Today marks the one-year anniversary of the commencement of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. It’s time for all of us, regardless of group or political affiliation, to put aside our differences and relish the fact that thanks to our institutional accountability mechanism (that we should all trust, lest we fall into the pernicious realm of unhinged conspiracy theorization) has, for the heinous crime of the world’s most powerful men trafficking underage girls for their own sexual gratification, blackmailing operation, and/or whatever-the-hell-a-temple-with-a-bar-lock-on-the-outside-implies, successfully prosecuted a single woman.
Unreservedly, this is something we can all celebrate. The clients can all move on to other vendors of their favorite services, but c'est la vie; what can you do? The #metoo media has moved on, and there is solace in the fact that there was some accountability in the end, so we can finally put this whole mess behind us. What a relief!
As a note of forbearance going forward, now that everyone’s conscience is assuaged and we can see clearly and the rain is gone, and things are going to get easier, and blue skies are smiling at us, we should all remember that in the event that there is any thought, even a mere flicker of cognizance that something may still be awry, it is vital to suppress the urge to pursue it further. Conspiracy theorization is the scourge of civilization, and threatens public perceptions of our sacred institutions. Far better to a priori eliminate that bad people can do things in groups than to be the sort of knuckle-dragging imbecile who believes otherwise.
For example, one shouldn’t want to be the kind of person who asks whether the intelligence agencies knew about Epstein, because one is then confronted with a harrowing binary; if the intelligence agencies didn’t know about Epstein, what is the point of our intelligence agencies? And if the intelligence agencies did know about Epstein and didn’t do anything, what exactly is the point of the intelligence agencies?
Frankly, anything other than insisting by fiat that Epstein was a lone ranger and an isolated incident makes one weird and paranoid according to the all-important herd-instinct-epistemology, and people who openly question or defame our intelligence agencies often turn out to be crazies who kill themselves with double gunshot wounds to the head. You don’t want people to take you for one of those kooks!
And you definitely, definitely don’t want to come off as the kind of tinfoil-hat-wearing weirdo who thinks that Jeffrey Epstein belonged to intelligence merely because the US attorney who cut him his sweetheart plea deal in 2007 said he was. That takes all the suspense out of it.
Beyond that, you definitely don’t want to be the kind of person far-right-extremist who asks things like why, given that it was abundantly clear that her husband had been jet-setting to a place now infamously known as pedophile island, Hillary Clinton was brought in to laugh about it on national television without anyone asking her why she wasn’t getting a divorce.
Giggle giggle giggle. The real problem is those conspiracy theorists; I totally agree with you, Trevor Noah. It’s totally not bizarre that everyone’s ok with this.
In fairness, perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Epstein also visited the Clinton White House 17 times. Probably he was such a boy scout on those occasions that Hillary is still in shock, and that’s why all of this deranged conspiracy theorization about her family has her positively tickled.
Above all, you definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely don’t want to swerve off the beaten path entirely, turning into some sort of totally unhinged Pizzagate nut job (to use the technical term) who, for example, believes that there was a code language in emails used by those close to the Clintons that indicated that they were involved in some sort of child trafficking activity ahead of time merely because the strange terminology used was consistent with the code language that has been used by law enforcement to detect pedophiles in other instances, and because the core thesis of the Pizzagate “nut jobs” was, in fact, shown by the discovery of Epstein’s operation to be correct, to the admission of no major media outlet whatsoever.
Remember, the DNC let Bill Clinton speak at their convention even on the same day photos came out revealing him getting a personal neck massage from one of Epstein’s sex slaves. If the whole Epstein-Clinton thing wasn’t a big nothingburger, would that have been allowed? Of course not. This is the #metoo party. That would be ridiculous.
Bill even took the opportunity to lecture then-president Donald Trump on how to conduct himself in the oval office. There’s no way he would be so brazen unless his conduct in and out of that office was impeccable.
Trump, of course, also famously associated with Epstein. While it can reasonably be said that the Epstein revelations are more damning of Clinton than they are of Trump, Trump was nonetheless the sitting president at the time, and the media’s lack of interest in plumbing the depths of his Epstein connection was nothing less than astounding. Perhaps the media hadn’t actually engaged in an unprecedented vendetta against Donald Trump.
Except, of course, objectively.
Amazingly, then, the same press that wanted all of America to believe that Trump got videotaped peeing on a Russian hooker, or got peed on by a Russian hooker, or something, without needing any evidence whatsoever (to date, none has been provided), was basically uninterested in pursuing the scandal for which they had vastly more circumstantial evidence and which would have produced vastly more outrage, and more warranted outrage, as nothing is more heinous than harming minors, or its sister act of complacency, given knowledge of such crimes, and unlike the Steele dossier, no one could have accused probing into the Epstein story as a political hit orchestrated by the Clintons.
Super weird, right?
In fact, one would think the entire political establishment should have been investigated for complicity in the court of public opinion if corporate media was anything like a free press after Cindy McCain spilled the beans that "Epstein was hiding in plain sight. We all knew about him. We all knew what he was doing.”
Of course, no such reckoning was ever had.
Understandably, those who have not been fully lobotomized by their televisions may find themselves unnerved by the situation. Some may not understand the higher-level motives behind the corporate media failing to behave like a free press, but such doubters should take heart and be assured that they are only the purest of motives, and can and should be blindly trusted. (Remember, failing to do so is extremism!)
In fact, the most trustworthy of these institutions is the New York Times, which openly publishes pieces advising you to resist engaging in the enlightenment-era principle of critical thinking, for your own protection, of course.
True to form, when it came to covering the Maxwell trial, there was no outlet more representative of responsible reporting, and in fact, of legacy media and big tech’s approach to the sensitivity of the topic in general, than the New York Times.
For preliminary context, in the modern age of the decline of physical newsprint and the corresponding rise of email distribution, the de facto front page for the Times’s global audience has become its daily morning newsletter, appropriately titled “The Morning”, by which the New York Times alerts its readership to those topics its journalists and editorial staff view as of major importance.
On the day of the commencement of Ghislaine’s trial, the staff bravely opted not to alert its readership of the advent of the trial at all.
The trial’s opening, which took place within jogging distance of the New York Times building, lost out to suggested “Latest News” articles like Matthew McConaughey not announcing a run for Governor of Texas and “Other Big Stories” such as an Oasis cover band being stranded by a snowstorm in an English pub for a few days. Suggested opinion pieces from the day of commencement of Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial included can’t-miss essays such as Margaret Renkl writing that she doesn’t feel the need to test her dog Rascal’s DNA.
For comparative basis, for the November 1st newsletter of the New York Times, corresponding to the inauguration of the trial of teen Kyle Rittenhouse, online subscribers were notified directly of the trial’s commencement in the email notification as one of its “Big Stories”. In addition to linking the article, the notification included a link to a Times video that “reconstructs the lead-up to the fatal shootings in Kenosha, Wis”.
That’s right. The New York Times makes videos. But only for really important stories like an otherwise unknown white teenager in the middle of the country shooting three other white guys who were charging him.
Of course, it goes almost without saying that if the shooter and victims were black, nobody at the Times would have batted an eye. And somehow, you’re the racist, simply for being a member of the general public who doesn’t understand why this white-on-white crime is so much more important. Don’t hurt yourself trying to figure it out. To properly understand, you’d have to be the kind of moral and journalistic deity who makes editorial decisions at the New York Times.
How do we know almost nobody in the MSM would have batted an eye if the defendant was black? Well, in addition to evergreen examples like virtually no one in the press caring about an excess of a score of people having been killed in Chicago the previous day, there are events (non-events?) like the Waukesha massacre that followed two days after the Rittenhouse verdict, in which Darrell Brooks drove in a zig-zag motion so as to “strike and hurt as many people as possible”, killing threefold Rittenhouse’s tally and maiming many others in what was clearly not self defense by any standard, and was instead what anyone with a pulse and half a wit realized was almost certainly a direct response to the media’s incessant Rittenhouse-trial race-baiting.
For its part, the media could not disregard the story fast enough.
In the same month, Andrew Coffee IV, a black man in Florida claiming self defense after he fired on police with an illegal firearm during a raid after being woken up by a post-announcement flash-bang, won his trial with no national outrage whatsoever.
It was almost as if self-defense was a legitimate legal defense. And Coffee’s case was objectively far less cut-and-dried than Rittenhouse’s was, as Rittenhouse’s was replete with footage showing him being pursued and charged by assailants.
Of course, “almost as if” is the key qualifier here, because your pedestrian attempt to be consistent is meaningless if you’re not the kind of moral and journalistic demigod who calls shots in the hallowed halls of a very, very fancy institution like the New York Times.
One such editorial call in recent times has been referring to Epstein’s death as a suicide without any caveats. For example, in the underwhelming coverage that the NYT did deign to include around the time of the Maxwell trial, the Times made statements such as “The trial of Ms. Maxwell, 59, the daughter of a British media mogul and a longtime fixture on the New York social scene, has been widely seen as the courtroom reckoning that Mr. Epstein avoided when he took his own life in prison a month after his arrest on sex-trafficking charges.”
Refusing to compromise on the position that Epstein took his own life is a noble act that the Times uses to abstain from irresponsibly feeding into the sort of civil unrest that could occur if it is believed that powerful forces are protecting powerful people occupying the highest echelons of society. As any prudent Times journalist well-knows, you only want to feed into potentially violent civil unrest when you’re directing public ire at a teenager in Wisconsin.
After all, pointing out that the designation of Epstein’s death as a suicide was and remains controversial because of details like the prison guards taking a buddy nap around the time of the incident while the cameras on his tier simultaneously failed to operate only encourages extremists (which is the technical term used for those unruly citizens who have opinions not expressly provided to them by their televisions). Some consider the dynamics of Epstein’s hanging, which apparently involved leaning his neck into a bedsheet (to work around the physiological impossibility of a 6-foot tall man hanging himself vertically from the bottom bunk of a bed frame shorter than him even at its topmost level), to be logistically untenable. This disbelief tends to be made all the more so by the fact that the bedsheet fractured Epstein’s left and right thyroid cartilage as well as his left hyoid bone, implying that the seemingly modest tether was, in fact, of world-class proficiency in strangulation.
Also of note in the zany filmography department is that the footage from Epstein’s earlier-reported prison suicide attempt from July was said to have been accidentally destroyed as reported to a judge by US attorney Maureen Comey, daughter of former FBI directly James Comey, and a lead prosecutor in Maxwell’s child sex trafficking case.
For its part, the prosecution team of which she was a leader appears to have done everything in its power to fail to uncover anything of significance about Epstein’s clients over the course trial’s proceedings. Vanity Fair journalist Gabriel Sherman produced just about the only candid review of the train-wreck to be found in mainstream media.
As detailed by Sherman, the prosecution appeared not to have remotely bothered to prepare witnesses for cross-examination. Perhaps the logic was that the girls had been through quite a lot, so they could take it. The team also announced that they were going to throw in the towel rest their case weeks earlier than expected. Maybe they had to hurry up and catch some sort of all-expenses-paid vacation.
The prosecution’s first witness was Epstein’s longtime pilot, Larry Visoski, who was so close with him that his daughter got married at the financier's infamous New Mexico Zorro ranch and who relished showing off the largess of his employer in enthusiastic photos.
In stark contrast with previous statements from prominent Epstein victims such as Virginia Roberts Giuffre and contrary to the commonsense fact that competent pilots are required by the demands of their profession to be observant and to not have dementia, Visoski claimed he never saw sexual activity on Epstein’s planes over his decades-long career for the trafficker.
Again, this is someone the prosecution ostensibly chose as a means to prosecute the case with.
Notable witness "Carolyn" said Maxwell groped her and said she had "a great body for Mr. Epstein and his friends", and the prosecution somehow took the opportunity to not ask her to name any of the pertinaciously referenced friends. (Carolyn was the witness who was sexually abused more than a hundred times and broke down at one point saying "my soul is broken”.)
Such obvious criticisms (and there are a litany of them, such as the prosecution not bothering to enlist any of the more prominent witnesses who appear to have been readily available) are difficult to find anywhere else in legacy media or big tech because, of course, it would be irresponsible to encourage the conspiracy theorists.
The judiciousness of the New York Times in not fanning the flames of distrust goes further than most people realize, because most people consume media that follows the exact same playbook.
For example, the New York Times has elected to never bother informing its readers that the FBI found Epstein’s cache of sex tapes labeled “(name of underage girl) + (name of VIP)”, and then promptly lost them.
Fortunately, the Times is in good company. As soft-spoken media darling Ann Coulter explains:
“As further evidence that there is ABSOLUTELY NO COVER-UP: The New York Times has never breathed a single word about the CDs lost in the FBI’s botched search. Nor has The Washington Post. Nor the Chicago Tribune. Nor the Los Angeles Times.
Wait — I’ll make this easier. Here’s a list of all the major U.S. newspapers that did report on Maguire’s breathtaking revelation:
1) The Miami Herald
2) The New York Post
The end.”
(America’s oldest continuously published daily newspaper appears to have a real problem with media blackout participation.)
Couple of rogues aside, we can laud most of the major media outlets are for almost without exception refusing to yield to the temptation to dutifully inform the American public of facts that might undermine the hegemony of the blackmail-cult class (is that moniker too forward?) except to the superficial extent that they absolutely had to (known to those up on the lingo as a “limited hangout”). However, in the modern era, they couldn’t have done it alone. Much respect is also due to the big tech platforms for suppressing attempts at independent journalism made by the general public to bridge the gap. In lieu of substantive media coverage, some independent journalists sought to compensate by reporting on the trial through social media. Many of those looking for coverage turned to a twitter account called @TrackerTrial that quickly became popular for being a dedicated source of information, before twitter suspended it with no real explanation provided.
None, of course, was required. Speech is really, really dangerous, and should be allowed only to those who can be trusted to say preapproved things. Anything else would be outright reckless.
All-in-all, there was a heroic conspiracy effort across the board to protect the general public from information that might be harmful, and the successful prosecution of Maxwell means there is much to celebrate. Justice has been served; everyone who deserved sentencing, according to the government and media, received it, namely one woman with daddy issues, and those who have dutifully opted to get their news from legacy media and/or big tech have been safely guarded against the kind of information that might lead them into the world of dangerous conspiracy theorization, which is the greatest threat to our civilization since the bill of rights allowed the citizenry guns and open discourse, two frustrating vestiges of Jeffersonian barbarism that can hopefully be snuffed out in the near future so our betters can operate with virtually risk-free impunity.
For the present, we will have to make do with gaslighting, media blackouts, and behind-the-scenes government manipulation of tech platforms that, while sometimes litigable for unconstitutionality, will not be prosecuted until long after successfully producing the desired effect, to the extent that there is enough accountability to prosecute them at all.
This system of public-private propaganda is particularly potent thanks to the consolidation of media ownership, and the influence of paradigm-setting media powerhouses like the New York Times and its courageous writers, who, armed only with insufferable hubris and sweet caffeinated beverages, struggle thanklessly under the weight of the paper’s historic gothic title-lettering to shape the narrative among wealthy coastal elites so as to drum up maximal disdain for dissenters (those contemptible “conspiracy theorists”) such that they can coherently direct their collective power to cover up the corruption of the sanctimonious influence-dealing institutions that work so well for them, as well as, more importantly, the voices of the mangy commoners attempting to point out said corruption, one gaslighting editorial decision, deplatforming, or search-results curation at a time.
If every once in a while some evil woman has to be run through the legal system for being an accomplice in whatever-the-hell-happens-to-captive-minors-in-a-temple-with-a-bar-lock-on-the-outside, so be it. As long as she’s learned enough from what may or may not have happened to her father and/or what may or may not have happened to her partner not to reveal anything more extensively incriminating.
Some still believe something like suicide-by-bedsheet will befall Ghislaine in prison. With a linen sufficiently skilled in martial artistry, such a tragedy remains possible. However, seeing as there’s no one to prosecute in a suicide, the justice system has done all it can regardless, so at this point, all can breathe a sigh of relief and get back to trusting Lady Justice to do whatever can be expected from a blindfolded woman holding a merchant’s scale.
Ideally, reigning in those dangerous conspiracy theorists.
Years ago I took an English class devoted to poetry. My professor made a comment that remains with me to this day. Simple put, that comedy is a hair away from tragedy. I'm certain he would have given you an A+ on this. Nicely done.