Sunday, November 23, 2025

Chump and the special 'justice' for Epstein (and Maxwell)

The lat pedophile and sex trafficked Jeffrey Epstein remains in the news.   We're still waiting to follow Congress recently passed laws but, at THE NEW YORK TIMES,  Anand Giridharadas weighs in on some of the e-mails already addressed:

At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.

The Epstein story is resonating with a broader swath of the public than most stories now do, and some in the establishment worry. When Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, speaks of an “Epstein class,” isn’t that dangerous? Isn’t that class warfare?

But the intuitions of the public are right. People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.

It is no accident that this was the social milieu that took Mr. Epstein in. His reinvention, after he pleaded guilty to prostitution-related charges in Florida in 2008, would never have been possible without this often anti-democratic, self-congratulatory elite, which, even when it didn’t traffic people, took the world for a ride.

The emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.


Jason Linkins (THE NEW REPUBLIC) notes his concerns:

As I’ve watched the Epstein story unravel across the media—through the shouting of lawmakers and the flood of tawdry emails dumped in the press—I’ve not been able to ignore how it’s all one big pile of rot at the center of polite society. My TNR colleague, Matt Ford, expressed similar sentiments in a recent piece, confessing that the truly despairing thing about the Epstein affair was that the whole idea of civic virtue seems to have been murdered, and in its place, a culture of elite impunity has risen.

For my part, I’m less worried about whether some Democratic Party luminary catches an Epstein stray and more concerned about whether Democrats bungle the opportunity to attack these corrupt arrangements and the presidential administration that has made them its North Star. This iron is, at the moment, particularly hot. A fresh Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found that Trump’s approval ratings had hit startling new lows, with respondents particularly “unhappy about his handling of the high cost of living and the investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”

Epstein and the economy—these are the twin albatrosses around Trump’s neck. The question, however, is whether Democrats will have the stomach and the sense to exploit both avenues to Trump’s ruin. It may not seem like a problem, but Democrats seem pathologically averse to multitasking, which explains why they’re making the salience of grocery prices their priority to the exclusion of all other matters. So monomaniacal is this approach that at various times over the past year, Democratic lawmakers have called other concerns “distractions”—up to and including Trump’s rampaging paramilitary forces.

The two are connected.  Epstein was the powerful and he counted out others in his class to protect him.  He counted on politicians and celebrities and Noam Chomsky and others to protect and redeem him.  If Brian Smith's son was guilty of pedophilia and sex trafficking, he wouldn't have gotten a sweetheart deal that reduced those actions to mere prostitution.  Behind bars, Brian Smith wouldn't have been treated like royalty -- the way Epstein was and the way his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell is being treated.  

And we see Chump, Epstein's roll dog, destroy the economy for the working class.  We see costs rise and employment dive.  He's not serving We The People, he's enriching the 1%.  


It's an abuse of power and he's involved in both.  It's an abuse of power and both expose him for the liar that he is.  


This is also an attack on women and girls -- something the GOP is infamous for.  Chump thinks he has nothing to hide, Rachel Louise Snyder (NEW YORK TIMES) notes:


Mr. Trump is right. He has nothing to hide because he stands to lose nothing. Whatever exists in those files surely will not be enough to wrest him from his perch. At least not yet. Even those who have shown some remorse — Larry Summers, for example — took years. Other men named, like Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, Noam Chomsky and Michael Wolff, have sought to distance themselves from Mr. Epstein or have not responded to press requests.

We’ve been here before. For so many, the Epstein saga echoes a once-hopeful #MeToo movement, when it seemed possible to reform the male-dominated systems that kept women down. The movement led to a handful of convicted men, but also fed a colossal backlash that reminds us how our country has never adequately protected women. The backlash also, arguably, contributed to the second election of Mr. Trump, who has overseen an era that might be unique in its willingness to sacrifice democratic institutions and American norms to control women.

As I write, there is a White House proposal that aims to lower the Office on Violence Against Women’s stature within the D.O.J. and cut its shoestring budget by nearly 30 percent. This would devastate shelters, advocacy programs and violence prevention measures, and escalate the danger for victims of intimate partner and familial violence in all corners of the country.

At the same time, a report on violent deaths of girls and women from 2014 to 2020 noted that laws constraining abortion providers were associated with a 3.4 percent rise in the rate of homicides related to intimate partner violence. We are being killed for our own lack of choice. An estimated one in 20 women in the United States gets pregnant from rape or sexual coercion, which equates to a whopping six million women with violence-initiated pregnancies. Six million. Two-thirds of the women who became pregnant from rape were injured during their assaults. 


Again it goes to who has the reigns of power.  Again, it goes to a pattern of victimization which those, like Chump, who stood by Epstein have practiced their entire lives.  Their sense of entitlement allows them to harm others -- especially others with no power.  

If you're wanting primary sources -- if you're wanting to read the e-mails yourself and not just depend upon reporting, James West (MOTHER JONES) notes:


Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee released a flotilla of Epstein emails—more than 20,000 in total. The revelations created a tidal wave of news. In perhaps the most famous email, Jeffrey Epstein claimed Trump “knew about the girls.” Epstein also called Trump “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours at my house” with a sex trafficking victim.

A trove of that size would ordinarily be difficult and time-consuming to sort, but this digital dump was especially cumbersome: packaged in oddly titled folders, and tossed with a random assortment of unsearchable detritus and system files.

What if you were able to just… read them like emails?

That’s the simple premise behind “Jmail,” a re-skinning of the documents programmed to look and feel like an everyday Gmail account, with all the design details impeccably parodied and emails displayed in sequential chains, just like your own inbox. It even includes a working search function. Its release this week created it’s own internet storm.


THE JERUSALEM POST is among the outlets noting Noam Chomsky's connection to Epstein.  Noam and his wife were both friends and much closer than the public has known.  What's interesting here is that they find this shocking.  Why is it shocking?  Noam fits the profile of a close friend of Epstein.  He's repeatedly been allowed to change the public record and to avoid serious questioning for questionable behavior.  Is Aura Bogado really going to be the only prominent figure to question Noam Chomsky regarding to pushing his own work in Larry Flynt's racist HUSTLER magazine.

 Mark Arsenault, Chris Hippensteel and Danny Hakim (NEW YORK TIMES) note various intellectual elites who ran with Epstein; however, for reasons only they can explain, they omit Noam Chomsky from the discussion.  Many US outlets outside of Boston have apparently also decided Noam Chomsky is of no interest.  That'll surprise some (it doesn't surprise me -- I know Nom far too well).  But if you leave the US press, you find not just THE JERUSALEM POST but other outlets covering it.  AZAT, THE GUARDIAN,  THE HINDUSTAN TIMES,  THE TIMES OF ISRAEL, NDTV,  FIRST POST,  THE BUSINESS STANDARD,  ZOOM BANGLA NEWS . . . 


There's a reason other countries are so interested in Chomsky but guess well have to wait for his death for that reasoning to be revealed in the US. 

Kat's "Kat's Korner: Is Chase Rice our most underrated living musician?" went up today as did Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Poll Slip" and the following sites updated:





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