Politics

• Little-known but Vital: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is targeting a little-known program that underpins childhood immunizations in the U.S. by paying people who suffer rare side effects from shots.
• A Serious Risk: Dramatic changes to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program risk driving drugmakers from the market, threatening access to shots, experts say.
• A Fragile System: The program underscores the fragility of America’s childhood immunization program at a time when Kennedy is renewing debunked claims about the dangers of vaccines.

Jesse Mackinnon - Common Dreams.

By the time the U.S. Justice Department released its memo in July 2025, the faithful were already starting to turn. There was no “client list,” no smoking gun, no perverted cabal of global elites laid bare for public vengeance. What they got instead was a cold government document and a half-mumbled shrug from President Donald Trump, who barely remembered the man everyone else had turned into a folk demon. “Are people still talking about this guy, this creep?” he asked, blinking like he’d just wandered out of a golf simulator.

The betrayal was almost elegant. For years, Trump’s people had promised the black book. Attorney General Pam Bondi said it was on her desk. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel practically branded his political future with it. Counselor to the President of the United Staes Alina Habba promised flight logs and names. And then the punchline: nothing. Or rather, a truckload of documents scrubbed clean and a memo telling the public to move on. The frenzy turned inward. MAGA loyalists melted down on camera. Laura Loomer called for a special counsel. Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino stopped showing up for work. Right-wing media turned on itself like rats in a pressure cooker.

But the Epstein file was never the point. The real story was not buried in a locked safe or hidden by the FBI. It was out in the open. It is still out in the open. The political movement that once pledged to drain the swamp has spent its second tour of duty building a legal and bureaucratic fortress around some of the oldest crimes in the book. Modern conservatism has come to rely not just on outrage but on inertia, and nowhere is that more visible than in its handling of child sexual abuse.

We are not talking about a secret ring or coded pizza menus. We are talking about a system that tolerates child marriage in over half the states. A system that forces raped minors to carry pregnancies to term. A system that slashes funding for shelters and trauma counseling. A system that lets rape kits pile up in warehouse back rooms while politicians pose in front of billboards about protecting kids.

This is not a moral failure or a bureaucratic oversight. It is an architecture. It is built from votes, funded by budgets, signed into law by men who say they fear God but fear losing donors more. The Epstein affair may have collapsed in a cloud of whimpering and spin, but what it revealed is far more corrosive than any one man’s crimes. The question is not why they hid the list. The question is why they need it at all when the ledger is already written in their laws.

Legalized Child Marriage as Institutional Abuse As of mid-2025, child marriage remains legal in 37 U.S. states. In most of these jurisdictions, statutory exceptions allow minors to marry with parental consent or judicial approval. Some states permit marriage for individuals as young as 15. Others lack any explicit minimum age when certain conditions are met. These legal frameworks persist despite growing evidence of their links to coercion, abuse, and lifelong harm.

Missouri serves as a prominent example. Until recently, it permitted minors aged 15 to marry with parental consent. Testimony from survivors has revealed how this legal permission facilitated predatory relationships cloaked in legitimacy. In one case, a girl was married off to a man nearly a decade older, and the marriage became a vehicle for sustained sexual and psychological abuse. Former child brides in Missouri have since called for a statutory minimum age of 18 with no exceptions. Legislative efforts to enact such reforms have repeatedly stalled.

Tennessee offers a more recent and pointed illustration. In 2022, Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that would have created a new category of marriage not subject to age restrictions. The bill failed under public pressure, but it signaled a continued willingness by some conservative legislators to bypass modern child protection norms. Even when confronted with documentation of exploitation, physical violence, and long-term trauma, these lawmakers often frame the issue around religious liberty and parental authority.

The Epstein affair was never going to end in justice. It was a mirror. What it reflected was not a single man’s sins but a political order that treats predation as a price of stability.

The prevailing rhetoric in these debates centers on traditional family values. Proponents argue that restricting child marriage infringes on the rights of families to make decisions without state interference. In some cases, advocates for maintaining the status quo invoke Christian theological justifications or present marriage as a preferable alternative to state custody. These arguments shift the legal focus away from the vulnerability of the minor and toward the autonomy of adults, particularly parents and religious leaders.

This legal tolerance undermines the enforcement of statutory rape laws. When marriage can be used as a legal shield, older adults who would otherwise face criminal prosecution gain immunity by securing parental consent or exploiting permissive judicial channels. In practice, the marriage license functions as retroactive permission for sexual contact with a minor. Law enforcement agencies are often reluctant to investigate allegations within a legally recognized marriage, even when age discrepancies raise clear concerns.

The persistence of child marriage statutes in conservative-controlled states is not simply a relic of outdated law. It reflects a policy choice. The choice is to preserve adult control over minors, particularly in contexts that reinforce patriarchal and religious hierarchies. In doing so, the state becomes an active participant in the erasure of consent. Legal recognition of these unions confers legitimacy on relationships that, in other contexts, would be subject to prosecution. The result is a bifurcated legal system where a child’s age and rights are contingent on the adult interests surrounding her.

Forced Birth Laws and the Abandonment of Minor Victims Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, state legislatures moved swiftly to implement abortion bans. As of July 2025, 10 states enforce prohibitions with no exceptions for rape or incest. These laws apply equally to adults and minors. In doing so, they erase the distinction between consensual and coerced sexual activity and impose state control over the bodies of children.

The consequences are observable. In Ohio, a 10-year-old girl became pregnant after being raped by a 27-year-old man. Because Ohio law prohibited abortion past six weeks and included no exception for rape, the girl traveled to Indiana to terminate the pregnancy. The physician who provided the abortion was targeted by state officials and subjected to professional disciplinary action. The child’s identity was shielded, but her case became a national flashpoint. No changes were made to Ohio’s statute in response.

In Mississippi, a 13-year-old girl gave birth after being raped by a stranger. Her family, unable to afford travel or secure an out-of-state appointment, watched as the pregnancy advanced. Though state law permitted abortion in cases of rape, it required police reporting and formal certification by the authorities. The procedural burden, combined with lack of local providers, rendered the exception functionally inaccessible. The pregnancy was carried to term. No support infrastructure was provided beyond birth.

In Texas, multiple cases have emerged involving girls under 14 who were raped by family members or acquaintances. One minor received abortion pills through informal networks. Another did not. In that case, the pregnancy continued until birth. In both situations, school staff, health workers, and shelter employees described an atmosphere of legal ambiguity and fear. Providers worried about prosecution for aiding what could be construed as an illegal abortion. Parents feared legal action or custody loss if they sought help out of state.

These laws are not merely restrictive. They are designed to inhibit access through a combination of legal uncertainty, bureaucratic obstruction, and geographic isolation. Requirements for parental consent and judicial bypass impose additional delays. In conservative jurisdictions, judges often refuse bypass requests outright. Clinics have closed. Providers have left. In many counties, no legal abortion services exist. For minors with limited mobility, no resources, and histories of abuse, these constraints function as a full prohibition.

Psychological consequences are profound. Research conducted by trauma specialists indicates that forced pregnancy following sexual assault exacerbates the risk of suicidal ideation, self-injury, and long-term mental illness. Minors compelled to remain pregnant often experience acute dissociation and chronic anxiety. Social workers report increased incidents of runaway behavior, substance use, and refusal to attend school. The medical literature consistently describes these outcomes as preventable harm.

The political response to these outcomes has been largely nonreactive. Elected officials in affected states have declined to revisit statutory language. When presented with specific cases, responses are limited to procedural defenses or deflections. Conservative media outlets often ignore these incidents altogether or question their veracity. State agencies rarely publish disaggregated data on minor pregnancies resulting from assault. In legislative hearings, victims are not called to testify.

This absence of acknowledgment is not accidental. The architecture of forced birth laws depends on abstraction. It requires a conceptual fetus without context, a generic moral narrative without victims. The insertion of real children into that framework exposes its contradictions. In response, the system silences or discredits those who do not fit the script.

The effect is the systematic abandonment of minor victims. The state declines to intervene in the act of abuse, imposes control over the outcome, and then withdraws when support is needed. In doing so, it transforms rape from a crime to a reproductive event and reclassifies children as bearers of state policy. The result is not a deviation from conservative thought. It is one of its clearest expressions.

The Systematic Dismantling of Survivor Support In early 2025, the Trump administration released a proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2026 that included significant funding reductions for agencies and programs supporting survivors of domestic and sexual violence. The Office on Violence Against Women removed all open funding opportunities from its website. This move came amid a broader effort to eliminate what the administration referred to as “woke” or ideologically driven programs. Internal Department of Justice (DOJ) memoranda confirmed that existing grant language was being revised to align with White House policy preferences, with particular scrutiny directed toward anything referencing diversity, equity, or inclusion (DEI).

The proposed budget eliminated the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. That agency had previously overseen funding for rape prevention and domestic violence education through the DELTA and RPE programs. These initiatives provided critical infrastructure for community-based interventions, including education campaigns, prevention training, and partnerships with local law enforcement. Their elimination removed a core pillar of upstream support.

At the same time, DOJ grant freezes disrupted downstream services. Nonprofit organizations across the country reported immediate and severe impacts. In Ohio, the Hope and Healing Survivor Resource Center announced potential layoffs of its court advocates and a reduction in emergency shelter capacity. In Washington D.C., House of Ruth stated it was experiencing multiple levels of new scrutiny when seeking reimbursement for already-approved expenditures. Organizations were directed to pause hiring and halt finalization of pending grant applications. Many could not meet payroll obligations for March.

Survivors of violence were displaced not by explicit prohibition but by the withdrawal of every practical means of assistance.

In Philadelphia, Women Against Abuse reported difficulties accessing funding for its LGBTQ-specific services. In Washington state, the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center prepared to end its legal advocacy program entirely. In both cases, staff warned that client wait times for crisis response had doubled within a single quarter. Administrators noted that many of their clients were minors or undocumented women who lacked other options. Reductions in services were expected to increase reliance on emergency departments and law enforcement, systems ill-equipped to handle trauma recovery or long-term safety planning.

The effects extended to rural programs as well. In smaller counties, shelters funded primarily through DOJ block grants began closing intake lists. Survivors were told to wait or relocate. Legal assistance for restraining orders and custody cases became difficult to obtain. Mobile crisis units were discontinued. Hospital advocates who had previously accompanied victims during forensic exams were no longer available. Each removed position created a compounding absence in systems already operating at capacity.

The budget’s emphasis on eliminating federal programs associated with DEI goals shaped the targeting of these cuts. While many victim services agencies did not explicitly advertise such language, internal reviewers flagged any mention of racial disparities, LGBTQ outreach, or culturally specific programming as potentially noncompliant with revised priorities. A senior DOJ official, speaking anonymously, stated that the Office on Violence Against Women had been instructed to avoid “risk exposure” by minimizing support for identity-based initiatives.

Although the Violence Against Women Act had been reauthorized in 2022 with bipartisan support, its implementation now faced procedural obstruction. Staff who had expanded under the prior administration were informed they might be subject to termination. A memo from the Office of Management and Budget described plans for agency-wide attrition. Staff with less than three years of tenure were given no assurances. Departments were instructed to prepare for reduced grant-making capacity over the following two fiscal cycles.

The dismantling of support systems was neither sudden nor undocumented. It unfolded through administrative erasure, funding attrition, and legal recalibration. Survivors of violence were displaced not by explicit prohibition but by the withdrawal of every practical means of assistance. Those left behind were often the least able to navigate the resulting gaps. For these individuals, the state offered no replacement. Instead, it imposed a bureaucratic silence where aid had once existed. The outcome was a deliberate contraction of the public obligation to protect.

Forensic Neglect and the Rape Kit Crisis Despite the adoption of sexual assault kit tracking systems in over 30 states, the United States continues to face a persistent national backlog. Tens of thousands of kits remain untested in police storage facilities, hospital evidence rooms, and crime labs. Many of these kits have been stored for years without analysis. Others were never submitted for processing due to departmental triage, lost documentation, or discretionary decisions by investigating officers. While some states have mandated timelines for submission and testing, enforcement mechanisms remain weak, and compliance is inconsistent.

The Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, a federal program designed to support evidence processing and data coordination, has received limited attention under the current administration. Although the initiative has produced measurable results in jurisdictions that prioritized its implementation, recent Justice Department actions suggest a deprioritization of forensic reform. The DOJ has declined to expand funding, and the program has not featured in recent public safety messaging. Internal budget documents indicate that grants for kit testing were not included in the administration’s revised funding priorities for fiscal year 2026.

As a result, survivors often experience long delays in receiving updates about their cases. Some discover years later that their evidence was never tested. Others are notified only after investigations are closed due to expired statutes of limitation. Communication is sporadic and mediated by agencies with limited resources and unclear protocols. Victims who attempt to inquire directly are frequently redirected or denied information outright. In some states, survivors have been required to submit formal public records requests to learn whether their kits were processed.

These delays compromise prosecutions. When evidence is eventually tested, witnesses may be unreachable, suspects may no longer be within the jurisdiction, and memory degradation may weaken the reliability of victim testimony. Prosecutors, facing caseload pressures and limited bandwidth, often decline to pursue cases that were mishandled in their early stages. Defense attorneys use the lag in testing to undermine credibility or introduce procedural challenges. The net effect is a collapse in accountability long before any trial begins.

The failures of evidence handling disproportionately affect marginalized populations. In rural areas, law enforcement agencies lack personnel and funding to maintain evidence integrity or pursue cold cases. In urban centers, kits from Black, Indigenous, and Latina victims are more likely to go untested. Multiple studies have found that law enforcement officers are more likely to doubt the credibility of victims from low-income neighborhoods, undocumented communities, or those with previous contact with social services. These judgments influence whether evidence is submitted for analysis and whether cases receive investigative follow-up.

The forensic crisis is compounded by data gaps. Many states do not track the number of untested kits in private hospitals or non-mandated reporting facilities. Others exclude kits from the backlog if they were collected before a specific year. The result is an undercounting that obscures the true scope of institutional failure. Federal authorities have not established a national registry or auditing mechanism to standardize reporting. This lack of oversight permits continued neglect without consequence.

Efforts to reform the system remain fragmented. Some jurisdictions have implemented notification protocols to alert survivors when their kits are tested or their cases reopened. Others have passed legislation requiring mandatory submission timelines. These efforts, however, rely on sustained funding and political will. In the current policy environment, neither can be assumed.

The accumulation of untested rape kits reflects more than a bureaucratic shortfall. It reveals a hierarchy of value embedded in forensic practice. Victims whose experiences align with prosecutorial priorities receive attention. Those who fall outside those norms are left in limbo. The backlog is not only a logistical failure. It is a measure of who is deemed worthy of pursuit.

The Performance of Protection and the Reality of Harm In the contemporary conservative lexicon, few terms have gained as much political traction as “groomer.” Once associated narrowly with criminal prosecutions of adults who built relationships with children for the purpose of sexual exploitation, the term has been repurposed as a generalized insult. It now targets a wide array of perceived ideological enemies, from public school teachers to LGBTQ advocates to librarians. In its current usage, “groomer” does not denote a specific criminal act. It signifies dissent from cultural orthodoxy. It functions rhetorically rather than descriptively.

This shift is not accidental. The term has become a central instrument in the conservative culture war arsenal. It is applied liberally to any policy, institution, or public figure that departs from a narrow conception of sexual and gender norms. The invocation of grooming no longer requires evidence. It requires proximity to subjects deemed socially suspect. Teachers who support inclusive sex education, therapists who serve queer youth, and public health professionals working with at-risk adolescents are all subject to the accusation. The result is not the exposure of exploitation. It is the expansion of suspicion.

The logic underpinning this rhetorical turn is strategic. By collapsing the distinction between ideological disagreement and criminal intent, the conservative movement recasts public discourse as a permanent battlefield of moral danger. In this framework, policy is secondary. What matters is posture. The capacity to signal vigilance becomes more important than the provision of safety. The accusation becomes the protection. The spectacle replaces the intervention.

By focusing public energy on the symbolic boundaries of morality, policymakers insulate themselves from accountability for structural abandonment.

This performance obscures the absence of actual safeguards for children. While conservative figures warn of drag queens and inclusive curricula, they vote against background check expansions for youth workers. They resist efforts to create national child abuse registries that include religious institutions. They block legislation to raise the minimum age of marriage. They eliminate funding for school counselors and after-school programs. They cut budgets for child protective services and reduce oversight of private adoption and foster care networks.

There is no contradiction here. The performance is the policy. Protection is not measured in outcomes. It is measured in volume. The louder the accusation, the less scrutiny is applied to legislative choices. Policy failure is neutralized by narrative substitution. When a child is raped and forced to give birth, the story is not told. When a teacher reads a picture book about diverse families, the story is told at volume. One incident is silent law. The other is national scandal.

The political value of outrage lies in its ability to redirect attention. Material neglect becomes invisible behind symbolic noise. The passage of laws criminalizing drag performances near schools draws headlines. The failure to fund rape crisis centers does not. By focusing public energy on the symbolic boundaries of morality, policymakers insulate themselves from accountability for structural abandonment. The child becomes a rhetorical device. She exists in theory rather than in law.

This asymmetry is visible in legislative activity. Since 2022, Republican-controlled legislatures have introduced hundreds of bills targeting LGBTQ speech, education content, and library access. Fewer than 10 bills have addressed forensic backlog reform. Even fewer have advanced. Proposed federal legislation to protect minors from online exploitation has repeatedly failed due to concerns about regulation of private companies. At the same time, multiple states have attempted to prosecute school staff for discussing gender identity under “grooming” statutes. The alignment is clear. Threats are defined ideologically. Interventions are reserved for performance.

Media infrastructure amplifies this distortion. Conservative news outlets and online influencers produce continuous content warning of threats posed by social workers, librarians, and drag performers. The framing consistently positions adults who support youth autonomy as predators. At the same time, actual cases of child sexual abuse in religious, athletic, and political institutions are downplayed or reframed. The function of this narrative is not to inform. It is to sustain a moral panic that legitimizes surveillance and censorship while diverting attention from systemic failures.

This process also redefines harm. Under the current paradigm, harm is not measured by suffering or injury. It is measured by deviation from normative identity. A child exposed to age-appropriate information about gender is framed as endangered. A child raped and forced to carry a pregnancy is not framed at all. She exists outside the moral narrative. Her pain is illegible because it does not confirm the ideological premise. She does not symbolize anything useful. She is inconvenient.

This redefinition produces policy that protects ideology rather than people. It enshrines the fiction that surveillance and restriction produce safety. It displaces accountability by substituting criminalization for care. The result is a system in which the primary targets of protective legislation are not predators but professionals. Teachers, counselors, and medical providers are monitored more closely than the men marrying minors or the judges enabling child pregnancies. The apparatus of protection becomes an apparatus of control.

This structure is not malfunctioning. It is performing as designed. The emphasis on symbolic enforcement over material assistance ensures that power remains centered. Actual protections would require redistribution. They would require funding, oversight, and transparency. They would require confronting the institutions most closely aligned with conservative authority: churches, courts, families. That confrontation is not forthcoming. Instead, the state protects the ideology of protection while abandoning the child.

The cumulative effect is institutionalized harm. Systems nominally built to safeguard children instead categorize them. They are either politically useful or they are not. Those who conform to the narrative of victimhood receive visibility without assistance. Those who contradict it receive neither. The performance of protection absorbs public attention. The reality of harm proceeds without interruption.

This disconnect is not unique to recent years. It has precedent in every era of moral panic. What is distinct in the current moment is the speed and reach of narrative enforcement. Digital media enables rapid mobilization around symbolic events. Legislation follows quickly. Meanwhile, data on actual abuse, assault, and neglect remains underreported and underanalyzed. The disparity between visible outrage and invisible harm grows wider. The system becomes harder to map and easier to perform.

The result is a hollow institution of child protection. It possesses language without infrastructure, law without care, and policy without contact. It functions as a mirror reflecting ideology back to its authors. The child at the center of the performance is not protected. She is used. The system that claims to speak for her leaves her undocumented, unsupported, and unacknowledged. This is not a gap in the system. It is the system.

A Coherent System, Not a Series of Failures This is not the result of a broken machine. It is the machine.

Child marriage laws that legalize statutory rape. Forced birth mandates that turn trauma into state policy. Rape crisis centers shuttered by budget design. Evidence kits rotting in closets. Drag queens banned from libraries while judges greenlight the weddings of 15-year-olds to grown men. None of this happens by accident. The patterns are too consistent, the outcomes too aligned. This is not a case of good intentions gone astray or bureaucratic confusion. It is a deliberate configuration of legal tools designed to shield abusers and discipline the abused.

The architecture holds. What looks like hypocrisy from the outside is strategy from within. It is not a contradiction to scream about “protecting children” while erasing them from legislation, data, and policy. It is not a glitch that the same people who ban books on puberty also block efforts to process rape kits. It is not ironic that the man whose administration claimed to be exposing Epstein’s secrets ended up presiding over their burial. It is structural.

The Epstein file was never about closure. It was about control. It served as a pressure valve, a vessel for all the anxiety and suspicion the base could not voice elsewhere. But when the promised reckoning finally came, it was blank pages and black ink. No fireworks. No arrests. Just a memo and a shrug. The silence that followed was not empty. It was full of meaning.

Because while they waited for the names to drop, the rest of the machine kept humming. Pregnant children were denied care. Shelters lost funding. Backlogs grew. Survivors disappeared into legal limbo. And the same men who had built their brand on outrage offered nothing but slogans and deflection. The spectacle of protection kept playing. But behind the curtain, the laws were doing exactly what they were designed to do.

It is easy to mock the true believers who spent years convinced that justice was one release away. But they were right about one thing. There is a network. It is not secret. It is written into the statutes and reinforced by the budgets. It lives in the votes cast to stall reforms and the speeches given to demonize victims. The rot is not hidden. It is codified.

The question now is not whether the system will be exposed. It already has been. The question is whether people are willing to see what has been made plainly visible. To understand that the policy scaffolding of modern conservatism is not a malfunctioning child safety program. It is a functioning disciplinary regime. Its purpose is not to protect the vulnerable. It is to sort them. To elevate the compliant and erase the inconvenient.

The Epstein affair was never going to end in justice. It was a mirror. What it reflected was not a single man’s sins but a political order that treats predation as a price of stability. The client list doesn’t need to be released. The clients wrote the laws. The machine is working.

new analysis reveals that companies seeking favorable outcomes from the Trump administration have pledged to funnel at least $63 million into Trump’s future presidential library. Other gifts and in-kind donations — including a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, expensive candlelight dinners at Mar-a-Lago, leftover inauguration donations, and more — bring the total value of gifts flowing into Trump’s library to at least half a billion dollars.

Republished under Creative Commons License.

Original article on Common Dreams.

The Trump administration is facing suspicion from all sides of burying information about the convicted sex criminal, who has a well-documented history with Trump. "This is about transparency and restoring trust, not partisan politics," said Khanna.

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna said he will attempt to force a vote in Congress to release all the government's files pertaining to the notorious financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

"On Tuesday, I'm introducing an amendment to force a vote demanding the FULL Epstein files be released to the public," Khanna (D-Calif.) tweeted Saturday night. "Speaker [Mike Johnson] must call a vote and put every Congress member on record."

The administration of President Donald Trump has been accused in recent days of covering up information about the extent of the financier's crimes and his connections to powerful individuals, including President Donald Trump himself.

"Why are the Epstein files still hidden? Who are the rich and powerful being protected?" Khanna asked.

Since Epstein's death in 2019 in federal custody following charges of child sex-trafficking, the billionaire investor has been the subject of rampant speculation.

Though his death was officially ruled a suicide, some have speculated that Epstein was murdered to prevent him from implicating other elite "clients" in his sex-trafficking ring. Epstein had relationships with powerful individuals, including former President Bill Clinton and the U.K.'s Prince Andrew.

Trump also has a well-documented history with Epstein. They have been extensively photographed together. And last year, an audio tape was released in which Epstein described himself as "Donald Trump's closest friend."

In June, amid a public falling-out with the president, billionaire Elon Musk said that the Trump administration, which he'd just departed, was covering up the files to protect Trump.

"Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files," he wrote. That is the real reason they have not been made public."

During the 2024 campaign, Trump said he would "probably" release the so-called "Epstein files" to the public. Meanwhile, many members of his Department of Justice—including FBI Director Kash Patel—rose to prominence in part by accusing Joe Biden's administration of covering up secrets about Epstein to protect powerful Democrats and other elites.

During his confirmation hearing, Patel said he would "do everything if confirmed as FBI director to make sure the American public knows the full weight of what happened."

In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the DOJ would be "lifting the veil" on "Epstein and his co-conspirators." She said she had Epstein's client list "sitting on my desk right now to review" and promised that "a lot of names" would be revealed. Though in subsequent days, little was released beyond information that was already public.

A memo released July 7 by the DOJ later stated that there was "no incriminating client list" and that Epstein indeed committed suicide. It also said that "no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted."

This reversal resulted in widespread anger, including from many Trump supporters directed at Bondi, who they accused of covering up information that might damage the president.

"Pam Blondi [sic] is covering up child sex crimes that took place under HER WATCH when she was Attorney General of Florida," wrote one of Trump's closest confidantes, Laura Loomer. "Bondi needs to be fired."

The following day, Trump chastised a reporter for continuing to ask about Epstein.

"Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years… Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable," the president said.

He would later write a long Truth Social post in which he defended Bondi and urged the public to "not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about."

The post received an almost totally negative response on Trump's own social media app.

The administration's dismissive response to the mysteries surrounding Epstein has led to suspicion across the political spectrum, including from some of Trump's closest allies.

"He said 'Epstein' half a dozen times while telling everyone to stop talking about Epstein," wrote Musk on X. "Just release the files as promised."

Khanna is now hoping to wield the widespread backlash to force the administration to come clean about what it knows.

"This is about transparency and restoring trust, not partisan politics. The public outcry is apparent," he said. "The files should be fully released and can be done so consistent with DOJ principles of protecting victims and the innocent."

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

Christian nationalism has become an overt motivation for Trump’s deportation efforts

In the Instagram video, uniformed border patrol personnel sling on vests and helmets. Grainy, night-vision footage of people, presumably migrants, moving through brush is spliced together with shots of helicopters hovering, all scored to a dark folk-harmony track that would sound at home in O Brother, Where Art Thou.

A twangy narration plays over the top: “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying: Who shall I send, and who will go for us? And I said: Here am I; send me.”

The clip was posted not by a church or religious leader, but by the Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol and the White House.

It’s nothing new for a government to make propaganda presenting their actions and policies as inspiring; Israel has been making videos of its military that feel like clips from Marvel movies for years, and using humor and memes to try to build goodwill. (The humor hasn’t always landed well.) The U.S. military, for its part, has long made recruitment videos that deploy action movie sequences to inspire young Americans to join the Army.

But the open invocation of the Bible to underscore the Trump administration’s deportation plan is new; the aesthetics of these videos suggest that the U.S.’s actions are not only exciting or noble, but also divinely ordained.

Not every post from DHS, Border Patrol or the White House cites the Bible, of course. Some are darkly joking memes, like one of a weightlifting skeleton with superimposed text reading: “My body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations.” Ha ha! Others capitalize on social media trends like ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, videos meant to provoke a pleasant full-body tingle, usually using calming sounds, like whispering or gentle tapping; the White House version features the sound of handcuffs clanking.

Most posts are just pictures and videos of deportations, framed by cheery or triumphant messaging, including at least one set to the song “Ice, Ice, Baby.” A carousel of pictures of people being handcuffed by ICE agents is captioned “Summer Postcards from DHS” with a heart emoji. A video of “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new detention facility in Florida, shows chain-link fencing around metal bunk beds, an electric guitar solo playing in the background.

Still, the video invoking religion is far from a one-off. Trump has been justifying his policies via references to God with increasing frequency, particularly since the attempted assassination at a campaign event. “He’s on a mission from God, and nothing can stop what’s coming” reads one black-and-white image of Trump striding through the night in a long black coat.

It feels almost too obvious to mention that this is a sign of the role that Christian nationalism is playing in driving Trump administration policies and priorities. Despite numerous stories of people with no gang connections or violent history being arrested and deported, or American citizens harassed or wrongfully detained, the Christian narrative frames the ICE agents as soldiers of God. It plays in an emotional, religious register that implies their actions must be righteous, however violent they might appear. After all, God’s ways may be mysterious, it seems to imply, so the only thing people can do is trust in God’s ordained messengers — who are, apparently, ICE agents and Trump.

Christianity is, of course, not the only trend in the Trump administration’s online messaging; a cruel style of online humor and extremism is also clearly playing a large role in the Trump administration’s messaging. But even these seemingly nonreligious memes are connected to a religious undercurrent.

The meme style the DHS and White House accounts are leveraging was built, in large part, by groypers, the followers of white supremacist Nick Fuentes. And Fuentes, who is Catholic, promotes a militant Christian nationalism that explicitly targets Jews. Even though many of the government’s posts do not overtly reference a Christian-run government, they are still, implicitly, tied to Christian nationalism; those who are in the know recognize the aesthetic symbolism.

But perhaps more important than whether a post is promoting Christian nationalism — an influence that has long been an obvious part of the Trump administration’s motivations and messaging — is the way that they normalize violent imagery. The more people are inundated by joking memes about people being beaten and handcuffed by U.S. government forces, the less startling they are. And the easier it is to believe that, perhaps, this is the way things have been since the beginning — just as God made them.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott doesn’t want to reveal months of communications with Elon Musk or representatives from the tech mogul’s companies, arguing in part that they are of a private nature, not of public interest and potentially embarrassing.

Musk had an eventful legislative session in Texas this year. In addition to his lobbyists successfully advocating for several new laws, Abbott cited the Tesla and SpaceX CEO as the inspiration for the state creating its own efficiency office and has praised him for moving the headquarters for many of his businesses to the state in recent years.

As part of an effort to track the billionaire’s influence in the state Capitol, The Texas Newsroom in April requested Abbott and his staff’s emails since last fall with Musk and other people who have an email address associated with some of his companies.

Initially, the governor’s office said it would take more than 13 hours to review the records. It provided a cost estimate of $244.64 for the work and required full payment up front. The Texas Newsroom agreed and cut a check.

After the check was cashed, the governor’s office told The Texas Newsroom it believed all of the records were confidential and asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office referees disputes over public records, to allow the documents to be kept private.

Matthew Taylor, Abbott’s public information coordinator, gave several reasons the records should not be released. He argued they include private exchanges with lawyers, details about policy-making decisions and information that would reveal how the state entices companies to invest here. Releasing them to the public, he wrote, “would have a chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process.”

DW.

What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and “selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands. Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it? They haven’t even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files. No matter how much success we have had, securing the Border, deporting Criminals, fixing the Economy, Energy Dominance, a Safer World where Iran will not have Nuclear Weapons, it’s never enough for some people. We are about to achieve more in 6 months than any other Administration has achieved in over 100 years, and we have so much more to do. We are saving our Country and, MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, which will continue to be our complete PRIORITY. The Left is imploding! Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein. LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT! The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024 — That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more. One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Source.

Article in PDF Format.

A political crisis has erupted within the Trump administration over an alleged list naming powerful men who participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious underworld of sex trafficking and pedophilia.

The controversy has exposed deep fissures within the administration, ignited a wave of recriminations and fueled public suspicion about the government’s participation in a further cover-up of the crimes of the billionaire Epstein and his associates.

Image source.

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

While he was writing Mein Kampf within the walls of Landsberg prison in 1924, Adolf Hitler argued that Germany’s salvation required a single, infallible leader — one whose will would override parliamentary squabbling, legal constraints and institutional checks. This governing idea, known as the Führerprinzip, became the spine of Nazi rule: first consolidating control over the party, then over the state.

A century later, the Führerprinzip is no longer lurking in the shadows. In Donald Trump’s second term, echoes of the doctrine are surfacing in policy, purges and propaganda, transforming American governance from a constitutional system into a vehicle for personal power.

Americans got an early glimpse of Trump’s authoritarian impulses in his hit reality TV show The Apprentice. His cosplay boardroom rulings were final, often abrupt and rarely questioned — mirroring a top-down leadership style that emphasized dominance over deliberation. At the time, Trump’s business empire was riddled with failures, yet his onscreen persona cast him as the ultimate arbiter of success and singular greatness. His trademark edict, “You’re fired,” thrilled viewers but also showcased his comfort with public humiliation. Long before executive orders and loyalty purges, the Führerprinzip was playing out on prime-time television, with 24 million Americans watching.

As the public was sucked in by Trump’s pose as a successful entrepreneur, by his outrageousness, his theatricality, grand promises and populist pronouncements, Trump barely eked out a victory in the 2016 presidential election, assisted by James Comey, widening fissures among Americans, internecine warfare among Democrats, misogynistic views about Hillary Clinton, and indifference among Republicans toward his ever-ballooning catalog of lies.

Level-headed advisors, military brass and Cabinet heads succeeded in containing Trump’s Führerprinzip impulses during his first administration — his urges to revoke broadcast licenses for networks like NBC after unfavorable coverage, to launch investigations into his political opponents, deploy active-duty troops during the George Floyd protests, among other potentially perilous moments.

Since taking office for the second time, Trump’s actions seem like they’ve come right out of a playbook for implementing the Führerprinzip – he has issued legally dubious executive orders, assaulted the rule of law, the free press, the judiciary, higher education, and so much more. He has used threats of retribution to turn Republicans into a party that marches in complete lockstep with a leader who demands loyalty above law.

It took Adolf Hitler five years before he was able to force his party to bend to his will, and another eight before he was able to expand his one-man control over the entire country. After serving just 264 days of a five-year prison sentence for his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, Hitler set out to assert his authority over a Nazi party that had been riven by infighting over ideology. At a conference of leading Nazi officials on Feb. 14, 1926 in the Bavarian town of Bamberg, Hitler succeeded in rewiring the party around his personal authority and transformed internal dissent into a loyalty test. Before the Bamberg conference, the Führerprinzip was theory. After Bamberg, it was the Nazi party’s operational doctrine.

When backroom political wheeling and dealing gave Hitler the chancellorship in January 1933, he wasted no time in applying the Führerprinzip to establish an iron grip on all of Germany. The burning of the Reichstag that February gave Hitler a pretext to raid and shut down newspapers and political offices, imprison without trial thousands of Social Democrats and Communists and others deemed a political threat, and end a whole slate of democratic rights that had been in place since the founding of the Weimar Republic.

The so-called Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934 was another crucial step in Hitler’s implementation of the Führerprinzip, and a moment when he became the unquestioned architect of a totalitarian state. In Hitler’s paranoid view, the Sturmabteilung and its leader, Ernst Röhm, had become a threat to his authority. Röhm and other SA leaders were arrested in late June and early July. The purge was also extended to others considered by Hitler to be insufficiently loyal. Up to 1,000 died in the massacre, including Röhm, who was executed after he refused to commit suicide. In the aftermath of the purge, the German armed forces swore an oath of allegiance to the Führer.

Brute force wasn’t used to secure the loyalty of the German civil service. Instead, it was a 1933 law that banned from the civil service anyone whose political views or racial backgrounds were deemed incompatible with Nazi ideology, including Jews and Communists. The civil service became an extension of Hitler’s will.

With a June 1933 decree, Hitler deployed the Führerprinzip to totally eliminate remnants of any political opposition by banning the Social Democratic Party. Party leaders and members were rounded up and sent to concentration camps and prisons, often without trial. Many fled the country or went underground. Germany was now a one-party state.

Obviously, Trump has not used the term Führerprinzip to describe the principles guiding his style of governing — assuming such principles exist beyond enriching himself and fellow billionaires, punishing anyone who’s crossed him, accepting luxury gifts from Middle Eastern potentates, and golfing while Texas children perish in floodwaters. But his rhetoric maps neatly onto the concept: loyalty over law, vengeance over governance, and personal will as public mandate. This post by Trump on his Truth Social propaganda platform says it all: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Just as Hitler used the Reichstag Fire Decree as a pretext to suspend civil liberties, Trump has issued executive orders asserting that his own legal interpretations are “controlling” across federal agencies—subordinating nonpartisan expertise to his personal will. To try to subvert a free press, Trump launched White House Wire, a taxpayer-funded platform that broadcasts MAGA propaganda. Prospective civil servants face loyalty tests, with job applicants being required to explain how they would advance Trump’s executive orders.

What’s disturbing about Trump’s second term is not just the considerable damage he’s already inflicted on our democratic institutions, but what may lie before us. Will, for example, America experience an equivalent of the 1933 Reichstag fire, some moment of national tensions, cooked up or otherwise, that Trump might use as an excuse to declare martial law and seize absolute power?

Nearly 90 million Americans, about 36% of eligible voters, didn’t bother to cast a ballot in last year’s presidential election. Their reasons for staying on the sidelines run the gamut — from not liking either candidate to thinking their votes didn’t matter to harboring a general apathy about politics. The 2024 election was without a doubt one of the most consequential in American history, and may turn out to be one of the most fateful. Many Americans shrugged off warnings by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris that Trump would act on his authoritarian impulses if elected for a second term. But we see now that Biden and Harris were right.

So what do we do now?

Become part of the resistance. Make a protest sign. Join the marchers. Volunteer for your local chapter of Indivisible. Make noise, lots of it. Germany’s first democracy died because too many Germans didn’t think it was worth defending. It would be an unspeakable tragedy if this was also America’s fate.

The phantom spirit of the Führerprinzip is alive and scheming within Trump’s brain. We must work together to banish it. As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but often rhymes. Let’s not be the generation of Americans who ignored that rhyme.

~"Brad Lander" by Rainforest Action Network is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/?ref=openverse .~

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

Brad Lander, New York City’s outgoing comptroller, is defending his decision to end pension fund investments in Israel Bonds in 2023, calling it a standard financial decision.

In a letter dated July 10 and shared with the media on Sunday, First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro accused Lander of orchestrating a “sustained and coordinated” effort to divest city pension funds from Israeli sovereign bonds. Since 1974, the city has invested in Israel Bonds, debt securities issued by the Israeli government with a roughly 5% return.

Lander’s predecessors — Scott Stringer, John Liu and Bill Thompson — invested tens of millions in these bonds.

The administration of New York City Mayor Eric Adams pointed to a report that government employee pension funds had $1.17 million invested in Israel holdings, down from $30 million in 1974. Mastro accused Lander of abandoning his “fiduciary duty” to appease the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. The letter demanded documentation from Lander’s office — including internal memos, consultant reports, and communications with third parties — regarding the decision not to renew Israel bond investments.

Lander pushed back forcefully in a letter first shared with the Forward, rejecting the claim that his decision not to purchase new bonds in January 2023, when the holdings matured, was political. When he took office in January 2022, the city’s pension funds held $39,947,160 in Israel Bonds. Lander said he was following the city’s policy of avoiding foreign sovereign debt, treating Israel the same as other countries rather than giving it special treatment in the pension portfolio. “The BDS movement asks investors to treat Israel worse than other countries,” he wrote. “I oppose this effort.”

In an interview on Sunday, Lander confirmed that city pension funds currently hold no investments in Israel Bonds.

Related Meet the Jews who helped elect Zohran Mamdani He said the $1.17 million purchase by the Police Pension Fund, reported by the New York Post in March, was made by a fund manager but has since been sold.

As of May, however, Lander said city pension funds still held more than $315 million in Israel-based assets, including nearly $300 million in common stock and over $1 million in Israeli real estate investment trusts.

“As a Jew, I am proud that we have these investments in Israel,” Lander said. “But I’m not allowed to make investments for that reason. They have to make financial sense to be consistent with our policies and my fiduciary duty.”

Lander accused his predecessors of “making politically motivated choices” to treat Israel in a more “favorable way” than other countries.

Mark Levine, the Democratic nominee for comptroller, who is also Jewish, said in an interview during the primary that he would repurchase the bonds as part of the city’s portfolio. “This has been a rock-solid investment for decades,” he said. “Israel has never missed a bond payment, and a good, balanced portfolio should have global diversity.”

Levine added that investing in Israeli bonds is “unquestionably the right thing to do from a fiscal perspective. And I think to do otherwise is not defensible.” His Democratic rival in the primary, Councilmember Justin Brannan, also committed to doing the same.

The fight for New York’s Jewish vote

New York City is home to the largest concentration of Jews in the United States. The city’s investment in Israeli bonds was a flashpoint in the Democratic primary for mayor, with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Adams attacking Lander for divesting from Israel. Many Jewish voters view the bonds as a bulwark against the BDS movement.

Lander came in third place after cross-endorsing Zohran Mamdani. Cuomo, who lost to Mamdani in the primary, is reportedly launching an independent bid this week.

Mamdani, a supporter of the boycott Israel movement, said during the primary that he would divest from Israel if elected. “That’s not something that I would pursue,” Mamdani said when asked about the city strengthening economic ties with the Israeli government.

A recent survey showed that 52% of likely voters said Mamdani’s embrace of the boycott Israel movement makes them less likely to vote for him. However, 30%, including 46% of those aged 18-44, said it makes them more likely to support him.

Adams is running for reelection on an independent ballot line. Recent polls show the incumbent mayor trailing far behind Mamdani, and receiving less support than former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose name appears on an independent ballot line, and GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa.

In recent weeks, Adams has sought to draw a sharp contrast with Mamdani over support for Israel.

The mayor has made courting Jewish voters central to his campaign strategy after trailing far behind in recent polls. He launched a mayor’s office to combat antisemitism. He also signed an executive order adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. In May, Adams announced the creation of the New York City–Israel Economic Council, an initiative to strengthen economic ties with the Jewish state.

Adams and Lander trading barbs

The letter sent to Lander seems to be another move to draw a distinction. Pundits expect Lander, who has become a key figure in Mamdani’s outreach to the Jewish community, to play an influential role in the next administration if Mamdani wins the general election in November.

“Brad Lander was elected to safeguard New York City’s financial future, yet he continues to pander to the antisemitic BDS movement at the expense of taxpayer dollars and our city’s best interests,” Adams said in a statement on Sunday.

Lander fired back in his response, calling it a “cynical effort” to “exploit division” for political benefit.

In the interview, Lander suggested Adams was using the bond lapse for “his own, craven, personal and political purposes.”

“I think this letter is one more pathetic attempt to try to curry favor with Jewish voters, rather than speak to the issues that really matter in New York City,” Lander said.

Homelessness is increasingly caused by soaring rents and low wages, not laziness or personal failures. The solution is strong government intervention to house everyone and to end landlords’ control over our lives.

President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again movement is looking for a scapegoat as its members rage about the Trump administration's Sunday announcement that there are no bombshell files about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

It appears they have landed on Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Axios reported that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—who spread Epstein conspiracy theories as a podcaster before Trump appointed him to the role he’s unqualified to hold—"took a day off from work" on Friday because he was so mad at Bondi.

CNN reported that Bongino is considering resigning, while one source told Axios they believe Bongino may have already quit.

“He ain't coming back,” a “source close to Bongino” told Axios.

Bongino is reportedly mad that Bondi publicly overhyped the supposed Epstein client list, which Trump’s Department of Justice now says doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, right-wing influencer and noted bigot Laura Loomer—who has Trump’s ear—also claimed on X that FBI Director Kash Patel is "LIVID" with Bondi "over her DOJ Memo and the lack of transparency from her office regarding the Jeffery Epstein files."

"Pam Blondi has brought total embarrassment to President Trump, @JDVance, @dbongino and @Kash_Patel. She has also LIED to the American people,” Loomer wrote in her post, using a pejorative name for the attorney general, and adding that Bondi “needs to be fired for this.”

Bondi did appear to lie to the American people when she said in February that she had Epstein's client list "sitting on my desk right now to review,” only to admit on Sunday that no such list exists.

This is not the first time Bondi has found herself in hot water over the so-called Epstein files.

Bondi came under fire in February after she staged an embarrassing stunt at the White House in which she gave MAGA influencers binders whose covers were labeled "The Epstein Files, Phase 1,” only for those binders to hold virtually no new information.

But the latest Epstein files debacle is sending MAGA into a tailspin as they try to come to terms with the fact that the Trump administration is telling them that the conspiracy theories they’ve pushed for years are false.

“The Trump admin's handling of the Epstein files has been a massive unforced error,” CNN’s Harry Enten said Friday. “Trump may wish it goes away, but Google searches for Epstein are up 1,200% this week. It's the top topic searched with Trump today. More have Googled Epstein this week than Grok or tariffs.”

Trump, for his part, has tried to downplay the entire matter around Epstein and his supposed files. At a Cabinet meeting earlier this week, Trump snapped at a reporter who tried to ask about the Epstein files, "Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years.”

“At a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas, it just seems like a desecration,” he added.

YouTube Video.

But since MAGA can never turn on its Dear Leader, it now looks like they’ve landed on Bondi as their scapegoat.

We'll see how long she lasts in the administration.

Republished from DailyKos under their terms.

Republished from ScheerPost under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. CC-BY-NC-ND.

The refusal by the Trump administration to release the files and videos amassed during investigations into the activities of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, should put to rest the absurd idea, embraced by Trump supporters and gullible liberals, that Trump will dismantle the Deep State. Trump is part of, and has long been part of, the repugnant cabal of politicians – Democrat and Republican – billionaires and celebrities who look at us, and often underage girls and boys, as commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure.

The list of those who were in Epstein’s orbit is a who’s who of the rich and famous. They include not only Trump, but Bill Clinton, who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former Secretary of the Treasury and former president of Harvard University Larry Summers, cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker, Alan Dershowitz, billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner, the former Barclays banker Jes Staley, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, the magician David Copperfield, actor Kevin Spacey, former CIA director Bill Burns, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who reveled in Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia.

They also include law firms and high-priced attorneys, federal and state prosecutors, private investigators, personal assistants, publicists, servants and drivers. They include the numerous procurers and pimps, including Epstein’s girlfriend and daughter of Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell. They include the media and politicians who ruthlessly discredited and silenced the victims, and strong armed anyone, including a handful of intrepid reporters, seeking to expose Epstein’s crimes and circle of accomplices.

There is a lot that remains hidden. But there are some things we know. Epstein installed hidden cameras in his opulent residences and on his private Caribbean island, Little St. James, to capture his high-powered friends engaging in sexual romps and abuse of teenage and underage girls and boys. The recordings were blackmail gold. Were they part of an intelligence operation on behalf of the Israeli Mossad? Or were they used to ensure that Epstein had a steady source of investors who funneled him millions of dollars to avoid being outed? Or were they used for both? He shuttled underage girls between New York and Palm Beach on his private jet the Lolita Express, which was allegedly outfitted with a bed for group sex. His coterie of famous friends, including Clinton and Trump, are recorded as traveling on the jet numerous times on released flight logs, although many other flight logs have disappeared.

Epstein’s videos are in the vaults of the FBI, along with detailed evidence that would rip back the veil on the sexual proclivities and callousness of the powerful. I doubt there is a client list, as Attorney General Pam Bondi claims. There is also no single Epstein file. The investigative material amassed on Epstein fills many, many boxes, which would bury Bondi’s desk and probably, if collected in one room, dominate most of the space in her office.

Did Epstein commit suicide, as the official autopsy report claims, by hanging himself in his jail cell on August 10, 2019 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City? Or was he murdered? Since the cameras recording activity in his cell the night were not functional, we do not know. Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother, who served as the chief medical examiner for New York City and who was present at the autopsy, said he believes Epstein’s autopsy suggests homicide.

The Epstein case is important because it implodes the fiction of deep divisions between Democrats, who had no more interest in releasing the Epstein files than Trump, and the Republicans. They belong to the same club. It exposes how the courts and law enforcement agencies collude to shield powerful figures who engage in crimes. It lays bare the depravity of our exhibitionist ruling class, accountable to no one, free to violate, plunder, loot and prey on the weak and the vulnerable. It is the tawdry record of our oligarchic masters, those who lack the capacity for shame or guilt, whether dressed up as Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

This class of ruling parasites was parodied in the first-century satirical novel “Satyricon” by Gaius Petronius Arbiter, written during the reigns of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. As in Satyricon, Epstein’s circle was dominated by pseudointellectuals, pretentious buffoons, grifters, con artists, petty criminals, the insatiable rich and the sexually depraved. Epstein and his inner circle routinely engaged in sexual perversions of Petronian proportions, as The Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie Brown, whose dogged reporting was largely responsible for reopening the federal investigation in Epstein and Maxwell, documents in her book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story.”

As Brown writes, in 2016 an anonymous woman, using the pseudonym “Kate Johnson,” filed a civil complaint in a federal court in California alleging she was raped by Trump and Epstein when she was thirteen, over a four-month period, from June to September 1994.

“I loudly pleaded with Trump to stop,” she said in the lawsuit about being raped. “Trump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open hand and screaming that he could do whatever he wanted.”

Brown continues:

Johnson said that Epstein invited her to a series of ‘underage sex parties’ at his New York mansion where she met Trump. Enticed by promises of money and modeling opportunities, Johnson said she was forced to have sex with Trump several times, including once with another girl, twelve years old, whom she labeled ‘Marie Doe.’

Trump demanded oral sex, the lawsuit said, and afterward he “pushed both minors away while angrily berating them for the ‘poor’ quality of the sexual performance,” according to the lawsuit, filed April 26 in U.S. District Court in Central California.

Afterward, when Epstein learned that Trump had taken Johnson’s virginity, Epstein allegedly ‘attempted to strike her about the head with his closed fists,’ angry he had not been the one to take her virginity. Johnson claimed that both men threatened to harm her, and her family if she ever revealed what had happened.

The lawsuit states that Trump did not take part in Epstein’s orgies but liked to watch, often while the thirteen-year-old “Kate Johnson” gave him a hand job.

It appears Trump was able to quash the lawsuit by buying her silence. She has since disappeared.

In 2008, Alex Acosta, who at the time was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, negotiated a plea deal for Epstein. The deal granted immunity from all federal criminal charges to Epstein, four named co-conspirators and any unnamed “potential co-conspirators.” The agreement shut down the FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful figures who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes. It halted the investigation and sealed the indictment. Trump, in what many consider an act of gratitude, appointed Acosta as Secretary of Labor in his first term.

Trump contemplated pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell after she was arrested in July 2020, fearing she would reveal details of his decades-long friendship with Epstein, according to Trump biographer Michael Wolff. In July 2022, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

“Jeffrey Epstein’s closest relationship in life was with Donald Trump…these were two guys joined at the hip for a good 15 years. They did everything together,” Wolff told host Joanna Coles on The Daily Beast Podcast. “And this is from sharing, pursuing women, hunting women, sharing at least one girlfriend for at least a year in this kind of rich-guy relationship with each other’s planes, to Epstein advising Trump on how to cheat on his taxes.”

The legal anomalies, including the disappearance of massive amounts of evidence incriminating Epstein, saw Epstein avoid federal sex-trafficking charges in 2007, when his attorneys negotiated the secret plea deal with Acosta. He was able to plead guilty to lesser state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution.

The prominent men accused of engaging in Epstein’s carnival of pedophilia, including Epstein’s attorney Dershowitz, viciously threaten anyone who seeks to expose them. Dershowitz, for example, claims that an investigation which he has refused to make public, by the former FBI director Louis Freeh, proves he had never had sex with Epstein’s victim Virginia Giuffre, who was trafficked at 17 to Prince Andrew. Giuffre, one of the few victims to publicly take on her abusers, said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” among Epstein and Maxwell’s friends, until at the age of 19 when she escaped. She “committed suicide” in April 2025. Dershowitz has sent repeated threats to Brown and her editors at The Miami Herald.

Brown continues:

[Dershowitz] kept referring to information that was contained in sealed documents. He accused the newspaper of not reporting “facts” that he said were in those sealed documents. The truth is, I tried to explain, newspapers just can’t write about things because Alan Dershowitz says they exist. We need to see them. We need to verify them. Then, because I said “show me the material,” he publicly accused me of committing a criminal act by asking him to produce documents that were under court seal.

This is the way Dershowitz operates.

What disturbs me the most about Dershowitz is the way that the media, with few exceptions, fails to critically challenge him. Journalists fact-checked Donald Trump and others in his administration almost every day, yet, for the most part, the media seems to give Dershowitz a pass on the Epstein story.

In 2015, when Giuffre’s allegations first became public, Dershowitz went on every television program imaginable swearing, among other things, that Epstein’s plane logs would exonerate him. “How do you know that?” he was asked.

He replied that he was never on Epstein’s plane during the time that Virginia was involved with Epstein.

But if the media had checked, they could have learned that he was indeed a passenger on the plane during that time period, according to the logs.

Then he testified, in a sworn deposition, that he never went on any plane trips without his wife. But he was listed on those passage manifests as traveling multiple times without his wife. During at least one trip, he was on the plane with a model named Tatiana.

Epstein donated money to Harvard and was made a visiting fellow in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, although he had no academic qualifications in the field. He was given a key card and pass code, as well as an office in the building that housed Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He referred to himself in his press releases as “Science Philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein,” “Education activist Jeffrey Epstein,” “Evolutionary Jeffrey Epstein,” “Science patron Jeffrey Epstein” and “Maverick hedge funder Jeffrey Epstein.”

Epstein, replicating the pretensions and vacuity of the characters who were parodied in the “Dinner with Trimalchio” chapter of Satyricon, organized elaborate dinner gatherings for his billionaire friends, including Elon Musk, Salar Kamangar and Jeff Bezos. He dreamed up bizarre schemes of social engineering, including a plan to seed the human species with his own DNA by creating a baby compound at his sprawling ranch in New Mexico.

“Epstein was also obsessed with cryonics, the transhumanist philosophy whose followers believe that people can be replicated or brought back to life after they are frozen,” Brown writes. “Epstein apparently told some of the members of his scientific circle that he wanted to inseminate women with his sperm for them to give birth to his babies, and that he wanted his head and his penis frozen.”

The Epstein story is a window into the moral bankruptcy, hedonism and greed of the ruling class. This crosses political lines. It is the common denominator between Democratic politicians, such as Bill Clinton, philanthropists, such as Bill Gates, the billionaire class, and Trump. They are one class of predators and grifters. It is not only girls and women they exploit, but all of us.

• United States Secret Service (USSS) denied multiple requests for additional staff, assets, and resources to protect President Trump during the campaign.
• United States Secret Service (USSS) did not fire a single person involved in the planning and execution of the Butler rally. United States Secret Service (USSS) formally disciplined only six personnel, some of whom received their disciplinary decision as recently as July 2025. In two instances, the final disciplinary decision was a reduced punishment from what was originally recommended. Former Director Kimberly Cheatle falsely testified to Congress that no United States Secret Service (USSS) asset requests were denied for the Butler rally.
• Despite United States Secret Service (USSS) leadership receiving an intelligence briefing regarding the protectee and authorizing counter snipers at all of President Trump’s outdoor rallies a day prior, counter snipers were not present at the July 9, Doral campaign rally.
• There were ill-defined responsibilities for United States Secret Service (USSS) agents serving in advance roles.
• United States Secret Service (USSS) agents failed to communicate crucial information regarding the suspicious individual to President Trump’s shift detail, which had the ability to prevent him from taking the stage.
• Pertinent threat intelligence related to the protectee was not shared with United States Secret Service (USSS) agents in charge of security at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally.
• There was a severe lack of coordination and communication between United States Secret Service (USSS) and state and local law enforcement from the advance process through the event.

Nineteen White House officials own between $875,000 and $2.35 million in the crypto assets President Trump proposed holding in a national reserve, according to CREW’s analysis of nearly 120 executive branch financial disclosures.

While cryptocurrencies can be extremely volatile, the government holding these assets in reserve could legitimize what is currently viewed as a risky asset class. In a scenario where increased institutional buy-in results in rising values, White House officials who own the assets in question could profit from the impacts of the reserve plan.

In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile. Days before issuing the order, President Trump described his plans for the digital asset stockpile in a series of posts on Truth Social, announcing his intention to create a “U.S. Crypto Reserve” that includes Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), XRP (the native cryptocurrency on the Ripple blockchain) and Cardano (ADA). The final order created two separate reserve bodies, one that holds Bitcoin and a second for other tokens.

Notably, Trump himself has a business relationship with Solana, having launched the $TRUMP memecoin on the Solana blockchain prior to his inauguration in January 2025. According to data from blockchain analysis firm Arkham Intelligence, he also holds a small amount of Ethereum valued at about $15,000, though that is not included in this analysis. Overall, Trump’s crypto projects are thought to have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family since election day in 2024.

Nineteen White House employees reported holding at least one of the crypto assets proposed by President Trump to be included in the government’s digital asset holdings. Sixteen staffers held Bitcoin, making it the most popular crypto asset among those found in CREW’s analysis. Three staffers also disclosed ownership of shares in Bitcoin ETFs, which allow investors to gain exposure to fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin without holding the token itself. Bitcoin and Bitcoin ETFs make up between $818,019 and $2,020,000, the bulk of the total holdings. Other tokens, including Ethereum, account for an additional $578,0156 to $33045,000 in assets held by White House staff. One staffer, Special Assistant to the President for Communications Ian Kelley, owned each of the assets named by President Trump in his Truth Social posts.

Deportations will eliminate millions of jobs held by immigrant and U.S.-born workers according to research on increased immigration enforcement.

Key findings

• The number of deportations will skyrocket once the Trump administration fully rolls out its agenda. This will curtail business operations and reduce employer demand for immigrant and U.S.-born labor.
• If the administration follows through on its goals of deporting 4 million people over four years:

1. There will be 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed U.S.-born workers at the end of that period.
2. Employment in the construction sector will drop sharply: U.S.-born construction employment will fall by 861,000, and immigrant employment will fall by 1.4 million.
3. The deportations will eliminate half a million child care jobs.

• California, Florida, New York, and Texas will have the highest number of job losses due to larger immigrant populations in these states.

Why this matters

Deporting vast numbers of immigrants from the United States is a major goal of the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. However, immigrants are an integral part of the U.S. labor market, and an increase in deportations will result in fewer jobs for both immigrant and U.S.-born workers.

How to fix it

To limit damage to the labor market, policymakers should stop the tactics that are vastly increasing immigration enforcement like the arrest, detention, and deportation of immigrants, and reinstate temporary immigration protections like parole and Temporary Protected Status. Instead of providing additional funds for an increase in aggressive and indiscriminate immigration enforcement, Congress should focus on policies that will improve wages and working conditions like providing work permits and green cards to those who lack a regular immigration status, as well as providing adequate resources for the enforcement of labor standards.

Deportations will lead to job losses

Senator Ted Cruz is many things: a constitutional originalist, a spineless coward, and most recently, a podcaster. His weekly show Verdict with Ted Cruz has raised some uncomfortable questions—not just about how many hours a sitting U.S. Senator should be allowed to whine about cancel-culture into a Shure mic, but about the ethics of monetizing a podcast while in office.

In 2023, watchdog groups filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging Cruz was illegally soliciting donations via the podcast. Although Cruz apparently receives no salary from the show, the iHeartRadio network has contributed nearly $1 million in ad revenue to a super PAC supporting Cruz’s reelection bid. The FEC, in its infinite wisdom, dismissed the complaint in early 2025. And while that may clear him legally, it raises a deeper, more philosophical question: Should politicians have podcasts at all?

In an effort to answer that question, I stumbled across something nearly as horrifying as Cruz’s beard: a page on the official House GOP website titled “Member Podcasts.” It turns out Ted Cruz is just the tip of a much darker iceberg. Republicans in Congress are podcasting in numbers that feel unsafe for democracy.

So I did the only heroic thing one can do in such a moment. I listened to at least three episodes of each available podcast and wrote a review of every single one, so that you, dear reader, never have to. The results were often incomprehensible and almost universally boring. Please enjoy the fruits of my labor, because I know I didn’t.