Very fair of you. Tracy, who seems to be a bit of a misanthrope, has been dogged on this story trying to “stick to the facts”. He seems to be an old school, annoying “journalist” asking impertinent questions. Just what we need.
He wrote for Rolling Stone at the time. My take was he took the liberal line on everything and wasn't very balanced and frequently used the f-word. I'm not a prude but I think journalists should avoid gratuitous swearing. Now I think we still differ politically but he stands for so much of what I stand for - free speech, pro-America, pro working class, while not diving into being a pro welfare-stater.
Right or wrong that was my view. Whether I was right or not then doesn't matter to me - I support him now, even the few times we disagree.
Don't forget Matt's support for common sense and following the facts where they lead instead of bending to The Narrative. This is the real reason he's now a far-right Hitler like most of the rest of us.
My evolution of opinion of Matt Taibbi tracks with yours. When he wrote for RS I thought he was another liberal douche, but when he had the courage and integrity to stand up against the mainstream -- at great peril to his own career and well-being -- he earned my deep respect. I've been a subscriber to his Substack since the beginning.
"Don't forget Matt's support for common sense and following the facts where they lead instead of bending to The Narrative."
This is spot on and also a major reason I've come around to being a Matt Taibbi fan (and our youngest son is named Matt...). Journalists (I use that advisedly because Matt is more of a journalist than the vast majority of mainstream "journalists" everywhere) must be more like Matt, following the facts regardless of where they lead, asking questions and demanding answers and not looking at everything through a partisan lens. Matt is much closer to my ideal of a journalist than most others and that's why I'm a paid subscriber.
I loved his writing for RS, probably because I never liked Wall Street, big banksters, Dubya or Dick Cheney. I always considered Matt an open-minded liberal, willing to engage the opposition and unwilling to swallow the mainstream pabulum.
For years I’ve only subscribed to people to my Left; in order to avoid confirmation bias. I was a bit nervous about this but was very pleasantly surprised to find their Venn Diagram of values overlapped mine about 85% of the time.
Hi Tom, you do not name names, so hard to judge what you really mean. If you are talking about some liberals, they have some core values that are very deleterious (my fancy word for the day). 1. Too emotional…leads to toxic empathy. 2. Lack of common sense. 3. Tend to support the Narrative reflexively, whereas any kind of confirmation bias should be watched for. 4. Seem to have little regard for facts and logic. 5. Enjoy gossip and guilt by association too much. 6. Solipsistic. Uninterested and unsympathetic to opposing views. 7. ‘I’m smarter than everyone else.”
Aside from that, they are very entertaining people, and commonly quite gregarious. Fun to hang around.
Can you unambiguize this? I can't tell if my comment is fucking atrocious or fucking awesome or fucking mundane or fucking funny or a fucking failure. Do I want to fucking know? But please don't fuck with me! ;)
Mr. Supreme, how will you fund a pony for everyone? Ponies do not just fall out of the sky. Are you aware of, or been affected by, the dangers of secondhand glitter inhalation?
Call it the Blogger's Prerogative (aka The Substack Shuffle or 'the blind leading the blind). The Substack poster, in this case Matt Taibbi, can get on his high horse and catch errors in the MSM while he can post content rife with error, sensationalism and deception and are never held to account. The one exception is when Taibbi left his basement to go on the Mehdi Hasan show, and the fig leaf was torn away. Speaking of which, Matt did you ever post corrections for your glaring errors on the Twitter Files? Do you recall telling us 20 million Tweets were flagged for removal as part of the Censorship Industrial Complex (the actual number flagged for review by the EIP was less than 3,000 and no recommendation was made as to actions taken). You also grossly conflated private entities with government agencies, and you conflated content moderation as censorship.
Don't get me wrong--cynical, curmudgeonly and obnoxious are right up my alley--but unless you are murdered by a politician on a press tour, Michael Tracey ain't gonna do shit.
Let me be clear--confronting politicians at press conferences is not journalism. Not even close. At that point you are just on tour following the dead--to sell necklaces and t-shirts.
Now, Tracey gets a million points for actually reading things--still amazingly rare among journalists--but he is so anti-intuitive that he still ends up under water.
Personal confrontation is not journalism--it's just streamer engagement bullshit.
Agree. But his writing and interview style can be a hard slog for anyone not motivated to focus on the essential facts. Relieved you’re taking it up. This issue is harder to talk to people about than Russiagate ever was.
Tracey did yeoman work on Russiagate almost from the get-go. He, along with Matt and Aaron Mate all did stellar work on that story throughout. I’m forever grateful. Looking forward to Matt’s findings on the Epstein saga.
Not a strong enough move to get me to resubscribe to the New York Times, but it is heartening that there’s at least one good journalist on the payroll.
I file The Gray Lady in my “Propaganda” folder along with most of the MSM. The transition to online and the majority stake purchase by a Mexican billionaire killed her. She’s just an activist rag now like most of the others .
There is literally no reason I again would subscribe to the Times unless every company everywhere stopped making paper and I had to use it to stuff boxes.
From genuine journalists, who are sadly all too few now, and from those of us who subscribe. Unlike some, I never disliked Matt's writing, even for Rolling Stone, though we do not agree politically. He has always impressed me as trying to get to the realities, the facts, and I have a great deal of respect for that, especially since the vast majority of soi disant "journalists" eschew that approach on principle (or the lack). We need Matt Taibbi, whether we agree with him on all points or not.
I agree that Epstein is just one in a long list of “worst reported.” Epstein is a gift to politicians that keeps on giving, unzipped when useful. Tucked away and forgotten when not so much.
You're letting the NYTimes writer off too easily. The "correction" still conveys the impression that Epstein was convicted of pimping a 14-year-old. I don't doubt that he did it -- he was a total sleaze -- but that wasn't what he was convicted of doing, and the distinction between accusations and convictions is kind of important.
I live in a neck of the woods where 14 looks 24. I guess I've lived long enough to have become jaded in the wicked ways of the world, but this story resonates with me more as exploitation of the vulnerable than of statutory rape. The girls were plenty old enough to be thought of as willing victims.
I made a similar comment elsewhere in reply to someone claiming the girls' "lives were ruined," which is complete bullshit. They weren't abducted; they knew exactly what they were doing and got paid well for it. Hell, many of them even recruited each other.
I don't know where these creeps got all their girls. From the sound of it, he went through an enormous number of them. Some of them were willing recruits but I expect a number were forced/trafficked. I have no idea where most of them came from.
If the media, including the NYT, were better at reporting, people would care more about all human trafficking, not just the celebrity adjacent. Let it rip, Racket.
There is no Epstein story. He was already tried and convicted and was about to be tried again but not involving underage. So Matt's investigation is going to come up with: there's nothing really there, especially no other men involved.
And that's why he says he is going to be very unpopular, because everybody thinks that they know everything about this and that there are all these other men who are pedophiles, who are being hidden by Epstein, which just isn't true.
I'm no expert on this story, but I don't have to be. The biggest problem I see with with it is the beyond-ridiculous avoidance and dismissal given the likely gravity of the scenario, and yours is typical.
We have an mountain of circumstantial evidence, and it is repeatedly being dismissed wholesale in the most flippant way imaginable. Expose what led to Prince Andrew's downfall, but do it for the rest of the gang, and be done with it. Are you saying we are really to believe Andrew was the only actual perp, never mind the only VIP? Or, are you against exposing a dozen plaintiffs as liars? Why?
The latest boomeranging nonsense out the Trump administration was the icing on the cake. If innocent, was theirs was a completely unnecessary shooting themselves in the foot. Why? Anyone with triple digit IQ is asking 'WTF is going on here?', if only to themselves. That's why the story doesn't die. What do you have against that?
I have to wonder how much evidence there is, that doesn’t come from women who are looking for multimillion-dollar paydays. Alan Dershowitz was able to prove his accuser was lying — when he visited Epstein’s island (with his family!), she wasn’t even there — apparently as part of a plot to scare a more seriously involved billionaire into coughing up hundreds of millions of dollars. (She also lied about being underage.)
Dershowitz writes that this woman, the late Virginia Giuffre, who was forced to admit she “may have been mistaken” about him, nonetheless made at least $32 million out of the Epstein case.
BTW, in her picture with Prince Andrew, Giuffre looks positively ecstatic. As far as I can tell, Andrew was defenestrated for embarrassing the Royal Family, not for breaking the law.
Yes. It seems more indulging in prostitution of a type (in this case very young but post-pubescent and willing girls) than pedophilia. The rich and famous who should know/behave better indulging in antisocial naughtiness doesn’t come as a great surprise to me. We live in a sewer. The johns are getting it for free, so the only crime is statutory. It's only recently that adolescent girls have been considered below marriageable age.
There are just too many people now (millions of U.S. adults, certainly) who know there's a hell of a lot more going on here than sex crimes, whatever one's opinions about them.
Whoever is asserting these things needs to lay these out in a permanent public forum, and allow them to be properly interrogated and defended. The assertions of public influence are the public's business. I make no claims of certainty at this point about as to what is going on here, or who is at fault, or how there may fault on opposing sides, in any number of ways large and small.
But wherever there are powerful people controlling in stealth and perverting society -- that is, as in *actual conspiracies* -- these need to be known. There sure seem to be plenty in this episode. So out with the evidence, so that WE can judge. Stacey Plaskett, Larry Summers, keep it coming.
Exactly. This whole long episode involves so much bizarre behavior by so many influential and powerful people. There is something behind all this. Michael Tracey exhausts great energy tamping out incorrect salacious details, but so what? There's a bigger untold story.
Matt mentions Jay Beecher, who is doing some really interesting work — basically confirming through his research that there were no clients. I suggest a read of his work to get an idea why many of us have come to that conclusion. And it has nothing to do with how the current admin is dealing with this.
This is it. If there's no there there, then why all the reluctance? I've read some of Michael Tracey's writing and I watched his conversation with Glenn Greenwald. I can see his point, but if what he's saying is true, there would be no reason for there to be an FBI file on Epstein at all, much less anything to hide in it.
What I have against it is the mob mentality. People believe something because they think everybody else believes it. And they just want to act out because they're being the hero going after secret pedophiles who aren't there.
Now, you guys pay or actively joined this site (I pay) because Matt is a great reporter, and you're already disagreeing with him before he even publishes.
Let me tell you, when he publishes and says there's no there there, you're all going to squawk, but I put my faith in Matt's reporting. Not you and your mob.
You're right in that like the murder of JFK, the FBI and CIA don't keep files acknowledging they did it. Only a fool believes this.
You're wrong in that Epstein was a tool of some intel agency ... likely not ours. But that was only for deniability. As with Five Eyes, the FBI and CIA has access to all the info.
Btw, I suspect Epstein worked for the Brits, thus the fascination with royalty.
Nope. Killed himself, which is what any dissolute aging playboy who had spent decades having his every whim attended to would do if they were facing the rest of their life in the federal pen.
He was confident he would get of on appeal according to his brother. He had just complained about being attacked by Nicholas Tartaglione, a man convicted of murdering four people.
For what? ... For nothing? Was he being framed? By whom? Why? If so, it sure seems he had a lot of powerful friends who could speak up for him in public, not to mention pull strings behind the scenes and make it go away.
So I'm just not following you how it was so bad he decided to kill himself -- yet at the same time the whole thing is a nothingburger with already-fully-exposed illegality, and no further perps to talk about than Prince Charles. If you can make sense of that, I'm all ears.
People who were powerful enough to have Epstein killed in prison and have the video destroyed--why did they wait until he was in prison to kill him?
If someone has blackmail material on you that can completely destroy you, and you are powerful enough to have them killed in prison and get away with it and make it look like a suicide--why in the hell don't you just have him killed long before he goes to prison?
And if you are killing pimps, why would you leave the girls alive? And more importantly, if you are killing everyone who can bust you out, why involve third party pimps at all--it's just more people you have to have killed--including all the hit men doing all the killing for you. You can't leave them alive either...obviously.
And since there are a hell of a lot more people willing to have sex for money, than people willing to kill for money--killing costs a lot more money than sex. So now you have to pay both for the sex and the killing of the person that you paid for sex--which doesn't make a whole lot of economic sense. You might as well just kidnap people at that point.
And why didn't they kill Ghislane? Does she not know anything, or is it too expensive to have someone killed in a minimum security woman's prison?And again...
Why not kill everyone before this is a even story?
I think I am most offended by how much conspiracy speculation is just bad writing. Have some pride in your craft.
Far too many people want the truth to be whatever serves their "side" best. If there is even a hint of the kind of ambiguity that would give a thoughtful person pause, they will glom on to whatever narrative does the most damage to the other.
Take the Russian Collusion nonsense. A full half of the country wanted to believe that the Trump Campaign was in cahoots with Russia in order to win the election in 2016. They didn't know the facts. No one knew the facts. But they wanted desperately to believe the story that would be most detrimental to Trump.
When the Mueller Report came out and proved to be a giant nothingburger, Democrats and their allies were incensed. They went from loving Bob Mueller to pieces to hating his guts in just one night.
What was Mueller's crime? He showed the American people that the President of The United States did not collude with Russia in an attempt to defeat Hillary Clinton.
Seems to me they should have been happy about this.
But, alas, what should have been a great relief to all those folks who had already decided that Trump was guilty, turned out instead to be a great disappointment. They didn't want Mueller to discover the truth, they wanted Mueller to validate their own uninformed opinions, and when he didn't, people Like Rachel Maddow wept on live TV.
Rachel should have been happy. Why wasn't she?
Anyway, this kind of uber-partisan bullshit is the norm these days. It's pretty sad, if you ask me.
That's running downwind so that unlike their love of Stalin and Castro -- for which they got scorched -- 30 years from now they can say they did cover the story.
Happy to see the Times respond to your correction but I have a feeling it's because you're Matt Fucking Taibbi (that's a compliment), otherwise they probably would have ignored you.
Regarding the Epstein story: something is fishy here and I don't know what it is. Early this year I was all for getting the news out (still am) and expecting to see lines of pedophiles perp-walked (well, I hoped for that anyway). Now I'm not so sure. Epstein was one of the most loathsome people on the planet but what really was the extent of his crimes? We don't know. Regardless of the extent, or lack thereof, we need to know the truth. If anything this will likely show us just how bad the media are, regardless of who's guilty, involved, etc. And maybe that's why they don't want us to know...
Very fair of you. Tracy, who seems to be a bit of a misanthrope, has been dogged on this story trying to “stick to the facts”. He seems to be an old school, annoying “journalist” asking impertinent questions. Just what we need.
Michael does God’s work. If I died under suspicious circumstances, I’d want him to cover it. In fact, I should set that up with him now
Please do! I've become a fan and now pay you (but years ago I loathed you). And if anything did happen I won't want that swept under any rugs.
And, even when we disagree I respect you and want you to continue doing the great job you are doing.
What was it Matt was writing years ago that made you loath him?
He wrote for Rolling Stone at the time. My take was he took the liberal line on everything and wasn't very balanced and frequently used the f-word. I'm not a prude but I think journalists should avoid gratuitous swearing. Now I think we still differ politically but he stands for so much of what I stand for - free speech, pro-America, pro working class, while not diving into being a pro welfare-stater.
Right or wrong that was my view. Whether I was right or not then doesn't matter to me - I support him now, even the few times we disagree.
Don't forget Matt's support for common sense and following the facts where they lead instead of bending to The Narrative. This is the real reason he's now a far-right Hitler like most of the rest of us.
My evolution of opinion of Matt Taibbi tracks with yours. When he wrote for RS I thought he was another liberal douche, but when he had the courage and integrity to stand up against the mainstream -- at great peril to his own career and well-being -- he earned my deep respect. I've been a subscriber to his Substack since the beginning.
"Don't forget Matt's support for common sense and following the facts where they lead instead of bending to The Narrative."
This is spot on and also a major reason I've come around to being a Matt Taibbi fan (and our youngest son is named Matt...). Journalists (I use that advisedly because Matt is more of a journalist than the vast majority of mainstream "journalists" everywhere) must be more like Matt, following the facts regardless of where they lead, asking questions and demanding answers and not looking at everything through a partisan lens. Matt is much closer to my ideal of a journalist than most others and that's why I'm a paid subscriber.
I loved his writing for RS, probably because I never liked Wall Street, big banksters, Dubya or Dick Cheney. I always considered Matt an open-minded liberal, willing to engage the opposition and unwilling to swallow the mainstream pabulum.
For years I’ve only subscribed to people to my Left; in order to avoid confirmation bias. I was a bit nervous about this but was very pleasantly surprised to find their Venn Diagram of values overlapped mine about 85% of the time.
Hi Tom, you do not name names, so hard to judge what you really mean. If you are talking about some liberals, they have some core values that are very deleterious (my fancy word for the day). 1. Too emotional…leads to toxic empathy. 2. Lack of common sense. 3. Tend to support the Narrative reflexively, whereas any kind of confirmation bias should be watched for. 4. Seem to have little regard for facts and logic. 5. Enjoy gossip and guilt by association too much. 6. Solipsistic. Uninterested and unsympathetic to opposing views. 7. ‘I’m smarter than everyone else.”
Aside from that, they are very entertaining people, and commonly quite gregarious. Fun to hang around.
As someone who voted for both Pat Buchanan AND Ralph Nader, I agree wholeheartedly.
Matt's writings are the only things I ever read in the Rolling Stone. Pop culture nonsense is of no interest to me.
But you can't understand American resistance to vaccine mandates without understanding Born to Be Wild, Rambo, and "Spirit riding free"
That's so fucking... I can't fucking even fucking come up with the fucking word. But it fucking starts with F.
Can you unambiguize this? I can't tell if my comment is fucking atrocious or fucking awesome or fucking mundane or fucking funny or a fucking failure. Do I want to fucking know? But please don't fuck with me! ;)
Curious as well.
See response to Giant asteroid...
Great question! I like the way it advanced the thread. 🧐
Put in in your will, Matt! ;) Keep up the good work.
Although he did kind of softball the Vermin Supreme interview outside a recent DNC convention 🤣
Is it even possible to hard ball an interview with Vermin Supreme?
Mr. Supreme, how will you fund a pony for everyone? Ponies do not just fall out of the sky. Are you aware of, or been affected by, the dangers of secondhand glitter inhalation?
The enemies you make ,
With the enemies you make, I’d set it up🤣🤣🤣
Call it the Blogger's Prerogative (aka The Substack Shuffle or 'the blind leading the blind). The Substack poster, in this case Matt Taibbi, can get on his high horse and catch errors in the MSM while he can post content rife with error, sensationalism and deception and are never held to account. The one exception is when Taibbi left his basement to go on the Mehdi Hasan show, and the fig leaf was torn away. Speaking of which, Matt did you ever post corrections for your glaring errors on the Twitter Files? Do you recall telling us 20 million Tweets were flagged for removal as part of the Censorship Industrial Complex (the actual number flagged for review by the EIP was less than 3,000 and no recommendation was made as to actions taken). You also grossly conflated private entities with government agencies, and you conflated content moderation as censorship.
Don't get me wrong--cynical, curmudgeonly and obnoxious are right up my alley--but unless you are murdered by a politician on a press tour, Michael Tracey ain't gonna do shit.
Let me be clear--confronting politicians at press conferences is not journalism. Not even close. At that point you are just on tour following the dead--to sell necklaces and t-shirts.
Now, Tracey gets a million points for actually reading things--still amazingly rare among journalists--but he is so anti-intuitive that he still ends up under water.
Personal confrontation is not journalism--it's just streamer engagement bullshit.
Agree. But his writing and interview style can be a hard slog for anyone not motivated to focus on the essential facts. Relieved you’re taking it up. This issue is harder to talk to people about than Russiagate ever was.
Tracey did yeoman work on Russiagate almost from the get-go. He, along with Matt and Aaron Mate all did stellar work on that story throughout. I’m forever grateful. Looking forward to Matt’s findings on the Epstein saga.
I like the sound of that moniker.
Not a strong enough move to get me to resubscribe to the New York Times, but it is heartening that there’s at least one good journalist on the payroll.
I file The Gray Lady in my “Propaganda” folder along with most of the MSM. The transition to online and the majority stake purchase by a Mexican billionaire killed her. She’s just an activist rag now like most of the others .
Speaking of Never Again…
Okay, that's 1 good response.
There is literally no reason I again would subscribe to the Times unless every company everywhere stopped making paper and I had to use it to stuff boxes.
Otherwise it's cat box litter liner.
They responded because Matt Taibbi commands respect.
From genuine journalists, who are sadly all too few now, and from those of us who subscribe. Unlike some, I never disliked Matt's writing, even for Rolling Stone, though we do not agree politically. He has always impressed me as trying to get to the realities, the facts, and I have a great deal of respect for that, especially since the vast majority of soi disant "journalists" eschew that approach on principle (or the lack). We need Matt Taibbi, whether we agree with him on all points or not.
And his writing is fun to read!
Do you mean they would not have responded to Me?! 😂
With or without the avatar?
The NYT has no credibility whatsoever anymore. It’s as trustworthy as Pravda was during the Soviet Union
Agreed. When the NYT reports the facts it is because it supports their Uniparty narrative.
Kudos for giving credit where credit is due, but I’d still argue that COVID school closures was the worst-reported story of the era.
I agree that Epstein is just one in a long list of “worst reported.” Epstein is a gift to politicians that keeps on giving, unzipped when useful. Tucked away and forgotten when not so much.
Keep up the good work.
Good journalists go where others fear to tread.
You're letting the NYTimes writer off too easily. The "correction" still conveys the impression that Epstein was convicted of pimping a 14-year-old. I don't doubt that he did it -- he was a total sleaze -- but that wasn't what he was convicted of doing, and the distinction between accusations and convictions is kind of important.
I live in a neck of the woods where 14 looks 24. I guess I've lived long enough to have become jaded in the wicked ways of the world, but this story resonates with me more as exploitation of the vulnerable than of statutory rape. The girls were plenty old enough to be thought of as willing victims.
I made a similar comment elsewhere in reply to someone claiming the girls' "lives were ruined," which is complete bullshit. They weren't abducted; they knew exactly what they were doing and got paid well for it. Hell, many of them even recruited each other.
I don't know where these creeps got all their girls. From the sound of it, he went through an enormous number of them. Some of them were willing recruits but I expect a number were forced/trafficked. I have no idea where most of them came from.
If the media, including the NYT, were better at reporting, people would care more about all human trafficking, not just the celebrity adjacent. Let it rip, Racket.
After the years of lying criminals intended bullshit from the New York Crimes it will take years for me to give them "kudos" ever again.
Talk about a sign of changing times - a responsive NYT!
Baby steps, but welcome.
I wanna know how Epstein got that initial plea deal, I've rarely seen something so corrupt.
There is no Epstein story. He was already tried and convicted and was about to be tried again but not involving underage. So Matt's investigation is going to come up with: there's nothing really there, especially no other men involved.
And that's why he says he is going to be very unpopular, because everybody thinks that they know everything about this and that there are all these other men who are pedophiles, who are being hidden by Epstein, which just isn't true.
I'm no expert on this story, but I don't have to be. The biggest problem I see with with it is the beyond-ridiculous avoidance and dismissal given the likely gravity of the scenario, and yours is typical.
We have an mountain of circumstantial evidence, and it is repeatedly being dismissed wholesale in the most flippant way imaginable. Expose what led to Prince Andrew's downfall, but do it for the rest of the gang, and be done with it. Are you saying we are really to believe Andrew was the only actual perp, never mind the only VIP? Or, are you against exposing a dozen plaintiffs as liars? Why?
The latest boomeranging nonsense out the Trump administration was the icing on the cake. If innocent, was theirs was a completely unnecessary shooting themselves in the foot. Why? Anyone with triple digit IQ is asking 'WTF is going on here?', if only to themselves. That's why the story doesn't die. What do you have against that?
I have to wonder how much evidence there is, that doesn’t come from women who are looking for multimillion-dollar paydays. Alan Dershowitz was able to prove his accuser was lying — when he visited Epstein’s island (with his family!), she wasn’t even there — apparently as part of a plot to scare a more seriously involved billionaire into coughing up hundreds of millions of dollars. (She also lied about being underage.)
Dershowitz writes that this woman, the late Virginia Giuffre, who was forced to admit she “may have been mistaken” about him, nonetheless made at least $32 million out of the Epstein case.
BTW, in her picture with Prince Andrew, Giuffre looks positively ecstatic. As far as I can tell, Andrew was defenestrated for embarrassing the Royal Family, not for breaking the law.
Yes. It seems more indulging in prostitution of a type (in this case very young but post-pubescent and willing girls) than pedophilia. The rich and famous who should know/behave better indulging in antisocial naughtiness doesn’t come as a great surprise to me. We live in a sewer. The johns are getting it for free, so the only crime is statutory. It's only recently that adolescent girls have been considered below marriageable age.
"the only crime is statutory"
There are just too many people now (millions of U.S. adults, certainly) who know there's a hell of a lot more going on here than sex crimes, whatever one's opinions about them.
I'm sorry to say I must be one of the few who has no idea what's going on here. I certainly find it all very strange.
You just know because you know and don't have any evidence. Get lost.
Whoever is asserting these things needs to lay these out in a permanent public forum, and allow them to be properly interrogated and defended. The assertions of public influence are the public's business. I make no claims of certainty at this point about as to what is going on here, or who is at fault, or how there may fault on opposing sides, in any number of ways large and small.
But wherever there are powerful people controlling in stealth and perverting society -- that is, as in *actual conspiracies* -- these need to be known. There sure seem to be plenty in this episode. So out with the evidence, so that WE can judge. Stacey Plaskett, Larry Summers, keep it coming.
All correct.
Exactly. This whole long episode involves so much bizarre behavior by so many influential and powerful people. There is something behind all this. Michael Tracey exhausts great energy tamping out incorrect salacious details, but so what? There's a bigger untold story.
Matt mentions Jay Beecher, who is doing some really interesting work — basically confirming through his research that there were no clients. I suggest a read of his work to get an idea why many of us have come to that conclusion. And it has nothing to do with how the current admin is dealing with this.
https://jaybeecher.substack.com/p/exclusive-police-had-jeffrey-epstein?r=htk88&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Of course there were no clients.
This is it. If there's no there there, then why all the reluctance? I've read some of Michael Tracey's writing and I watched his conversation with Glenn Greenwald. I can see his point, but if what he's saying is true, there would be no reason for there to be an FBI file on Epstein at all, much less anything to hide in it.
What I have against it is the mob mentality. People believe something because they think everybody else believes it. And they just want to act out because they're being the hero going after secret pedophiles who aren't there.
Now, you guys pay or actively joined this site (I pay) because Matt is a great reporter, and you're already disagreeing with him before he even publishes.
Let me tell you, when he publishes and says there's no there there, you're all going to squawk, but I put my faith in Matt's reporting. Not you and your mob.
You're right ... and wrong.
You're right in that like the murder of JFK, the FBI and CIA don't keep files acknowledging they did it. Only a fool believes this.
You're wrong in that Epstein was a tool of some intel agency ... likely not ours. But that was only for deniability. As with Five Eyes, the FBI and CIA has access to all the info.
Btw, I suspect Epstein worked for the Brits, thus the fascination with royalty.
LMAO you suspect. Are you CIA?
Oh hell no! There’s *plenty* still to be revealed from the Epstein evidence. Use your wildest imagination.
And he was roped in his jail cell just for chuckles right
Nope. Killed himself, which is what any dissolute aging playboy who had spent decades having his every whim attended to would do if they were facing the rest of their life in the federal pen.
He was confident he would get of on appeal according to his brother. He had just complained about being attacked by Nicholas Tartaglione, a man convicted of murdering four people.
He didn't kill himself.
His trial was just starting. He'd gotten off before. There was no reason for him not to think he wouldn't get off again.
Killed himself because he was going to prison forever.
For what? ... For nothing? Was he being framed? By whom? Why? If so, it sure seems he had a lot of powerful friends who could speak up for him in public, not to mention pull strings behind the scenes and make it go away.
So I'm just not following you how it was so bad he decided to kill himself -- yet at the same time the whole thing is a nothingburger with already-fully-exposed illegality, and no further perps to talk about than Prince Charles. If you can make sense of that, I'm all ears.
How does the logic on this work?
People who were powerful enough to have Epstein killed in prison and have the video destroyed--why did they wait until he was in prison to kill him?
If someone has blackmail material on you that can completely destroy you, and you are powerful enough to have them killed in prison and get away with it and make it look like a suicide--why in the hell don't you just have him killed long before he goes to prison?
And if you are killing pimps, why would you leave the girls alive? And more importantly, if you are killing everyone who can bust you out, why involve third party pimps at all--it's just more people you have to have killed--including all the hit men doing all the killing for you. You can't leave them alive either...obviously.
And since there are a hell of a lot more people willing to have sex for money, than people willing to kill for money--killing costs a lot more money than sex. So now you have to pay both for the sex and the killing of the person that you paid for sex--which doesn't make a whole lot of economic sense. You might as well just kidnap people at that point.
And why didn't they kill Ghislane? Does she not know anything, or is it too expensive to have someone killed in a minimum security woman's prison?And again...
Why not kill everyone before this is a even story?
I think I am most offended by how much conspiracy speculation is just bad writing. Have some pride in your craft.
How do you know these things?
Far too many people want the truth to be whatever serves their "side" best. If there is even a hint of the kind of ambiguity that would give a thoughtful person pause, they will glom on to whatever narrative does the most damage to the other.
Take the Russian Collusion nonsense. A full half of the country wanted to believe that the Trump Campaign was in cahoots with Russia in order to win the election in 2016. They didn't know the facts. No one knew the facts. But they wanted desperately to believe the story that would be most detrimental to Trump.
When the Mueller Report came out and proved to be a giant nothingburger, Democrats and their allies were incensed. They went from loving Bob Mueller to pieces to hating his guts in just one night.
What was Mueller's crime? He showed the American people that the President of The United States did not collude with Russia in an attempt to defeat Hillary Clinton.
Seems to me they should have been happy about this.
But, alas, what should have been a great relief to all those folks who had already decided that Trump was guilty, turned out instead to be a great disappointment. They didn't want Mueller to discover the truth, they wanted Mueller to validate their own uninformed opinions, and when he didn't, people Like Rachel Maddow wept on live TV.
Rachel should have been happy. Why wasn't she?
Anyway, this kind of uber-partisan bullshit is the norm these days. It's pretty sad, if you ask me.
My annual subscription to Racket News is money well spent.
(Seriously, no snark in that whatsoever.)
Go F their crap up, Matt. Make the rubble bounce.
I don’t care who you piss off as long as you tell the truth as you see it, without fear or favor.
I just noticed there is a man’s image associated with my account. I’m not that person and did not upload that image.
Didn't NYT also provide an almost objective account of Biden's mishandling of immigration? Have they hired some real journalists?
Five years after the fact.
That's running downwind so that unlike their love of Stalin and Castro -- for which they got scorched -- 30 years from now they can say they did cover the story.
Like Covid vaccine injuries and reporting on the possible lab leak origin of Covid, NYT got to the party tragically late. Hard to admire.
Happy to see the Times respond to your correction but I have a feeling it's because you're Matt Fucking Taibbi (that's a compliment), otherwise they probably would have ignored you.
Regarding the Epstein story: something is fishy here and I don't know what it is. Early this year I was all for getting the news out (still am) and expecting to see lines of pedophiles perp-walked (well, I hoped for that anyway). Now I'm not so sure. Epstein was one of the most loathsome people on the planet but what really was the extent of his crimes? We don't know. Regardless of the extent, or lack thereof, we need to know the truth. If anything this will likely show us just how bad the media are, regardless of who's guilty, involved, etc. And maybe that's why they don't want us to know...