• Hohsia [he/him]
    hexbear
    61
    5 months ago

    Occam’s razor here

    The CIA killed Epstein. Not memeing

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]
      hexbear
      41
      5 months ago

      Yeah, this is kinda the most reasonable conclusion once you connect the dots (his role acquiring blackmail for intelligence, the sheer amount of different powerful people from different countries implicated, him messing with the money, etc). The real conspiracy theory is the mental gymnastics the official story has to perform.

      • Hohsia [he/him]
        hexbear
        16
        edit-2
        5 months ago

        Right, like I know people shit on leftists for seemingly blaming the CIA for everything bad, but when you view it as a network, it’s hard to not see some obvious connection

        • FunkyStuff [he/him]
          hexbear
          13
          5 months ago

          The thing that really characterizes liberals to me is their abject failure to consider how multiple different issues are connected in structures that serve functions. In their minds, that whole Epstein case is compartmentalized into its own little bubble, and it doesn't interoperate with other phenomena like current wars, history, electoral politics, corporations, etc etc. But of course, when you start to consider that these things interact with each other (not in one big conspiracy, but as a system that is beyond any individual's control), you look crazy.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]
      hexbear
      41
      5 months ago

      Secret CIA Files Say Staffers Committed Sex Crimes Involving Children

      Declassified CIA inspector general reports show a pattern of abuse and a repeated decision by federal prosecutors not to hold agency personnel accountable.

      https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/cia-employees-sex-crimes-children-secret-files-foia

    • @DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
      hexbear
      10
      5 months ago

      The only thing that makes me think they didn't is how most people believe this is the case, and how quickly the "Epstein didn't kill himself" meme spread.

      I recognise that it is basically just contrarianism, but it really feels like the CIA wants people to think they killed Epstein. Doesn't mean they didn't of course, but a lot of the discourse around this treats the matter as "settled" when they uncover a conspiracy like this, when it should be just the beginning of looking deeper into it.

      • RyanGosling [none/use name]
        hexbear
        37
        edit-2
        5 months ago

        but it really feels like the CIA wants people to think they killed Epstein.

        but a lot of the discourse around this treats the matter as "settled" when they uncover a conspiracy like this, when it should be just the beginning of looking deeper into it.

        Situations like these are called limited hangouts.

        When [the intelligence agency’s] veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.

        And it worked. “Epstein didn’t kill himself” is now just a personality trait and merchandise slogan on the right. For the few who do connect the dots, they get no assistance from those in the mainstream “investigative journalism” industry who have more resources.

        As a result you mostly get circumstantial evidence and blamed as crazy. And unfortunately, a lot of the so called investigators ARE crazy because democrats have completely dismissed the possibility that the Epstein case goes deeper, leaving the republicans to monopolize the conversation. So now you have one side that’s just virtue signaling and muddying the waters with their “independent research” and one side that’s too scared to do anything lest they get associated with the crazies. No one achieves anything of substance, and Epstein and his friends win.

        • @DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
          hexbear
          21
          5 months ago

          Ah, thanks for that insight. As a non-American I wasn't even aware this had become politicized along party lines like that.

          • @Justice@lemmygrad.ml
            cake
            hexbear
            35
            5 months ago

            Democrats will tell you straight-faced that JFK was not killed by the CIA or any other US government entity. That it legitimately was a lone gunman acting solely on his own desires. Despite the literal mountains of evidence that the CIA and FBI had every reason to eliminate JFK. They just call that conspiracy theories.

            Republicans will probably agree it was some US government entity, so this justifies cutting Medicare and whatever else. Not the CIA and FBI though. Also, when they say the government killed JFK they really just mean "the Jews" somehow. The "fun" part of dismantling right wing hoggery is finding the part where they're just blaming Jews for everything.

            What a great fucking country. This all intermingles to make dissent from a position of power impossible at the moment.

            • FunkyStuff [he/him]
              hexbear
              18
              5 months ago

              I think it's worth noting that the responses from chuds vary wildly. There definitely are some boogaloo type chuds that believe more or less the same thing we do about JFK's assassination, some aren't antisemitic about these things at all. But they still draw the wrong conclusion from it. The important lesson to be learned is that reactionaries often see the same contradictions we do they just resolve them in injust, misguided ways.

              • @Justice@lemmygrad.ml
                cake
                hexbear
                12
                5 months ago

                I don't necessarily disagree that on a personal level many of them may not care or hold specific antisemitic beliefs about like "Jewish capital" or "Jewish media" those sorts of things which are very explicitly in the realm of Nazis.

                But the people on the right who do currently and historically push narratives they buy into and such tend to be antisemitic explicitly or very thinly veiled.

                It seems to be one of the problems with rejection of agency propaganda and neoliberalism is it leads you to only a few paths. You can pick up Marxist viewpoints where you see that there is no race or ethnicity controlling everything but rather a self-interested domineering capitalist class. And you can trace back the history with Marx holding your hand and see that this is very probably the truth of it. He nailed it back in the mid 1800s.

                Or if you reject Marx because you are racist or find it easier to believe or, probably true for many Americans, you were told by literally every institution growing up that Marx was a fraud and communism sucks blah blah. Then maybe you see similar observations "all these people are hoarding wealth and knocking off world leaders" and someone else helps nudge in the puzzle piece of "how many of them are Jewish?" Without any real grounding in real history, without a proper analysis of capitalism and neoliberalism now days and their effects on liberal democracies, it's easier to lean into the available racist theories and remain ignorant of exploitation, primitive accumulation and such.

                OR the rarest breed of right winger. the ones who aren't racist, do understand a Marxist view of the world and then actively choose to be on the side of capital. Like they invert the entire point of reading Capital. Maybe they're cynical and see this as inevitable so someone might as well profit and it should be them. I say these types are rare because while maybe a lot of republican types might ascribe to some ideology along those lines, just by the numbers most are not capitalists, they're just wage laborers with a backwards view of things.

                So I guess overall, maybe a lot of them don't actively know they hold racist beliefs, but if you ask them "why?" enough times down the rabbit from "why JFK?" it will lead, probably, to a controlling group of wealthy people and if you into that with them I don't imagine the outcome will be not-racist, I'll just say. Because fundamentally right wingers love private property, they think accumulating wealth is fine and ethical, etc. so the capitalists as described by Marx can't be a nefarious class just as they are. They have to have some special element that makes them "actually bad" because random Joe Republican wants to accumulate $1B too. But he thinks he's the good guy. So how can he condemn this guy who does have $1B? Well, he's Jewish or Arab or Chinese, etc. and those immutable traits explain, to them, why those capitalists are evil and bad and doing conspiracies, but also, some capitalists like Trump, Peter Theil, Elon, can be good.

              • commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]
                hexbear
                10
                5 months ago

                I think how we should characterize this is something like "they are anti-Semitic in form, but not about Jews specifically" or anti-Semitic in form but not content"

                Anti-Semitism, according to Sartre and many others, would've created the object to which it must attach even if it weren't Jews. I don't know many right-wingers who would ever attach their theories specifically to Jews (though it is unfortunately not rare). Many honestly have no signified to attach these ideas too, which is dangerous, but many have "gays" or "black people" or especially now "Chinese" to whom they attach this anti-Semitic form to give it content.

                Anti-Semitism's form was never limited to anti-Semitic content, but it was very common that they came together.

                Or maybe we need a new word for the content, because treatment of Chinese influence is constantly trending towards the exact forms and similar contents to how Jews were treated in the late 19th century

                • FunkyStuff [he/him]
                  hexbear
                  7
                  5 months ago

                  10000-com maybe some more specific form of "essentialism," where behaviors that spring out of class antagonisms and power are instead attributed to immutable attributes of the people who perform them.

  • ElChapoDeChapo [he/him, comrade/them]
    hexbear
    56
    5 months ago

    surprised-pika surprised-pika-messed-up surprised-pika

    Seriously though, the CIA had to be involved too

    Not saying Mossad isn't guilty as hell but I think this hydra has several heads

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]
      hexbear
      17
      5 months ago

      They’re definitely involved. Though I can’t really find a reason why the CIA would be interested in American academics and celebrities who don’t have much influence in the cultural or power sphere. That’s likely a Mossad operation, or Epstein was just getting off on his own time.

      • Gay_Wrath [fae/faer]
        hexbear
        16
        5 months ago

        excuse the tinfoilhat shit, but i've heard epstein was heavily involved with trying to do some starseed eugenics program shit. source 2

        I could definitely see that being a weird pet project that somehow was justified to get funding for in the CIA. Like "these are the best/most important people and we're gonna use them for the template for our eugenics program"

        It sounds ridiculous but since it was all men, it could have been a weird cum harvesting + blackmail combo harvesting operation. Not that much stranger than the israeli cum harvesting and giving soldiers a bunch of drugs to see if they could mind control, i guess. If it wasn't the CIA, he just seemed personally interested in having a "smart"/"famous" people cum depository to do eugenics with

        • RyanGosling [none/use name]
          hexbear
          12
          5 months ago

          Yeah i think the eugenics thing was just a side project and the CIA didn’t care that much. From what I understand, not all of the academics and scientists involved engaged in any of the child trafficking and abuse. But the fact they weren’t creeped out suggests maybe they’re a bit too comfortable with random sources of funding

          • ReadFanon [any, any]
            hexbear
            13
            5 months ago

            Time to put the tinfoil back on but this is my hunch:

            Hazing culture used to be rampant and completely in the open. Often people would be forced to do degrading, humiliating, and incriminating things in order to enter into membership of whatever group it is.

            So it might just be some stupid stuff to join a frat or a sorority, or it might be doing something like killing your first civilian in order to join a police gang or committing war crimes to be counted as a fully-fledged member of a military unit.

            Part of the function of hazing is to create a closed culture with everyone having dirt on everyone else so that nobody snitches on the others or steps out of line somehow.

            I don't believe for a second that it has actually gone away, any more than I believe that hazing culture never made it's way into politics (unless you're arguing that it started in politics and then filtered its way down...)

            I think it's completely within reason to suspect that Epstein and Maxwell were running a sort of hazing ring alongside their other bullshit. In fact, I think the operations or the functions they performed all kind of blurred into one.

            Given how they both treated their victims, if you've heard the victim testimonies, they would prey upon people, groom them, worm their way into their victims becoming dependent upon them in some fashion, and they'd sort of drop weird and creepy acts on their victims out of the blue. If I'm not mistaken, I think there are some of the victims (who weren't as central to the case) who got scared off when Epstein or Maxwell did creepy shit - they noped out. Epstein and Maxwell seemed to get their kicks from manipulating, coercing, and forcing their victims to transgress stuff like their boundaries and cultural norms and laws. (Obviously Epstein and Maxwell got their kicks from transgressing the boundaries of their victims too.)

            It's not a stretch to imagine they were doing this to adults in high society too. Maybe someone gets a little bit financially dependent upon Epstein or they get a bit wooed by Maxwell or they need them for access to a major figure in their field, that sort of thing. And then they start pushing that person by transgressing boundaries, a little bit at a time.

            The adults who are principled nope the fuck out (side note: in no way am I trying to imply that I think Epstein's child victims were principled/unprincipled by noping out or not when I say this). The ones who are predators, would-be predators, and the ones who have flexible morals get brought in closer to the circle bit by bit.

            All the while this is happening, Epstein and Maxwell are collecting dirt on people and the closer someone is to this, the more access and favours they get provided with, and the more dirt is collected on them.

            My hunch is that it was a big ring of rich, powerful, and influential people with Epstein and Maxwell at the centre but probably with someone else actually at the top, like the CIA, and if you wanted to go far then you could sell your soul to the devil and jump on the Epstein/Maxwell escalator to bring yourself to a position of having more power or influence in your field.

            Of course the people who do this are now owned by Epstein's operation and so if the person at the top of the operation doesn't like some of the things that you're doing/saying/writing about, Epstein gets in contact with you and does something like threatening to go public with his recordings of you doing illegal shit that would absolutely ruin you permanently. Or a favour is required from you so it's extracted by the same method.

            Because of this, I think that there's probably a certain amount of people who are Epstein associates that were either still being courted by Epstein and Maxwell or who were already influential in their field so they weren't part of that inner circle of creeps but those influential orbiters were still used as part of the operation to lure in others with the promise of access to this orbiter.

            I wonder if the creator of The Simpsons, who got a foot massage from Virginia Giuffre on Epstein's plane, ever did anything more than that later. I wonder if that was one of the early things they'd drop on someone to see how the person would responded before they would push things a little bit further. Maybe it starts with a foot massage and the next time it's a full-body massage and then the next time... yeah.

            I wonder how many people turned down the offer for a foot massage. I wonder how many people noped out. I wonder how many people didn't.

            I'm not saying this lets the people you respect/admire that are known Epstein associates off the hook but when someone like Chomsky says that he only ever used Epstein for his financial services I could imagine that he could have been an orbiter just as much as he could have been a part of the inner circle.

            Just about everything in this comment is speculation so don't take it as fact.

            I guess to put it in the simplest terms, I think Epstein was a particular type of groomer who liked to see people transgress and be transgressed upon, to see people degraded and humiliated, to have people dependent upon him in as many ways as possible so they couldn't say no. I think he found someone who had the same grooming tendency in Maxwell. (Hence why there was that comment from Maxwell about them being "soulmates" or something like that despite not dating for very long and not being married/romantically involved, if I'm recalling correctly?). I think they ran an operation where they carried out these grooming urges, definitely on their known victims, but likely on adult marks as well. I think they probably collected a lot of other groomers along the way. I reckon they turned a whole lot of people into groomers and drew out their abusive tendencies by creating a permissive environment and fostering these tendencies. I reckon they would have collected dirt on their adult marks unwittingly through lying, intoxication, and trickery as well because seeing someone transgressing their own boundaries without their consent would have given Epstein and Maxwell a thrill.

            I think it was basically like a big network that was like a secret society of creeps who would lure people in with favours and essentially haze them then use this as leverage over that person and to lure in more hazing victims.

            This is basically what Virginia Giuffre was forced into doing to recruit other child victims of Epstein/Maxwell. I think it fits their MO.

            And I think they were collecting dirt for a big player like the CIA or Mossad.

            • hotcouchguy [he/him]
              hexbear
              8
              5 months ago

              I wonder how hazing operations have changed over the decades, as video has become so ubiquitous and media more decentralized. I could see the amateur hazing rings getting scared off or collapsing under poor opsec, while those that remain are more organized and more professional. Do fraternities and amateur sports teams still do hazing? Seems like much less compared with 50 years ago. Is Skull & Bones still around? Maybe? Probably? But then there are massive organized networks like this one, and presumably more (VC networks perhaps?)

        • RyanGosling [none/use name]
          hexbear
          3
          5 months ago

          No. Jenna Ortega and Jake Paul have no reason to be an interest of the CIA lol, neither does some random professor unless he’s in an important scientific field. Just because you have money and fame doesn’t mean you’re important.

      • TheDialectic [none/use name]
        hexbear
        10
        5 months ago

        They have infinite money. Having their fingers on the people likely to move or shake things is a reasonable use of their time for them. They have in the past tapped authors and artists as soft power sources. Even if they don't use them it would be prudent to set up access in case they ever decide they want to.

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]
    hexbear
    52
    5 months ago

    I am nauseated by the way that this story -- which I don't doubt is true because Mossad and Israel are wretched -- will feed into scapegoating Jews for US problems even more than people already do.

      • @Justice@lemmygrad.ml
        cake
        hexbear
        55
        5 months ago

        They do

        Zionists WANT Zionism to replace Judaism. They want every Jew to be a Zionist and to move to Israel to do their settler colonialism. Move to Israel, have tons of babies, genocide Palestinians and take their land/homes.

        This applies to Christian and other non-Jewish Zionists as well as the Jewish ones.

        This is one of those conclusions that feels counterintuitive or whatever because it centers on "but... that means Jewish Zionists actively seek to make Jews worldwide less safe to force them to flee to Israel." All evidence points to this being exactly what Zionists (all of them) are always saying and doing. The irony though is their racist hatred for Palestinians and broadly Arab Muslims blinds them to the reality that the Zionist project not only endangers Jews worldwide due to propping up these conspiracies but also in Israel itself. I mean, 10/7 should've made that abundantly clear.

        As the US continues to decline in power, Israel will very likely experience more and more 10/7-style attacks. Honestly, I do wonder if it could even survive just one more attack like that. Just like the US, Israel has failed to calculate its position as the world changes around it. Instead of peaceful coexistence they've insisted on genocidal force.

        • ReadFanon [any, any]
          hexbear
          32
          5 months ago

          Zionists are opportunists first, always.

          They subjected Ethiopian Jews to mass birth control without consent and they sought to restrict the citizenship rights extended to other Jews (and did so successfully for decades).

          Zionists will subject anti-zionist Jews to all sorts of open hatred.

          Zionists literally collaborated with Nazis.

        • Tachanka [comrade/them]
          hexbear
          12
          5 months ago

          Zionists WANT Zionism to replace Judaism. They want every Jew to be a Zionist and to move to Israel to do their settler colonialism

          It's kind of odd that one of the main thrusts of the Israeli Fascist argument is that Jewish people are always in danger of being genocided and therefore they should all move to one tiny country in the middle east where everyone in the surrounding area supposedly hates them. Haven't they ever heard the idiom "don't put all your eggs in one basket"?

          • ElChapoDeChapo [he/him, comrade/them]
            hexbear
            8
            5 months ago

            Exactly, even back when I was a radlib my thoughts on isntrael as a Jew were "wait, they want us to all go to one place? I seem to remember some history where we were made to go to specific areas which went horribly for us, sorry not falling for this shit"

    • 7bicycles [he/him]
      hexbear
      25
      5 months ago

      First thing I checked was who wrote this book and why lol

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]
        hexbear
        29
        5 months ago

        Shut the fuck up, obviously there are Jewish bankers, and Israel and Mossad are real problems, but this isn't medieval Europe, where Jewish bankers were somewhat their own class (due to Christian laws). Separating them from white and other bankers is flat antisemitism and mainly serves to harm Jewish proles, who are our comrades just as much as any other members of the proletariat.

  • idkmybffjoeysteel [he/him]
    hexbear
    38
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    It's amazing that anyone is able to be blackmailed in this day and age, given that absolutely no one gives a fuck how many scandals you are implicated in. I firmly believe that if every single name leaked tomorrow, with detailed accounts that we are able to verify, absolutely nothing would change. If I have learned anything in the last decade, it is that the most powerful people would probably increase in popularity if they were accused.

    • SupFBI [comrade/them]
      hexbear
      23
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      Child sex abuse is one of the few things that can still take a powerful person down. No one cares about bribes and extramarital affairs, those have been normalized.

      • idkmybffjoeysteel [he/him]
        hexbear
        22
        5 months ago

        Not if they can just deny it and have enough pull to avoid prosecution. At the very least, institutions will wait until these people are dead or close to death before going after them.

      • @GinAndJuche
        hexbear
        1
        5 months ago

        So is marriage :grill-boomer:

    • @Great_Leader_Is_Dead
      hexbear
      5
      5 months ago

      Yeah I honestly wonder why they even bothered killing Epstein. Trump could fuck a kid on stage at a rally and lose 0 support.

  • Teekeeus [comrade/them]
    hexbear
    31
    5 months ago

    being killed in prison is such a downgrade from being killed on a yacht

  • pooh [she/her, any]
    hexbear
    28
    5 months ago

    I've thought this ever since I learned about Robert Maxwell's work for Mossad. I think it's more likely Ghislaine was Epstein's Mossad-supported handler as opposed to Epstein running the show. I'd guess Wexner also had Mossad links, given his ties to Israel and generous financial support for Epstein.

    • ReadFanon [any, any]
      hexbear
      11
      5 months ago

      So more tinfoil for the thread but:

      What I want to know is what happened with Paul Schaefer - he flees Germany to "the middle east" and makes contact with the Chilean ambassador at some stage.

      There are few countries in the middle east that wouldn't be shit upon if Paul Schaefer fled there - "Nazi pedophile was harboured by Saddam Hussein!!" "Nazi sex cult leader and torturer was harboured by Gaddafi!!"

      I mean the western press is fairly gloves-off even when it comes to a US client state like Saudi Arabia, partly I think to keep them on a short leash.

      I want to know where in the middle east someone like him ends up, how long for, how many people in his "congregation" are evacuated with him and how this whole thing is financed, and what the circumstances were for him making contact with the Chilean ambassador to get an invitation to migrate there with his congregation.

      But what do you know? I can't find anything about this at all. Nothing.

      Am I saying that Mossad used this cult-like pedophile ring for their own purposes and that they collaborated with this particular Nazi? No.

      Am I saying that Mossad has ties to a cult-like pedophile ring, via Maxwell especially but also Epstein, that they may have used for their own purposes? Yes.

      Am I saying that Mossad collaborated with other Nazis when it was convenient for them in order to achieve their political goals? Yes.

  • emizeko [they/them]
    hexbear
    19
    5 months ago

    I remember articles where the author (Ari Ben Menashe) was saying this same thing right after Epstein got arrested/killed

  • tree@lemmy.zip
    hexbear
    11
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    If he was Mossad or working for them they are really not running a tight ship letting their former prime minister go party with their own blackmail operation. Like they're not gonna tip off their own prominent politicians to stay away from him, that doesn't seem very smart.

    • MF_COOM [he/him]
      hexbear
      15
      5 months ago

      Barak was Labor I don't think tho Israeli deep state has fond feelings for him

      • tree@lemmy.zip
        hexbear
        8
        edit-2
        5 months ago

        Really I can't imagine it still, it's not like labor is doing anything fundamentally different than the other parties, I imagine there are plenty of labor party members among whoever represents the Israeli deep state, regardless, it will be extremely embarrassing and probably crater Israeli faith in institutions if it ends up being that an Israeli intelligence operation entrapped their own PM.

    • Maoo [none/use name]
      hexbear
      1
      5 months ago

      Having leverage over the politicians that could act against you is very smart