Salem Revisited
The obsession with the Epstein files has created another excuse for censorious mob rule, right up there with the reign of CoVidiots and #MeToo mania. But the societal damage may be worse this time
When a teenaged girl fell down in convulsions in front of Salem’s array of upright citizen judges and then wheeled around to point at someone in the audience, crying out that she’d seen that woman, (Goodie Sarah, perhaps) “dancing naked with the devil,” Goodie Sarah was marched off to be burned at the stake…purely on a sex-starved hysterical girl’s say so. Freud was not around to talk about the sexual frustration-related hysterias young women are prone to.
We are not burning people in village squares at this point but Epstein-mania is doing harm and, I submit, worse harm in February ‘26 that at any time before simply because the Epstein Transparency Act mandated a crazy-huge new data dump.
It’s still not all of the files (more about that later) but on January 26, 3.5 million pages were added to the collection available for public view.
I get vertigo when trying to search the Department of Justice’s “Epstein Library.” It’s the rawest of raw data, no explanations included, and most of it utter dross—like email chains that go on for pages simply because the entire email, from inception to end, is copied in every new PDF with even cursory replies like “will call later.’
Never mind that you have to tie interns to their desks to search for crumbs because there’s no keyword search function. There are names in them thar hills and that’s what the public is panting for. Both Republicans and Democrats are sickeningly obessed with waging “mentions” warfare on each other, producing the ridiculous day-long hearings featuring “mentioneds” like Leslie Wexner and today (February 27) Bill Clinton.
Clinton will be asked to explain the photo in which he is SEEN IN A HOT TUB WITH YOUNG WOMEN, as a Fox announcer said sternly. (Actually, the photo does not show Clinton in “a hot tub with young women.” He’s seen in a rather large indoor pool with Ghislaine Maxwell.)
But “hot tubs,” doncha know. People use ‘em for sex…or so I’ve heard.
The DOJ website helpfully warns us before we enter their Epstein Library that this latest drop “may include fake or falsely submitted images, documents or videos, as everything that was sent to the FBI by the public was included in the production that is responsive to the Act.”
Never mind that sane caveat from the DOJ (in our ADD-afflicted world nobody reads that far), things have gotten so mad, the fear of guilt by association so intense, that merely to be mentioned in some fashion is considered probable connection to the Global Sex Trafficking Network, to the “rape island Jeffrey Epstein had set up where rich and powerful men were abusing young girls,” as Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) recently put it in a “Release All the Files” tirade.
(Remember that part about stuff “sent by the public” as you read further. If you’ve ever worked in, say, customer service you know that the American public is full of attention-starved lunatics.)
Fortunately for those panting after miscreants, Epstein was a great collector of bold face names. (Though inconveniently those names fall all over the political spectrum.)
Before he was branded with the scarlet P (for pedophile, see footnote) 1 the financier was a hyperactive party animal/socialite, a single-guy-about town (which meant he could keep up with dating mores, unlike his drearily married friends.) He had the funds to throw great parties in swanky locations like an Upper East Side townhouse right off Central Park and on his private island to which guests were flown on one of his private planes. Some of the academic types he hosted (Noam Chomsky, a frequent visitor to the island, comes to mind) probably weren’t used to this treatment and may have jumped at the chance.
Here’s why merely to attend a party in the 90s right up to 2008 when his first conviction (for “trafficking”—to himself,” i.e. paying women to have sex with him) is not immediate evidence of guilt: Here’s how New York magazine fluffed all over that native New Yorker in 2002 with their piece, “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery.”
He comes with cash to burn, a fleet of airplanes, and a keen eye for the ladies — to say nothing of a relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize–winning scientists across the country — and for financial markets around the world.”
The wizard that meets the eye is spare and fit; with a long jaw and a carefully coiffed head of silver hair, he looks like a taller, younger Ralph Lauren. A raspy Brooklyn accent betrays his Coney Island origins. He spends an hour and fifteen minutes every day doing advanced yoga with his personal instructor, who travels with him wherever he goes. He is an enthusiastic member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations
For his 50th birthday in 2003 gal pal Ghislaine Maxwell compiled a birthday book with contributions from friends like Bill Clinton. Here was Woody Allen’s contribution
On his flight logs one finds Stephen Hawking (who attended a scientific conference held on the infamous “Pedo Island,”—guys immobilized with ALS are the worst hounds, don’t you know!) Peter Thiel, Woody Allen, Itzhak Perlman, actor Kevin Spacey, magician David Copperfield, also turn up.
Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Richard Branson appear in long runs of email.
In her memoir Katie Couric reported having dinner at the townhouse in 2010. Showing how seriously “elites” took the 2008 convictions at the time, the dinner was in 2010 and was also attended by the likes of George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Rose.
In other words, obviously (not obviously enough for dimwitted legislators) if you take at least ten years worth of texts and emails from a social butterfly like JE, you’re going to find correspondence from prominent people, most of the exchanges on the level of “hey dude, great lunch.”
(Wait a minute! “Lunch”…that’s code for sex with teenaged girls, right?)
Epstein had majored in physics in college and apparently he loved to collect scientist friends (not just Stephen Hawking; that’s merely the biggest name), sometimes sponsoring their research and inviting them to conferences on the island.
Yesterday (Thursday, February 26) two important and entirely sympathetic men—both with science connections—were made to walk the plank.
Mark Tramo was a professor of neurology and music at UCLA professor. He has studied and been published on “the use of auditory stimulation to ameliorate pain and stress for premature infants.”
Apparently Epstein found this interesting (because of his sexual attraction to infants…NOT) and funded some of Tramos research. Accordingly in a understandably warm email to Epstein Tramo mentioned, en passant, that he’d just seen interesting research showing that "a newborn will suck on a pacifier more vigorously" if the baby hears his mother's voice.
Wow. The word “suck.” Since the general public is stuck on the false notion that Epstein was a “child molester” and not simply a procurer of women who would have been of legal age in thirty American states, the general public has gone…there is no other way to describe it…batshit.
One upright citizen (in screenshot below) stationed herself outside Tramos office and “screamed for an hour.” Six thousand people signed a petition callling for his ouster.
"God bless this woman! What kind of monster must Mark Tramo be?," gushed New York Times columnist Rod Dreher on X. Yesterday we learned that Tramo’s contract with the UCLA school of music will not be renewed. His fate at the school of neurology is still up in the air.
Tramo is still young and may still be able to rehabilitate himself but consider the case of economist Lawrence Summers who was fired yesterday from his remaining position at Harvard. He also resigned from the board of AI company OpenAI and numerous other positions at such places as Bloomberg News, The New York Times, and the Center for American Progress.
The guy was no slouch; admitted to MIT at sixteen he went on to serve as the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury (1999 to 2001), president of Harvard University (2001 to 2006), and director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He’s a brainiac. (But even brainiacs, as we will see, can go mooning around after a little love and affection.)
But never mind all of those achievments. The sisterhood has been tracking his movements ever since an address at a 2005 Harvard Conference on the subject of “Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce.”
Struggling to explain the disparity between men and women in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions, Summers did not bleet about a glass ceiling instead he famously said:
…in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude…I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them
Intrinsic hard-wired sex differences between men and women expressing themself in preferences for kind of work??
Summers had sent a “signal of discouragement to talented girls and women,” and the apology tour began. He wasn’t sorry enough for Senator Elizabeth Warren so when she joined the call for Summers’s head, he resigned the Harvard presidency.
Summers is in the news again (the guy is just INCORRIGIBLE) because it turned out he had been friendly with Jeffrey Epstein for years (including post-2008) judging from the huge run of emails that have surfaced. The huge run of text is fleshed out with dozens of “you in town?”, “on plane call you later”s. But if one sifts with dedicated Salem-esque commitment, one finds an email where Summers calls Epstein his “wing man” after he’d sought the hipper guy’s advice on how to proceed in what he believed was a budding romance with a woman.
None of the emails are at all obscene but they reveal a man attempting (and failing) to cheat on his wife (One should never make assumptions about marriages. Perhaps they had an open marriage.) The discussion ends when Summers concludes forlornly “I think for now I’m going nowhere with her except [as an] economics mentor.”
Oh, how the world has jumped on that. “Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers, and institutions — or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else,” snarled Senator Warren.
In fact, Epstein talked about women with many of his male friends. Shocker: This is something guys do!
A lot of these guys like Tramo and Summers ran in academic and/or government circles which I theorize means they rarely met Alpha males with whom to have guy talks, so Epstein, very smart and a lady’s man, (a rare combination) fulfilled that role.
Speaking of Guy Talk,
a CBS health correspondent named Peter Attia walked the plank last week as well. His worst crime? This email:
Everybody wants to jump in the Hang ‘em High fun. So eager were Representatives Khanna and Massie to get into the j’accuse act that Khanna thundered from the house floor that the files had just revealed new names of “wealthy powerful men that the DOJ hid”
The next day February 10, 2026, on the house floor, Khanna read out the full names of the new miscreants he’d discovered: complete unkown, average citizens named Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, and Nicola Caputo.
This is the file Khanna and Massie had seen:
Ooops. It turned out a few days later that these four were on the same list as Jeffrey Epstein because their photos been used as “filler” in a folder of visually similar men to see if an alleged eye witness would pick the actual suspect (Jeffrey Epstein) out of the line up.
Now remember:
Everything that was sent to the FBI by the public was included in the production that is responsive to the Act. Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims…
But why pay attention that buzz kill when you have so-called eyewitness accounts of people electrocuting babies on an Epstein yacht?
And so social media postings, even the columns of once reputable columnists, are panting to tell us “the real dirt.”
“It’s much worse than you thought,” writes one fellow who appears otherwise sane in his Facebook profile:
A mini industry with its own pundits and published books is emerging to push the notion of a baby-eating Mossad connection. Really? Don’t you think you should at least hide your invocation of the ancient blood libel of the Jews?
Are vast numbers of Americans really that stupid now? Did this guy not think it was important that the bilge he calls evidence was clearly labeled as coming from an anonymous caller to the DOJ? (The DOJ invites citizens’ reports of crimes, by the way, on its website.)
Does he not understand that prosecutors have been crawling all over Epsteinalia since 2005 or thereabouts and evidence of “ritualistic child sacrifice” would have attracted law enforcement attention before?
I find the spread of these “theories” very troubling. and more evidence of the Stupiding of the American Mind.
In any case, it turns out Alan Dershowitz who had misgivings about a full release of the files was right. He advocated a full and complete unredacted release (which still hasn’t happend, by the way) but he looked uneasy when he talked about the victim-favoring character of the exisitng redactions
There are CSAM stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material, privacy protections written into the Epstein Transparency Act. The DOJ’s conservative “treat all women in these files as potential victims” policy to avoid further harm. These sound like important protections for genuine victims, but they are drafted broadly enough to allow virtually any woman defining herself as a victim to have mentions to her and photographs of her removed. And that has the effect of removing the shades, the subtleties concerning accusers from the files.
As Grok put it, “The law forbids hiding information just because it’s embarrassing to powerful people, but privacy for victims is explicitly allowed (and in practice, broadly interpreted here).”
What we’ve ended up with, as usual, is a very one-sided picture. One that absolutely sanitizes the “survivor sisters”—a new name for Epstein accuser—and throws men out to fend for themselves in another man-hating moment in our history.
In other words, Dershowitz pointed out, it would be possible to see the testimony (quite sexually graphic) by Epstein accuser Virginia Guiffre (who later recanted her entire charge) but not the material showing Guiffre to have been a fabricator.
”This has become McCarthyism, the worst I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” Dershowitz remarked today in an interview with WABC-Radio.
Part 2, forthcoming:
What you might see about the alleged victims if anything potentially damaging had not been redacted.
“Please Don’t Call it Pedophilia”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-179382838