which is probably a lowball estimate — is impossible to endorse. His nominal ghostlike opponent, Ed Gallrein, has pathetically ducked debates, barely does any real interviews, and almost nothing is known of his background beyond that he was hand-picked by Trump. When he does occasionally deign to speak, Gallrein loves to give himself tough-guy credit, claiming the details of his vaunted military service are too “classified” to inform voters about. So he’s basically just relying on a massive influx of outside cash to muscle his way to an ignominious victory.

It’s also true that Massie’s opponents appear to disdain him for reasons that have nothing much to do with the reasons he so richly deserves defeat. Everyone knows Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and the other filthy rich donors pouring in astronomical amounts of money are doing so because they perceive Massie to be intolerably unsupportive of Israel. And they would’ve harbored this disdain whether or not Trump had declared Massie persona non grata. But his Trump feud presents the donor clique with a rare opportunity to oust a meddlesome incumbent, because ordinarily the built-in advantages of incumbency make this nearly impossible. Trump, however, commands such outsized influence with Republican primary electorates that if he’s already fuming mad about Massie — enough to wage an electoral jihad against him — the pro-Israel donors have every reason to swoop in and capitalize.

Trump’s repeated posts on Truth Social intimating that something vaguely nefarious went down with the timing of Massie’s marriage to his second wife is gutter-level stuff — but nothing particularly new for Trump, whose premier skill has always been knowing exactly what “buttons to push” with his political foes. Nothing is off limits when he really wants to make it hurt. He’s even been promoting a new set of “allegations” against Massie, related to a bunch of similarly vague intimations of supposed misconduct with a woman Massie purportedly dated after the death of his first wife. The whole thing looks incredibly flimsy. But no, the idea that Massie now karmically deserves to be slimed with cheap innuendo, because he’s been flinging similar nonsense in all directions for the past ten months, is not a logic that can be countenanced, as it validates the idea of meritless rumor-mongering, so long as the target can be deemed sufficiently “deserving,” according to whatever criteria anyone wants to invoke to make that inherently subjective determination. Still, eleventh-hour flimsy accusations against Massie do highlight that he might’ve been well-advised to exercise greater caution before hurling evidence-devoid attacks at others, especially if he and his supporters would like that courtesy extended to him. Bear in mind, the “allegations” against Massie, such as they can even be ascertained, are trivial compared to the allegations Massie has gratuitously leveled against the many alleged sex-trafficking “associates” of Epstein.

One tragedy of Massie is that for years, he really was an anomalously independent-minded member of Congress — otherwise a body that puts a premium on relentless conformity. I’d say he was even one of the very few members I would have personally reported having any degree of admiration for. Take, for instance, his nimble intervention in April 2024 to marginally impede passage of the TikTok ban, which Speaker Mike Johnson had tried to fast-track using the existing legislative vehicle of a pending National Security Supplemental bill. Massie could not block the measure entirely, and it did end up getting passed, but his quick-thinking efforts at least helped to galvanize public awareness of Johnson’s sneaky maneuver, and a significantly larger number of his colleagues joined him in voting NO than had been anticipated. Massie was always unusually adept at monitoring the arcane minutiae of legislative procedure, including the extra-arcane workings of the Rules Committee, on which he previously sat — and which most members of Congress can barely explain, nevermind the average citizen. Massie consistently performed a useful public service by elucidating various inside-baseball machinations in a manner the general public could comprehend. He’s also been known to make a point of explaining every vote he casts, rather than just coasting on the assumption that a critical mass of his constituents will never pay attention to the ins-and-outs, which is what most members of Congress bank on.

Massie’s willingness to vote against the slew of performatively “pro-Israel” resolutions which endlessly lard up the House agenda is one of his more praiseworthy traits, so of course, that’s what he is now being attacked for in the ads swamping his district. It remains an open question how many Kentucky GOP voters even care about this issue, but the messaging may be effective among older Evangelicals who watch a lot of TV — perhaps the most reliable GOP voting bloc. Conversely, Massie’s refusal to grovel for “pro-Israel” nonsense could conceivably nudge other segments of the electorate toward a more pro-Massie direction, although those potential voters are unlikely to be watching the TV stations where the ads are being aired. “Spots” assailing Massie for failing to support the Iran War could have a similarly uneven impact, but the Republican Jewish Committee strategists placing the ads are probably clever enough to discern which demographics to target. The ads’ emphasis on Massie being “disloyal” to Trump, and entering into alliance with the likes of AOC and Ilhan Omar, is probably enough to inflame the id of the median Republican primary voter, whatever their precise views on the Iran “excursion.” Shameless use of AI to generate fake video vignettes of Massie holding hands with AOC/Omar makes the ads especially odious. Despite a cursory “AI” disclaimer, the vast majority of Kentucky GOP primary voters will likely not be familiar with the latest frontiers in AI technology, and will probably just assume the footage real.

So there can be no doubt that Massie is being inundated with an enormous deluge of sleaze, uncorked by his crime of not bowing to Trump, whose pique has invited “pro-Israel” operatives to flood Massie’s district with agitprop. Would it be regrettable if this anti-Massie torrent is effective enough to beat him? Sure, that would be regrettable. But it also wouldn’t magically negate Massie’s own “regrettable” conduct. (Just like AIPAC & co. successfully ousting Democratic incumbents Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush in 2024 didn’t magically absolve them of critique, either.)

Because leaving aside Trump, the “pro-Israel” donors, and every other variable in this race, let the record show that once Massie decided he would dive head-first into the swirling toilet-bowl vortex of Epstein mania, he went completely off the rails.

At the “Epstein Survivors” press conference Massie co-organized last September, one of the “survivors” he loves to venerate so much, Lisa Phillips, famously caused a media sensation when she declared that her trauma sisterhood was going to produce their own “list” of sex-trafficking perpetrators, and hand it off to Massie and/or Marjorie Taylor Greene to then read on the House floor. Massie told reporters after the press conference that he was “encouraged and surprised to hear that they are going to create a list,” and he would be glad to be of service. “We need to start with the list,” Massie said, “and find out who on the list is guilty, and what crimes did they commit.” Which represented a stark inversion of the “presumption of innocence” ideal one might’ve thought Massie would cherish as a longstanding civil libertarian. He volunteered that he’d be happy to “go to the floor of the House and read the list,” thereby condemning unknown men for unknown child sex crimes, with zero corroboration necessary, because thanks to the Constitution’s “Speech or Debate” clause, Massie would personally “not suffer any defamation cases” for doing this, even if he were to falsely incriminate loads of guys. “A list of three dozen names would not be hard to carry to the floor of the House of Representatives and read in five minutes,” Massie explained. “And perhaps read it everyday.”

Of course this prospective stunt never happened — no “list” was ever produced. Which strangely never impelled Massie or his compatriots to reconsider their assumptions as to the veracity of the “survivor” claims. Nor did they revise the certainty with which they had inveighed against the scores of purported child sex-traffickers they assured everyone were being covered up in the “Epstein Files.” Instead, the new talking point became that we mustn’t burden the poor “survivors” (or their profit-seeking lawyers) with any expectations of disclosure, because “it’s not their job to release the names,” as Massie told me in November 2025. He’d go on to repeat this same emotional-blackmail talking point on National TV — a talking point that’d been provided to him and other “survivor” advocates by the Bradley Edwards “victim” lawyer syndicate, with whom Massie and Khanna were collaborating on trauma-informed PR strategy, and even the legislative text of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. It was a gambit that worked out exceedingly well for Edwards & co., as they leveraged the public uproar around “Epstein Files” made possible by Massie’s bill to secure at least two additional class-action settlements, worth approximately $108 million, from which Edwards and his colleagues will receive another generous 30% cut. Who says government can’t create wealth?

After the Survivor-furnished “client list” idea fizzled, by February 2026, Massie eventually took matters into his own hands with a dramatic speech on the House floor in which he demanded the mass-arrest of Epstein confederates, for what he said was the “unspeakable” conduct revealed in the Epstein Files. As per usual, he did not specify what criminal conduct he was referring to — nor did he identify what criminal statutes had been so obviously violated. As I wrote at the time: “Thomas Massie is innovating a fascinating new slant on libertarian philosophy by constantly running around accusing private individuals of heinous crimes, demanding their arrest, pre-supposing their guilt, and calling on the government to disregard basic notions of due process.” It was in this Floor Speech (delivered under the immunities of the “Speech or Debate” clause) that Massie finally named a bunch of men he claimed ought to go down for their complicity in pedo trafficking. One he flamboyantly named was Leon Black, declaring: “You don’t even have to see past the redactions to see that this man needs to be investigated… it’s right there in the files.” For all that Massie loves to self-righteously pontificate about what he claims is right there for anyone to see in the “files,” he clearly hasn’t spent much time actually reading them — otherwise he presumably would’ve known that Leon Black was in fact investigated, by both federal and state prosecutors, for totally fabricated child-sex crimes, as I detailed in my lengthy two-part series last week on the monumental fraud of “Jane Doe” and her enablers.

What might be most galling about Massie’s routine is that he has still never bothered to learn the most basic facts of the Epstein case — the very thing he has staked his political career on, and can’t stop thundering about day after day. Because he’s such a media darling now (just like every Republican who feuds with Trump inevitably is) he was recently interviewed on the BBC, and gravely intoned to this international audience that a vast Epstein Coverup remains in progress: despite millions of records coming out pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act that Massie co-sponsored, the DOJ continues to maliciously conceal “internal memos and emails” related to Epstein’s federal Non-Prosecution Agreement from 2006-2008. “They haven’t given us any of those documents,” Massie told his solemn British inquisitor. It really must be stressed how catastrophically uninformed one must be about the “Epstein Files” to seriously believe this. Like, you must have spent under 10 minutes total looking through the “files” you claim you so desperately wanted to unveil. Because there’s an absolute mega-avalanche of exactly these records available in the public domain — the very records Massie astonishingly claims are missing. Email threads, prosecution memos, and a giant expanse of other records depicting prosecutors’ internal deliberations related to the Epstein federal NPA. Some of the materials had already been public prior to the latest DOJ productions, and countless more were subsequently released. I even made a little explanatory video highlighting a tiny fraction of the “documents” Massie claims were damningly withheld. As usual, it turns out Massie was talking straight out of his “assie.” But you can see why he has to keep the intrigue going. Never will there be a point where he’ll just come out and say, “OK folks, looks like we’re done here!” The sinister coverup, by dogmatic necessity, will have to go on indefinitely.

Massie’s position on the Epstein fiasco has always been a straightforward example of willfully-fallacious reverse reasoning. He kicked off his crusade in July 2025, when by his own admission he had very little knowledge of the facts or evidence underlying the actual Epstein case, and preemptively decided there was a massive child sex-trafficking scandal waiting to be exposed. As he conceded on a February 2026 podcast, prior to last year, he “wasn’t paying a lot of attention” to the whole Epstein thing. But then the infamous DOJ/FBI memo dropped on July 6, 2025, and whammo: social media erupted, re-igniting the controversy on a grander scale than ever before. Massie correctly perceived a political opening he might profitably seize — especially as he was on course for a Trump-backed primary challenge the following year. By that point, Massie had already opposed the signature domestic legislation of Trump’s second term, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” and Trump had already started threatening to primary Massie as early as March 2025. By June 2025, the threats were overt, with Trump announcing he’d begun to assemble the requisite political infrastructure. Given this precarious political predicament for Massie, who had previously lobbied for Trump’s endorsement in 2024, and endorsed Trump himself that year, he now needed to devise an audacious strategy to withstand the coming Trump-backed onslaught. Which would be no small feat, given Trump’s demonstrated ability to pick and choose GOP primary winners on a dime, with something like a 90% success rate, especially in Congressional races — a singular power Trump aggressively wields that is virtually without precedent in modern American history.

And so, with perfect timing, a five-alarm-fire Epstein Uproar drops right into Massie’s lap. You can’t dispute the political logic that led him to leap into the “Epstein Files” sinkpit. There’s no question it has exponentially expanded his national profile — and even made him one of the most high-profile politicians in the entire country. Because it was going to take something extraordinary (in a literal sense) for Massie to have any chance of overcoming the mad Trump vendetta. And it may even work! Massie constantly solicits donations on the basis of his wild Epstein quest, and sure enough, the online contributions have flowed steadily in. It may not rival the billionaire largesse of his opponent, but it’s enough to at least stay competitive. And all other things being equal, there is something laudable about being “beholden” to a pool of small donors, rather than a narrow cabal of obscenely rich “elites” whose entire political project revolves around a certain Middle Eastern client state. If Massie does manage to fend off the primary challenge tomorrow, it will be one of the most impressive electoral feats in recent times.

But the soundness of the political logic Massie has employed does nothing to negate his substantive free-fall into algorithmic oblivion. Which is a virtual inevitability whenever anybody decides to integrate “Epstein Maximalism” into their public persona. On the same dopey podcast where he acknowledged having little or no pre-existing knowledge of the issue before roughly ten months ago, Massie explained his belief that Epstein is alive — today — because with the help of a shadowy intel cabal, our friend Jeffrey mysteriously “disappeared” from the federal jail facility, and “we can’t find him.” How did Massie come up with this fascinating theory? He admits to basically outsourcing it to his social media followers, having posted a poll on X in February 2026 asking what people really think happened to Epstein — and a solid plurality voted for “He is still alive.” So that’s become Massie’s take, too. The most high-profile champion of Epstein “accountability” in Congress just parrots whatever lunacy floats across his social media feed. Despite the subject-matter expertise one might have thought he’d garnered after so many months as foremost Epstein authority. Because he apparently never got a chance to look through the autopsy photos of Epstein’s dead body, found in the Epstein Files he loves preaching about, to at least clarify how they are consistent with the “still alive” theory he spins out on podcasts.

NOTE: While the volume of ads dumped into Massie’s primary race is insane, outside groups supporting Massie have also gotten rather nasty. Whatever “edgy” and “based” political pro thought it was a genius move to plaster an LGBT flag-colored “Star of David” on a pro-Massie ad was going out of their way to stupidly troll and outrage-farm. Whatever instinct gave rise to this is probably closely related to whatever brain-disease resulted in Massie’s “Money Bomb” fundraiser showcasing the likes of Dave Smith rambling about how we might finally “crack the code” — of pizza and grape soda in the Epstein Files — by electing lots of mini Massies, to which Massie himself responded with a brag that he had personally “uncovered the pedophiles.” Once again, he avoided getting into further detail about which “pedophiles” he claims to have triumphantly uncovered.

On a personal note, I can’t help but point out that after I was ejected from the “Epstein Survivors” press conference Massie co-organized last year, at the direction of Marjorie Taylor Greene and a mob of angry “survivors,” for the crime of asking a question they didn’t like about the chronic recantations of Virginia Roberts Giuffre — who was otherwise being declared an “American Hero” that day for her heroic Epstein victimhood — Massie told me he thought I was “really rude.” I asked him to please elaborate on what he meant, and he kind of just mumbled a non-answer and drifted off. This, after I’d been threatened with arrest for asking a question at a press conference to which I’d been invited by the staff of Ro Khanna! It was sadly emblematic of Massie’s recent devolution into logically-garbled foolishness — a far cry from the version of him I had, until very recently, regarded as among the few examples of laudable Congressional service. Massie has even adopted the tedious sloganeering jargon of “Believing Survivors” and so forth — like he’s suddenly some big hero for “women.” He routinely praises the three female Republican colleagues who joined him in signing the discharge petition for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and accusatorially wonders why his male Republican colleagues refused to follow suit. As if everyone should strive to emulate the sterling political acumen of Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Marge Greene.

Would I be thrilled if Massie loses tomorrow? No — the obscene sleaze-fest marshaled against him, and the risible person selected by Trump to take his place, make that impossible. But should he be cheered onto victory, after his nonstop clown-show antics over the past ten months? Also, emphatically, no. Sometimes everyone involved deserves to be tainted with the stench of defeat.

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Anyway, after the panel, I saw Bret Weinstein sulking around at something called the “Speakers Lounge,” and we had a few sporadic followup chats. He had already tweeted that my behavior on the panel was “pretty despicable,” and accused me of “ambushing” him. He also suggested that I had a hand in orchestrating the panel on false pretenses. I replied that I had simply been invited to attend the Web Summit, and was asked for suggestions on what might make for an interesting panel. So yeah, among my suggestions was something along the lines of, “Should we abolish all podcasts?” I’d been solicited to suggest topics with media or political relevance; obviously I wasn’t being brought there to discuss “tech,” AI, or blockchain. The guy organizing the conference did in fact take one of my suggestions, and formulated a panel premise on that basis. Or at least that’s my understanding of the unremarkable sequence of events. I had no notion that Bret Weinstein would be on the resulting panel. I honestly had little notion of what I would even be doing, or what the Web Summit even was — I’d just never been to Vancouver before, and kinda wanted to visit regardless, so this was as good an excuse as any. Turns out fellas like Aaron Mate (a Vancouver native) were also present, along with various other media types whom it would also not be 100% intuitive might get invited to such an event: Ryan Grim, Chris Hedges, Cenk Uygur, Curtis “Moldbug” Yarvin, Lauren Southern, Nate Fischer, Julius Krein, Eoin Higgins, among others. So, it was worth making the trek. But beyond that, I had no involvement in orchestrating the panel, despite Bret predictably spinning a theory that I had elaborately conspired with the organizers to “sandbag” him.

I want to correct one error I made on the panel. (See, I actually correct stuff where necessary). I incorrectly referred to the March 16, 2026 podcast Bret appeared on as the “Chris Jones Show,” when in actuality it was the “Danny Jones Show.” I regret the error. I’m not sure why I jotted down “Chris” rather than “Danny” in my notes, but I did, and have no problem admitting this error! Here is the exchange I was referring to, at 27:57:

DANNY JONES: And you know, that was also around the time of the George Floyd riots, and all that stuff, where people were burning cities down, and destroying everything in the streets, over one person being murdered. And I can’t help but wonder why we don’t see anything like this, now that this Epstein stuff has come out. When there’s evidence of people eating children, and molesting and trafficking children.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it’s unfathomable. Because the implications -- it’s not just that you had this group of monsters apparently engaged in all of this unthinkably evil behavior. But the relationship to power is so clear in the so-called Epstein Files that the question is, you know, we have monsters near power. That’s extremely dangerous.

Bret and Danny then went on to expound a whole master-theory of Pedo Protecting Power on the basis of this totally batshit premise — that the “Epstein Files” had conclusively revealed evidence that scores of children were “eaten” by Epstein and his “monstrous” associates.

Bret apparently thought that my citing this extremely recent example of his podcast oeuvre was a despicably unfair “ambush,” even though it seemed perfectly sensible that if I was going to be on a panel about how we should “abolish podcasts,” I would be well-advised to cite a couple of concrete examples of the larger critique I was making. Which, to be clear, is not that we should literally “abolish all podcasts.” That’s impossible, obviously, and podcasts themselves are a neutral medium. What I am arguing is that we should somehow dislodge the current podcast-dominant online media ecosystem, which has become an engine of lucrative hysteria-fomenting, with zero factual standards, and zero repercussions (socially, reputationally, etc.) for peddling a constant slew of garbage. Because of this warped incentive structure, garbage-peddling is actually rewarded with increased revenue, stature, and political influence. Hence, Bret going on a podcast and doing something as insane as affirming that children have been cannibalized, before an audience of millions, and then facing zero consequence for this whatsoever, is a perfect example of what I’m critiquing when I semi-facetiously proclaim that we should “abolish all podcasts.”

Bear in mind, Bret has also espoused versions of his Epstein master-thesis on the #2 “News” podcast in the United States, the Tucker Carlson program. It was on the March 11, 2026 edition of that illustrious program that Bret spun out a postulation that Trump went to war with Iran because a “hidden power structure” coerced him into doing so, and of course this “hidden power structure” somehow intermingles with Epstein. Bret is so deeply disturbed by Trump attacking Iran — something he never could’ve fathomed Trump possibly doing, back when Bret was holding pro-Trump campaign rallies in 2024 — that he now feels he’s obliged to search for the real truth of how this eventuality could’ve possibly happened. And he’s landed on a hidden Epstein power structure being the real reason. Excerpt from the Tucker podcast:

BRET WEINSTEIN: The reason that the Epstein phenomenon, whatever it was, is so important, is that it suggests a hidden power structure that was there for leverage. It is unfortunate that in the edit that we have been shown, we don’t have conclusive evidence of who, what they were after, or even how the leverage worked. All we can see is strong evidence that there was something. Logically it is implied that it was connected to intelligence services. Ours, likely Israel’s, who knows who else. When you see your government, your president functioning in ways that do not add up, it’s like watching a planet behave oddly because of the gravity of some object you haven’t found yet. There’s the implication that there’s something with power in this system that is undeclared, as far as we know it is unnamed, and the central question is what is it, how does it work, and how much effect is it having on what we do.

Bret has similarly argued (on various podcasts) that the “Epstein Phenomenon,” as he oddly calls it, represents “the most fundamental question in the democratic republic that is the United States.”

But… he thinks it makes me a contemptibly “bad person” to “ambush” him by bringing up these remarks — on a panel expressly devoted to the insanities of the current podcast media environment? OK, lol.

Anyway, I have more to say about the “Web Summit,” and the various hilarities that it spawned on account of my humble presence there, but I gotta go take a ferry. I figured I would spend at least a day viewing some of the “sights” to be seen in Vancouver while I am inexplicably here.

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Often it will be suggested that to express misgivings about the defamatory maelstrom of Epstein hysteria, one must be suspiciously concerned with the reputational interests of “powerful elites.” Because even if certain “elites” might get wrongly impugned as child-sex criminals from time to time — what’s the big deal? They have plenty of power, money, and connections to comfortably withstand this minor inconvenience. So why waste one’s breath lamenting their woes, which they probably deserved in some deeper sense anyway? After all, members of the so-called “Epstein Class” can be assumed “spiritually” guilty of something really bad, even if the specifics of a particular child-sex crime allegation might not be totally accurate. If you find yourself overly bothered by this besmirchment of “elites,” you must have some suspiciously warped priorities.

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First off, let’s set aside how insane it is to rationalize a tornado of unrelenting slime, spewing forth noxious falsities in every direction, so long as those on the receiving end of the splatter can be deemed sufficiently “powerful.” Such a logic could only be condoned if one has decided to repudiate the very aspiration of truth-seeking, and no longer even pretends to value fidelity to facts. If you’ve got some grievance with a particular “elite,” or even with some under-defined group of “elites,” you are perfectly entitled to enumerate those grievances however you see fit. But if your grievances are so well-founded, why would you be reduced to just making stuff up? Why would you go out of your way to tolerate a tsunami of pure sleaze? Shouldn’t there be tons of legitimate material available for you to predicate a reality-based critique on, aimed at whatever elite(s) you claim to most revile? Well, evidently not, if you’ve set about rationalizing the massive defamation-tornado — perhaps because you find the fallout “funny,” or socially/politically pleasing in some way, per whatever half-baked theory you’ve cobbled together. If that’s the case, you’ve shown you have no problem with the lunatic second and third-order effects, namely: infesting the public mind with loads of demented garbage, thereby ensuring any critique of “elites” that might gain popular traction will be mired in crass delusions, and therefore not much of a reasoned critique at all.

For now, though, let’s leave aside the question of whether or not we should care about the capricious reputational damage inflicted on “elites” at the hands of Epstein mania. That’s a question easily bracketed at the moment. Because what seldom gets anything close to enough emphasis is that the collateral damage extends far beyond the opulently well-monied, or politically well-connected. Plenty of “normal” people have found themselves slimed with incendiary filth, and with little recourse at their disposal. The four random men who were falsely implicated in child sex crimes by Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna — including an auto mechanic and an IT technician — have still yet to receive so much as a piddling apology from the two Congressmen most responsible for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and the resulting mass production of “Epstein Files” by the DOJ. A great many more “non-elites” could be cited as among those similarly pelted with slime on account of some tenuous Epstein “connection” that some nutbag internet sleuth tried to invent.

Which brings us back to Kristy Makuta and the monumental “Jane Doe” fraud — chronicled by me in Part One — that on its own could easily rank as one of the craziest cons in all of Epstein lore. Crazy enough that lawyer Jeanne Christensen of the extortionist Wigdor firm — who formerly represented Kristy before the fraud was conclusively exposed — had zero compunction about asserting, to take just one creepy example, that Kristy “had sex with Larry Summers” — as though this had been unassailably confirmed after exhaustive rounds of due diligence. In reality, no such due diligence was performed at all. If anything, the opposite. To somehow make matters impossibly worse (this story always manages to get worse), Christensen was so shameless as to make her assertion not in some casual off-hand chat, but in written communications she proactively transmitted to federal prosecutors, with the unsubtle objective of coaxing the Feds to bring criminal charges, on the supposed strength of evidence that was later found, in an April 23, 2026 ruling by Judge Jessica Clarke, to have been brazenly faked. This necessitated the imposition of severe sanctions against Jeanne Christensen individually, as well as her entire rotten Wigdor law firm, and even Kristy Makuta herself, aka “Jane Doe,” given her present capacity as a pro se plaintiff. But there should never have needed to be a belated court judgment for anyone anchored in minimal sanity to recognize that Kristy’s claims, and the evidence supposedly proffered to substantiate them — phony sonogram images, mocked-up decades-old “diaries” — were a whirlwind of unvarnished lunacy. That should’ve been painfully obvious from the very first second, at least if one was not blinkered by such deliriums as “trauma-informed” ideology, or the insatiable lust for extracting gargantuan financial payouts.

The wholesale abolition of critical discernment is what makes the Kristy episode all the more remarkable, and indeed disturbing. Because it’s one thing to castigate Larry Summers; he’s been through the ringer already on Epstein stuff. You can see why ideologically-captured lawyers and prosecutors might’ve been inclined to blithely accept the premise, however unfounded, that Summers had committed grave child sex crimes, since he did in fact have a well-documented relationship with Epstein, and would also himself qualify as an “elite.” But here’s where it gets much sicker: Christensen and her law enforcement colleagues were just as willing to malign a bunch of consummately “normal” people, with zero public profile or stature whatsoever, as perpetrators of the most heinous child-sex villainy imaginable, based on the very same crackpot evidence that should’ve been discounted by any sane observer in roughly two seconds. Those consequently slimed include Kristy’s former cheerleading/dance coach, her biological parents, her late grandfather, and other “non-elites” who unwittingly got thrown into the steaming pile of slime.

Thanks to the confabulatory tales confected by Kristy, in concert with her so-called “adoptive mother,” Amy Duffey, and her now-sanctioned lawyer, Jeanne Christensen, a random woman who once ran a cheerleading/dance studio for high school-age girls in Northern Virginia has now been traduced as someone who brutishly “groomed” and “sex trafficked” a helpless autistic child with a rare form of Down Syndrome. Christensen outrageously told federal prosecutors that this unsuspecting woman “forced [Kristy] to perform sexual acts with adult men since she was very young,” and from there it was only a short step to force her into the hellish pedophile captivity of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, Leon Black, and about two dozen other culprits. Worse yet, Christensen claims to have eventually pried out of Kristy, after many intense lawyer-client recovered memory sessions, the revelation that her dance instructor/cheerleading coach “handed [Kristy] off to Maxwell and Epstein” at the direction of Kristy’s biological mother.

I won’t name the dance coach here, but for the record, she is completely exposed in the DOJ’s repository of “Epstein Files” — full name, date of birth, phone number, residential address, name of partner/spouse, employment history, maiden name, etc. And consequently, her info is splashed all over the internet for the rest of time as somebody state and federal law enforcement suspected of the most grotesque child sex crimes. Kind of interesting, isn’t it, who does or does not receive the courtesy of generous redactions in these “files,” so as to shield their “identifying information” from the glare of frothing online hordes? Because this random woman certainly did not receive any such courtesy, despite by all accounts being a totally innocent “victim” of what amounts to a deranged, systematic fraud — perpetrated with the connivance of government agents who are supposed to exercise bare-minimum discretion with the awesome powers they’ve been granted to destroy people’s lives, whether by throwing them in prison or nuking their reputations. Instead, this confirmed female victim has been paraded for all to see, while fraudulent “Epstein Survivors” such as Kristy continue to enjoy indefinite anonymization, per edicts from the DOJ, Congress, the media, and the courts. Even prosecutors involved in the absurd hustle are mostly redacted in their humiliating email exchanges, though I was able to identify some using my expert computer skills. Which does not negate the underlying fallacy of the redaction criteria: that anyone who can claim Epstein-related “victimization” is shielded from public scrutiny forevermore, lest they be “re-victimized” — and even if their “victimhood” is judicially ruled to have been based on a slew of ridiculous fabrications. Meanwhile, “normal” people like this dance instructor, who were appallingly maligned along the way, possibly unbeknownst to them, are freely un-redacted and now available for every crank on the internet to “investigate.”

Let’s recall the “evidence” we’re talking about here:

The above “diary” is the slam-dunk evidence that lawyer Jeanne Christensen was so eager to inform federal prosecutors she had successfully “decoded,” and was therefore in a position to report Kristy’s biological mother for sadistically orchestrating her own daughter’s brutal rape, because according to these “decoded” messages, the mother and father were both knowingly in the vicinity of Epstein’s NYC townhouse when Kristy was delivered to Leon Black for sex-servitude, at which time Black psychotically bit off chunks of Kristy’s genitalia and rammed sex-toy devices into both her vagina and anus — splattering blood across the carpet in Epstein’s chamber. Again, this was said to have occurred while Kristy’s parents waited nearby, sneering with delight at the gruesome scene, because they were about to get paid for “trafficking” their own daughter for a night of crazed child-sex bondage.

Christensen told prosecutors that after Kristy became upset about Leon Black viciously raping her, she requested to see a doctor, but “the reaction from Epstein, Maxwell and her parents” — all supposedly working in collusion — “was one of anger,” not toward the rapist, but toward Kristy. She was thus reprimanded for ruining her parents’ pleasant weekend jaunt to NYC, because apparently Epstein stepped in after the bloody climax and decided the Makuta parents would no longer receive the cash they’d been promised for “trafficking” Kristy to Leon. So after she was brutally raped with their knowledge and approval, Kristy’s parents “drove her from NYC back to Woodbridge Va.” Which on top of making them out to be the most vile parents on the planet, also straightforwardly implicates them in a child-sex trafficking conspiracy, for which they could conceivably be prosecuted. Which is of particular relevance here, as again, Christensen was passing along this information to federal prosecutors.

On July 21, 2023 — surely by happenstance, four days before Kristy’s original Leon Black lawsuit was filed — Christensen sent off an indignant late-night email to the same set of federal prosecutors, opining how “outrageous” it was that “criminal charges have not been brought” against Leon Black. By necessary extension, the many claimed co-conspirators responsible for tormenting Kristy would also have to be charged — all on the strength of evidence produced by Kristy, which was then dispatched to federal prosecutors by Christensen, who attested to its clear-cut reliability. This means Kristy’s own parents, not to mention her former cheerleading/dance instructor, should’ve been headed to prison right alongside Leon Black, at least if Christensen had her way, as she had alerted prosecutors to this sprawling cross-section of “non-elite” persons who once conspired to “groom,” physically assault, and “traffic” Kristy, thrusting her into the unthinkable sex-torture vortex of Epstein, Maxwell, Black, et al.

And it was all 100% made up!

Judge Jessica Clarke’s ruling on April 23 shows that Christensen kept up the ruse for as long as possible, however:

In an internal memorandum dated December 11, 2023, Ms. Christensen described how she had learned—two weeks earlier—that Plaintiff’s biological mother first introduced Plaintiff to Ghislaine Maxwell in Clearwater, Florida. Id. at 1–2. Plaintiff also testified multiple times at the March 2024 JPMC Hearing that she first met Ghislaine Maxwell in Clearwater, Florida. March Hearing at 10:3–25, 73:3–7.

The December 11, 2023 memorandum also reflects Ms. Christensen’s contemporaneous impression that Plaintiff’s biological mother knew about and helped strategize how to traffic Plaintiff. ECF No. 233-5 at 2–3. At the March 2024 JPMC hearing, Ms. Christensen told Judge Rakoff that Plaintiff’s biological parents “play[ed] important roles in trafficking [Plaintiff] to Jeffrey Epstein.” March Hearing at 6:4–6. And in June 2024, Ms. Christensen stated on the record in the JPMC Action: “I am saying that [Plaintiff’s] biological mother 100 percent is the person who, in the very first instance, sent her to Ghislaine Maxwell, and then had been telling her about this very important wealthy man.” June Conference at 17:14–17. “So, yes, I am saying that her mother was intimately involved.”

Here is Christensen sending copies of the fraudulent “journals” created by Kristy, supposedly documenting the fake child sex torture, as email attachments to her contacts in the US Attorney’s Office:

Apparently, this is the type of conduct that earned Jeanne Christensen prestigious awards in the legal industry, recognizing her “Elite Women” achievements in both 2024 and 2025. One can only hope that the awards will keep coming her way in 2026, notwithstanding the recent judicial finding that she “repeatedly lied” to the Court, and evinced flippant non-concern about ensuring her submissions were factually correct.

I will note that Kristy’s mother appears to be a staunch Trump supporter, as indicated by her various social media pages. Whether this has anything to do with the mother being hallucinated into chief trafficking villain per the narrative invented by Kristy, Amy, and Christensen is difficult to say, given the continued concealment of so much information in this case, but it’s at least a plausible hypothesis that warrants further investigation.

What makes the whole thing even more mind-blowing is the unwavering credulity with which federal and state prosecutors responded to this onslaught of extortionist fantasies: not by ignoring or rebuking Christensen, but springing instantly into action; within nine minutes of receiving the Christensen email about how “outrageous” it was that nobody had yet been prosecuted, one of the prosecutors forwarded along Christensen’s defamatory missive to a colleague — at 10:04pm on a Friday night! — asking if anyone had been able to “circle back with Jeanne.” Then by the following Monday morning, the colleague confirmed that he/she would indeed “circle back directly to Jeanne,” and “touch base” on how to go about further squandering taxpayer resources on tacitly legitimating this slimeball con.

The prosecutors depicted in these “files” almost come across as impossibly gullible, and therefore dumb — but the thing is, they are not dumb. They are quite intelligent. They should be understood as shrewdly advancing a behind-the-scenes legal and political strategy that has proven astoundingly effective — simply look at how the Epstein furor now registers in the public arena, amongst members of Congress, journalists, and countless others. Prosecutors associated with “Special Victims Units” tasked with handling these matters seem disproportionately comprised of women, and perhaps most pertinently, women who have clearly calculated that their paramount ethical duty is to instantly project steadfast, credulous acceptance of all claims involving sexual abuse, with the label of “victim” always being preemptively ascribed. “Epstein” was merely one high-profile forum for them to showcase the ideological constructs they’d been marinating in, with their elaborate “trauma-informed” dogma and new, infinitely elastic conceptions of “trafficking.”

For all the talk about the supreme imperative of “transparency,” these DOJ emails mostly redact the identities of prosecutors who dealt with the shambolic Kristy situation. So we don’t have a complete picture of who all it was that relayed in June 2023 — utterly astonishingly — that they “do not doubt” the veracity of Kristy’s extravagant tales. We do know the principal non-doubter was someone with the initials “AW,” from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, who conveyed her non-doubt to federal colleagues, as memorialized in a subsequent memo, composed about a month before Christensen filed the first iteration of Kristy’s lawsuit against Leon Black, as she was clearly angling for some prosecutorial heft to add to the complaint. Thankfully, “AW” can be identified as Alissa Wimmer — more on her to follow — but for the most part, prosecutors’ names are arbitrarily redacted throughout the “Epstein Files,” according to no discernible provision in the Epstein Files Transparency Act authorizing this, and even though the EFTA bars redacting material to spare public officials from “embarrassment.” Because one thing of which there can be truly “no doubt” is how humiliating this whole sordid episode is, and how nightmarish it is to contemplate such absolute dimwits wielding the power to throw people in prison on behalf of the state.

That said, the main no-doubter of Kristy, Alissa Wimmer, was an Assistant District Attorney then working under Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, until she moved to more lucrative pastures in July 2024. She is now a “Regional Public Safety Liaison at Uber.” (Unsurprisingly, she has not responded to my emails seeking comment.)

She’s the one who is recorded as having communicated to federal prosecutors in the SDNY that after assessing Kristy’s claims, she and her DANY colleagues “do not doubt her allegations” against Epstein and Leon Black, at minimum, and they had also come to “believe she was abused” by Jes Staley, a former JP Morgan executive known to have once been an Epstein associate. So non-existent was her doubt that she came to these conclusions despite having admittedly “not found any independent corroboration” for Kristy’s wild claims. This evidently had zero impact on their credibility assessment. Frickin’ incredible.

The June 28, 2023 memo in which these sterling law enforcement professionals express zero doubt in Kristy’s veracity was passed duly up the chain, first by an Assistant US Attorney, name redacted, and then to a Special Agent at the FBI New York Field Office, name also redacted — the two Feds then make an appointment to meet and discuss this undoubted information. The FBI agent summoned is described in an email signature as some sort of specialist in “Child Exploitation/Human Trafficking,” which is certainly a window into the prevailing mindset within that subset of the modern law enforcement profession. Kristy is presented by these federal officials not as someone who made a bunch of outlandish claims with zero corroboration, but as a “victim who recently came to our attention with connections to the Epstein/Maxwell case.” Any notion that Kristy might be best described at this preliminary juncture at least as an “alleged” victim, or a purported victim — or choose your bare-minimum qualifier — was apparently not something that occurred to these seasoned professionals, who by 2023/2024 had clearly embraced a professional code whereby truth-value would be pre-assigned to any claims of Epstein-related victimhood, no matter how “far-fetched,” as Judge Clarke eventually characterized Kristy’s story by 2026.

So now, Alissa Wimmer works in a senior role at Uber. That’s the high-salary reward a taxpayer-funded prosecutor received for displaying such catastrophically poor judgment that she personally met with Kristy, as well as her purported “adoptive mother” Amy Duffey, and was totally confident to tell federal prosecutors in February 2023 that Kristy had been factually established as someone who was “trafficked by Maxwell and Epstein,” and had bravely “come forward and alleged sexual abuse by Leon Black.” State and federal collaboration on the matter continued for months, with a June 2023 memo recording that Wimmer & colleagues had conveyed that “the victim and her mother would be ok with sharing more information with us” — “us” being the Feds — as the NY District Attorney’s Office “find her credible,” despite “very little corroboration,” and “no outcry witnesses until years later.” With the “outcry” being to the “adoptive mother.” How much information did these prosecutors have on file about the nature of this supposed “adoptive mother” arrangement? You know, the “adoptive mother” being Amy Duffey, who is around nine years older than Kristy, and met her as a “disability” administrator of some sort at George Mason University?

Here is Wimmer conducting an educational session earlier this year with law enforcement personnel in Hudson County, NJ:

She also testifies in court, explaining in a December 2025 trial that her job is to “assist law enforcement” on matters with some nexus to the Uber platform:

Over the course of their DANY investigation, Wimmer also incredibly uncovered “other allegations of sexual abuse unrelated to JE/GM,” including “sexual abuse from priest and a separate kidnapping,” but no followup on these bombshells is apparent. However, Wimmer and friends were quite interested in the Feds taking the lead on going after Kristy’s biological mother and father, since it is noted that they “drove [Kristy] over state lines,” placing them squarely in a federal purview for potential “trafficking” charges.

So there’s just a small selection of thoroughly “non-elite” individuals whom this Kristy-backing lawyer cabal were happy to slander with the most inflammatory slime, nuke their reputation, lobby for their imprisonment, and cast as uniquely malevolent sickos, even by the standards other alleged Epstein “associates,” because they were pegged as having been willing to sacrifice their own daughter for the perverse sexual gratification of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Leon Black, and others. And it was all… simply made up! Outright fabricated. As if this couldn’t get any worse, the now-sanctioned lawyer Jeanne Christensen would even progressively sprinkle in some additional sleazy details, telling her federal interlocutors that Kristy’s sister was also sexually abused — the same sister whom Kristy later accused in a judicial proceeding of physically assaulting her — and oh by the way, according to Christensen, the sisters’ paternal grandfather was also “in on it.” That’s the exact wording Christensen uses in her communications with federal law enforcement: Their long-deceased grandfather was “in on it.”

One of the outstanding mysteries of this whole fiasco is whether Amy Duffey, the “adoptive mother” who is often described as Kristy’s trusted “intermediary,” was ever made aware that in a July 8, 2024 hearing before Judge Jed Rakoff, Kristy — apparently not accompanied by Amy on this particular occasion — alleged that she was being abused by her so-called “adoptive father,” aka Amy’s husband, Bruce Marco. According to Kristy, as a woman in her late 30s, she was forbidden by Bruce “to drive, have a job, have friends, leave the house, or consume media without prior approval.” And on top of that, Bruce also sexually assaulted her. One can’t help but wonder what the Bruce/Amy marital dynamic is like — not to mention the larger dynamics of their purported household, since these people are all said to be living under the same roof together. (Bruce and Amy have still not returned any of my repeated messages.) Here’s a snapshot of Amy, for posterity:

Kristy appeared under the impression that her testimony before Judge Rakoff at the July 2024 evidentiary hearing in which she alleged “abuse” and sexual assault by Amy’s husband — whose surname “Marco” she has otherwise assumed in different versions of her alias — would be kept permanently secret, apparently not expecting that Judge Clarke would ultimately invoke her own discretion to quote from sealed excerpts. In recent pro se filings, Kristy has indicated that her representations in the JP Morgan proceedings overseen by Rakoff “were made under explicit assurances of confidentiality,” and that removing this protection after the fact “would violate the very principle of trust upon which survivor participation in legal processes depends.” Can someone please ask Amy Duffey about Kristy Makuta accusing her husband of sex crimes? Again, they won’t answer my calls…

In one email exchange, an Assistant US Attorney states, based on a discussion with Alissa Wimmer of the Manhattan DA’s office, that Kristy “was adopted by supportive family, mother is always there for interviews and she serves as liaison for meetings.” Apparently nothing about this curious adult “adoptive” arrangement was perceived as noteworthy enough to warrant the notation of any “red flags.”

Nor did it occur to the Guardian, in a curiously-timed May 6 article, that the “adoptive” arrangement might be cause for further scrutiny:

In late October 2023, Doe was interviewed by the claims administrator in the JPMorgan case. She later found out she was being allocated $2.5m.

It was a moment of elation for Doe, her adoptive mother told the Guardian, because it was the first time she felt that her trauma was being recognized.

Don’t you think Guardian readers might’ve been interested to learn some additional context about this “adoptive mother” dynamic, given that Amy only “adopted” Kristy approximately four years ago, thanks to a quirk in Virginia state law, when Kristy was an adult in her late 30s? Because when most people hear the term “adoptive mother,” they’re probably not even cognizant that “adult adoption” of this kind is a “thing,” and would surely assume that Kristy had been “adopted” as a vulnerable child. Which must be a deliberate omission of context. Because you don’t have to be a hard-nosed detective, or even especially cynical (like me), to infer that what’s really going on here is that Kristy and Amy are co-contrivers of some bizarre long-term plot, about which entire psychology textbooks could be written, and salacious Netflix “true crime” specials produced. (I haven’t received any reply to a list of questions I sent to Guardian editor Betsy Reed.)

Maybe the most important takeaway from the Kristy fraud is not so much about Kristy herself, but the structural fraud it indicates is rife in the wider universe of Epstein-related “settlement” vehicles. Because it’s exactly these settlement vehicles which have generated such grossly inflated estimates of “Epstein victims” — coloring public perceptions of the Epstein affair as constituting a vast trail of unpunished pedophilia crime. Recall that one of the genuine revelations from the “Epstein Files” earlier this year was that the figure of “over 1,000 victims” constantly cited by journalists and politicians, after making its debut in the notorious July 2025 FBI/DOJ memo that set off the larger Epstein meltdown, was completely phony, and based on cooked up statistical chicanery. The figure of those “harmed” by Epstein somehow included “family members” of purported Epstein “victims.” Uncles? Cousins? Who knows. Not to mention, most of these purported “victims” were adults at the time of their claimed victimization, despite (as usual) the eye-popping figure being cited to encapsulate the unthinkable scope of pedophilic sex criminality.

This is not a “past tense” issue, either. At least two additional settlement vehicles are currently in progress to compensate another indeterminate expanse of “Epstein Survivors” — one from Bank of America, as of March 27, 2026, in the amount of $72.5 million, and another from the Epstein Estate, as of February 19, 2026, in the amount of $35 million, even though class-action claims against the estate were supposed to have been resolved with finality years ago, through the establishment of the original Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program in 2020, which stopped taking new claimants in 2021. But that didn’t stop David Boies, Bradley Edwards, and colleagues enjoying their 30% “legal fees” from going back to the Gravy Train in 2024 and demanding yet another class action settlement against the estate, by suing its executors, Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn. By the time “Epstein Files” mania was in full-bloom again in early 2026, their latest litigation gambit paid off.

Sigrid McCawley, the lawyer who previously served as an intimate legal companion for Virginia Roberts Giuffre — not too dissimilar from the marginally-less-plausible role abortively played by Jeanne Christensen with Kristy — claimed that the “numerosity” requirement was satisfied for this new round of class-action settlements by citing the phony figure of “over 1,000” victims. As such, Sigrid maintained, “there remains hundreds of class members with valid claims” entitled to huge tax-free cash payouts.

In their Bank of America action, Boies and Edwards initially asserted that “thousands” of Epstein victims were still waiting to be discovered. I spoke to both Boies and Edwards at the April 2, 2026 settlement hearing at the Manhattan federal courthouse. Even though news of this settlement agreement was breathlessly reported throughout the media as further supporting the notion that a massive pedophile crime spree had gone shamefully unpunished, and finally another major financial institution would be held “accountable,” Boies candidly conceded to me that “based on prior cases, you could say that certainly, this time, the majority were over the age of 18.” That is, the vast majority of females in line for life-changing Bank of America money would have been adults at the time of their claimed victimization. Which must be true, because the period covered by the BoA settlement is June 30, 2008 (date of Epstein’s original guilty plea in Florida) to July 6, 2019 (date of Epstein’s federal arrest). Any female who can self-report as having been “harmed” by Epstein’s purported “sex trafficking venture” during this period is eligible for funds, on the logic that BoA ought to have blocked Epstein from banking services starting on the date he was convicted of state-level prostitution offenses. But based on all available evidence, anyone “abused” or “trafficked” during this period would have to have been adults, because Epstein has still never even been accused of any illicit sexual contact with any person below age 18 from 2005 onwards — including in the mountains of hyper-dramatized civil litigation, nevermind any actual criminal charges. So there’s another payout spigot opened up for women who can claim years after the fact that they were “trafficked,” as adults, under the resolutely confidential provisions of the court-approved settlement protocol.

As to the new Epstein Estate settlement mechanism, this one somehow dates back to 1995, so we’re now talking about 30+ year old claims that can potentially be submitted, with no adverse consequences for the claimant should anything be exaggerated or even outright falsified. And if you’re looking for a few bucks, act fast, because the truncated deadline (strangely) happens to be today, May 12, 2026, at 11:59pm EST.

The claims administrator for both funds? Simone Lelchuk. The same person who initially approved a whopping $2.5 million payout to Kristy!

Recall: Kristy had submitted fake evidence in the JP Morgan action, including the falsified sonogram images purporting to depict fetuses she was purportedly impregnated with by Epstein, which were then snatched right out of her uterus and in one case, flushed down a toilet. Even her former lawyers at Wigdor had to eventually admit they had no choice but to “disavow” those images, amid incontrovertible proof of fraud, and then withdraw their representation of her. But not before the falsified evidence was duly accepted by Claims Administrator Simone Lelchuk to award Kristy a $2.5 million jackpot. The lucrative scheme was only interrupted because Leon Black’s lawyers, embroiled in litigation brought by Kristy and Wigdor, caught wind of the payment and notified Judge Rakoff, who was overseeing the JP Morgan settlement, and is likewise now overseeing the Bank of America settlement. Rakoff accordingly said he had come to harbor “serious doubts about [Kristy’s] credibility” after being compelled to hold a series of evidentiary hearings with her — but he apparently “never made particularized factual findings on the record regarding [Kristy’s] allegations,” because sure enough, in swooped Simone Lelchuk to broker a side-deal “stipulation,” whereby Kristy was awarded a reduced amount of $200,000. Rakoff inexplicably approved this “stipulated” payment on August 21, 2024 — without having first issued the “detailed opinion” he apparently had in the works, which was to outline why he’d felt obliged to intervene and deny Kristy’s claim outright.

At the April 2 hearing I attended, Rakoff said he had every confidence in re-appointing Simone Lelchuk to handle the Bank of America payouts, because she has “performed extremely well in prior settlements.” Huh????? For his part, Rakoff commented that while “victims of Epstein’s monstrous acts can never be fully compensated,” they are surely “entitled to just compensation” — an insight into the rigor with which Judge Rakoff evidently feels it’s appropriate to evaluate any “victimhood” claims. Part of the new Bank of America claimant fishing expedition will entail publishing solicitation notices in USA Today, People magazine, and Gazeta Wyborcza, a Polish newspaper (?????) as well as devising a customized social media campaign to locate additional “victims.” In other words, a complete free-for-all, with every incentive for the lawyers to scour the deepest recesses of the potential claimant pool, including an expedition to Eastern Europe, in order to justify their 30% cut off the top-end.

For the new version of the Epstein Estate class-action settlement, submission materials are notably being made available in Russian and French, as well as English — so who the hell knows what this new constellation of “survivors” could consist of. Simone Lelchuk has stressed that her goal, above all, is to avoid “re-victimizing” the purported victims, using the well-established “trauma-informed” methods she is so expertly well-versed in, which in practice means doing little or no corroborative inquiry whatsoever, as indicated by her easy approval of Kristy’s batshit claims.

Again, what is “problematic” about all this is not necessarily that Bank of America has gotten hoodwinked into forking over another $72.5 million to Epstein Survivors Inc., just as JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank compliantly did before them, because whatever, the feckless corporate lawyers for these giant banks are total squishes, and barely even try to contest any of it — so desperate are their clients not to be tagged as malicious “trafficking” enablers. What’s most “problematic” is that the reams of newfound “victims” are being lured out of the shadows with giant cash prizes, and as a consequence, the total number of “Epstein” victims will continue to astronomically inflate — fueling the clueless, hysterical Pedo Panic narrative that has gripped the US political system, and indeed much of the world, on the basis of virtually nothing that could conceivably be described as “pedophilia,” and also on the basis of victim-evaluation criteria that we now know, with demonstrable certitude, has encouraged (and rewarded) the commission of outright fraud. The practice in prior settlements has been that the David Boies and Bradley Edwards lawyer gaggle hires an “investigative team,” who then “locate and correspond with dozens of potential Class Members on social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and via email, to provide notice of the underlying action and information relating thereto.” That’s being replicated once again. I asked Bradley Edwards if he reckoned there would be any more non-adult “Epstein Survivors” found pursuant to the Bank of America settlement. He said: “In the United States, I don’t think so,” but “who knows what he [Epstein] was doing in France.” Meaning, they have now turned their gazes to foreign frontiers to keep the profitable mega-narrative going.

Beyond the structural fraud incentivized by these settlement vehicles, helpfully illuminated by the Kristy case, there are plenty more sleazy mechanics of the Epstein mass-hysteria racket also to be illuminated. Consider the mind-bending ordeal of Dana Chasin, a Democratic Party fundraiser and far-flung heir to the Rockefeller fortune, by way of his late step-mother Laura Rockefeller Chasin, a great-great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller. Recall the bogus “diaries” manufactured by Kristy were consequently published by the DOJ pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, having been entered in government repositories as a result of Jeanne Christensen feverishly forwarding copies to prosecutors, since she was claiming to have oracularly “decoded” the fake diaries, and was imploring the Feds to hurry up and bring indictments based on this fabricated evidence. Chasin is fleetingly mentioned in one of these “diaries” as having flown Kristy around in a “small prop plane” on multiple occasions, including to a grisly sex-torture session in NYC. If true, he was at minimum guilty of “sex trafficking” an autistic, cognitively-impaired teen.

**Speaking of Kristy’s pretensions to cognitive impairment, her diagnoses seem to consistently coincide with the discomfort of her legal activities. Because by July 2025, Kristy was claiming in pro se filings that she was in the midst of an “acute medical and psychological crisis,” and therefore incapable of participating in further proceedings “at this time.” She requested a stay while she recuperated, clarifying: “This is not a voluntary delay or tactical decision, but a documented state of cognitive and emotional collapse.” (Apparently her “cognitive and emotional collapse” had not prevented her from drafting another lengthy and reasonably well-written legal letter. If the letter was in fact drafted by her “adoptive mother” Amy Duffey, whose life appears commingled with Kristy’s in ways that even the most battle-hardened psychology pros would struggle to fully apprehend — that certainly ought to have been disclosed to the court, but instead, Kristy represents herself as the author. Nevermind that Kristy’s original complaint against Leon Black in 2023 claimed that “developmentally,” she is 12 years old, despite paradoxically possessing an “above average” IQ.)

But anyway, once Dana Chasin was reported in the media as having been “named” in the dastardly Epstein Files, his erstwhile Democratic fundraising recipients were of course lightning-quick to throw him right under the bus. Congresswoman Sharice Davids (D-KS) promptly atoned for having once received donations from Chasin by sending an equivalent amount, $4,250, to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which, by the way, is a Congressionally-authorized NGO, and probably not in desperate need of the symbolic chump change. Dan Osborn, an independent Senate candidate in Nebraska aligned with Democrats, also instantly canceled a forthcoming fundraiser that was to be hosted by Chasin. (The Nebraska Senate race has since been dominated by tit-for-tat Epstein attacks, with both Osborn and incumbent Republican senator Pete Ricketts accusing one another of being tarnished in some fashion by Epstein.)

Despite the bizarre ambiguities around Kristy’s cognitive status, and thus the questionable reliability of her self-generated evidence, Dana Chasin was identified to federal prosecutors not just as one of Kristy’s many depraved “traffickers,” but as an outright rapist, at least according to the mystical “decoding” heuristic Jeanne Christensen claimed she had divined, endowing her with the miraculous ability to translate Kristy’s faked “diaries.” Christensen claimed to have made the discovery that childlike words found in the “diaries” such as “yucky” and “gross” were in fact “code” for criminal sex acts; this was sufficient for Christensen to matter-of-factly inform federal prosecutors that Kristy “had sex with Larry Summers,” a claim located in the same entry where Kristy also purportedly describes the “yucky” and “gross” things that were done to her by Chasin.

After enduring a fierce backlash for appearing in this fabricated “Epstein File,” Chasin eventually hired lawyers to submit a motion in the Leon Black court docket: “Again, these claims are false,” the filing said. “Mr. Chasin has never owned or leased a plane, much less a ‘small prop plane,’ and he never met Jeffrey Epstein, nor communicated with Jeffrey Epstein, nor visited any of his properties.” According to the motion, the falsified diaries were no barrier for Chasin to be denounced and disowned in droves. “Employees at his organization quit, and he has been unable to hire replacements. Many of his personal and professional contacts stopped associating with him.” Chasin argued he was entitled to petition that certain materials in the pending Kristy matter be unsealed, as they would prove exonerating of him.

No one needs to have any pre-existing affinity for heirs to the Rockefeller fortune, or Chasin’s donor/operative activities in support of the Democratic Party, to find this episode shockingly mendacious and certifiably insane. If we’re still using the verb “canceled” anymore, here’s a guy who’s been “canceled” in the truest sense of the word, circa 2026, for stuff so manifestly divorced from reality that it would almost be comical if it wasn’t so dark. You don’t like the Rockefeller intergenerational wealth transfers, or you don’t like Chasin’s fundraising practices in particular? Sure, have a go at him for that. But to just completely make stuff up? Or cite completely made-up materials to “cancel” a guy as a diabolical child-sex trafficker? In no universe can this possibly be defensible, even if the unlucky target may arguably qualify as some sort of “elite.” Because as I’ve hopefully shown, there are plenty of thoroughly “non-elite” bystanders who’ve gotten snagged in the same exact outburst of mindless hysteria. And whether elite or non-elite, society as a whole gets cheapened and demeaned with this unchallenged proliferation of a political and legal narrative which, the deeper you dig, the more you discover is predicated on a veritable whirlwind of cynical embellishment and/or brazen, outright fraud.

While it’s true that Kristy stands somewhat apart in having confabulated her whole tale from scratch, as well as her inclusion of far-out details like forcible impregnation with the offspring of Epstein and Maxwell — hence the falsified sonogram images she cooked up to try and substantiate this — the emphatic credulity with which she was treated by a grand consortium plaintiffs’ lawyers, journalists, and most alarmingly, state and federal prosecutors — who astoundingly said they had “no doubt” in the veracity of her fantastical fictions — gets right to the heart of the entire Epstein hysteria-machine. Which is a dynamic that really does cry out for some properly intensive “investigation,” if anything Epstein-related still needs to be investigated.

But it goes even further. (I told you, this story ALWAYS manages to get worse.) Here is the personal publicist of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a woman named Dini von Mueffling, emailing Kristy in February 2026 to tell her that she unreservedly “believes” her, and also wanted to offer undefined “personal” support, such as PR and legal services. She even encouraged Kristy to link up with other “Epstein Survivors” so she could benefit from their collective support system.

Kind of makes you wonder about the veracity of other stuff Dini von Mueffling has had a hand in pumping out for public consumption over the years, no?

Continuing in the “it only gets worse” department, Kristy told Judge Clarke in December 2025 that she had received “outreach from a member of Congress,” and spoken to Congressional staff about her claims, which she was surely thrilled to find were received with only the most reverential earnestness.

Finally, please take a gander at the following February 16, 2026 video report by Scripps News, the digital media wing of E.W. Scripps, one of America’s oldest newspaper conglomerates. Its material gets syndicated to local TV stations across the country.

HEADLINE: ‘I’m beyond broken’: Diary in Epstein files details abuse girl says she endured

SUBHED: In a style reminiscent of teenage scrapbook collages, the girl glued magazine words onto pages to describe her abuse.

The video segment, aired far and wide, represents Kristy’s “diaries” as presumptively authentic, with the author of the diary, Kristy, declared to be a presumptive “survivor,” whose diaries can therefore be surmised to accurately chronicle her horrific ordeal of forced pregnancies, abduction of newborn babies, etc. Again, these are the same diaries now judicially determined to have been filled with provably falsified and fabricated material. Scripps correspondent Alexandra Miller even credits the “decoded” messages as real, and solemnly recites them back to the viewer. She then brings on a lawyer commentator, Eliza Orlins, who states matter-of-factly that Kristy was a “sex slave,” and “we all should be screaming and yelling” about why there weren’t any investigations based on this material (which there actually were, mind-blowingly enough) and why no one was ever prosecuted for the (fake) crimes described therein. Amazingly, but not surprisingly, Alexandra Miller serves as some sort of “adjunct lecturer” in Journalism Studies at the University of Maryland. And altogether unsurprisingly, she has not responded to my requests for comment.

I usually try to maintain an air of detached bemusement about this stuff, and there’s no question that much of Epstein mania can be morbidly comical, not unlike the man himself. But seriously — what the hell? This latest wrinkle could not possibly get any darker.

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Meet Kristy Makuta, also known as Ahava Leah Duffey-Marco, and also known as other variations of that alias. Her date of birth is 7/5/1985. She currently resides in Haymarket, VA, along with her purported “adoptive mother,” Amy Duffey, who is purported to have “adopted” Kristy as an adult in 2022, when Kristy would’ve been 36 or 37 years old. Amy is approximately nine years older than Kristy.

Kristy Makuta is many things. She claims to be severely autistic; members of her family have said she discovered this condition only in her 20s, without having previously displayed any obvious signs of “autism,” and started identifying as such only after consuming copious amounts of autism-related content on the internet. She also claims to be afflicted with something called “Mosaic Down Syndrome” — a rare disorder which, according to family members, she assigned to herself only in her 30s, after seeing posts on social media from a cousin with a Down Syndrome child, and envying the outpour of sympathy the posts engendered. Her self-identification with this curious syndrome enables Kristy to claim devastating cognitive impairment, and entitlement to extensive accommodations as a “disabled” person — while at the same time exhibiting traits that do not appear “physically or outwardly different from a neurotypical individual,” as her former lawyers have described the strange phenomenon.

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Kristy is also someone who announced herself an “Epstein Survivor,” and in furtherance of this, became the Jane Doe plaintiff in some very high-profile litigation: Doe v. Black (1:23-cv-06418). Starting in 2023, lawyers from the uniquely repugnant and rapacious law firm Wigdor LLP began operationalizing Kristy to level some of the most sensational, grotesque allegations ever leveled in any Epstein-related action, which is really saying something. Their principal target being Leon Black, the billionaire financier and onetime Epstein money-management client.

Kristy Makuta is likewise someone who’s been granted the generous perk of judicially-conferred anonymity, a tactic deployed more and more aggressively across the legal, political, and media landscape — and in Kristy’s case, with special vigor, as it’s plain that if even a small portion of the true facts were ever to emerge about her background and behavior, not only would her litigation gambit collapse — which it already mostly has, even without her official unmasking — so too would a fraud of epic proportions be exposed, and in tandem, exposure of those who connived to facilitate it.

Kristy is also now someone who has been struck with harsh judicial sanctions, after a decision by Judge Jessica Clarke, who found that Kristy fabricated and falsified evidence in her submissions to the Court. It was also ruled that her previous lawyers, namely Jeanne Christensen of the repellent Wigdor firm, had “repeatedly lied” to the Court on Kristy’s behalf — in a futile scramble to contain the debacle they unleashed, by coaxing Kristy to assume a new identity of harrowing survivor-client, with supposedly actionable legal claims to bring forth. Christensen was also found to have directed Kristy to destroy evidence — another sanctionable offense for which Christensen was harshly reproached. This evidence ought to have been preserved, according to ordinary legal ethics. But it’s not hard to see why Christensen directed the destruction, as there could be no other logical way to sustain such a ludicrously confabulated narrative, except by commission of increasingly outlandish fraud. Fraud, on top of fraud, on top of fraud: that is the story of Kristy Makuta, now revealed here for the first time as “Jane Doe” in the lawsuit against Leon Black. The sheer audacity of the fraud, and its utter detachment from any semblance of reality, is almost without rival even in the annals of hallucinatory Epstein lore. Which again, is really saying something.

As of April 23, 2026, Kristy Makuta has been judicially ruled to have “falsified sonogram images in her personal journals” — images her lawyers had contrived to submit as evidence proving she was brutally “trafficked” and raped by some combination of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Leon Black, and a host of others. The purported chronological through-line is difficult to track, but it’s alleged to include malefactors ranging from her high school cheerleading/dance coach, her own parents, and perhaps Harvey Weinstein, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump.

Kristy contains multitudes. She has claimed to be a “Russian-American,” who wants to make it clear that she stands with Ukraine. She has claimed to be a proud Jew, and therefore deeply concerned by the perceived rise in anti-Semitism. She has declared herself a “Resister,” looking to link up with fellow Resisters on the internet. She’s even an aspiring lawyer, she has said, and hopes to one day start a non-profit to help other autistic survivors of child sex-trafficking.

The whole genre of “Epstein” is so replete with insanities — a constant swirling carnival of them — that it’s become tough to be genuinely dumbstruck by anything anymore. However, this one really takes the cake. I have personally spent the past several days in a kind of bewildered stupor, double-checking everything to make sure I’m processing this shit correctly, because it can’t possibly be real. But it’s real — all too real. And it so gravely indicts the legal profession, the judicial system, state and federal law enforcement, and of course, the incorrigibly credulous media, that for something like this to have even been allowed to happen in the first place would seem to necessitate dissolving the entire rotten edifice, and starting over again from scratch. Because just when you think you’ve seen it all vis-a-vis “Epstein,” something so mind-melting comes down the pike that you can’t help but stumble around in a light-headed, mystified trance.

NOTE TO READERS: There is way too much lunatic material here for me to properly synthesize or organize in a single succinct article. So this will probably have to be some sort of multi-part series. But time is of the essence, because after I first contacted Kristy Makuta by email on Sunday, May 3, the very next morning, she sent some sort of panicked emergency letter to Judge Clarke, attaching screenshots of my extremely polite email, and appeared to suggest I had threatened her with “irreparable harm,” jeopardizing her own personal safety, as well as that of others in her household, including “minor children” whose status she does not elaborate.

(I guess it doesn’t matter that my own personal phone number was “doxxed,” and is now available for all to see on the federal court docket — but hey, whatever!)

Judge Clarke quickly shot down Kristy’s foolish request, correctly noting “the Court does not have the power to prevent publication of Ms. Doe’s name by a nonparty to this suit who gained her name from a source not covered by the protective order.” To which I say: hear, hear!!! Isn’t the First Amendment grand? Kristy Makuta, Kristy Makuta, Kristy Makuta.

That being said, when I told Kristy I wanted to give her a chance to explain why her anonymity should be preserved, in light of the feverish efforts she and her former lawyers have made to that end, I was serious: I wanted to at least hear out the argument, articulated in her own words. And I’d retain an open mind, notwithstanding my admitted predisposition to err decisively on the side of max disclosure and transparency in such matters, and notwithstanding the rest of the media zealously opposing disclosure and transparency in this one area. But instead of taking up my offer, Kristy ran immediately to the Court, petitioning for some sort of relief to protect her from the “imminent risk” she claimed I’d inflicted upon her. She makes this urgent plea in her current capacity as pro se plaintiff, after the vile Wigdor firm was finally compelled to withdraw their representation of her last year, in a sequence of events so humiliating it should ideally be the death knell for that entire racket they’ve been running over there. Even more humiliatingly, the lawyers have now been slapped with a raft of refreshingly severe and richly-deserved sanctions, which again should be career-ending in any sane legal/political/media climate — but in the present climate, we shouldn’t get our hopes up, because I’m sure Douglas Wigdor and Jeanne Christensen will find some seedy way to pick up the pieces and carry on with their extortionist, fraudulent ways.

Christensen, the lawyer who dealt most intimately with Kristy, and cajoled her into theatrically narrativizing the ultimate version of the “trafficking” tale, has now been required to submit a copy of Judge Clarke’s order brutally sanctioning her “in any case in any federal court in which she is counsel of record” for the next year. At least as recently as March 2024, Christensen was trying to goad federal prosecutors into criminally charging Black, among others, for psychotic child sex crimes, based on evidence now shown to have been preposterously fake — and the fakery of which should’ve been blindingly obvious to anyone not blinkered by cuckoo ideological mania, where anything’s on the table if it means achieving “accountability” for any self-proclaimed “survivor” — along with the plentiful monetary rewards this “accountability” tends to be accompanied by. Christensen emailed her contacts in the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, claiming she alone possessed the oracular ability to “decode” secret messages that Kristy had purportedly created decades ago, by way of her purportedly unearthed “diaries” — original copies of which were claimed to have been magically discovered in a storage unit sometime in 2024, months after the original 2023 lawsuit against Black was filed.

Here’s one such entry that Christensen declared she had miraculously “decoded,” to reveal a secret message from Kristy about how she’d once gone to Mar-a-Lago as a cognitively-impaired child sex slave:

“I can explain all of the cryptic statements,” Christensen had the chutzpah to tell federal law enforcement officials. Words like “yucky, mean, gross, bad,” she explained, “often mean sexual assault/intercourse/rape.” Christensen then pointed to an example of Kristy purportedly recounting how Ghislaine Maxwell once made her do something “yucky” in a hotel room — so obviously the Feds should take further prosecutorial action on the evidentiary strength of this rambling “decoded” material. (Bear in mind: Kristy never even met Ghislaine Maxwell, nor Jeffrey Epstein, nor Leon Black, nor anyone else whom the “decoded” messages are supposed to show her being sexually enslaved by. I’m telling you — this is seriously the most mind-blowing shit.)

But perhaps the most incredible thing about the whole crazy scam, which perhaps should be most emphasized above all else, is that Kristy and her Wigdor enablers would’ve essentially gotten away with it if they hadn’t gotten so cocky. A few tweaks to the timeline, and Kristy Makuta would be a multi-millionaire right now. How do we know that? Because we know the submission she and her lawyers made to the JP Morgan settlement fund in 2023 — nominally set up to compensate an all-inclusive spectrum of “Epstein Survivors” — was approved by Simone Lelchuk, the Claims Administrator, and then approved by Jed Rakoff, the presiding federal judge. Kristy and Wigdor could’ve just ridden off into the sunset at this point, with their illicit winnings in tow, thanks to settlement-eligibility criteria that was so comically lax, the overseers were handing out giant payments left and right to anyone who could hypothesize that they once might have been within four football fields of Jeffrey Epstein. So lax were the assessment protocols, in fact, we now know for certain that literal fabrications were being approved willy-nilly. And we’re not just talking about marginal embellishments, or some light dramatization, or shading the truth with confirmation-biased hindsight. Nope, we’re talking about total and complete inventions, with zero basis in empirical reality whatsoever, by someone who never even met Epstein, Maxwell, or anyone else connected to their supposed “sex trafficking” venture.

Had they just counted their blessings after the JP Morgan jackpot, life would be sweet right now for Kristy and her “adoptive mother” Amy Duffey — a former administrative employee at George Mason University, who during her tenure there went by the title of “Assistant Director of Disability Services.” And has subsequently come to “service” Kristy as her so-called “adoptive mother,” in one of the craziest “familial” dynamics you’ll ever have the misfortune of hearing about.

It turns out Kristy, Amy, and the lawyer cabal got a little too high on their own supply, because rather than contenting themselves with the whopping $2.5 million payout from JP Morgan, they couldn’t resist taking things up a notch, and decided that Kristy could be further instrumentalized in Wigdor’s ongoing offensive against Leon Black. Upon which, Kristy became the main character in the third of three scurrilous lawsuits accusing Black of Epstein-related sex crimes. (All three would eventually unravel.)

We only know the exact amount of Kristy’s initial settlement allocation thanks to a strange new article in the Guardian, published May 6, which appears to have been rushed out in order to preempt mine, and was clearly drafted in coordination with Kristy and Amy. So hallelujah — now we know this $2.5 million payout was what the Claims Administrator, Simone Lelchuk, determined Kristy was owed for her utterly imaginary “trafficking” tale.

Sorry to be crass, but I can’t resist pointing out the email signature and Zoom handle of Simone Lelchuk both clarify that she uses “she/her” pronouns — just in case you ever run into Simone, and want to avoid an awkward faux pas by accidentally referring to her as he, him, they, etc. Simone also boasts that as “an experienced Claims Administrator,” she made certain to “put in place best practice procedures to make the gathering of information as trauma informed as possible.” While Kristy & co. have tried to impress upon federal prosecutors and judges that “coded messages” could be deciphered in her phony “diary” entries, one thing the general public really should be prepared to “decode” are terms like “trauma informed,” among other therapeutic jargon, as it typically connotes abandonment of any normal empirical standards for evaluating the truth-value of claims, so as not to “re-traumatize” purported “trauma” victims — with “trauma” now being a kind of invisible universal life-energy that anyone can claim to have located in their bodies at any time, for any reason.

We also now discover that the $2.5 million was only nixed after a late-stage intervention by Leon Black’s attorneys, who sent a letter to Judge Rakoff warning that Kristy and Wigdor were in the middle of perpetrating a “serious fraud.” Even so, Rakoff still eventually approved a smaller yet respectable sum of $200,000. Maybe it wasn’t quite the life-changing riches that Kristy and her “adoptive mother” Amy had envisioned, but $200,000 (tax-free!) ain’t a bad haul for just making stuff up. Any payment of any amount from the JP Morgan fund also entitles Kristy to a complimentary suite of à la carte healthcare services until at least 2028, courtesy of a separate JP Morgan arrangement with the government of the US Virgin Islands.

According to the settlement paperwork, Simone Lelchuk was supposed to have determined how much money each claimant would receive by carefully studying “the circumstances, severity, type, and extent of the alleged abuse or trafficking, the nature and duration of the relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, and the impact of the alleged conduct on the Participating Claimant.” In addition, “should the Claims Administrator have concerns as to the accuracy” of any submission, she was to take prompt remedial action. But apparently, Simone had no such concerns about Kristy, and therefore had no reservations about legitimizing a total and complete hoax. Really makes you think, doesn’t it — especially insofar as the wider universe of purported “Epstein Survivors” who have been validated by these “confidential and non-adversarial” settlement vehicles, but maybe lacked the special hubris of Kristy & Co., which triggered an unexpected extra round of after-the-fact scrutiny.

When the blockbuster settlement payout was first awarded to Kristy in January 2024, it was only by the efforts of Leon Black’s counsel that any real “concerns” were belatedly raised — which was at least enough for Judge Rakoff to hold a hearing on March 15, 2024, at which Kristy testified. Even then, according to prosecutors’ notes describing the hearing — transcript of which remains sealed — “Rakoff said that he was inclined to sustain the award.”

Eventually, however, the Class Counsel for the overall JP Morgan program, longtime Epstein “victim” super-lawyers Bradley Edwards and Brittany Henderson, appeared to realize that if Kristy’s bogus claim was allowed to move forward, it could imperil their entire $290 million enterprise. So they looked into it themselves, and concluded Kristy had “never met” either Epstein or Maxwell, despite the dramatic lawsuit narrative she and Jeanne Christensen had concocted. Please note: what almost certainly happened here was not that Bradley Edwards suddenly had a revelation about the virtues of lawyerly truth-seeking. Rather, he merely caught wind of one anomalous disputed claim, which never would’ve been disputed in the first place, and would’ve never crossed his desk, but for the ancillary fact of the ongoing Leon Black lawsuit, which had prompted a last-minute intervention by Black’s attorneys — and only after Kristy’s submission had been approved, twice. It was at this point Edwards apparently realized letting Kristy’s claim proceed unchallenged could not only sink the credibility of entire settlement operation, but enter facts into the record that would complicate the victimhood chronologies proffered by his many other clients. And so exposing the narrow fraud of Kristy and Wigdor became incidentally necessary for his own self-preservation.

Here is (some of) what Kristy claimed happened to her when she was “trafficked” by Jeffrey Epstein, her cheerleading coach, and so forth:

Plaintiff was crying still when [Leon] Black placed his mouth on her vaginal area. At this point, Plaintiff realized that struggling would be useless given how much stronger and physically more massive Black was and instead pleaded with Black to stop as she sobbed. She felt a sharp pain in her vagina, like a hard pinch and she let out a loud scream. At the scream, Black lifted his head out from under her skirt and she saw blood on his mouth and she panicked and kicked him with her right leg. Her “kick” landed on his chest, and while it likely did not hurt him, he was enraged that she struck out at him and he began viciously cursing her. He then called her a “fucking bitch,” “whore” and a “slut,” and picked Plaintiff up off the massage table and threw her to the floor. Once on the floor, Plaintiff attempted to scramble towards the door but Black instead grabbed her legs, pulled Plaintiff towards him and she saw blood on the floor which likely was from her rectum. In his rage, Black called her a “little cunt.” Black got on top of her. Plaintiff went into shock and began to disassociate, trying to convince herself that she was somewhere else but the unimaginable pain she experienced prevented her from even this temporary respite. He continued to violently thrust himself on her with such force, that she felt he was crushing her pelvic and hip bones.

Only problem: this was all completely made up, the details systematically confabulated — amounting to little more than a deeply disturbed, delusional woman being treated not as an object of pity, or someone who required a major medical intervention, but as another lucrative money-making opportunity for a network of craven vultures, who inevitably swoop in whenever they spot some fresh prey — that is, a reality-detached female making lurid Epstein-related claims on social media. It clearly does not matter how stupendously far-fetched the claims are, how little evidence there is to back them up, or even that an abundance of indicators obviously point to the claims being invented wholesale. Given the current incentives of the legal/political/media climate, pure confabulation is often more than sufficient to launch outrageous litigation crusades, even if it ends up terrorizing innocent bystanders — and not just wealthy “elites” like Leon Black, but scores of others Kristy also fingered as complicit in hideous child sex crimes, which only took place in the “alternate reality” she conjured, abetted by huckster lawyers and other enabling freaks. According to a private investigator who interviewed her erstwhile family members, Kristy has “assumed a series of different names and personas,” and thus has “a history of making up alternate realities, and frequently invents things” that, as one relative put it, “become her reality.”

Portions of the Leon Black lawsuit are basically just stitched together from pre-existing lawsuits and other material that could be easily found in the public domain, reconstructed into a new “reality” that Kristy strove to inhabit. For instance, her complaint says Ghislaine Maxwell taught her how to “make Jeffrey happy” by showing her certain massage techniques, which is strikingly similar phrasing to what Virginia Roberts Giuffre once used in her own alternate-reality narratives, wherein she too said she was ordered to “keep Jeffrey happy.” This lawsuit is basically Kristy inserting herself as a main character into someone else’s script, patching together fragments to generate her own bespoke storyline. The “biting her vagina” detail is cribbed from a previous lawsuit brought against Black by the same sicko law firm; Jeanne Christensen had alleged on behalf of a woman named Cheri Pierson that Black once “placed his mouth on her vagina and began biting her,” at which time Pierson “experienced excruciating pain” and was in “agony.” Numerous other lurid details pervade that lawsuit, which Leon Black’s defense likewise maintained had been “totally fabricated out of whole cloth” — and indeed, it was eventually dropped with prejudice.

But unlike the failed Pierson litigant, for several years now, Kristy’s true identity has been safely hidden from public view, thanks to the strident exhortations of the court system, which jealously guards “victim” anonymity as perhaps its highest and most sacred duty. (Journalists tend to vehemently agree with the resulting concealment of public records.) In general, legal and media strictures around withholding “victim” information are already wildly excessive and irrational. But that larger structural problem is almost immaterial here, because the unique circumstances of this situation are that “Jane Doe” has now been judicially ruled to have perpetrated a fraud on the Court, and therefore the public. She has been sanctioned accordingly by Judge Jessica Clarke. In no conceivable world could her continued anonymization be justified, even if you’re the most flamboyant advocate of “victims.”

While the matter of Kristy Makuta stands somewhat apart in the annals of Epstein lore — as her claims were not just strategically dramatized or embellished, but 100% fabricated out of whole cloth — the basic pattern is still a familiar one. Long-established players such as Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Maria Farmer, and Sarah Ransome may have at one point actually been in Epstein’s presence, unlike Kristy, but are still roughly in the same ballpark mentally, what with their trail of erratic confabulating behavior, grandiosely dramatized post hoc narrative reconstructions, and so on. Yet all were also eagerly leveraged by gangs of lawyers who swarmed them — sanitizing and legitimating their claims, in hopes of making them sound presentable and ostensibly-legally-actionable. Time after time, however, this strategic credulity would eventually blow up in the lawyers’ faces; Farmer and Ransome might have been instrumentally useful for awhile, but they soon started excoriating their own former lawyers as part of a grand, never-ending plot to deceive and malign them.

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Maria Farmer was integral in popularizing the idea, now known to be evidence-devoid, that Epstein had rigged up hidden cameras throughout his many properties for the purpose of surreptitiously recording blackmail footage on legions of prominent men he entrapped into compromising sexual situations. Maria was once gainfully represented by the likes of David Boies, Bradley Edwards, Stanley Pottinger, etc. back when she was helpful litigation-wise. Fast forward though, and she started claiming (for instance) that she was sodomized over the phone by Pottinger, while her mother was present. (No, I am not making this up.) Maria Farmer’s mental state apparently didn’t give the lawyers pause while they were using her to extract settlement riches, nor does it give pause to the editors of USA Today, who recently gave her a byline (or purported byline) for a beautiful op-ed commemorating her late friend and fellow “survivor” Virginia Roberts Giuffre — a version of which was read aloud at the VRG “memorial” I attended last month in Washington, DC.

Here’s a slightly less PR-friendly writing sample from Maria — a December 19, 2024 email she wrote to Simone Lelchuk, the settlement claims administrator, which was swiftly forwarded by Simone and her assistant to the FBI, because they thought Maria really was crazy enough to do something crazy:

We artists are about to get really loud. My name was smeared and stolen by conspiracy TRUMP/EPSTEIN freaks be YOU AND BOIES made my name the lowest hanging fruit, as the COCONSPIRATORS were protected adult JANE HOEs. MY TALENT WILL NEVER BE STOLEN.

As I was used to expose this case, your JANE HOE adult clients hid from their DECADES OF TROLLOP WORK. TWAT PEDDLING IS ILLEGAL LAST I CHECKED. So is selling humans into slavery, or marrying them to traffic them. SO IS TRAFFICKING YOUR OWN DAMN CLIENTS!

Simone, your ilk fancies “collecting” what artists like me create. You lack all creativity, so you harm victims of Weinstein/Epstein for a living.

Badly WAYWARDS my new lawyer will be billing you for the art for which you never paid. Sent from my iPhone

“We all feel very threatened by what is happening,” Simone wrote to an FBI agent, who then passed the email up the chain, asking another FBI colleague if they had a prosecutor available “that can review the dozens of correspondences that Ms Lelchuk has received in order to determine if it meets any statutory requirements?”

It’s unclear who exactly Maria is claiming was “trafficked” to whom, or by whom, but she does seem to vaguely suggest that her former lawyers, David Boies and Bradley Edwards, are in on the trafficking plot.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre was just as far gone off the deep end, but thanks to the sheer salaciousness of her claims, and her undoubted persistence, the scattered kernels of actual evidence that did actually place her in the company of Epstein for a time were enough for clever lawyers to enrich themselves and her, and she is now posthumously venerated as an American Hero. Then there’s Sarah Ransome, who pretty much introduced the whole idea of Epstein’s island being veritable rape pit (despite no evidence of any rapes taking place there) — and is also someone from whom one can now find page after page of fevered ALL CAPS emails declaring herself a seminal world-historic figure, who must be delegated to mediate various geopolitical conflicts, while she threatens to gang-rape another purported Epstein survivor, Juliette Bryant, as well as Juliette’s young son.

As for Kristy Makuta, she also predictably ended up claiming that her lawyers were orchestrating a sinister plot against her, having “manipulated my emotional vulnerability and disability to gain my trust, encouraging me to disclose private information under promises of psychological and emotional support” — including on an unspecified trip with Jeanne Christensen to New England, which Kristy claims was misrepresented to her as entailing “fun,” and which she agreed to take despite her “adoptive mother’s clear concern that such a trip was inappropriate.”

You might be wondering how Kristy Makuta could even have an “adoptive mother” who is approximately nine years older her. Well, you’re right to wonder. Turns out Amy Duffey can only legally be the “adoptive mother” of Kristy because Amy’s husband, Bruce Marco, is approximately nine years older than Amy, and therefore satisfies the statutory requirement for adult adoption in the state of Virginia: “the person to be adopted is at least fifteen years younger than the petitioner.” Bruce Marco is approximately 18 years older than Kristy, whereas Amy Duffey on her own would not have been permitted to adopt Kristy. In yet another spellbinding twist of fate, Kristy apparently told Judge Rakoff, unprompted, that she was now also being abused by her “adoptive father” Bruce, the husband of Amy Duffey, whose marital status had enabled Kristy to be adopted in the first place. Imagine spending a weekend in that household? (Neither Kristy, Amy, nor Bruce would respond to my repeated requests for comment, despite having 100% seen my emails, phone calls, and texts.)

The trails of abusers in Kristy’s life is seemingly without limit. She claims she is “scared” of her biological mother, and was once physically assaulted by her biological sister. Similarly, her interactions with the former lawyers have been deemed retroactively abusive — Kristy claims that fateful New England trip came about only because Jeanne Christensen “lied about the purpose of the trip in order to isolate me further and use that time to gain more sensitive disclosures.” As though obtaining “sensitive disclosures” from Kristy, for the purposes of the litigation she and the lawyers were jointly pursuing, is now considered illicit. At least Wigdor’s strategy of using mentally disturbed women for their own vexatious ends has finally bitten them in the ass.

What’s abundantly obvious is that Kristy and her mysterious minder Amy Duffey, also bizarrely her “adoptive mother,” were mostly just copy-and-pasting from a template already well-established by the likes of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Maria Farmer, and Sarah Ransome. Just as Kristy was ordered by Christensen to terminate her Twitter account, and therefore destroy evidence, VRG once claimed to have burned her diaries in some sort of therapeutic healing ritual, thereby destroying reams of pertinent evidence. And when it comes to Kristy claiming that her ultimate goal is to start some kind of “trafficking awareness” nonprofit, this was also borrowed from VRG, whose lawyers Edwards and Henderson created a shell nonprofit for her, to give a patina of public virtue to their mission of extracting exorbitant settlement monies from the British Royal Family and others. The final iteration of this VRG nonprofit, which goes by the acronym SOAR, and is still putatively operated today by her weepy siblings on an endless PR tour, never discernibly did anything while she was alive other than receive the fat cash settlement transfers, and secondarily serve as a barebones online publicity portal for Virginia — allowing her to claim her profession was “trafficking awareness activist” or some such, aka literal “professional victim.” VRG and her cohort could thus present themselves as doing what they were doing for the noble cause of sparing other little girls from heinous sex torture — rather than running a racket to both enrich themselves and bolster their weird “trafficking”-centric political ideology.

Indeed, core to the “Epstein” mythos is an assemblage of severely disturbed and mentally ill women, whose grandiloquent ideations were egged on by unscrupulous lawyers (and journalists) — always with an eye on the monetary prize. Kristy would’ve fit right into the mix, if only she had some morsels of actual evidence at hand, rather than just outright fabrications.

One of Kristy’s purported “diary” submissions is a collection of cards, letters, and other mementos she seems to have legitimately saved from a 2012 stay at an in-patient residential treatment facility, for what she has publicly said were anorexia problems. Then by 2023-2024, she suddenly “found” these old materials, and wouldn’t you know it, the apparently authentic letters and things were magically interspersed with new first-person journal entries she purports to have written at the time, wherein she goes on at great length about her fear of Jeffrey Epstein, her worries that the truth could come out about how he impregnated her with four children, etc. The self-written add-ons were supposed to serve as corroboration that she had been privately memorializing her Epstein-related abuse all these years. But as Judge Clarke notes in her conspicuously dubious assessment, the entries furnished by Kristy about purportedly being “trafficked” are written only in pencil, known to be “an undatable instrument” — while by contrast, “letters from fellow patients and counselors” were “almost exclusively written in ink,” which can be dated using forensic tools. Kristy even tries to cover her tracks retroactively, offering a strange preemptive justification in her pencil-only scribblings, writing on what she purports to have been May 15, 2012: “Ugh, I hate writing in pencil but that was all I could find and now I will be like this forever for consistency.”

The judge’s skepticism about Kristy’s pencil usage supports the inference that these supposed journal entries are themselves fabrications — an attempt to transport Kristy’s fantasies of extreme Epstein predation, which she publicly revealed for the first time on Twitter circa 2022, back to at least a decade prior, by commingling her newly-invented narrative with real stuff she did save from her 2012 stay in the residential treatment facility. But after awhile, the flimsy facade could no longer be sustained, and a (based black female) judge has since declared that in any forthcoming trial with Leon Black, her complete set of “diaries” will be ruled inadmissible, having been contaminated by demonstrable fraud — namely the “sonogram” images that appear in certain entries, which Judge Clarke found to be “falsified” over the course of the investigation she apparently took it upon herself to conduct. (Judge Clarke, while unusually “based,” has not yet terminated the lawsuit entirely.)

This means Kristy will not be able to introduce evidence she tried to manufacture, aiming to show how she’d been enslaved as Epstein’s “personal incubator” — that is, forcibly impregnated four times in some sordid plan to perpetuate his genetics. This theme also clearly derives from Kristy’s cursory research on the internet, which she then formulated into a litany of grotesque hallucinations, as detailed in the bogus “diaries.” One storyline culminates with her fetus being ripped out of her body and flushed down a toilet.

Most of the “diaries” purported to have been generated by Kristy as a sex-trafficked teen and/or young adult already look like something out of a 1970s Serial Killer odyssey, Son of Sam or whatever, except for mentally unglued “trafficking” freaks. Any minimally rational observer, familiar with the factual and evidentiary basics of the Epstein affair, should have been able to instantly discern that it was little more than a profoundly unwell woman concocting an elaborate fantasy, for the edification of herself and her lawyers, wherein she would be retroactively integrated into the Epstein drama by appropriating a bunch of already-public information, and then sprinkling in some novel details, such as how Kristy had been led to believe she was going to be “adopted” by Jeffrey, and pursuant to this, she was inseminated multiple times by him. (Epstein had no children.) It’s part fan-fiction, part raw phantasm, and part crude legal hustle. In any sane world, it would’ve been tossed right into the trash can, but in the present world, it was treated with shocking seriousness — and presumed true at the highest levels of law enforcement, “activism,” and media.

The above image is just a small sample of what the newly-sanctioned lawyer Jeanne Christensen told federal prosecutors she could personally “decode” for hidden sex-trafficking messages, so certain of her clairvoyant powers was Jeanne, that with what really seems like utter earnestness, she reported that Kristy had, all told, been horribly sex-trafficked by at least 25 different men — and the DOJ needed to move fast to put them all behind bars.

NOTE: the only reason these “diaries” ever became public in the first place is because the Wigdor lawyer crew, led in this instance by Jeanne Christensen, repeatedly represented to DOJ prosecutors and the NY District Attorney that the “diaries” were legitimate evidence, and kept forwarding them scanned copies. Which means the copies were entered into archives that subsequently became responsive to the disclosure requirements of the “Epstein Files Transparency Act.” So three cheers for the transparency, I guess, even though it’s probably not quite the kind of “transparency” that survivors and politicians had been sloganeering for. Oh well!

Much more to come soon, but I’m leaving it here for now. The final kicker: I think I may have actually met Kristy about a month ago, and spoke to her on the phone, totally unaware at the time of who she was. Yikes.

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Not to belabor the point, but on the matter of potential Russiagate prosecutions, here’s something I should’ve mentioned in my unplanned debate yesterday with Matt Taibbi: my general position is that “Russiagate,” broadly construed, is best understood circa 2026 as an unresolved political problem — and one that can now be said to have occurred in the somewhat distant historical past (OK, the relatively recent past). Any measures that might be warranted to remediate this decade-old political problem, therefore, would be most aptly pursued in the political domain, rather than by application of punitive criminal law.

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One of the core problems I always had with “Russiagate,” an admittedly nebulous term, was that issues of ordinary political disputation — such as whether Trump appeared to be favoring foreign policy prerogatives that were overly aligned with Russia — got wildly warped into some kind of urgent “national security” crisis, and in tandem with that overwrought theme, the federal law enforcement apparatus deemed itself authorized to barrel head-first into the political arena with unprecedented audacity. The entire premise of this “Deep State” intervention was fallacious and destructive, I’ve always argued, and the successive Russiagate ops by the Feds, starting with “Crossfire Hurricane” in July 2016, followed by the Robert Mueller (RIP) Special Counsel saga in May 2017, were themselves fundamentally predicated on a slew of destructive fallacies.

It was obvious that what ultimately gave rise to these brazen law enforcement gambits was the wider political outburst that’d been triggered by Trump’s overall ascendance, and among the most self-righteous purveyors of this spasmodic outburst were factions of the FBI, who connived to reify their political anxieties through “novel” application of punitive state power. In other words, they arrogated authority to referee a roiling political dispute, although they’d never admit it — and made the tactics they employed appear all the more existentially vital, thanks to the conjoined theatrics of the “Intelligence Community,” or at least certain elements therein. The whole Russiagate episode did tremendous damage, for a host of reasons, which I chronicled almost daily from around 2016 to 2019. (Here’s one small example, among countless I could dig up.)

Cheering these encroachments by the National Security State into domestic political affairs — the consensus reaction among left-liberals at the time — struck me as uniquely repellent, whatever the hell one ever thought about Trump. That’s why I made it such a huge journalistic focus of mine. But as to what remedies might be practicable today, in 2026…?

Well, I’m not usually in the habit of proposing “solutions,” because sometimes there just aren’t any, but even so, I’d have thought a no-brainer would’ve been to establish some kind of big-league Congressional inquiry, modeled on the landmark Church Committee of the mid-1970s — which despite its imperfections, did unearth a great deal of hitherto hidden information about the dark inner-workings of the Security State complex, which till then had been cloaked in almost impenetrable secrecy since it was regrettably created after WWII.

***As a brief aside, one glaring flaw of the Church Committee was that it did not adequately probe the out-of-control antics of John F. Kennedy and his bagman brother Robert F. Kennedy — described, inter alia, by Seymour Hersh in the tragically underrated Dark Side of Camelot (1997). Hersh writes that evidence linking JFK and RFK to ZR/RIFLE, a clandestine CIA caper to assassinate foreign leaders, most obsessively Fidel Castro, was “overwhelming” — and much of this evidence was known to Church’s Committee as it scoured through various chapters of CIA chicanery. But “for political reasons,” Hersh says, the matter was not robustly pursued, as Democratic Senator Frank Church did not want to disrupt his party’s cherished Kennedy lore. This is just one datapoint, of many, that made such a complete farce the latter-day exaltation of RFK Jr. as some kind of valorous warrior against the “Deep State,” even if the dumb-dumb podcaster guys all giddily ate up that weird inverted “Camelot” narrative he concocted, and then proceeded to subsume into the GOP, having cleverly imbued himself with an aura of nonsense bizarro nostalgia around his BS family lineage — as though RFK Jr. was on an epic hero’s journey to finish the Deep State-slaying mission of his martyred dad and uncle. My IQ dropped a few points just summarizing it.

Anyway, something akin to a Church Committee for the 2020s, excavating whatever’s yet to be excavated about the recent conduct of the National Security apparatus, always seemed a perfectly creditable political remedy to the problem of “Russiagate,” such as that problem continues to exist. Informative public hearings could conceivably be held, appropriate fact-finding undertaken, and remedial legislation then to emerge, perhaps with an eye toward curbing excessive government surveillance powers, or at least restraining the Security State from intruding in presidential campaigns. Which undoubtedly did happen with Trump in 2016, on totally scurrilous grounds. During the Biden Administration, it even became an occasional MAGA talking point, promoted by the likes of Matt Gaetz and such, that the time had surely come for Church Committee 2.0, and Republicans would have this at the top of their agenda if they retook Congress in 2022 and/or the Presidency in 2024.

Well, we haven’t heard much about that idea lately.

And why do you figure that might be?

Hmm. Let’s ponder.

Maybe because Donald Trump has no interest in actually curbing the powers of the “Deep State.” His singular grievance has only ever been that those powers were once marshaled to his own detriment, and yes, he was often substantively correct in his complaints. But now, in Term Two, he’s got thoroughly consolidated control of the Executive Branch. No longer are there any bureaucratic holdovers maneuvering against him, as in the First Term, hiding away in their little ideological silos to plot and connive. Indeed, Trump has now comprehensively imposed his own ideology on the Security State structures, and we all know the main feature of Trump’s ideology is personal allegiance to him. That being the case, he’s all in favor of exerting audacious state power, so long as it serves his own interests — rather than getting him caught up in another open-ended Special Counsel fiasco, as bedeviled him the last time both politically and practically, having constricted his latitude to govern. No such nuisance bedevils him in 2026. Russiagate? Schmussagate.

Look no further than his current unbridled enthusiasm for renewing FISA, the very warrantless surveillance law once notoriously used against him in 2016! Pay no mind — that’s all ancient history in Trump 2.0. (He actually supported FISA renewal in his first term too, when the contradictions were even more pronounced.) And while he continues to superficially grouse about FISA here and there, the kicker came during the 2024 campaign season, when he and “MAGA Mike” Johnson huddled at Mar-a-Lago and jointly endorsed that year’s FISA renewal package, because, as Trump would explain, he was ahead in the polls! And accordingly, he would soon be the one exercising the relevant powers again, and doing with them as he pleased — so why get rid of them now? That’d just be shooting himself in the foot. President Donald J. Trump is many things, but he’s never been somebody who seems particularly inclined to diminish his own power.

So there you have it — the key legal architecture underpinning Russiagate is still in effect, today and for the foreseeable future, thanks to the boisterous personal advocacy of Trump, who now claims it’s “desperately needed” for his “little excursion” in Iran:

Trump does passingly remind us that the FISA “instrument” was once used against him by one of his arch nemeses — “the Dirty Cop, James Comey” — but don’t fret, MAGA faithful: extremely reassuring reforms have been taken, namely that Trump himself is back in charge, and he’s organized the Executive Branch more to his liking. Meanwhile his Clown Show underlings at the DOJ roll out another ridiculous case against Dirty Cop Jim, after botching their first attempt — but now they’ve regrouped, and are nailing him for the heinous crime of posting a photo of some seashells on Instagram. Which we’re supposed to believe constituted Comey threatening to assassinate the President. Weird that if the seashells were so menacing, it took almost a year to indict Comey for photographing them, since this could have easily been done within about 24 hours of the initial May 15, 2025 post. It’s not like months and months of profound legal contemplation was required here. The indictment is a comically barebones two pages, literally charging Comey for posting an Instagram photo from his little beachside stroll. Weird, also, that it comes after they already screwed up their prior indictment of Comey, after Trump installed a 30-something bimbo as interim US Attorney in Virginia, with zero prosecutorial experience, which predictably resulted in the charges getting tossed.

They’re deliberately insulting our intelligence with this stuff. Sure, it’s true, as I documented at the time, that “the process is the punishment” — that was definitely the case with the Mueller Investigation, which embroiled all manner of tangential Trump-connected stragglers in a fishing expedition that never found the phantom “collusion” it was nominally set up to find. And even though forgotten bit-players like Jerome Corsi and Michael Caputo were never charged with anything, their lives were still upended for roughly two years, not least with exorbitant legal fees, but also just the threat of federal prison hanging over their heads, which takes a huge psychological toll. Is that what Trump’s trying to replicate with Comey? Probably so. The obviously meritless nature of these indictments would thus be entirely explicable, because however devoid of merit an indictment might be, having to deal with the federal government bringing any indictment against you is more than onerous “punishment” unto itself.

Let’s not get silly, though. “Going after” Comey this way, based on political grievances originally stemming from Russiagate, does nothing to substantively rectify the wrongful government conduct associated with Russiagate. There is no “accountability” to be gained with this routine — or at least none that would meaningfully curtail the excesses of the National Security State, which Trump is now eagerly deploying for his own ends. Be real: Trump manifestly does not want any serious interrogation of “Deep State” activity, because that would require interrogating the very activities of which he’s now in control — and is keener than ever to aggressively wield, both home and abroad. Is it possible that DOJ ends up indicting some additional Russiagate villains, like John Brennan, the crazed former CIA Director and current “pro-democracy” pundit? Sure, it’s possible, maybe even probable. Is it possible that certain material might be uncovered over the course of that theoretical prosecution, which could fill in certain aspects of the historical record re: Russiagate? Sure, that’s also possible. But it’s also extremely likely that the whole thing just devolves into yet another shambolic mess, yielding nothing of real value, other than to satisfy Trump’s personal pique, just like the rest of the “retributive” score-settling so far. (Comey Part One? Bust. Letitia James? Bust. Jerome Powell? Bust. Mark Kelly? Bust.)

So no, I’m not seeing any legitimate civic-minded quest for True Russiagate Accountability, defined as something that would actually advance the public interest, or improve public policy, or accomplish much of anything else worthwhile. What I’m seeing instead are the predictable results of a myopically one-man-show administration, where everything invariably revolves around him, and whatever addled predilections he’s got bouncing around in his head on any given day. TO BE FAIR: This is exactly what he promised the electorate! “I am your retribution” was a pretty creepy proclamation, because it invites the average citizen to view him as their spiritual avatar, like a National Father Figure or something, rather than as a political vehicle through which to attain things that would benefit the entire polity. But it’s still what he openly vowed to voters: satiating his personal lust for “retribution,” sold as vicarious liberation for Joe and Jane Sixpack. And he won the 2024 election on that very explicit, repeatedly-articulated vow. So… ho-hum. Yeah, I get how the mythical logic can resonate for his hardest-core supporters, who really do think him getting payback against a rotating cast of antagonists will lower their gas prices or whatever, but it’s also a substantively idiotic proposition, and could only have been salable with the aid of a monumental Personality Cult.

For this and other reasons, expecting some Revelatory Russiagate Reckoning through the ad hoc deployment of vindictive law enforcement power — it’s just pure folly. It solves none of the underlying political problems that caused Russiagate in the first place, such as the semi-autonomous ability of Security State agents to meddle in domestic political events. It does drastically accelerate the trend of American political conflict giving way to tit-for-tat prosecutorial warfare, whereby the conflicts are adjudicated not by standard political means, but through the criminal justice system — an absolutely horrible venue for adjudicating political conflict. And yes, I say this as someone who was loudly critical of all four Trump prosecutions when he was out of office. Go check the record if you want. So I’m well aware that this trend I’m bemoaning was likewise accelerated by retributive Democrat zeal against Trump. But that doesn’t mean I’m suddenly going to start celebrating another great leap into Mutually Assured Destruction, just because it’s Trump’s turn again to punish his rivals. The whole dynamic is woeful. It corrodes the larger political culture in a very foundational way, and sends us hurtling into Banana Republic territory even faster than we already were. The unhinged reaction to Trump by blithering liberals and their Security State companions was a sure sign of Banana Republic degeneration over a decade ago. Trump pouring another gigantic can of fuel on the fire is not something to be welcomed for its own sake, or because it activates some nerve in your cranium that chemically induces you to crave carceral punishment for people you dislike. (Although if you’re just a pure partisan simpleton, I can see why your lizard-brain would be lighting up at the thought.)

As with so much that has transpired in Trump 2.0, this was all bleakly foreseeable, at least if you weren’t hoodwinked by algorithmic hackery, or otherwise occluded from apprehending obvious political reality. Remember that “Project 2025” document emotionally-disturbed liberals were constantly screeching for us all to be so gravely fearful of? Here’s what I wrote about it in July 2024:

When it comes to what’s commonly referred to as the “Deep State” in MAGA parlance — aka, the “Intelligence Community” — Project 2025 contains virtually the opposite of what’s being suggested by hysterical libs. (Go figure). Fundamentally, the guidance calls for marginally re-organizing the Intelligence Services so as to empower them.

Trump loves to grouse that elements of the National Security State were irrationally against him in 2016-2018, and that’s true as far as it goes, with the Russiagate/Mueller fiasco being proof of these tawdry machinations. So it would make sense that Trump and the people in his orbit would want to impose various safeguards to prevent any future sabotage against Trump. But the idea that this means Trump would radically overhaul the “Intelligence Community” and put it in service of Putin and Kim Jong Un, or whatever other nonsense, is just entirely wrong. Simply read the text!

[…]

With regard to the CIA, Project 2025 decries the tendency of “risk aversion or political bureaucracy to delay execution of the President’s foreign policy goals.” It thus recommends the diminution of bureaucracy and placement of individuals in the agency who will more effectively harness the power of clandestine operations to fortify and expand American hegemony. Another huge shocker!

The “intelligence” section of the document further advises the renewal of FISA warrantless surveillance, declaring that “Section 702 should be understood as an essential tool in the fight against terrorism, malicious cyber actors, and Chinese espionage.” Which again nicely aligns with Trump’s position, so far as it can be ascertained, seeing as he backed MAGA Mike Johnson’s successful effort to renew FISA in April, on the understanding that they both wanted Trump to be the one wielding that power when it next comes up for reauthorization in two years.

Sorry to toot my own horn here, but this is pretty much exactly what’s come to pass. You want a big cathartic Russiagate Reckoning? Fat chance. What you’re currently getting, good and hard, is just a further empowerment of the Security State Goliath — the fruits of which brought you Russiagate in the first place. Except now it’s being commandeered by the ideological manias of Trump 2.0, or “Trump unleashed” as I sometimes call it. Which could easily just bring us a thousand more Russiagate sequels.

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I know people are going to accuse me of “milking” what is now, amazingly, Day Five of this insane Jim Acosta / Substack Brawl journo-fracas, but if Jim is going to hop on his little video stream with the “gaslighting” queen herself, Tara Palmeri, and unleash a tornado of utter bullshit about me, I’m sorry, but I am journalistically and patriotically obliged to respond! Frankly, I’m obliged as a Real American, who won’t take this shit lying down!

I apologize in advance for subjecting you all to a 10+ minute video of Jim Acosta and Tara Palmeri telling each other how brave they are — if you’d rather spend that ten minutes twisting your eyeballs out with a rusty screwdriver, you’d be more than justified — but unfortunately, there’s no other way I’m aware of to deliver the spellbinding “content” they just vomited.

First, please take note of how Acosta introduces the whole subject of the aborted Substack brawl he initiated. He labels me an “online troll who calls himself a journalist” — as though I have not gone through an Acosta-approved accreditation process to obtain my Serious Journalism Card, which I guess would entail going through hours of hair and makeup at CNN HQ in Columbus Circle, to make doubly sure I’m immaculately well-coiffed for my next important TV “hit,” in which I’d pompously recite that day’s trite Trump-related talking points, and preen for the cameras as a Savior of the First Amendment. That would be Journalism 101 at the Jim Acosta Graduate School of Journalism, which perhaps should be established at Barnard College or somewhere. We can only imagine the legions of eager students who’d be lining up to be imparted with Jim’s once-in-a-generation journalistic wisdom.

Just to run through some of the Greatest Hits:

And who could forget his hilariously self-righteous book cover:

Well, in the interim, Jim got booted from CNN for whatever reason, and is now relegated to Substack with the rest of us schmucks (where he appears to be doing spectacularly well, even though it’s difficult to fathom who his tens of thousands of paid subscribers possibly are. But whatever, respect the hustle.)

You gotta feel for Jim on some level though, because it must be a bit emasculating for him to have to schlep to the same White House Correspondents’ Dinner party as little ol’ me. Surely I don’t even deserve to be in his hallowed presence; he’s one of the leading journalistic titans of our age! And me? I’m just a lowly “online troll” who’s never done anything that could be rightly described as “journalism.” Maybe such taunts, however obnoxious, would’ve at least carried a little more weight back when Jim was a vaunted Chief White House CNN Correspondent of slinging daily pre-recorded video segments for Wolf Blitzer — but when you’re now suddenly a fellow “Substacker,” and still think you’re entitled to preach from your mountaintop about who gets to be called a “journalist,” that’s just so hilariously pathetic. But perfectly in character for sniveling Jim.

Jim and his little buddy Tara ran through a series of such wild lies and distortions about Yours Truly — and with such sublime, irreproachable self-certitude — that it’s almost impressive. Acosta claims that he personally witnessed me “harassing” the groundbreaking investigative journalist (and serial quote fabricator / fraudster) Julie K. Brown, and in addition, that I was “not really letting her get away” from me. This is just 100% made up. If you really want, you can consult the surplus of eye-witnesses who will readily dispel this nonsense, including Justin Robert Young, who was right there the entire time. I never made any physical contact with Julie whatsoever, of course — nor would I ever seek to! I’m not retarded! (Jim is the one who decided to introduce physical violence to the mix, lol, by demanding that I “step outside” with him and have an old-fashioned slugfest. To which I of course instantaneously agreed.)

But anyway, no, I was not “blocking” Julie’s movements in any respect, nor did I even have the ability to do that if I wanted to. I literally just walked up to her, at an ostensible media party, introduced myself, and then she immediately started scurrying away like the uncaged rat she is. I then remained within earshot of her for approximately 30 seconds, repeating my paramount question of the night: Does she have any evidence for her ongoing sleazy insinuations that I am being illicitly paid by Epstein co-conspirators? Asking her this worrisome question is apparently what constitutes “harassment,” according to Julie’s petulant pampered worldview — which chivalrous Jim was of course leading the charge to co-sign. Julie evidently regards herself as some kind of Epstein Survivor by Proxy, and therefore believes herself entitled to all the same Survivor Protections the Real Survivors are speciously afforded, meaning: never can they be asked a single discomfiting question about anything, despite raking in millions of dollars tax-free from ill-gotten settlement funds, and appointing themselves international political activists. They constantly huddle with Congress, including as recently as this week, they’re always advocating legislation, and so forth. But you can’t ask them any probing questions about any of it. Rather, the proper role of journalists is to simply Lift Up Their Voices (and the Voices of their profit-seeking lawyers). Julie, by extension, is deserving of the same rigorous protections.

So that’s Big Lie #1 on Jim’s dopey little stream with Tara: there was no “harassment,” and no physical obstruction by me whatsoever.

Jim then dazzles Tara with his exciting tale of how “he [Michael Tracey] and I kind of got into it” — notably without clarifying that he’s the one who drunkenly blurted out the challenge that we “step outside” and physically fight! But of course I’m the presumed Baddie in this whole situation, and therefore also the presumed aggressor. A very savvy omission on Jim’s part, I’ll grant. (Jimbo, if you’re out there, I’m still more than willing to meet you at the time and place of your choosing to “throw hands,” as the kids say, since that’s what you claimed you wanted to do on Saturday night. Let’s go, for real! You want an elbow drop from the top rope? Tombstone piledriver right into the frickin’ concrete?)

Big Lie #2 is when Jim mentions that Tara informed him I had the audacity to show up at “some vigil” earlier in the day, April 25, which is true — the “vigil” in question was not some somber private remembrance ceremony, but a public political event in which legislation such as “Virginia’s Law” was being advocated, and at which members of Congress such as the insufferable Jamie Raskin (D-MD) melodramatically orated. Raskin went the whole nine yards, proclaiming Virginia Roberts Giuffre to be in the same pantheon of American Heroes as Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks! So yeah, I did “show up” to that event, Jim. You at least got that part right. There was also an interpretative dance interlude:

The minute I showed up to this thing, on the frickin’ National Mall mind you, I was swarmed by unknown security goons. Before I could literally do anything at all, except stumble onto the premises, these guys and gals were getting in my face, refusing to identify themselves, and purporting to restrict my movements — claiming they were empowered to dictate who I was allowed to speak with, or not. Obviously what’s going on here is that the Survivor Group Chats light up the instant I’m spotted anywhere these days, so a fake “security” protocol can be activated, and I can be physically blockaded from doing the most basic acts of journalism amongst sainted Epstein Survivors, Inc. One particularly nasty woman, who claimed to be some sort of “safety” volunteer (Hey, Heidi) even at one point started physically grabbing at me, demanding that I not approach the “memorial” stage, and refusing my polite request to keep her grimy paws off my torso. Sure, I could’ve reported her for “battery” or something if I really wanted — the Park Police and National Guard were amusingly puzzled by the whole spectacle — but I was not looking to get any law enforcement involved. I literally just wanted her to buzz off, but she and her nameless colleagues wouldn’t relent. At one point, a group of five weirdos seriously followed me all the way to the Washington Monument! They just wouldn’t leave me alone, so passionate were they in their mission to stymie my ability to do anything journalistically useful.

Tara was apparently there that afternoon too, sneaking around like a dumb little creep, and surreptitiously filming me. Which was fine, I guess: there’s nothing particularly interesting in the footage she intrepidly obtained, beyond me standing there, fruitlessly trying to reason with the Security Goons who designated themselves my unwanted minders, for the crime of merely showing up to a political rally in Our Nation’s Capital. After creep-posting her unremarkable video of me, Tara even linked up on Twitter/X with another Scumbag Tara — the scam-artist currently known as “Tara Reade,” to spread totally made-up garbage about there supposedly being “police records” in my shameful past for having stalked women, which is 100% fictitious. Absolutely never happened — nothing remotely of the sort. So please, Tara(s), go ahead and try to locate those non-existent police records. I’m begging you. Behold the depths to which these scumbags sink:

Tara then tells Jim that at the Epstein Survivors Press Conference back in September 2025, I was “shoving my camera in the faces of survivors,” which also literally never happened. She completely made that up. I do seem to remember Tara doing to me exactly what she falsely accused me of doing to others, but that’s neither here nor there:

So she’s just straight-up lying, over and over again! She explains to Jim that I also “started following her around at the Capitol” that day last September, which I also did not do. There is either something gravely wrong with Tara’s memory, or she’s knowingly confabulating an alternate-reality for herself, in which she’s the benighted heroine. As with the Epstein Survivors, it’s difficult to know one way or another what’s guiding her broken epistemology.

Tara then says Julie K. Brown was having a really rough day on Saturday, because she was so close to Virginia (true enough, Julie dedicated her ridiculous 2021 book to her) — with the idea being that I guess I should have known how emotionally fragile Julie was, and refrained from trying to talk to her at a media party we were both invited to attend. WTF? God, what absolute wimps these hucksters are. I really do hate the term “gaslighting,” but the term does perfectly capture this whole perverse dynamic. Tara bemoans how “sad” and tragic it was that I would “target” Julie under such trying circumstances… by again, walking up to her and introducing myself, which I thought was the whole point of these tedious media parties? Perhaps not — I hadn’t realized that an emotional No Fly Zone had been declared around poor Julie. I deeply apologize for the pain I caused!!!!! I will administer twenty lashes to myself for flouting this important tenet of the Survivor Journo Code.

Tara goes on to declare how “mystified” she is by me in general, and reprises her standard shtick of darkly speculating about what my true motives could possibly be for covering the Epstein saga in the manner I do. She says she resents that I have viciously “attacked” her past journalistic “collaboration” with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a person whose trail of proven confabulations is so vast and mystifying that it would be impossible to rehearse in this post and still keep it a reasonable length. Tara, however, proclaims that she was totally correct all along to “collaborate” with Virginia, because we’ve all subsequently learned that “she was telling the truth,” and her hallucinated fantasies have been vindicated, pursuant to the epochal “anti-trafficking” crusade she was waging, enabled by her cabal of lawyers, publicists, media lackeys like Tara, and various political emissaries. Those are the people that I really have “contempt” for, if I have contempt for anyone, despite Tara telling Jim how suspicious it is that I have such disproportionate contempt for the “survivors” themselves.

Tara then naturally proceeds to rehash our famed Piers Morgan appearance together from February, in which Tara, totally incapable of responding to a single thing I said on the merits, decided to pull out the Joe McCarthy-inspired “Are you now, or have you ever been paid by Epstein co-conspirators” card. Jim remarks that I was caught not answering her sleaze-fest question, because of the random technical glitch with my earpiece — a falsehood Tara eagerly corroborates on the video stream, knowing full well that I did respond to her scummy little question the moment I could actually hear it. Such are the vaunted journalistic standards of Jim Acosta: he couldn’t be bothered to watch the full YouTube panel before rushing on air to impugn me as a guy who goes around avoiding inconvenient questions about whether I’m being secretly paid with pedo blood money.

Jim has a hearty laugh about my admittedly blusterous exhortation in the early hours of April 26 that he haul his butt over to the Hampton Inn where I was staying in DC, so we could finish what he started (wanting to duke it out). He again suggests that I’m the one who first introduced the concept of physically fighting this shithead, when it was literally HIM who got all high on his own White Knight supply and threatened ME! There’s no factual dispute about this, he admits it himself! Yet the sequence of events has been flagrantly misreported all across the godforsaken internet. Alas, what are you gonna do.

Tara again intimates that I must have some kind of corrupt financial motive for my foul Epstein coverage. “What is this man fighting for?” she piously asks of me. “Who is he fighting for?” Because when she finds herself wondering, as she often does, why I am so very “passionate” about this one issue in particular, she says she uses her formidable skills of inferential reasoning to surmise that it must be totally about the money. OK, Tara. Again, I only wish I had access to this great billionaire largesse you keep scummily imagining me to be lavished by. Because I could maybe move out of my one-bedroom apartment in Jersey City, and perhaps also upgrade to a newer model of Hyundai Accent.

Tara mournfully relays that the “survivors” were super distressed when I showed up to the VRG “memorial” on Saturday afternoon, as “it caused a whole commotion,” because the Security Doofuses had no choice but to annoyingly descend on me. NOTEWORTHY DETAIL: I caused absolutely none of this (negligible) commotion! Any commotion which might have transpired was solely due to the consternation apparently triggered by the mere fact of my presence at this public political event. But fine, whatever, I’m the one who’s obviously to blame, and morally sullied for my outrageous conduct. I DISAVOW! I DISAVOW MYSELF. Maybe I’ll go to Little St. Jeff’s in the US Virgin Islands and blow my brains out, right on those heinous sandy beaches, out of penance to Tara and Julie and Jim, so they’ll never again have to be “harassed” by my stumbling visage.

Jim says he “hates to talk about me” any further, because it only “elevates” me in my despicable quest to do… something. What calumny I’m doing exactly, he never quite identifies. (Of course, these two shit-stains have 100% ignored any of the relevant substantive issues this entire time.) He informs his audience that I am truly “repugnant” for having the gall to “go after the truth-tellers” such as Julie, Tara, and I guess the general agglomeration of “survivors” who are now so deeply fearful of me. Jim then advises that I owe an apology to “all of us,” although I’m not sure what cohort he’s exactly referring to as apology-warranting. Regardless, Jim, I hereby apologize for not more assertively demanding that we follow through on your tough-guy drunken threat to throw haymakers in front of the Smithsonian. Because while I am certainly not a natural-born fighter (I think my last fight was when I was approximately 11 and my behaviorally-challenged 12-year-old neighbor randomly charged me on my front lawn) I nonetheless would’ve been happy to let the chips fall where they may that night, fueled by Substacker Adrenaline and a couple of cocktails. I would’ve loved to see your smug face smashed into the sidewalk, thus rendering you a Survivor of sorts, which is clearly what you crave. Maybe you would’ve cried out for Wolf Blitzer to come save your hide, but let me tell you something Jimbo, there’s no Wolf to swoop in and save you anymore. It would’ve been just you and me, alone, exchanging hard blows like Real Men, as the pathetic reality of your failed TV career came crashing down.

Tara then lumps me into the same category as the other “prominent men accused of crimes” who have allegedly also tried to “target the survivors” — as though I’ve got some sordid pedo-sex criminality in my past that I’m desperately trying to cover up, and so need to intimidate the “survivors” from exposing. Jim dutifully nods in his usual wimpy affirmation. These pieces of shit!

To wrap up, finally, Jim and Tara agree that I should be likened to… Donald Trump (?????) because both of us are notorious “bullies,” and we both need to be taught a lesson: that bullies ought to be socked in the face. “I’m sick and tired of bullies like Donald Trump, I think he’s a bully,” Jim bloviates. “I think what this Michael guy was doing over the weekend makes him a bully. And America, we’re tired of bullies… this is the year when bullies, maybe they get punched in the nose!”

Alright Jim: for the millionth friggin’ time: let’s square the fuck up! Right now! Where you wanna meet Jimbo? Las Vegas? Palm Beach? Times Square? In front of the White House? Truly, I will go to the ends of the Earth at this point to grant your wish for a decisive beatdown.

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In the previous installment of this impromptu series, I asked somewhat facetiously if it’s “time to bring back New Atheism.” The shrewdly-crafted headline made it especially easy to catch those of you who decided to respond without bothering to read the actual article first, because in the literal opening sentence, I clarified that no, I am not seriously advocating that “we” should somehow magically re-import the peculiar “New Atheism” of the mid-2000s — now a relic of a bygone era anyways. Because whatever “discourse” correction might be necessary today, it would bear little practical resemblance to that obsolete mini-phenomenon of two decades ago. At the same time, plenty of worrying “discursive” trends can be observed in 2026 that are in some sense successors to what “New Atheism” once identified, and in theory assembled itself to counteract. These maladies have only grown more pervasive, updated for recent political and technological developments. Namely the escalating flurry of unchallenged superstition that’s constantly billowing all around us, with increasingly overt political applications, and with no appreciable barrier really existing anymore between the digital and tactile realms. The present predicament would thus seem to cry out for a newly invigorated “secular” intervention, notwithstanding the inherent difficulties in delineating how this “intervention” would even work, or if it’s even possible at all.

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Take, for instance, a 2021 survey of Americans’ religious attitudes, which found that the demographic by far the most likely to agree with the statement “Top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings” were self-described Biblical Literalists. Note that this survey was conducted during a relatively more embryonic phase of what has since fully blossomed into a mass-scale Pedo Panic — centered, of course, on the belief that the levers of societal power are fundamentally controlled by elite pedophile rings, the ghastly members of which conspire to rule over us all, in furtherance of their pedophilic interests. Systematic mass rape of children, accordingly, is omni-present and deliberately unpunished, as the evildoers are forever shielded from “accountability.” You know the drill — it’s the defining mythos of our age!

Just a few years ago — 2021! — this sort of belief was mainly seen through the lens of wild-eyed internet manias such as QAnon, and therefore understood as the province of the “Populist Right” — an admittedly nebulous political category, but one which, broadly construed, could be reasonably said to correlate with what one might call the more fervid styles of “grassroots” Christianity. Or more specifically, the unlimited varieties of homegrown American Protestantism, subject as they are to no hierarchical constraints around proper biblical exegesis, with no formal clerical authority promulgating any binding doctrinal decrees. Your average local pastor can be his own supreme theologian. The ensuing beliefs are often aggressively “political,” in the sense of Americanized partisan self-sorting — and commonly preached with a distinctively frantic, catastrophist urgency. Disdain for cultural liberalism is the default, and by extension, disdain for the modern Democratic Party. So it’s not a huge stretch for avowed believers in Biblical Literalism to infer that if Democrats are already wreckers of traditional Christian morality, and thus already doing Satan’s bidding, it would naturally follow that they’d likewise be running occult pedo rings out of the Clinton Foundation basement.

Hence, the loose political logic weaving together Biblical Literalism and Pedo Panic is easily explicable. But surely it would have to go deeper than just standard partisan expedience? Surely there must be some more elemental epistemic overlap between 1) Believing in floridly unregulated incarnations of Christianity and 2) Being primed to believe in floridly unregulated theories around demonic pedophile networks. The habits of mind inculcated by the former must be doing something to inculcate the latter… right? Because if you’re willing to accept the literal truth of various primeval myths — such as that millennia ago, after an earthquake purportedly struck ancient Palestine, masses of graves suddenly opened, corpses arose from their eternal slumber, gained some sort of sentience, and were spotted traversing around Jerusalem — you would seem to have embraced certain habits of mind that would foreseeably incline you to embrace myriad modern-day myths, without much regard for the soundness of their evidentiary basis.

A funny thing happened in the years following that 2021 survey: Democrats started embracing their own politically expedient version of QAnon! The DNC and similar organs now routinely taunt Republicans as the “Pedophile Protection Party,” as though that’s their core, animating mission. What to make of this development from the standpoint of religious versus secular epistemology? Because although religious belief has by no means been expurgated from Left-liberal precincts, Democrats do have the relatively more secularized coalition, among which there are relatively few Biblical Literalists. Yet increasingly, we see even loud-and-proud liberal atheist pundits like Bill Maher starting to proclaim that as of 2026, they have no choice but to agree that QAnon was fundamentally right all along — even if Bill might continue to have marginal reservations about the more extravagant side-plots, i.e. the cannibalism and infant sacrifice stuff. Nonetheless, whatever mode of information-processing Bill’s been employing as of late has evidently led him to conclude that yes, wow, it turns out there really are these deviously hidden networks of villainous pedo-traffickers that run everything.

You might reasonably ask: Wait, doesn’t this throw a monkey wrench into my whole thesis? That there’s an overriding need for some full-throated “secular” corrective, in view of the baleful discursive problems currently plaguing us? Because I certainly couldn’t blame “religion” as such for Bill Maher and his liberal fellow-travelers, themselves (mostly) irreligious — or at least not traditionally “religious” — peddling such crank conspiratard nonsense. Right?

Well, here’s one way to think about it: certain haywire beliefs, and the habits of mind underpinning them, have a way of percolating outward from their religious progenitors, especially when aided by the pulsating vortex of modern techno-innovation. All must bow before the Almighty Algorithm. Or in other words, beliefs which might have once been largely confined to a Biblical Literalist fringe can progressively infiltrate other sectors of the epistemic landscape. And the next thing you know, nominally “secular” folk end up just as blinkered by scatterbrain “religious” prophecies — perhaps with some light modifications added to accommodate their pre-existing worldviews. Presumably, Bill Maher has not yet come to believe that the harrowing elite pedo-rings are supernaturally engineered by Satan in a grand cosmic plot to sabotage Christianity. However, the basic elements of the belief Bill has adopted can still be traced back to the dysregulated patterns of thought that strongly correlate with, and in large measure derive from, exactly the sorts of fervid religiosity that Bill would otherwise claim to deplore.

Maybe a healthy dose of irreligiosity, or at least aversion to disordered mythological thinking, would’ve been helpful as the internet frenetically trawled through the latest rounds of “Epstein Files.” Because yeah, that definitely felt like a situation where widespread impairment of critical faculties was less than ideal. Scores of social media users were flooded with a tsunami of scandalous-seeming government records, and voila: an overnight online consensus emerged that these “files” contained rock-solid proof of rampant pedo-raping activities. Everyone’s worst fears about secret occult sex rituals were true! Email participants were totally speaking in code — communicating their depraved plans by winking reference to random foodstuffs. Yadda yadda yadda.

How might some “irreligious” intervention have supplied a useful corrective here? The “files,” of course, did not contain the sensational pedo-crime evidence that the internet uniformly agreed they contained. But what’s that got to do with monotheism, you ask? How does this have any connection to the tenets of Christianity or Islam? Well, for one thing, if you were delving into those poorly-organized archives with an eye toward rooting out material that would validate your pre-existing belief in a certain supernatural mythos — such as that Satan is actively interceding in human affairs, and can take possession of corporeal bodies, whereby the demonically-possessed hosts are beguiled into performing graphic child sex rituals — you’re probably not starting off on the soundest empirical footing as you embark on your document analysis journey.

Given the reality of algorithmic incentives, and the baseline human credulity that exists anyway since time immemorial, foregrounding a “religious” analytical method for evaluating Epstein Files can bleed out rather easily into “non-religious” interpretive paradigms — that is, sublimated by people who may not even consciously affirm any belief in a supernatural “Satan” entity. But they still encounter and absorb, at extraordinarily high volumes, the epistemic habits of the quintessentially “religious” — insofar as it’s a quintessentially religious conviction that demons are the proximate cause of perceived political and social troubles. A well-founded “corrective” intervention would thus undertake to explain the rather big flaws in a Satan-based framework for processing important information, such as the evidentiary prerequisites for bringing criminal charges. Emphasis might be placed on the special pitfalls of this uninhibited superstition amidst a giant free-for-all social media firestorm. The resulting lessons would be applicable whether or not any particular individual is a conscious believer in monotheism. Because legions of unsuspecting internet users are consuming these ascendant Podcastological theories — their habits of mind increasingly molded by epistemic tendencies which are “religious” in the first instance, even if those individuals would never personally self-describe as believers in Biblical Literalism.

I should also confide my longstanding intuition that there’s something especially salutary about the “atheistic” impulse when it comes to journalistic pursuits. Not that journalists (or anyone else) ought to be going around “evangelizing” for atheism, or flamboyantly confronting monotheism-believers about their illogical religious commitments. It’s simply that atheism — or perhaps more accurately, the non-subscription to any totalizing systems of supernatural belief — is manifestly the superior starting point if one has set out to observe, document, and synthesize earthly phenomena. Let’s say you hear about some unusual event that’s purportedly happening, and you want to go discover the truth of it, to the best of your ability. Isn’t your discovery process going to be severely hampered if you start off by assuming that the event in question can, or even must, be explainable by reference to some unprovable supernatural force? Believing things on “faith” is generally not a reliable heuristic for conducting journalism. Quite the opposite, in fact: it can egregiously distort your capacity to accurately ascertain things, weigh competing evidential claims, assess credibility, and so forth. The building blocks of journalism! When what you’re looking for is evidence, hunches of divine authorship cannot suffice. Neither can invoking some holy writ you’ve already assumed the truth of since childhood. Because if the relevant truth-conferring authority is uniquely not subject to the same standards of empirical corroboration you’d apply to any other “non-religious” phenomena, haven’t you suspended your truth-seeking rigor in a way that journalism obviously cannot countenance?

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Trump sent his stooges Jughead Jared, Witless Witkoff, and Jittery JD to Islamabad last weekend to deliver surrender terms under the pretense of “negotiations” — immediately upon the conclusion of which, he ordered a Naval Blockade, right in the middle of the supposedly ongoing “ceasefire” that had been declared a few days prior, with conspicuously unspecified terms.

US military assets have been arrayed against Iran in a holding-pattern posture since the onset of this so-called “ceasefire” — “locked and loaded” — with thousands more troops deployed in the meantime. The “ceasefire” has not brought de-escalation, as the term would seem to superficially imply, but escalation — a Naval Blockade is an act of war by any intelligible definition, and Trump brags this one is even more powerful than the Blockade he previously imposed on Venezuela. Hopefully most of us still retain the capacity to remember things that happened more than five seconds ago, and can summon the memory of what the Venezuela Blockade was a precursor to.

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This whole Iran “ceasefire” period since April 7, slated to expire after a two-week window on April 21, has been an extremely transparent ruse. The point of the ruse, as can be observed over and over again with Trump’s policy on Iran, is to justify further military action — an almost identical reprise of what transpired in February 2026 and June 2025. That is: send Steve Wiktoff and Jared Kushner to conduct ostensible “negotiations,” and declare that the only acceptable “negotiated” outcome is one that would require Iran to submit, humiliatingly, to maximalist US dictates. That was the M.O. when Witkoff was “negotiating” at Trump’s behest in April/May/June 2025, at which time he similarly sauntered in with demands that Iran renounce all uranium enrichment, and dismantle their nuclear facilities under US and Israeli supervision. In other words, self-inflict an abject national humiliation. Anyone who’s followed the Iran nuclear issue for any length of time, including pre-Trump, would have instantly recognized that even the most “moderate” Iranian political factions could never accept such a “deal.” And so, predictably — as had been resoundingly telegraphed — the outcome was war.

Fast-forward to February 2026, and Kushner has been inserted into the diplomatic mix, following the great triumphs he supposedly achieved with his management of the Russia/Ukraine portfolio (whatever happened with that?) and his business-savvy development of a new governance strategy for Gaza, whereby his father-in-law had been appointed the territory’s new Supreme Leader — with Jared himself organizing the new Gazan police force, among other innovative nation-building projects. That “ceasefire” was also not quite a “ceasefire,” in the sense that fire has not ceased in Gaza, even if the outright pulverization offensive was temporarily dialed back. Lo and behold, the ceasefire also served as a perfect opportunity for Israel to regroup and prepare for the Big Enchilada, Iran, without being interminably bogged down by the nuisance of Hamas.

In early 2026, Jared and Wiktoff continued right where Trump left off in Summer 2025, repeating the “zero enrichment” surrender condition in the new round of Oman-mediated “negotiations.” In short order, per blindingly obvious recurring pattern, the bombing would soon again re-commence.

And now we’re in another phase of the alleged “negotiations,” with Vance shoehorned in for the Pakistan junket, bearing demands that were just as maximalist as ever, perhaps even more so, with the Strait of Hormuz added as another “diplomatic” flashpoint. Despite triumphantly announcing a few days ago that the Strait was gloriously open for business, Trump now says Iran has “Totally Violated” the agreement that had supposedly been reached, as the IRGC began firing on commercial vessels. Notably unresolved: the paradox that the Strait was somehow “open,” even as Trump forcefully clarified that his Blockade would continue unabated, barring usage of the relevant Iranian ports. So that was another jumble of gibberish, which of course never made any sense as a sustainable resolution to the conflict. What made far more sense: it was another precursor to aggressive military action, since Trump could surely claim, as he has this morning, that Iran was in “violation” of some agreement that he mostly seems to have conjured in his own head.

So today he declares “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY” and repeats his threats from two weeks ago to blow up the entire country if Iran does not capitulate within approximately 72 hours, pursuant to the “negotiations” he’s sending off Jared and Witkoff to oversee. (Kiss of Death.) And some people will still treat this whole charade with unwavering credulity. How much more data could you possibly need?!?! For Christ’s sake. (Sorry for taking the Lord’s name in vain. I disavow.)

But seriously, do you think Trump is just kidding around when he demands “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”? And threatens to blow up the whole of Iran, so as to destroy the existing state apparatus? (Destruction of which would seem to be a necessary precondition for imposing “unconditional surrender” — the same condition imposed on Japan and Germany in WWII.)

Most of the stuff Trump has threatened to do with respect to Iran, he’s ultimately done! It’s not just a “bluff,” or run-of-the-mill “Art of the Deal” bravado.

— In March 2025, he said if Iran did not capitulate within 60 days, “there will be bombing.” There was in fact the promised bombing, in June 2025, the minute the 60 day ultimatum window expired.

— In June 2025, he threatened to assassinate the Supreme Leader. In February 2026, he did it. “I got him before he got me,” Trump said, hours after “Operation Epic Fury” was launched. “They tried twice. Well I got him first."

— In September 2024, he gave a prepared speech threatening to bomb the entirety of Iran to “smithereens,” and destroy “the country itself.” That’s currently in progress. “If they don’t sign this deal, the whole country is going to get blown up,” Trump said today, April 19.

— He’s called for “regime change” (or more accurately, “regime destruction”) in June 2025, January 2026, and February 2026 (non-exhaustive). That is also currently in progress.

— In April 2026, he threatened to wipe out all of Iranian civilization, which he seemingly defines as bombing their remaining national infrastructure, perhaps with some ancient Persian cultural sites thrown in for good measure. Since issuing this threat, he and his stooges have been laying the groundwork to effectuate it. (Pete Hegseth must be prayerfully salivating at the prospect.)

Is it really so implausible to fathom that he’d actually go ahead with this oft-threatened plan, and bomb the entire country back to the “Stone Age,” just as he’s been vowing to do over and over? That’s where this policy trajectory has always been headed. There was a time when it seemed just as extreme and implausible that he would actually go ahead and assassinate the Supreme Leader. Threats to that effect were just his standard hardball “negotiating,” we were assured.

UPDATE BECAUSE I FORGOT TO INCLUDE THIS: “To the victor belong the spoils,” Trump said on April 6. That’s his declared intention for the ultimate end-state in Iran. As he’s explained, this vision includes him personally selecting the next Iranian political leadership (as with Venezuela) and also personally controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Because he would love to “take the oil” — one of his few consistently-articulated (and increasingly, implemented) foreign policy convictions. None of these Trump-declared goals are attainable if the current governmental structure of the Islamic Republic remains in place.

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This is Part One in a multi-part ad hoc series. I don’t know how many parts there will ultimately be, so relax.

No, I’m not going to seriously argue that “we” should somehow “bring back” the particular brand of “New Atheism” that briefly gained popularity in the mid-to-late 2000s — mostly as a function of its association with a handful of high-profile figures like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, etc. Whatever that phenomenon was exactly, it was very much specific to a bygone political and cultural era. Partly what catalyzed it was a burgeoning sense that various flavors of monotheistic zealotry had been allowed far too much sway in matters of “public discourse,” without any satisfactory rebuttal. This felt all the more irritating, because Americans who considered themselves atheists, agnostics, or otherwise irreligious had for some time been a rapidly growing demographic, and yet were conspicuously under-represented in the public arena, which still valorized traditional religiosity as a moral model to which all should aspire. The related idea that religious belief must be treated as sacrosanct, and therefore uniquely immunized from critique — even blistering critique where appropriate — was a taboo many saw as long overdue for some unapologetic jettisoning. Even if it might come at the expense of offending “people of faith,” another weird Bush-era coinage. And so into that void swept the “New Atheists” — with their brash personalities, media fluency, above-average vocabularies, and knack for stirring up rancor.

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Some of the latent grievances that gave rise to “New Atheism” were perfectly defensible. I’ll admit that I personally harbored many of them, and eagerly inhaled all the best-selling “New Atheist” books. Yes, I have a signed copy of “God Is Not Great” by Hitchens. Yes, I watched all the early YouTube “debate” videos. And why shouldn’t I have? Questions around the existence or non-existence of God are always going to be thrilling on some level to contemplate, and publicly joust over. Because by golly, aren’t these supposed to be the most profound questions of all? Beyond the age-old philosophical arguments, it struck me as eminently sensible that reintroducing some form of muscular “secularism” to popular consciousness was a worthy endeavor, despite the unavoidable vagaries of what exactly that would entail.

Remember, this was a period when George W. Bush was seen to have turbo-charged the influence of politically-domineering Evangelical Christianity — with all its moralizing bluster, hostility to scientific advancement (“stem-cell research” was a big flashpoint then) and signature hypocritical censoriousness. Not to mention the War on Terror, and the Iraq War in particular, being routinely framed as a titanic “Clash of Civilizations” with apocalyptic religious overtones. Although ironically, it should be said that even during the headiest days of the G. W. Bush years, there was hardly anything as extreme as the Pete Hegseth prayer-tirades of late, in which the self-proclaimed “War Secretary” showily beseeches the Almighty to “pour out your wrath” on the Nation of Iran, and unleash “overwhelming violence” on their infrastructural assets, so that the United States Military might be empowered to “break the teeth of the ungodly.” It’s doubly ironic that this stuff is so in-our-faces today, because although Bush was himself a professing Evangelical, it’s almost impossible to imagine him countenancing such garish displays of blood-thirsty zeal, especially as sermonized with the imprimatur of the Pentagon. Conversely, no one in their right mind would associate Donald Trump with earnest piety of any sort, but he’s clearly got no issue allowing the Hegseth Holy War talk to flourish under his Administration. Perhaps this is in part because of Trump’s own personal apathy toward matters of the divine. I mean, for Christ’s sake, here’s a guy who just casually posted a brazen idolatry meme of himself in the visage of Jesus Christ — a straightforwardly heretical act if there ever was one, at least if you subscribe to a doctrine that regards such things as “heresy.”

Back in the “New Atheist” heyday, tracts like “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” were emblematic. I read that book, by the left-wing journalist Chris Hedges, around the time it came out in 2007; the thesis was basically that a menacing new Fascism was taking hold in America, and if we right-minded citizens didn’t get our act together, shock troops would soon be marching down Main Street USA with a Bible in one hand and an AK-47 in the other. We were warned, in essence, that the country was on the brink of full-blown militarized theocracy. It should be said, however, that Hedges rejected any common cause with the most visible “New Atheists,” insisting that his own immersion in theological study had shown him the problem was not religion itself, only the politicized perversion of it — notwithstanding the wholesale anti-religious repudiation favored by “New Atheists.” Hedges also took exception with Hitchens, Harris, et al. making a big stink about the purported crisis of “Islamofascism” — a curious portmanteau that grew out of their mounting frustration that Islamist suicide-bombers were complicating what they viewed as the otherwise virtuous efforts by the Bush Administration to administer a fruitful US military occupation in Iraq.

So if not “New Atheism” per se, what exactly might we want to “bring back” in 2026? Well, we could start by identifying certain problems that seem painfully characteristic of the current era, at least when it comes to “public discourse.” (Perceived flaws in “public discourse” having been what catalyzed that earlier iteration of “New Atheism.”) Because it seems many of these present-day problems are traceable to a worrisome trend of accelerating tolerance/validation/embrace of wild and crazy superstition as a heuristic for apprehending the world. Accordingly, the disordered habits of mind that invariably accompany such superstitious belief have been allowed to proliferate across the board, without any real challenge.

This trend is encouraged and amplified, of course, by the Goliath of social media — which was barely a blip on the radar two decades ago, but today infuses everything. For instance, more and more people (with larger and larger followings) seem to think it’s totally cool, and not at all embarrassing, to attribute what they see as troublesome political and social developments to the alleged existence of demons. And we’re not just talking about “soft demonology” here — an abstract supposition that metaphysical “evil” always lurks in the background, tempting humanity with its wicked lure. No, we’re talking about the unabashed belief in active and identifiable demonic intercession in the earthly realm, and even in the corridors of government, such that anything which might go awry — politically, socially, militarily, or otherwise — is best understood as the nefarious intrusion of Satan, and/or his council of demon assistants. (Really.)

That this stuff now rockets around the internet virtually unchallenged is not just crazy-making in its own right, I’d argue — it’s very damaging to society. Much of it you might call Tuckerology, since he’s definitely one of the foremost proselytizers, having apparently convinced himself that he’s undergone some major religious epiphany since departing Fox News. Recently, he avowed that the United States is under “greater demonic attack” than ever before in our history. And he’s not being metaphorical about it. Especially disturbing was his latest foray into revival of “Satanic Ritual Abuse” claims — it was only a matter of time — which he conveyed to his mass audience with deadly seriousness, alongside a Catholic priest purporting to specialize in exorcism procedures. So we can almost certainly expect a marked uptick in podcast listeners reporting new cases of demonically-induced child sex crime, whether by “recovering” their own long-lost memories of such, or claiming to observe it contemporaneously among children exhibiting various behavioral problems.

According to the priest, the prevalence of Satanic child sex abuse surged in the 1980s, but then inexplicably “plateaued” for awhile, and is now back with a vengeance. Neither he nor Tucker appear to wonder what the explanation for this strange cyclicality might be: did Satan and his subordinate demons (such as Baal, the demon of fornication, and Loki, the demon of mischief) randomly decide to take a break in the 1990s, maybe because the economy was booming and the Soviet Union just collapsed? Or perhaps it has something to do with recurring cycles of media-fomented hype around scary demonological dangers? Because there definitely was such a cycle in the 1980s, and another one is now ramping up in the 2020s. But maybe that’s just a big coincidence. Maybe that’s what Satan wants us to think.

When this bunk gets commercialized and shoveled out for mass consumption — no doubt, there’s a huge market for such garbage — it gets packaged with a kind of baked-in conceit that to challenge any of these beliefs, no matter how loopy and brain-melted, would be an affront to Christianity itself. And would therefore be deeply wrong, because we dare not offend the sincere Christian believers by denigrating a long-established tenet of their “faith.” Christians believe in demons, and have since antiquity, we’re told — so just DEAL WITH IT. Rebuking this resurgent demonological worldview would be tantamount to rebuking Christianity itself, or at least Catholicism, depending on how you care to taxonomize the demon-belief chart.

OK… fine. I suppose we have to rebuke Christianity itself then. Not because every Christian must subscribe to the wackiest podcast spin that Tucker puts on his own demon blather, but because with or without Tucker, there has never been any good reason to believe that demons are roaming the land, infiltrating corporeal vessels at Satan’s direction. (If you believe in a conception of “demons” that is more metaphorical in nature, you are of less immediate concern, but the latest surge in demonological frenzy does not seem remotely confined to figurative expressions of “evil” or whatever.)

A reasonable person might ask: Huh? What does any this have to do with “religion” per se? Aren’t you just complaining about Tucker again? Didn’t you just get done telling us that “New Atheists” always said the real problem was religion itself — not just the most whacked-out manifestations of religious belief? And if we’re not “bringing back” New Atheism, surely we’re also not “bringing back” their blanket excoriations of all religion! Right?!?! Aaaahhhh!!!

Well, for one thing, this explosion of peasant-like superstition goes far beyond the digital walls of the Tucker Carlson Network, even though there are legions of impressionable “influencers” and politicians eagerly taking cues from Tucker’s own supernatural “journey,” and then subsuming its features into their own “content.” Case in point: JD Vance proclaiming his newfound belief that UFOs are actually “celestial beings” ordered by Satan to “fly around doing weird things to people.” This stuff is propagating to the public at a preposterous scale, thanks to the one supernatural entity we’re all forced to worship: the Almighty Algorithm.

But sure, there’s nothing new about an outsized demand for divinely-inspired nutbaggery among the denizens of the internet, and among humans in general. Crank eschatological prophecies, medical quack cures, ascription of misfortunes to Satanic interference, and so forth — this has all been around for ages. What’s new is that the “podcast sphere” — also known as Podcastistan, home of the Podcast Creatures — has become so unavoidably dominant in terms of audience reach and political leverage. And in this ascendant loon-infested sphere, any barrier that may have previously existed between the fixations of the freakoid fringes and the biggest bullhorns in the entire media ecosystem has been thoroughly evaporated.

So now we have this giant engine of madcap religious fervor bellowing at us 24/7, inculcating all kinds of warped pathologies, which are quite ominous, at least if you’d prefer for society’s mechanisms of knowledge-production to be somewhat anchored in reason. The feeble-minded magical thinking, bestowal of political and professional rewards for indulging in the craziest shit, the ballooning susceptibility to mass hysteria and moral panic, etc. — these are the fruits of the current infotainment environment. Not to mention genuinely grave matters of public concern being reduced to the equivalent of voodoo, as demonstrated by Tucker blaming the Iran War on a spooky “spell” that has tragically overtaken Donald Trump, whom Tucker claims to have recently discovered has no control over the Executive Branch.

Mind you, when Tucker starts declaring that Trump is “enslaved” by Israel, he isn’t making an evidence-based argument about Israel wielding too much power in the American political system. He’s positing that a supernatural curse has befallen the Commander-in-Chief, and if salvation doesn’t arrive soon, we’ll all be hurtling headfirst into the apocalypse. For example, after Trump issued his especially unhinged Easter threat to annihilate all of Iranian civilization, Tucker’s immediate response was to unsubtly theorize that Trump might actually be the Anti-Christ — without asserting this directly, of course. But everyone who was clued-in got the message: Trump is being manipulated by Satan (via Israel) as part of some grand cosmic plot to exterminate Christianity. That this could be interpreted by huge swaths of the citizenry as a non-insane diagnosis of US foreign policy just speaks to how outlandishly contaminated everything has gotten — which, yes, does strongly suggest some need for a full-throated corrective. Maybe not by importing obsolete “New Atheism” from the 2000s, but something. Something that could muscularly combat this campaign to disastrously impair the critical faculties of millions. No one in their right mind should welcome the mass-adoption of hallucinatory short-cuts for reasoning about consequential public affairs. There’s nothing positive to be gained by telling the average YouTube viewer that defaulting to vaguely mystical “conspiracism” is a solid means by which to process information, even if it’s being advertised under the banner of Christianity, or “religion” in general — which of course we’re supposed to solemnly respect, and withhold any rudeness toward, as a matter of common decency. But wait: what if it’s true that the origins of such fallacious thinking can be traced back to religious belief itself? And not just Tucker’s latest haywire capitulation of it?

Here’s where I have no choice but to get a bit edgy. I’m certainly not calling for anyone to go around evangelizing “atheism” per se. But I do think that a rational corrective to this insanity would have to include some resolute defense of the atheistic instinct — or at least of irreligiosity in some form or fashion. A few qualifiers: No, I don’t plan on obnoxiously confronting or “debating” anyone about their private religious views, just for the hell of it, and especially not ordinary people just going about their lives. (When it comes to woefully influential Podcast Creatures, the calculus necessarily changes.) I’m not going to lecture you, or anyone, to suddenly renounce your long-held religious convictions, merely because doing so would give me some sniveling self-satisfaction, because I’m so pompously sure that your religious convictions are dumb. I won’t be barreling into the Ozarks to upbraid local townsfolk who believe in demons. I won’t even tell the Podcast Creatures that they’re stupid if they don’t abandon the religious doctrines they’ve probably accepted to one degree or another since childhood.

But I’m also not going to arbitrarily credit this stuff as a rational heuristic for evaluating worldly affairs, or ascertaining moral wisdom, or deciphering political developments, just because certain people might take offense. “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” or to be more precise, a thoroughgoing defense of empiricism and reasoned, evidence-based inquiry — abundantly supported by a centuries-old corpus of philosophical and scientific pursuit — does not arbitrarily get negated because you like to chant “Christ is King” on the internet, or because you have fond memories of attending Church on Sundays with your grandma. Or even because you presently attend Church (or a Mosque or a Synagogue or whatever). The sincerity of your beliefs does not obviate the need to explain why totalizing monotheistic belief systems contain a direct route to the risible windbaggery now dominating the podcast circuit.

It’s also not a sufficient rebuttal to barrage me with the “Shrek wearing a fedora” meme, which for years I’ve had hurled my way whenever (on rare occasion!) I happen to evince some sign that I do not affirm, or accept the substantive validity of, whatever monotheistic dogma you’ve endorsed, based on ancient texts purporting to describe supernatural phenomena that took place in the Middle East thousands of years ago. Yeah, I know it’s trendy to deride as “cringe” anyone skeptical of grandiose supernatural claims. And that it’s really “based” to submit to the rule of some claimed supernatural authority. Failure to do so will result in you being instantly typecast as a smug, Cheeto-eating Reddit user.

I admit the following throwaway tweet of mine from nine years ago was kind of frivolous, and even needlessly provocative. Still, the basic point stands:

This article got much longer than I expected when I first started writing it, so I chopped off the (forthcoming) second half. Please do not take this initial entry as any kind of fully comprehensive treatise, intended to address every conceivable counter-argument. I haven’t even really made the argument yet! (And maybe never will!) I wrote this partially as a self-serving exercise in “thinking aloud” — gathering my thoughts about something that’s been irking me, but which I couldn’t quite articulate in any succinct way. “Part Two,” to be published soon, will delve into my own personal trajectory of religiosity and irreligiosity. I will propose that an “irreligious” disposition — baseline skepticism toward any kind of totalizing supernatural worldview — is especially helpful (even imperative?) when it comes to the practice of journalism. I will also distinguish “traditional” forms of religiosity from the more “secular” forms that also arise all-too-frequently in the modern era. (I’m against the latter, too.) The increasing secularization of the populace should by no means be taken to imply any sort of renaissance in rational thought. For the purposes of keeping this endeavor somewhat contained, I’m not going to branch out into any significant discussion of “Eastern” religions; I will stick with “monotheism,” which I define for practical purposes as encompassing Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. And yes, I’m aware that each of these three contains infinite multitudes and irresolvable internal debates. Again, this isn’t intended as an all-inclusive treatment of what is quite possibly the “biggest” subject that humanity has ever grappled with. It’s about locating an unwelcome trend in “public discourse,” and pondering what might be most profitably done as a corrective. The next “part” of this ad hoc series will be paywalled, so please consider subscribing if you’ve found this at all interesting. (If you haven’t found it interesting, I bear no grudge.) And yes, I of course came up with a way to shoehorn in Epstein.

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Anyway, following his resignation, Joe Kent jumped immediately onto the Podcast Circuit. Which is rife with epistemic problems, as we’ve often discussed. So I wanted to get into some things with him that maybe he has not addressed yet, or at least hadn’t addressed from the angle that I wanted to approach from.

Matt Taibbi was supposed to co-pilot the interview, but his hotel Wifi crapped out and he had to abort. Don’t fret though, because Joe Kent has graciously agreed to join the two of us on a forthcoming expeditionary mission to Greenland.

Let me know what you think.

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