MTracey podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mtracey.net

Enjoy, lol.

Based on my recent Compact Magazine article.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mtracey.net

The wait is over. Buckle your seatbelts. Here’s our discussion of the massive new Epstein Files release.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mtracey.net

I’ve spent the last 24 hours consuming an unhealthy amount of Epstein Files. Tis the season to be Jeffrey.

As everyone ravenously gobbles up all the new “Epstein Files,” released with redactions galore by the Department of Justice (hey, I tried to warn you!) please enjoy this discussion I recorded yesterday with Ian Maxwell, a man who I’m sure has many noteworthy traits in his own right, but for our purposes is most relevant because he happens to be the brother of Ghislaine Maxwell — perhaps the most high-profile inmate in the federal prison system. I won’t shy away from acknowledging that I’m of the belief that Maxwell was wrongly convicted, that her 2021 trial was a complete farce, and that she’s essentially been scapegoated for the mythological sins of Jeffrey Epstein. Because someone had to pay for his world-historic wrongdoing, even if the contours of this perceived wrongdoing are seldom well-defined. Along the way, all manner of civil liberties were aggressively curtailed to put Ghislaine in the can — from suspending the right to confront one’s accusers, previously guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, to the “cruel and unusual punishment” of being tormented with beaming strobe-lights every 15 minutes, so she could not even sleep in pretrial detention. Exculpating evidence was withheld from her defense counsel; profit-seeking civil lawyers were effectively deputized as surrogate prosecutors. “Victims” were trotted out to contrive the most outlandish tales about events that took place as many as 27 years before; none had ever named Maxwell as a “sex-trafficking” villain until post-2019, when the settlement floodgates opened, and they could maximize their payouts by ensuring their newly-recalled memories aligned squarely with the government’s crusade to nail someone, anyone, for the broader Epstein fiasco. As an FBI official effused upon Maxwell’s arrest in July 2020, it took a great deal of “creativity” for enterprising law enforcement professionals to figure out a way to send Maxwell to the slammer. Because the factual predicate was not exactly straightforward. But they got it done, by god, thanks in no small part to the cultural and political mania that prevailed at the time, which even swept right through the jury box. One juror spoke up at a critical moment during deliberations, imploring his fellow jurors to set aside their misgivings about the witnesses’ credibility, because he too — the juror, that is — was himself a child sex abuse survivor, and this somehow endowed him with the knowledge that the government-designated victims must be telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. One problem, though: this sermonizing foreman had also falsified his juror questionnaire, checking “no” under the question: “Have you or a friend or family member ever been the victim of sexual harassment, sexual abuse, or sexual assault?” Which was supposed to have been grounds for him to be disqualified from the resultant jury pool, given the likelihood that he’d fail to remain impartial in evaluating the alleged child sex crimes at issue in the trial. But the judge paid no mind; post-verdict appeals made by Maxwell’s counsel were soundly rebuffed. So now she’s been sitting in prison for over five years, and has also incongruously become a partisan “hot potato,” with Democrats darkly intimating that she must’ve been moved to a slightly-less-onerous lockup facility because she’s an accessory to some “coverup” engineered by Trump, even though no one ever specifies what exactly is being covered up. So there you have it: I spoke to her brother yesterday. And so concludes my stream-of-consciousness introduction to that conversation. One big, unwieldy paragraph that I’m not even going to bother trimming down for aesthetic reasons. Deal with it!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

I went to Epstein Press Conference, Part Two today in front of the US Capitol. Some initial thoughts.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mtracey.net

I was called forth from my slumbers (and detour into the NYC mayoral race) to comment on the latest Trump/Epstein silliness.

You’ll have to scroll around in the video a bit to see the interviews (skip Richard’s solo intro). Live-streamed this afternoon from Middle Village, Queens.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

This Wednesday, October 8, I intrepidly voyaged to New Brunswick, NJ for the final New Jersey gubernatorial debate of the 2025 election cycle. Now, you may be asking yourself: Why should I care about the New Jersey gubernatorial race? Even if you live in New Jersey, you may find yourself asking this question. And I’m not claiming you should care deeply or passionately. But there are some interesting dynamics perhaps worth keeping an eye on.

First is that if Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, the Democrat, wins, it’s likely she’ll eventually be courted to run for president. There has only ever been one female governor of New Jersey, and it was a Republican (Christine Todd Whitman). So we’ll probably hear a lot about Mikie’s “history-making” triumph as the first female Democratic governor of the state. Her political career was assiduously cultivated by Party chieftains, beginning when she won her election to the House in 2018, as one of the estimable “Dem National Security Women” who swept to power that year, along with Elissa Slotkin (CIA) who is now Senator from Michigan, and Abigail Spanberger (CIA) who now appears to be a shoo-in for the next Governor of Virginia. (NJ’s off-year race, at least per conventional wisdom, seems more competitive than the VA race.) Mikie wasn’t CIA, but she’s a former Naval Aviator and Federal Prosecutor — so close enough. And she’s always running around declaring that her vaunted public service is “rooted in the defense of our country on the front lines of national security.”

So, basically, Mikie Sherrill is poised to become a major national figure. And as such, it’s worth interrogating her ideological profile and inclinations. Some of those inclinations include: constantly calling contested political claims “misinformation,” promoting censorship-friendly “Online Safety” initiatives, being extremely over-rehearsed and boring, etc. At the post-debate press conference, I was able to ask Mikie about her “misinformation” verbal tick, as you can see in the video above.

Joining me for this New Jerseyean adventure was Meagan O’Rourke, whose YouTube channel you should also take a look at. She’s mainly been covering the NYC mayoral race, and asked Mikie whether she reciprocates the apparently unsolicited endorsement that Zohran Mamdani (somewhat strangely) gave Mikie in August. Zohran is diligently trying to “moderate,” while Mikie is already seen as a thoroughly “moderate Dem,” and is therefore trying to fend off any accusations that she may be emboldening the “radical socialist” element of the party. These divergent incentives have made for a confounding situation where Mikie simply refuses to weigh in on the NYC mayoral election, even as there are a raft of issues on which the NJ governor and the NYC mayor would manifestly have to work together. As you’ll see, she unconvincingly evades Meagan’s question.

I also mixed things up a bit by asking Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican, about the Trump Administration seemingly marching toward imposing regime change in Venezuela. While admittedly not the most obvious New Jersey-focused issue, NJ does have one of the largest populations of Venezuelan-born residents — therefore it’s conceivable that if the Venezuelan government gets further crippled and/or overthrown, there could be a surge in migratory inflows to the state. Jack, probably truthfully, said he didn’t know enough about the issue to comment. At the same time, he did say he gave the Second Trump Administration an “A” rating, so he should perhaps consider brushing up a bit on what it’s doing abroad.

Finally, I managed to raise my absolute favorite subject in the world — Jeffrey Epstein. But it was not my doing that Epstein bizarrely became an issue in the New Jersey gubernatorial race! Mikie Sherrill, still a sitting member of Congress, joined with every other Democrat and a handful of Republicans to sign the Khanna/Massie discharge petition, purportedly to compel release of the “Epstein Files.” And she put out a statement trying to claim that Jack Ciatterelli is too afraid of “his boss,” Trump, to join her heroic efforts to demand Epstein-related transparency. When I put this to Jack, he said it was another one of Mikie’s lies, and he’s all in favor of releasing the files. I doubt he even knows what “releasing the files” would mean — much less that the Khanna/Massie legislation would not actually bring about the full release of such files — but there you have it. The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein somehow haunts the 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial election.

Meagan and I chatted about all this and more in the above video — press conference clips included — so give it a good little watch, if you want.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe