A year before Donald Trump was elected the first time, way back in 2015, I heard clear echoes of history’s most infamous and most evil dictator in Donald Trump’s rhetoric. I said so, I wrote about it, and almost every person to whom I worried about the potential for the United States to go in the direction of 1930s Germany either patronizingly suggested I calm down or else called my “hyperbolic” or melodramatic.
I say the above not to say “I told you so” (this time), but rather to say that even as someone who realized what Trump was doing over a decade ago, I never, ever, ever would have imagined any of the wickedness revealed by the Epstein files. I regret having read some of what I have read from among those documents. I’ve lost faith in the basic decency of human beings. Go ahead and tell me to calm down or call me hyperbolic.
Pages of the Epstein files have revealed the unfathomably cruel natures of the world’s most powerful and influential people. I can’t really think of any worse version of humanity than men like Epstein who terrorize children and teens, people like his associates who joined him or who laughed about what he did, and the reality is that almost none of us had any idea that such things happen in this world—even though I now believe Stanley Kubrick made a movie specifically to tell us to see what has been happening plainly in front of us.
And still, I’m torn. It’s not possible to say that anything is ‘as bad as’ what Epstein and his insanely vast network did. But praising Adolf Hitler, a man who commanded the murders of over 12 million innocent human beings—I mean, that’s honestly as bad as what Epstein did. It’s an apples-and-oranges comparison of the worst kind, but isn’t being a Nazi as bad as what Epstein did? Nazis murdered children. Nazis tortured and starved children, performed medical experiments on children without anesthesia, worked them to death without a care. So yeah, being a Nazi and being a Nazi supporter actually is as bad.
What about being found liable for having raped a woman? What about having bragged in an audio recording about having sexually assaulted multiple women and getting away with it? What about being accused by 25 women and at least one 13-year-old girl of rape or sexual assault? What about this same man shrugging and smirking as he tells a studio audience that he wants to have sex with his daughter? What about being a traitor to your country?
Conservative columnist David Brooks on PBS Newshour last spring compared the second Trump regime to Pol Pot and Stalin, saying they will “be responsible for the deaths of probably by the end of this hundreds of thousands if not millions of people.” He said, “That’s Elon Musk’s legacy.” This was approximately six months before Tesla’s board of directors and shareholders awarded Elon Musk a trillion dollars for this. Jeffrey Epstein terrorized over a thousand people, destroyed lives, drove some people to commit suicide. He didn’t order the deaths of millions of people and get history’s biggest raise in return, however.
In the video above, David Brooks says that “in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead.” As of today, 18,000 kids and over 168,000 adults (and counting) have been left to die within one year from HIV/AIDS, and 14 million human beings are projected to have died fully preventable deaths by 2030 for absolutely no reason other than inhumane sadism. All of this must be said to be at least as bad as what Epstein did. All of this is one man. It is worth noting that the high-end estimated number of people killed in the Holocaust is 13 million.
The Trump administration stands to have caused more deaths within the next four years.
The public doesn’t seem to care at this point. I’ve urgently told so many people about this statistic because…because oh my God. And those people tend to repeat to me the worst of what they heard in the news this week and then often, to lift spirits, will joke about Pam Bondi’s bad dye job or Karoline Leavitt’s grotesque lips. We’re actually, honestly, seriously projecting a Holocaust-level death toll and…meh. That doesn’t really interest people. It would if it were ever discussed in the news but it is never discussed in the news.
What is discussed in the news? Well, this photograph of Karoline Leavitt’s scabby lips generated headlines for weeks.
What about profiting directly off the murders of people, bragging about it to one’s shareholders, and indulging in public about sadistic daydreams of “spraying fentanyl-laced urine” on business analysts for pleasure as Palantir CEO Alex Karp does?
Epstein, Trump, Musk, and more. All of these are real human beings. All of them are rewarded endlessly for their inhumanity. They are rewarded financially by shareholders and boards of directors or foreign actors rewarded by billionaires who sponsor them to make hatred popular among younger generations. They are rewarded politically by Catholic-majority Supreme Court justices who change laws to authorize their lawlessness, their amoral sadism and their greed. The more evils they commit, the more they are rewarded—even as the public freaks out over Jeffrey Epstein. The public freaks out over Elon Musk begging Jeffrey Epstein for access to one of his ‘wild’ parties (Is the intention to participate any less condemning than actually participating?) and yet otherwise, the media and elected officials always refer to Musk’s supposed genius and reward him, choosing to pretend that Holocaust denial and elevation and empowerment of white supremacists is not equally bad. It’s equally bad.
As a bit of time has passed since the most recent mountain of documents was released, I’ve been recalibrating what has been in front of me for years, and I am learning that my eyes have been ‘wide shut’ for a long time.
For those who are willing to look at what’s plainly before us, let’s survey the landscape of what we choose to tolerate from exceptionally wicked people:
This man is the singular embodiment of every deadly sin. Even Jeffrey Epstein called him “evil beyond belief.” I can’t think of a moral line, a line of our supposed values, that he has not crossed. He was found liable for having raped one woman, we’ve all heard him brag about sexually assaulting multiple women, he has been accused by at least 25 women and girls of sexual assault including his own first wife, and he was close friends with history’s most notorious predator of children, and that friend called him “evil beyond belief.” He has laughed on talk shows that the only thing he has in common with his daughter Ivanka is “sex” and that he would “date her” because of her figure. He incited a coup and then he dropped legal charges against the people who carried out the coup on his behalf. He began his political career and amassed a cult following by rallying hatred of Mexican and Muslim people, gaining him strong white nationalist support as his political base, and then he refined his scapegoating to target transgender people and all brown immigrants foremost. He has built concentration camps, deployed military into the streets, authorized masked paramilitary to take over American cities and shoot his own citizens dead, as he joked told us he could do back in 2016. And people laughed.
The people of the United States, our Congress, our Supreme Court, our police and our military all have allowed all of this.
Universities that would never, ever consider hiring anyone found liable for rape have bowed down to Donald Trump and paid him millions of dollars. When he told universities to betray their students and implement bigoted, discriminatory treatment toward LGBT students, foreign students, and other groups, they said “Yes, sir,” and followed orders. When he told them that First Amendment rights of free speech, press, and assembly have no relevance to him, Columbia university scapegoated its own students and stole back credentials from them, keeping hundreds of thousands of tuition dollars for the non-crime new crime of exercising constitutionally guaranteed civil rights. The truth is that this behavior is as fraudulent as what Trump University did—and that should be no surprise because the university has chosen to follow Trump’s mad dictates and reject the United States Constitution out of greed and cowardice. But it doesn’t matter; as with every billionaire and every European royal desperate to be admitted to one of Epstein’s hellish parties because of the perceived prestige, students are still bustling to compete for admission to Columbia, and their parents are eager to brag about their kids’ exclusive statuses.
Leadership matters. People follow leaders. The country is following Trump—even most of those who criticize him—by accepting just as German citizens did in the 1930s that hatred and discrimination are normal now, just regular everyday life. I was right in 2015 when I worried that Trump would cause this kind of corruption in the values and fabric of the United States, and I am telling you right now that I am right that we are currently on track for the atrocities of Epstein’s network to be regarded as nothing out of the ordinary within a year if not months. Because we’ve been conditioned to follow these leaders. People want to get into Columbia, people want to work for the Washington Post and CBS News, all because of perceived prestige of those brands and regardless of what they do, and you can bet that more people than ever want into a network like Epstein’s.
Let us not pretend that Epstein and his wicked network are unique.
Let us remember that just over a year ago, a so-called “rape chat” was discovered in which over 70,000 men told one another about their horrific tormenting of women (and girls?), including a man who drugged his wife for over a decade so that he and at least 20 other men could violate her. When this information was publicized via the media, the public was shocked and appalled as we are now about Epstein. I suspect most people have forgotten all about it by now—as many people who, once appalled, now are publicly lamenting the loneliness of men. After all these revelations—global trafficking and sex enslavement of girls and young women by billionaires, heads of state and royalty, after university fraternity rape clubs and global group chats of tens of thousands of men who brag about having raped their own mothers and sisters, today’s media and political messaging is: Poor lonely men!
And while that’s the trend that has caught on, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance has said that pregnancy by rape is a mere “inconvenience,” and the leading voice of the far right is calling for the arrests of all women. It is necessary and urgent to note that all of what the Republican party has done since 2025 sounded equally preposterous and was dismissed as hyperbole a decade ago.
Let us remember that a decade ago, 19 male students at American University in Washington, D.C. were discovered to have their own mini-version of the network described above. It is no coincidence that this occurred just as the Republican party was converting into the overtly hate-based party it became as it embraced Donald Trump. This was the same period of time during which Milo Yiannopoulos was becoming a rich celebrity by spreading hatred of women and transgender people on college campuses, carrying and selling merchandise with the slogan “I’d rather have cancer than feminism.” He was celebrated by Bill Maher, Simon & Schuster gave him a quarter-million-dollar deal to codify his hatred in book format, and Ann Coulter hitched her wagon to him as he moved into the right-wing-extremist space she once held.
I’m making a point that what horrifies people about Epstein revelations soon will become old news and regarded as no big deal, and Yiannopoulos is a prime example that this happens. When he was at the apex of his star-troll status, two videos of him advocating sexual abuse of adolescent boys began to circulate online. His initial defense was that he supports ‘pedastry’—sexual coercion of adolescents, not prepubescent children, and that that is fine. When that failed, he claimed he is a victim of sexual abuse and asked for forgiveness. To no avail: Simon & Schuster canceled his book contract, Breitbart and CPAC fired him. He was shunned. For a while. Until…Marjorie Taylor Greene hired him to work for her on Capitol Hill. Yes—the same Marjorie Taylor Greene who turned against Trump because of Epstein’s abuses of minors hired Milo Yiannopoulos whose career imploded because he advocated sexual abuses of minors.
Meanwhile, most recently, Megyn Kelly—who was once celebrated in the news media and even in a feature film starring Charlize Theron because of her perceived victimhood after she claimed Roger Ailes sexually harassed her at Fox News and because Trump bizarrely said Kelly “had blood coming out of her wherever” while moderating one of his debates—recently said exactly what Milo Yiannopoulos said years ago: She doesn’t believe Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile because, according to Megyn Kelly, “he liked the barely legal type.” Kelly, an attorney, defined “the barely legal type” as children who do not look younger than ages “15 or 10.”
To demonstrate how quickly our social norms have changed for the perverse, Milo Yiannopoulos lost every one of his lucrative media gigs less than a decade ago when he was heard defending sexual assault of teens. Megyn Kelly evidently lost no fans, no followers, and SiriusXM radio has silently stood by her without losing subscribers.
Our norms have changed dramatically over one decade, and the acceptance and behavior of the public is the reason. A decade ago when Yiannopoulos advocated adult men engaging in sex with minor boys, the understood social norm was zero tolerance. Today, that’s not understood. SiriusXM subscribers threatened to unsubscribe when Megyn Kelly rapesplained Epstein’s predation of minors—but they didn’t make good on their threats. This told SiriusXM that, hey, Megyn Kelly is generating controversy and that means free promotion for her show, and no one is unsubscribing—that means she’s profiting us, just as we gambled she would! In effect, Kelly’s vile comments are good for business—her own and SiriusXM’s—and the reason for that is that the public will is not even strong enough to make people unsubscribe from a radio network. This has served as positive reinforcement for Kelly’s bad behavior, as she most recently ranted with racist and xenophobic pride to Piers Morgan that the Superbowl should be “unifying,” which to her means “not for the Latinos” or for Muslim Americans. Because unifying the country means dividing it, of course.
The moral state of the nation is bleak.
Donald Trump’s rhetoric and the example he has set with his own actions has betrayed every single ‘good’ value and virtue that people claim, and he has demonstrated that people’s purported values and virtues are empty. If people were inherently good, people like Donald Trump could not rise to the level to which he has risen.
American Nazis rallied around Trump as soon as he ran for office. David Duke, Richard Spencer, and other white supremacists endorsed him and wore MAGA merch along with swastika armbands. The legacy is Nick Fuentes and other Nazis.
Fuentes praises Hitler regularly, and last week, he said, “The number-one political enemy in the United States is women. Women get sent to the gulags first, obviously. Which women? All women. Every woman. Every woman and girl is sent to the gulags. We will determine who the good ones are after the fact. Well, what about the good ones? What about the trad ones? First of all, there are no trad ones or good ones. Second of all, we will determine which ones are acceptable after they're all imprisoned. Then we will let them out.”
Fuentes is depicted by most non-extremist media as what he is: A monster. A bad Nazi.
So, then, we can say that if the media represent the common consciousness and conscience of the people of the United States, the media’s condemnation of Nick Fuentes is evidence that we haven’t lost our soul. Right?
Absolutely not right. Because Elon Musk is every bit as monstrous as Nick Fuentes is, and he is almost always depicted deferentially by mainstream media. OK, so IBM stopped advertising on Twitter because under Musk’s ownership, Twitter posted literal Nazi propaganda next to IBM ads. OK, so the chatbot Musk designed refers to itself as “Mecha-Hitler.” OK, so Musk gave a Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration. OK, so Musk actively supported a far-right German candidate whose campaign slogan was based on a German Nazi slogan. OK, so Musk has said that Nazi death camps were designed for “disinfection.” OK, so Musk has openly denied the Holocaust so often that France is investigating him for violating French laws.
OK, OK, OK. So what? France can investigate him. The United States rewards him. Trump’s regime handed Musk a chainsaw—literally and figuratively—and he personally fired over 200,000 legitimate civil servants and stole over 300 million Social Security numbers, scampering off to do even more nefarious deeds. Here in the United States, the obvious reaction was to reward him. Tesla’s board and stakeholders gave him a raise from mere hundreds of billions to a trillion dollars. And the mainstream news tells us always: Elon is a genius.
So: Fuentes is a bad Nazi, Musk is a brilliant Nazi, and at least one of these men is to be worshiped by all of us, says the American media and—oh, look!—so does the Anti-Defamation League, which exists to combat antisemitism.
Nazism isn’t new. It surged—you guessed it—in 2015 as it rode the coattails of one Donald Trump, president of the United States of America. His most ardent supporters initially were former Klu Klux Klan ‘grand wizard’ David Duke, who called Trump ‘the best of the lot,’ and Richard Spencer. While Duke was more or less retired by the media by 2015, Spencer was made into a star by the media at this time. He rebranded and repackaged white supremacy and American Nazism as “the alt-right,” and the media lapped up the term and spewed it in all directions until the public embraced this mysterious new “alt-right,” which was sold in news stories as a cool new trend for young people. The Atlantic magazine years before published an article called “How to Ask for the Hitler Youth Haircut,” describing it as ‘dangerous, sort of awesome, and really offensive.” Richard Spencer had that Hitler Youth haircut, and he was featured in a video published by The Atlantic on November 21, 2016 giving a Nazi salute identical to the one Elon Musk would give on January 20, 2025 at Trump’s inauguration; as he led a room of white men to give the Nazi salute, Spencer cried out, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” (“Hail victory” is the English-language translation of the German “sieg heil” always given to Adolf Hitler by German Nazis.” In June of 2017—about half a year after publishing Spencer’s Nazi salute of Donald Trump—The Atlantic published a stunningly long 8,000-word feature of Richard Spencer titled “His Kampf,” complete with flattering photoshoot and an accompanying documentary video called “Rebranding White Nationalism: Inside the Alt-Right.” I was worried and I spoke out about my worry at the time that articles and videos like these were cultivating a ‘cool factor’ associated with the so-called alt-right, which we are now in 2026 back to recognizing as Nazism.
Of course, editors at The Atlantic would deny that their promotions of Spencer and framing him as yet another ‘genius’ of marketing hatred have anything to do with the rise of people like Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes, but I contend that they have everything to do with mainstreaming it so that now, a decade later, young men who have been brought up with this media messaging really think hatred is not only normal but virtuous and a way to become rich and famous, to get magazine feature profiles and documentary videos made about them.
And these young men aren’t just alt-right; they’re right: Two days ago, The New York Times published a feature of a young influencer who uses racist epithets regularly and hits himself in the face with a hammer to look pretty (really), all to get attention and to amass great wealth, which he is doing thanks in part to The New York Times mainstreaming him in the way The Atlantic mainstreamed Richard Spencer. The worse these young men are, the more attention they get, and the more that that happens, the ‘cooler’ and richer they’ll become, and that’s what makes Elon Musk look up to them. He wanted to get into Jeffrey Epstein’s wild sex parties, and he wants to get into the cool club of teen hatemongers like ‘Clavicular’ and ‘Big Balls,’ the latter of whom he paid to fire 200,000 federal employees. It’s so insane.
Milo Yiannopoulos, who worked as a video games reporter (How is that a thing?) in the United Kingdom before Steve Bannon imported him to the U.S. to report on national politics and to campaign for Donald Trump, later was found to be a Nazi himself, using the word ‘Kristallnacht’ as his email password while working Breitbart under Steve Bannon, and videotaped singing ‘America the Beautiful’ with white supremacist Richard Spencer while giving a Nazi salute. All this was happening while Bill Maher and Out magazine were singing his praises, while Simon & Schuster was offering him a quarter-million dollars to publish his opinions, while CPAC was offering him a headlining keynote address slot at its political conference, while he was being invited by universities across the country to preach hatred of women, transgender, and Muslim people and encourage young college students to vote for Donald Trump.
As it turns out, Yiannopoulos’s rise to fame was not organic through his writing at Breitbart. His rise—and likely much of the fawning press he got—was allegedly paid for by the ultra-conservative family of “secret hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer.” According to a BuzzFeed report, the family even paid for Yiannopoulos’s legal fees when his U.S. residency was threatened.
Interestingly and to my extreme dismay, while the media were all abuzz about the cool new “alt-right” from around 2015-2018, even the LGBT media got on the bandwagon. Out magazine, which represents LGBT people, published a feature profile of Yiannopoulos with a campy and flattering photoshoot that took up approximately one half of an entire issue. Yiannopoulos was outspoken about his racism, his xenophobia, his hatred of women and most especially his hatred of transgender people, making it astonishing that an LGBT magazine would give him this kind of space and treatment.
Many condemned Out for mainstreaming Yiannopoulos and choosing to frame his casual racism and hatred of trans people as innocuous, even adorable, as they presented him as a silly, harmless clown. Out’s editor and its sister magazine The Advocate defended the puff piece as journalism.
It should have come as little surprise to anyone that Yiannopoulos eventually claimed not to be gay at all, and he says he regrets “mainstreaming homosexuality.” I would argue that this is one claim Yiannopoulos really can’t credit to himself—it’s the media who mainstreamed him, entirely by choice, and in doing so they mainstreamed hatred among youth culture, and in doing so, the media created an incubator for hatred to become a rite of passage among young men in the United States.
And while having been supposedly shunned by the Republican party back in 2017, Milo Yiannopoulos claims to have coordinated Donald Trump’s 2022 dinner with proud Nazi Nick Fuentes. The point: This is all a coordinated effort, and the mainstream news media have played the primary role in creating our culture—and the public has lapped it all up for a decade, either unwittingly or with knowing glee.
Fuentes, being representative of young men who’ve grown up in a political media environment that has made celebrities of men like Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, ‘Clavicular,’ Charlie Kirk, J.D. Vance, and others who trade in hatred, openly and proudly advocates sexual assault of women:
So I ask again: If you’re really so upset about Epstein’s network, what will it take to wake you up to the reality that Epstein’s evil is matched by evils all around us, from Trump and Musk to podcasters and online trolls who Gavin Newsom has said during fawning interviews his own son loves.
Like Elon Musk, the media constantly tell us that Palantir Founder Peter Thiel is a genius. Thiel, after all, co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk, and then he co-founded Palantir, which spies on all of us and “occasionally kills people,” according to current Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who is also a genius, according to the press.
Listen to what Karp told Aaron Ross Sorkin during a public interview.
Sorkin, a journalist paid by The New York Times and CNBC, dutifully laughed, and the audience applauded as the Palantir CEO for no reason at all volunteered that he fantasizes about spraying “fentanyl-laced urine” on “analysts who tried to screw us.”
Over recent years, more people have become aware that Palantir spies on U.S. citizens and worse—we’ll get to that—but few know that the United States Department of Education recently paid Palantir $60 million to build a database of students, and that that database launched last week.
Let’s take a very quick look at some defining characteristics of these exceptional leaders.
Peter Thiel:
Genuinely believes that environmental activist Greta Thunberg “is the antichrist,” and he’s been giving small, private lectures to radicalize people based on this premise.
Is not sure whether he believes the human race should continue to exist.
Definitely had nothing to do with the death of his ex paramour, a male model and social media influencer who fell to his death from a Miami balcony while taking a selfie after breaking up with Thiel.
Gave $100 million to Donald Trump’s first political campaign before funding J.D. Vance’s sudden—and inexplicable given his total lack of rizz—rise to power.
Champions the idea of a “Dark Enlightenment,” which proposes that tech-industry billionaires overthrow the United States government, appoint themselves as an oversight board, appoint a dictator, and enslave the whole of the non-wealthy U.S. population, who they believe to be intellectually inferior and of lesser human value.
Is interviewed reverentially by mainstream journalists such as Ross Douthat of The New York Times, never challenged even when he sounds patently insane.
Is praised as a genius.
I showed the video below of Peter Thiel defending the health insurance industry choosing to “kill thousands of Americans by denying them coverage” on the grounds that, quoting Thiel, “…um. Ugh. Mm. It’s. Uh. It’s. I d—, I d—, I d—, I d—, I d—, I don’t know. What. What to say, I, I think, I, I still think, you should try to make an argument? And I, I, I think this is, this is, you sh—, you know, there may be things wrong with our healthcare system, but you have you have to make an argument and you have to try to find a way to convince people and uh and and and and chan, change it by that. And this is, you know, this is not going to work.” The person I showed it to said to me, “He has a point. You do have to make an argument.” I think it’s probably time to give up on trying to make sound arguments. I know—people here tell me!—no one has the patience for logic today. Only, I guess, hate.
Alex Karp:
Said last year, “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.”
Also said, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make…the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion, kill them.” He said that directly to shareholders via a conference call. Stocks went up and he was rewarded with $6.8 billion.
Is interviewed reverentially by mainstream journalists such as CNBC’s and The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, never challenged even when he sounds patently insane.
Is praised as a genius.
Back to Epstein.
Epstein trafficked and traded children and adolescents to billionaire men and women for unconscionable abuses. Donald Trump was his good friend, we know, and Bill Clinton was his buddy. The Crown Princess of Norway and Sarah Ferguson of the U.S. fought for his affections in writing as Ferguson’s ex-husband, former Prince Andrew Mountbatten perched over what appears to be a little girl in nightmare-inspiring photos from the Epstein files.
Who are these people?
What people would tolerate such horrors, much less participate in them?
Well, a global cabal of child predators in the highest positions of power is something from a dystopian horror movie, to be sure, but so is Donald Trump’s entire biography, and so are the things that Elon Musk is rewarded with a trillion dollars for tweeting, and so are Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s comments as he brags that his company “on occasion” kills people and that he fantasizing about spraying “fentanyl-laced urine” on analysts.
All these men are as wicked as Epstein in different ways and perhaps in the same ways, but only Epstein and Epstein affiliates are appalling to people at this moment in time. Why? Because what we claim to be our values and our virtues are flexible, which means they are neither true values nor true virtues.
Growing up, I learned about Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson—the worst of the worst—and today it turns out the most-celebrated and most richly rewarded men in the world really are no better. And all of these men were made in part by the media and by public adoration.
Former Norway Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland has been formally charged with corruption because of revelations from the Epstein files.
Current United Kingdom Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s career in public service is likely to end because of his affiliation with someone named in the Epstein files.
Charles, king of the United Kingdom and 14 commonwealth nations, is facing pressure to turn against his disgraced brother, who no longer may be called Prince Andrew.
Nothing similar is happening in the United States.
Congressman Jamie Raskin, who has read unredacted Epstein files, says that Donald Trump is named literally more than one million times in Epstein files—how, we don’t know, because the U.S. Justice Department has redacted his name to protect him. We now know Melania Trump’s name was redacted from released files; two years before she married Donald Trump, Melania Knavs was the sender of flattering messages to Ghislaine Maxwell that ended “Love, Melania.” Most people by now have heard that Elon Musk sent an email to Epstein begging to join one of his wild parties. (Musk was rejected.) Trump cabinet appointee Howard Lutnick blatantly lied about his affiliation with Epstein, with files revealing he spent time on Epstein’s infamous property after Epstein had been convicted of child sex trafficking. And of course, here in the U.S., there is no accountability similar to what is happening in Norway or the United Kingdom.
We don’t punish depravity in the United States, whether it’s sexual assault, Holocaust denial, or a CEO bragging about murdering people.
We reward depravity. Trillion-dollar raises. Feature articles in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Out magazine.
Gavin Newsom knows this. Even as he has fashioned himself via social media as Trump’s boldest critic, he has simultaneously invited Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro onto his podcast for fawning interviews.
For his social media following, Newsom tweeted that ICE’s murder of Renee Good is “state sponsored terrorism”:
Governor Newsom Press Office@GovPressOffice
STATE. SPONSORED. TERRORISM.
1:00 AM · Jan 8, 2026 · 1.79M Views
799 Replies · 4.47K Reposts · 51K Likes
At the same time, for his manosphere following, he told Ben Shapiro on his podcast that masked ICE agents who murdered Good and Alex Pretti are not terrorists and he does not want ICE to be abolished. Nothing to question about his character—just look at the teeth! Look at the tan! Look at the hair! Just look, say all the journalists—he’s SO PRESIDENTIAL!
If I were more dedicated to this, I could create a minutes-long supercut of the hosts of The View telling us how majestically maned, and therefore how qualified, Gavin Newsom is to be president of the United States—forget the ICE stuff, forget that he drooled over Charlie Kirk, forget he chose to marry Donald Trump, Jr. paramour Kimberly Guilfoyle. Look at the hair.
The duplicitous Milo Yiannopoulos, who so convincingly masqueraded as gay that an LGBT magazine chose him over its entire LGBT and female readership, reportedly used ‘Kristallnacht’ as his email password while he worked for Steve Bannon at Breitbart.
Kristallnacht is the night in Germany that kicked off the Holocaust, when masked paramilitary agents terrorized and murdered Jewish people throughout German cities at the order of Adolf Hitler.
Masked paramilitary ICE agents terrorized people in the United States, including residents of Minneapolis, Minnesota, boldly murdering two U.S. citizens, parading an elderly U.S. citizen out of his home wearing only underwear in the middle of January, and using a little boy as ‘bait’ to draw his father out of his home. Six other human beings who are not U.S. citizens but who are human beings constitutionally entitled to be alive died in ICE custody in January. A man from Ireland who has lived in the United States for 20 years was arrested and held in ICE custody for five months; he describes the facility as a concentration camp. A man from France who has been a legal resident in the U.S. for years was suddenly told by his employer to go back to France “today”; he tried to leave and was told there was no way out. He tried to exit through Canada and was denied entry. He was then arrested and held in ICE concentration camp facilities without food or any basic hygiene, with the lights on 24 hours a day and nothing to lie on except the hard floor, for three days before finally being deported without explanation.
The news media is doing its damndest to make Gavin Newsom the Democratic nominee for president because, they incessantly tell us, he is handsome and therefore qualified to be president. And Gavin Newsom wants to maintain ICE, which is murdering human beings and building concentration camps throughout the United States.
So: How can we be surprised at the vastness of Jeffrey Epstein’s network if we really think about it, if we are really honest about what we know about people?
How can we allow ourselves to feel genuinely shocked by abhorrent revelations from the Epstein files when the richest and most powerful men in the United States—who have been given their power with the consent of the people and who are regularly made richer by boards and shareholders—are so openly wicked in so many ways?
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