The Long-Awaited Epstein Files... Kinda.
I mean, I guess it's a start [she wrote dubiously].
Let’s play a semi-gruesome game: Imagine as you’re loading eighty-eight dollars’ worth of cauliflower gnocchi and chimichurri empanadas into the trunk of your car, you’re kidnapped at knifepoint in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. While you’re very busy being bound and gagged, your captor drives you deep into the forest. After a while, he drops a bombshell: Someone you know actually hired him to kill you. They offered him $15 grand to get the job done, he tells you, but if you can cough up, say, twenty thousand, he’ll let you go, no hard feelings. For argument’s sake, pretend you just happen to have exactly that amount in your parka pocket (your next stop was to pick up a bunch of crap you found on Facebook Marketplace, nobody’s judging), so you fork over the fat wad of cash and he actually makes good on his promise. No stabbing, no shallow grave, no dramatic last words or pleas for mercy.
You’re free! You’re alive! You escaped a near-murder! Halleluiah praise [insert favorite deity here]!
*I’m going to go with finding out who hired him, but you do you.
Strangely—and yet not strangely at all, if you’re paying attention—lots of people have had an astonishing lack of interest in finding out who hired Jeffrey Epstein to procure a parade of innocent young girls for their deranged sexual pleasure.
To be clear, Epstein himself was (is?) a vile, despicable, sickening excuse of a human being on par with anyone who takes money to kill other people for a living. And while it’s widely known that he personally exploited and sexually abused countless minors, it’s been equally established that he was trafficking underage victims to actors, attorneys, executives, politicians, royals, and other high-profile figures. Those parasites, I’m sure you realize, would then be guilty of some combination of charges including child exploitation, sexual abuse of a minor, prostitution, racketeering, conspiracy to commit sex trafficking, and the production or possession of child pornography.
In other words, they are criminals.
It seemed for a minute as if our new administration was dedicated to transparency and accountability on all fronts, including the deepest and dirtiest of them. Attorney General Pam Bondi promised to release the complete “sick” Epstein files—names and all!—and in return, the people promised they were ready for it.
But then just like with the slow-drip “Pfizer dumps” (what ever happened to the rest of those, anyway?), it turned out the plan was to release the evidence in phases, with the first batch dropping yesterday. The files were not, as folks had hoped, published on some official website where us commoners could peruse them at our leisure; instead, they were handed to a righteousness of “right-wing influencers” who posed awkwardly with their little treasure troves of terror.
The internet was not impressed.
As you would imagine, #Epstein was trending on X all day, with lots of armchair reporters speculating about every aspect of the release and pointing figures at anyone with a binder pulse and calling the info recipients “paid propagandists” and claiming—accurately as far as I can see—that Dump #1 contains absolutely nothing that hasn’t already been released.
My buddy Brad Skistimas (known by his band name Five Times August) posted a catchy little ditty that I think sums up yesterday’s nothingburger with a side of cold nothingfries and a withered side nothingsalad pretty succinctly.
Maybe something magical is happening behind the scenes that we non-influencers simply aren’t privy to. Maybe they really will release meaningful—read: damning—data swiftly and completely. Maybe there’s a good reason for the slow, weak reveal (to protect the victims, one can only hope, and not to drag out the process in the hopes that the easily manipulated masses lose interest). Maybe ceremoniously handing the yawn-inducing “evidence” to a cacophony of conservative journalists was the administration’s way of acknowledging the new press corps—and pounding the final nail into the mainstream media coffin. Maybe Epstein will show up fresh out of witness protection with all the receipts and take down his entire sorry lot of co-conspirators. And maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow with taut skin, a couple million surprise bucks in the bank, and a fresh litter of kittens at my feet. A girl can dream. But at this particular juncture, I’m not going to lie. It feels like I just watched the world’s most disappointing episode of Dancing with the Tsars.
What do you guys thing has happened, is happening, and will happen? I can’t wait to hear. :)
