Difference between revisions of "25: The Construct: Jeffrey Epstein"

Hello, this is Eric with a few notes on today’s release. This was recorded over half a year ago, and I’ve sat on it because I didn’t want to release it. I had hoped that the story it discusses would have been followed up by others as I never wanted to be entangled with it. Instead, that story has barely moved. For some reason, there is no one capable within the world of institutional media or government of moving this enormous story forward, despite worldwide interest, I’ve elsewhere named that unseen force the DISC or Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.

What I see when watching this video of the episode in question is a frightened 53-year-old man in an unscripted and perhaps occasionally rambling hour of discussion of Jeffrey Epstein. He doesn’t exactly know how to say what he has got to get across, but perhaps that is because he isn’t simply a middle-aged man at all. When I look closer, I see a terrified 10 or 11-year-old boy who many years ago was sent to therapist. Why was that child so terrified of going to see a therapist, you may ask? Well, because of inappropriate events set in motion by the therapist’s behavior at the first of their two meetings. That, however, was not what caused the lasting terror. Despite the therapist being a trained and established authority figure and the boy being a minor, it was possible for the boy to simply and firmly say, no, I do not want that, you must stop. Thus, the boy is not a survivor. He was not a victim and he did not want a random broken person to be integrated into his life story. Today, the man in that chair addressing the camera is simply the man that became of an unlucky boy who was sent to see a professionally licensed therapist who crossed his path. What was terrifying instead was that when I explained that I did not ever wish to go back to that accursed office, I was forced against my will and with a good amount of screaming and terror I might add, to go again for a second meeting. At that second meeting, I was intimidated by the failed and inappropriate therapist who was obviously himself terrified. Being forced back into such a dark office alone as a boy to be berated, threatened, and shamed by an out of control representative of the world of institutional authority alerted me to just how badly outgunned the individual is when confronted by the terrifying reality of institutional actors attempting to silence a lone voice. Why would no one listen to the boy when he told them what had happened? Why wouldn’t any one adult, powerful and credentialed, speak up for that child and his right to be free of the suppose that therapy and therapist could no one see the terror in the child’s eyes? Why simply because two sessions had been booked did he need to continue with this random therapist who was clearly a damaged soul and one who needed real therapy much more than the boy?

This episode is ultimately about the world of institutions, the institutions of journalism that will regularly destroy individuals by reputation, but who will generally not ask comparable questions of other institutions. The institutions of the intelligence world, which owe us information as to what is known about Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and their operation. The institutions of government that will not hold hearings into out-of-control intelligence activities as we did in the 1970s. And the institutions of technology, which track our every move and know all our secrets yet cannot locate a single individual like Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice, who completely improbably seems to have vanished from the face of the earth as of March, 2020.  

But just as this episode is about institutions, it is also about individuals and the various ways that they’re made vulnerable to institutional objectives. Because every individual may be destroyed at will by the same complex of institutions that are themselves deciding not to act with vigor and policing each other, we are all at risk when we deviate from their scripts and expect structural change. Thus, the act of pointing out the absurdity of the story is in fact terrifying, which gets to the questions raised by the young boy in our story. Why will no one listen to me when I say I do not ever wish to encounter the monster or the official class he represents ever again? Why must I go back to the same institutions that harm me? Why does a child’s evident terror mean nothing to any adult nor any institution at all? Why can we not talk openly about the risks to the individuals from the expert and authority classes when we have a conflict between them?  

As it happens, analogs of all of those personal questions are now being asked in hushed tones about Jeffrey Epstein and the bizarre institutional response to his story. Why are we not expending resources to figure out what giant structure we apparently just tripped over? Are we really going to sit here and not ask whether this was a protected or state-sponsored pedophile running some kind of intelligence operation to control people in positions of power, wealth, and influence? Are we okay with the idea that we aren’t even asking on the record questions about whether our intelligence communities traffic in underage minors, some as young as 12 years of age?

Well, I have an answer for that boy. One day you will become a man and you will fear loss in the battle between the flawed and vulnerable individual that all adults eventually become and the amoral institutional world who continues to hold most of the best cards. You will learn the story of Jean Seberg, and that alone will change your life. You will not know to whom you can turn. You will come to believe that there is no news media nor justice system, nor social movement, nor representative government that truly cares about protecting minors. In real terms, when institutional power, money, secrecy, and sex are all woven together, you will become part of the problem by remaining silent for a while to cope with your fears. That is unless you are able to overcome them to clear your throat and finally say, “You know what? I refuse to continue to be part of the charade in this way anymore.” I have always felt Jeffrey Epstein was a construct and I now fear that he was a state-sponsored pedophile, protected by governments, and I have kept quiet too long, partially out of fear that the trail could lead to either or both of the two nations I love most in this world. I’m not really here for myself and I’ve been avoiding this. And perhaps at least directly, I’m not even mostly here for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his organization. I am at last really here, selfishly, for a young boy, long gone, why abandoned, to prove to him that it was actually possible at personal risk to stand up for children and against the system. These young girls are no less deserving, of course, but I don’t know any of them personally, so I will stick to the issue that animates me. The individual standing against the institutions who would crush him or her. So, to that long dead and previously abandoned former self let me just say this: “Sorry, I’m a little late kid. I, uh, became afraid that the imperfections of what I’m about to say next could derange my adult life and make me vulnerable to those who would destroy anything and anyone who threatens them using everything at their disposal. I apologize for my cowardice. It is one of many character flaws that I am working to correct, but you as a boy did nothing wrong and it will be a pleasure to stand up for you, come what may. You’re a solid kid who didn’t deserve this, and I think you deserve a better champion, but Jesus wasn’t available, so you got me instead. Let’s do this thing.” I know this is crazy, but I think that there’s even a remote chance we can take these guys. We can at least try and go down swinging. Let’s just release it, flaws and all and hope that the world is more kind than its failing institutions. But that said, stay tuned. Please be a little bit forgiving and enjoy the episode.

So the first thing I want to do is I want to be relatively clear, that I’m somebody who believes that there is a fair amount of organization behind the scenes, usually of a relatively low level of organization that, is unknown to the people who are watching TV or listening to, let’s say, NPR on the radio. And at various times I’ve dug more deeply into various stories, and so I want you to have some idea of my history in the space. In the 1980s and 1990s, I became very active in believing that the so called STEM shortage of scientists and engineers that was claimed by the policy research and analysis division of the National Science Foundation, was in fact a conspiracy in order to make life easier for employers who would be facing American scientists with an ability to bargain, and make higher wage demands, and that the National Academy of Sciences and National Science Foundation interceded, interceded on the behalf of employers, which was tampering in the labor market in an absolutely vital sector resulting in the Immigration Act of 1990 or IMACT90, as it was called. At that point, I also became aware of what I have termed the Borjas Rectangle Theory: that is that employers generally, in free market economies when they’re complaining about labor shortages, are actually trying to transfer wealth from labor to capital, complaining instead that there is a small inefficiency that needs to be rectified, which we might call the Harberger Triangle. So that is, employers claim that there’s a small inefficiency, but in fact, they’re seeking large transfer payments from the vulnerable to the well-heeled. I also believe that NAFTA and the free trade agreement from the 1990s was a kind of conspiracy supported by the economics establishment of the United States; that they knew that free trade was not a freebie. It was not, in fact a rising tide that lifted all boats, but was in fact, again, a transfer, which was claimed to be a pure good for everyone. This is the difference between something called the Kaldor-Hicks objective function and the Pareto objective function. I also believed that string theory was largely a desperation measure in physics that was sold to the world to buy time when in fact the field of theoretical physics was failing. I also claimed that the Boskin commission formed by Packwood and Moynihan in the mid 1990s, was a kind of conspiracy to transfer, actually $1 trillion, by using the fact that Social Security payments are indexed to inflation, as well as tax brackets being indexed to inflation, so that if you could show that the CPI was overstated and you could reduce the CPI, you could transfer millions without having to touch the so called “third rail” of American politics.

I also became aware of what I called the Gated Institutional Narrative; in effect, a storyline or narrative that many institutions claim to believe, but would easily be disrupted if outsiders were allowed to comment on it in a way of walling it off so that these narratives could in fact govern the American mindset and get us talking about things that we would never normally choose to talk about in terms that seem completely unnatural to me. This is also the origin of the four-quadrant theory, which I’ve pushed out, which is a way of intimidating people away from holding positions that are not supposed to be habitable, like, for example, if you’re a xenophilic restrictionist on immigration, supposedly this is the position. The most famous example of the theory is Cathy Newman questioning Jordan Peterson saying, “so what you’re really saying is,” and this is an implied threat, which is that if you try to express something subtle, you will be mapped to expressing something that is beyond the pale.

In addition, in the early 2000s, I came out talking against the great moderation and mortgage backed securities. I published in, I think I submitted in 2001 to Risk Magazine, my first article on mortgage backed securities, and I kept talking about the fact that we had not actually banished volatility from the markets. And this is a period of time where I was sort of the going around the hedge fund conference circuit with Nassim Taleb, talking about the fact that even though volatility was decreasing, that this was not a permanent state of affairs. Furthermore, I objected to non-recourse loans, in the wake of the great financial crisis, and I’ve talked openly about the false narratives of the inevitability of Hillary Clinton versus Bernie [Sanders], which was a giant mistake in my opinion, of the New York Times interceding in an election in a completely inappropriate way, and they doubled down and came up with the impossibility of Donald Trump, which I tried to use Preference Falsification, the theory of Timur Kuran, who we just had on the program in order to say that the likelihood of a Trump victory was far higher than anyone had imagined.

So in order to do responsible conspiracy theorizing, my first rule is that one should not attempt to allege a type of conspiracy that has never been encountered before. Over the years, many conspiracies have been uncovered, and so we have a menu, if you will, of proven conspiracies with which we can try to figure out whether something is in fact possible. And to give you an idea, I’m going to list a small number of conspiracies that have been proven and give you the idea of why these things figure in my imagination. And I think that what will happen over time is that you’ll see that I’ll refer to the same conspiracies over and over again because they give us an idea of the boundaries of the possible. First of all, one question: Is it possible that mainstream media can be weaponized by the intelligence community for the purpose of destroying a well-known individual? That is, as I am recording this, I am aware that the intelligence community could decide to tarnish or destroy or, in their words, cheapen my reputation, by planting stories in mainstream media. In this case, I would point people to one of the most important examples we have, which is the destruction of Jean Seberg, the leading actress who was originally found by Otto Preminger to play Joan of Arc, and also used by Jean-Luc Luke Godard in the film "Breathless" as the heroine. Jean Seberg was accused, due to her radical politics, active in the Black Panther Party, of cuckolding her husband and bearing the child of a Black Panther and in a news item that was planted by the FBI with Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times later repeated by Newsweek. The great thing about this is you don’t have to believe me; you can just look it up.

When I got to the door, it was an extraordinary experience. He in fact was living in what was for Manhattan, which is famous for relatively small dwellings, even for the very rich in a very large townhouse. I went through the door. I was greeted, treated professionally, and I was led to a waiting room. In that waiting room, which I believe was off to the left as you entered, I sat in the chair for a while and I noticed that there was a large mechanical piece of art, and I believe that it had some electronics to it. After a while of sitting in my chair, my recollection is that I went up to this art object and I started trying to inspect it. As I was looking at the art object, which I thought was quite innocent, I suddenly thought that I saw something like a lipstick camera, that is a very small camera whose lens was staring straight at me. My first thought was, “Holy cow. I’ve discovered that there’s a hidden camera that has been trained on me while I’ve been in this room.” I thought myself to be rather clever for having found it. But my second thought was exactly the reverse of this: I bet this isn’t that difficult to find; the object that it was buried in attracts attention. And it must be that people who look at this object invariably find the camera, and then I started asking myself, “am I supposed to find the camera? Is this a test? Is this person trying to make sure I’m comfortable with being under surveillance?” The whole thing was now quite queer and I went back and I sat down, as I recall it.

Another technique that I like to use is I like to think about a decision tree, and in a decision tree, I don’t want to have to say which branch of the decision tree is true and which branch is false. Very often when you share a conspiracy theory, what you find is that people want to know exactly what do you believe? Well, what do you think happened? What do you think was really going on? Well, the answer is I don’t know. But what if you can come up with a theory that is true no matter which branch of the decision tree you’re on, that you have confidence in? This is where I’ve been headed.

Now, around- I forget when it was 2005? -- some point through 2007, Jeffrey Epstein becomes entangled with Florida law enforcement for requesting or arranging massages from underage women; that was almost certainly a massage was a euphemism for some form of child prostitution. This was an extremely disturbing episode in which he was vigorously defended by a high profile team, which is his right in an adversarial system, but it was with a particular vigor that I found absolutely disturbing and unsettling, and that the sentence given to Jeffrey Epstein seemed to be so reduced compared to what he was being accused of, that I felt like I had to just check- check all of my intuitions. Why was such a light sentence being imposed? Further, people I knew went and visited him in prison and talked about him being a friend, talked about him being a massage enthusiast, it made no sense to me that this person who was being accused of some form of pedophilia was being treated very differently than I would have imagined by people that I very much respected at the time.

I didn’t understand what was going on, but I started to formulate a second theory, and I haven’t heard it discussed much in the media, so I’ll share it with you now. The idea is that if you buy the idea that Jeffrey Epstein was in fact a construct of the intelligence community, my belief is, is that he was constructed to be a sapiosexual Hugh Hefner. In some sense. He was the Dan Bilzerian of his day. That is somebody who is not interested in little girls, but is instead interested in young women, women over the age of consent, who by law have every right to associate with whoever they wish to and can engage in consensual relations. Now, you may frown upon it. You may look down upon it. You may say that it’s an abusive power, for a man in his 40s, 50s, what have you to be cavorting with some person above the age of consent. However, I don’t take the same exact view of it that I take the view of somebody going below the age of consent. So in the era of #MeToo, we have a different situation in which people are very uncomfortable even talking about the legal situation in which women in their early twenties, who may be trying to wield sexual power or contending with men who may be trying to wield political or economic power, and that’s an issue that I don’t have a particular interest in settling, but whatever it is, it’s very different than somebody sending people to a high school to find 15 year-old girls or 14 year-old girls for erotic massages or prostitution or what have you.

But I’ve had another issue that I’ve tried to talk to people about, which I also think figures into this story. Why was Jeffrey Epstein so focused on science? And in particular, why was he focused on heterodox science? Keep in mind, I’m just, I’m reading, I’m reading nothing. This is a completely ad lib, so just allow me to catch my breath. In my theory, what I fear and what I believe is, is that the American scientific project, has not understood that it has been abandoning its scientific assets, and if you look at my work, you can notice that this is a through line having nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. In effect, we have made it impossible for American scientists to profit using the market from their discoveries because we exclude fundamental discoveries from intellectual property protection. Therefore, you have a problem that when you make a discovery, it is both inexcludable, if you share it in the scientific literature and inexhaustible, that is that anyone who discovers it can use it without precluding anyone else from discovery, from using it. Okay. When you have something that fits those twin criterion, then even free market economists will agree that it constitutes a public good, a failure of the market to keep value and price in lockstep. In essence, we pay for scientific research out of taxpayer dollars because the market cannot price it correctly. So you have something which I believe to be a fantastic value, including military value and potentially industrial value as it is translated from pure science into technology. However, for some reason the United States has been losing its appetite for funding high level scientific research and protecting it with academic freedom as the university system goes into free fall. That is, our university system is structured as a Ponzi scheme and after Vannevar Bush and the endless frontier doctrine forced us to do our blue sky research inside of universities rather than inside of research institutions dedicated to the purpose, we developed a weird problem. We would no longer be able to pay our scientists and use the fact that people could contribute the labor of their youth into a system where they would then become professors to train other professors. If each professor trained perhaps 20 graduate students to become professors, you can tell that after a very short period of time, you’ve got a pyramid scheme that can’t keep expanding as we did in the postwar system where we educated sub 10% of our population at a post-secondary level to around 1970 or so when we were educating at around 50% of our population at a post-secondary level. So when the music stopped, the system started to decay. You had an extremely valuable system. I’ve said before that theoretical physics largely constructed our modern economy. It invented the world wide web. It invented the semiconductor. It gave us nuclear power, nuclear weapons, our communications technology in the electromagnetic spectrum. So many of the things that we take for granted, including molecular biology, came out of theoretical physics. And so what I have likened this to is that the United States had something like a Ferrari convertible, and it left the top down so that it started getting filled up with rain, and it started scrawling steal me, in Mandarin, Farsi, and Russian on its front bonnet.  

We are not protecting our scientific assets. In fact, when Jeffrey Epstein came back out of prison, I think, if I recall correctly, I tweeted that Jeffrey Epstein was somebody who was, funding what the American government refused to fund. And I recall, if I’m not being too self-kind that I said, welcome back with a period rather than an exclamation point because I was extremely dismayed that we are fundamentally leaving this open. We left a niche for such a person to start exploiting us. If Jeffrey Epstein was able to find this niche, then I believe that other nations will be able to find it as well. So what happened inside of the scientific enterprise is that many scientists had some memory from inside of the system when professors would in fact have potentially second homes or even third homes, where they would be paid at a level that was commensurate with financiers, or high-priced lawyers. That, in essence, the children of academic families were growing up, with the children of very well to do families because there wasn’t such income and asset inequality in the United States. I believe that the need to pay the scientific community, particularly the top members of the scientific community at a far higher level, is not a question of taxpayer dollars. It’s a question of, first of all, being fair to the community that created our economy. Those are not taxpayer dollars. They’re scientific dollars, in my opinion, we can argue that at some other point. But it’s also a question of national interest. That is, that is completely irresponsible for us to pretend that the market for scientific research talent should be determined by your ability to teach undergraduates. We should probably decouple the teaching and research enterprises. We should probably get rid of the majority of our research enterprise and we should take care of the people who are obeying power laws at a very high level for the national interest. It’s not a question about overpaying them. It’s a question of we are leaving a valuable asset unguarded, and I believe that Jeffrey Epstein was attempting, in part, to gain control of that asset.

So I’ve been at this for 15 years, not knowing it was going to end like this. I think many of us have tweeted out that if he was in fact, attached to the intelligence community, that he was going to have to die because otherwise these secrets would get out, and am I scared that I’m thinking about releasing this to the general public? Yes, but I’m also scared about not releasing this to the general public. My belief is that this was a poorly constructed operation, and that when it comes to light, which intelligence community it was, we are in danger of countries that I care a great deal about being thought to have constructed a pedophilic honeytrap, using kompromat to use the Russian word for that, which would be used to control people in order to gain some sort of a geopolitical strategic advantage. Now, I am not of the opinion that Jeffrey Epstein was a savory character, and I’m not saying that he didn’t hire prostitutes or coerce women into orgies or what have you, but my guess is that at the moment, he was not using that, particular kink of his four children in order to enmesh scientists or other politicians as the news media sometimes hints at when it is not suggesting that he’s simply dead by his own hand. In fact, I think it’s extremely dangerous to think about this as being the decision of a country. Now, I’m not going to lie, I’ve thought that the country might be Israel, and as an American Jew who’s lived in Israel, I don’t think Israel came to this decision, if in fact he is a product of the Israeli intelligence network. In fact, this would be something that would be top secret. It would have been decided by a tiny number of individuals, and it is not right to take down in nation based upon the idea that you can’t even do intelligence work because you contrived such a ridiculous idea as Jeffrey Epstein in order to gain kompromat and therefore control over influential people inside of another country. What I would believe instead is that this is a tiny program and that these people should come forward or that we should find them by reinitiating the Church and Pike Commissions. There is now so much bizarre stuff of this kind that it is time to revisit the Church and Pike Commissions of the mid-1970s to find out what our intelligence and other intelligence agencies may have been up to. We need something to restore our confidence and when, and if we find out that a foreign power has been operating in the US, perhaps with our consent or perhaps we are in fact gaining some benefit from an operation that we could not ourselves do post Church and Pike, I think what we would do well to realize is, is that this situation is not the responsibility of any country, but the responsibility of people in the intelligence community who would have gone out of control.

Now, do I know this to be true? Absolutely not. Am I infallible? Far from it? I wouldn’t have shared with you that I was wrong about Bernie Madoff, in fact, if all of these conspiracy theories turned out to be exactly true, some of them still remain to be proven. But what I’ve tried to do is to try to talk to you about the idea that I don’t think that the story is being fully explored. I’m extremely dismayed that over a very brief period of time, we went from suggesting that Jeffrey Epstein was allegedly dead by his own hand, to believing the medical examiner’s report as if this was a conclusive. In fact, the charge that he might’ve been murdered, with an understanding of the powers that be, that controlled the correctional facility in which he was housed, includes the charge that the medical examiner’s report would likely have been doctored. That’s not an additional charge; you wouldn’t murder somebody if the report would conclusively show murder, unless you actually knew that you had enough control over the system to control it all. Furthermore, there has to be a facility that keeps local law enforcement, local medical officers from stumbling over something of high value. You couldn’t responsibly run the intelligence community, which has to be able to carry out covert operations, operations that are disturbing, operations that are effective, without constantly fearing that low-level law enforcement and low-level medical examiners, could blow the whole thing sky high. Now, whatever the facility is that keeps our high-level intelligence work safe from low level enforcement could easily have been operative. I don’t mean to suggest that it was, only that, it is not reasonable to suggest that it is crazy to assume that the medical examiner could be induced to file a report to support an official narrative.