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Ghislaine speaks! And as it turns out, there is still nothing to the Epstein conspiracies. Michael Tracey has a nice breakdown of how it went, pointing out that there is no indication she is lying, even when you might expect to see signs of her doing so. He joins me to discuss.

I went into this conversation thinking I had learned almost everything important about the Epstein saga. I was wrong. There are so many threads to pull here. But they’re not the ones people expect. The whole case against Ghislaine appears to have been drummed up by trial lawyers who recruited the “victims,” conducted the PR campaign, got journalists on board, and, according to Ghislaine and evidence presented by Alan Dershowitz, were engaging in a blackmail ring that involved threatening to drag more people into the story.

It’s all rotten from top to bottom. It’s always easy to see a moral panic in retrospect. A hallmark of moral panics is that groups normally at odds unite to condemn a target. As Michael alludes to, podcast bros, CNN, and Fox are all on the same side here, making him a rare beacon of truth. They’re still wrong.

We also talk about the role that taking high doses of testosterone might have played in Epstein’s behavior, something that came out during the Ghislaine interviews. He was clearly acting recklessly, which led to his downfall, and we now finally have an explanation of why.

There are some video and audio problems near the middle of the conversation, and Michael disconnects at one point, but he comes back on and we finish the discussion.

Note: I’ve heard from some of you who are paid subscribers that you don’t know how to get the full episodes via your podcast apps. It’s very simple. Just go to the episode page on the newsletter website on your phone or desktop. Don’t do it through the Substack app; it must be a browser. At the top, there will be a tab that says “Listen via…” Choose that, and then pick from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. It should then allow you to add the show to your feeds, where you’ll automatically get the full versions of all episodes when they come out. Note that you need to do it separately for both shows associated with this newsletter: The Hanania Show and The H&H Podcast.

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Michael Tracey joins me to talk about the latest saga in the moral panic over pedophilia and its intersection with antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The most interesting part of the conversation is when we discuss how the concept of “prostitution” has disappeared from the culture. Everything is “trafficking” or must involve minors. I note that, with the collapse of social conservatism, we no longer have any basis not to allow legalized prostitution. To justify the current state of the law, then, in addition to the grant money involved, we need a new angle, which exaggerates or invents the coercive aspects of most sex work.

Michael brings up the point that if Elliot Spitzer were arrested today, the women involved would unquestionably be treated as helpless victims.

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Last month, Tulsi Gabbard in her capacity as the head of DNI released a number of documents pertaining to Russiagate. On the right, an entire mythology has grown around the idea that the Obama administration, Hillary, and Deep State actors fabricated the idea that Russia helped get Trump elected, along with the narrative surrounding ties between his campaign and the Putin regime.

Even as someone who hasn’t followed all the twists and turns of this saga, I knew enough to understand that some of Gabbard’s most sensationalist claims were laughable. With great fanfare, she informed the world that the Obama administration knew that Russia had never hacked the voting machines to deliver a Trump victory. Under the headline “New Evidence of Obama Administration Conspiracy to Subvert President Trump’s 2016 Victory and Presidency,” the DNI press release lists the following bullet points

* In the months leading up to the November 2016 election, the Intelligence Community (IC) consistently assessed that Russia is “probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means.”

* On December 7, 2016, after the election, talking points were prepared for DNI James Clapper stating, “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome.”

* On December 9, 2016, President Obama’s White House gathered top National Security Council Principals for a meeting that included James Clapper, John Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe and others, to discuss Russia.

* After the meeting, DNI Clapper’s Executive Assistant sent an email to IC leaders tasking them with creating a new IC assessment “per the President’s request” that details the “tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election.” It went on to say, “ODNI will lead this effort with participation from CIA, FBI, NSA, and DHS.”

* Obama officials leaked false statements to media outlets, including The Washington Post, claiming, “Russia has attempted through cyber means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome of an election.”

* On January 6, 2017, a new Intelligence Community Assessment was released that directly contradicted the IC assessments that were made throughout the previous six months.

The problem of course is that the administration never claimed that Russia manipulated the vote tally! Everyone who is familiar with the most basic facts surrounding Russiagate knew this already.

Go back to the first bullet point, with the quote that Russia was “probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means.” Now look at the complete passage here, on page 2, taken first from the email of an unnamed Obama administration official:

Russia probably is not trying to going to be able to? (sic) influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure. Russia probably is using cyber means primarily to influence the election by stealing campaign party data and leaking select items, and it is also using public propaganda. [emphasis added]

Another email in response concurs with this judgment and repeats the phrase.

The dishonesty is staggering. Put aside all other claims that Gabbard makes, this is so blatantly in bad faith that it’s immediately discrediting, and should make you skeptical of everything else these people say. Especially when this lie is combined with calls for Obama to be prosecuted. The Trump administration is speaking to an audience that it knows is misinformed, or unable to understand the distinction between “Russia tried to influence the election” and “Russia tried to change the election outcome by manipulating voting machines.”

This recent news renewed my interest in the Russiagate story, so I invited my friend Renée DiResta (X, Substack, personal website) on a livestream to talk about it. She is a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, and the former research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She also did work on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

I used to take a very dim view of the misinformation crowd, and there are many researchers out there who give the field a bad name. I once saw institutions like the Stanford Internet Observatory as being at the center of a vast censorship complex that sought to simply stamp out all dissent from leftist orthodoxy. As someone who was repeatedly suspended under the old Twitter regime, I joined many on the right in seeing these people as a personal threat to my right to speak.

If only the world could have stayed so simple! I could be a free speech absolutist, and never take any position that risks giving power to people who might eventually censor me. Yet recent years have shown that we need something like a community of responsible academics, intellectuals, and curators of content watching over the misinformed mobs that have been mobilized in the era of social media.

If the flaws of the misinformation studies community made many of us believe in the desirability of an internet without any public or private regulation at all, the Trump movement and Elon’s X have made the best case against that position one can imagine. The flaws of the media and liberal establishment can be dealt with through appeals to morality, compelling counterarguments, and attempts to hold people to their own stated principles. In contrast, there is no way to take a similar approach to MAGA. These people simply lack any interest in building or maintaining truth-seeking institutions, and are appealing to a political base that is so misinformed that it allows them to get away with what more sophisticated observers will recognize as absurd lies.

All of this is to say we need people like Renée. She walks me through the latest Russiagate news, and dissects Gabbard’s claims one-by-one. We start with the aforementioned non sequitur about the Obama administration knowing that Russia did not hack voting machines. We then go on to discuss whether Russia preferred Trump in 2016, the Durham annex, and more.

One important point that needs to be emphasized is that the Senate Select Committee Report, with Marco Rubio serving as chair, concluded that the Russians tried to help Trump in 2016.

This hasn’t been controversial until recently. The two House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence reports quibbled with that conclusion. Note that the HPSCI was chaired by Devin Nunes at the time, whose job is now literally being the head of Truth Social, and working as an aide was Kash Patel, whose job is now literally being the head of the FBI after a time writing children’s books teaching kids to worship Trump, and of course getting consulting fees from Truth Social. Arguments should be judged on their merits, but it tells you something when the mainstream of both parties agree on something, while the only ones who take the opposite position are known grifters and Trump lackeys. And even the HPSCI reports don’t put forward the most radical claims spread by MAGA influencers and Michael Shellenberger types, like the idea that Putin actually preferred Hillary, or that the DNC hack wasn’t carried out by the Russians.

We close by discussing why this matters, what is at stake when we continue to debate Russiagate, AI slop, and what can be done to make social media better.

Important documents

January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment

2019 Mueller Report

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report (August 2020)

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Report (filed September 2020, released July 2025) (not to be confused with the HPSCI report from 2018)

The Durham Report and the annex (May 2023)

Articles

Renée, “Reconning ‘Russiagate’”; her conversation with Shellenberger

NYT 2015 report on Russian internet troll farm

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Michael Tracey joins me on the stream this afternoon to talk about the latest in the Epstein saga and additional things he has learned about the accusers. It seems like every time Michael looks into one of the accusers or one of the journalists who has taken up the Epstein cause, he uncovers new problems. His last article is on one Nick Bryant, who responded to Michael asking a simple question about his source for a sensationalist claim about human trafficking by calling him a pedophile. We also talk about Ghislaine being moved to a minimum security prison, and whether Trump has a plan regarding what to do with her. It looks like she may have worked out some kind of understanding with the administration, and in the coming weeks and months we’ll be finding out exactly what the terms are. Finally, we close with a few Sydney Sweeney takes, and respond to the revelation that she registered as a Republican a few months after my big article last year. The stream ends with me getting stabbed in the eye by my own eyelash, so become a paid subscriber if you want to see that.

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Michael is back for yet another Epstein podcast. In this one, we spend a lot of time going over Ross Douthat’s recent interview with Julie K. Brown, who has been the most important journalist covering the Epstein story. Michael shows how she glosses over the credibility problems of the alleged victims who were supposedly trafficked to men other than Epstein, even implying that one of them was killed.

We talk about Michael’s article on what Bannon is hiding. I encourage him to send it to Democratic members of Congress, and he follows my advice by DMing Ro Khanna as we’re speaking. If Democrats start discussing the need to subpoena Bannon in the coming days and weeks, you’ll know why.

We also take some questions from the audience.

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Alright, I really thought we were done, but with the revelation that Trump wrote a love letter to Epstein about their shared secret interest, I guess not. As I tell him, I was in the gym and had to go outside and record in my car. For something this funny, one finds a way to post.

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I thought we might be done with Epstein, but Trump decided to start calling his supporters morons for ever believing in the conspiracy, which means the scandal is not going away. Michael is therefore back to discuss. See our first conversation here, where we go over the background and basics of everything Epstein. Michael and I are both of the opinion that there is probably something here that Trump doesn’t want the world to see. The Bannon angle in particular seems underexplored. I encourage Michael to write something on the topic, and he says he’s going to take my advice.

Later in the discussion we talk about the specifics of the Ghislaine Maxwell conviction, and whether it might get overturned by the Supreme Court. See Michael’s thread on the topic here. This strikes me as a terrible miscarriage of justice, given that there was practically no evidence against her other than the decades-old recollections of supposed victims who had a financial incentive to lie.

Something we forgot to mention is that there’s now a discharge petition that might force a vote on the Epstein files on the House floor. I’m excited to see where this goes politically. The substantive truth of what Epstein was doing doesn’t seem that interesting, but this has become a fascinating political football, having more of a divisive effect on MAGA than perhaps any other issue since the movement began, or at least since it has entered its more cultish phase.

I am not big into the art scene. But when a Dutch girl reached out to me to be part of one of her projects, I saw who she was with, noticed that they were within a twelve-minute drive, and decided that this could be fun.

As it turned out, Christiane is part of Keeping It Real Art Critics (KIRAC), which is perhaps best known for its project getting Michel Houellebecq to agree to have sex with two of its members on camera. This led to him writing a short book denouncing his former collaborators and filing a lawsuit to try to stop the film from being released. You can read about the feud in the New York Times here, and watch the trailer here.

While engaging in their latest project, I got to talking with members of KIRAC, and they described another movie that director Stefan Ruitenbeek had made called Honeypot (2021). The premise is that Jini Jane, one of the girls who was set up with Houellebecq, publishes on a conservative Dutch website a call for right-wing men to have sex with her. She ends up settling on a far-right voter from the working class and a philosopher named Sid Lukkassen, and the film centers on her meeting up with them as part of her quest to solve political polarization.

Upon watching the movie, I decided to return to the house where I first met members of KIRAC and interview Stefan and Jini about Honeypot. To mark the occasion of the release of this interview, Stefan has today posted the entire movie on X. You can watch it here, and I would recommend doing so before listening to this conversation. As promised in the interview, here is the safe-for-work version, though it only has the first twenty-one minutes.

What I ended up being fascinated by was the contrast between the two kinds of rightists and how they interact with the same woman under vulnerable conditions. The film ended up telling us something important about the differences between those who land on the conservative side for organic reasons, working-class men who this kind of politics naturally suits, and the thinker who is as distant from members of his own coalition as he is from his fellow intellectuals. The foreplay, the sex scenes, and the aftermath of the second encounter brought home the depth of the pain and sense of cognitive dissonance felt by some right-wing intellectuals.

While we often see incels and trads as hateful misogynists, their views are in many cases an outgrowth of extreme sensitivity. They seem to be less equipped than other men to deal with being rejected by a woman. I simply could not relate to the emotional neediness Lukkassen displayed, and him accepting his role as the supplicant in the meet-up. The working-class guy did not have this problem! The insecurity that such rightists feel ironically makes them behave in ways that repel women, turning their fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don’t believe that Jini went in expecting this or manipulating the situation so she would accept the first man and reject the second. I felt that these were organic interactions that showed how a romantic situation can go one way or another depending on what the man reveals about his soul. You see Jini getting progressively angrier, and, like most women, unable or unwilling to put into words exactly what is turning her off, she latches on to these various excuses, which Lukkassen is not sophisticated enough to see for the pretexts that they are. Stefan explains to me what about the man he finds offensive. It’s not that he’s clueless, but rather the lack of curiosity. I speculate that this is what right-wing politics often is – retreating from complexity into a rigid inner life that creates a vision one uses to try to mold the rest of the world.

In the interview, I question the two guests on different scenes in the movie, including the parts that blur reality and fiction. I express some confusion about why a trad or incel-adjacent right-wing philosopher would agree to have sex on camera in the first place, as this would be unthinkable in the American context. Another cultural difference: in the Netherlands, feminists took the side of the right-wing philosopher. I enjoyed having the opportunity to question Jini regarding what exactly about Lukkassen’s behavior turned her off, and how he was unable to redeem himself in her eyes, even screwing up his attempt to give her a spanking. Don’t be this guy!

Lukkassen ends up humiliated here, so much so that it made me feel some unease about watching and promoting the movie. That said, he was an adult who consented to being in that situation. My mind was fully put at ease upon hearing from Stefan that Lukkassen was once again friendly with him and had come to accept what had happened, despite the film turning into a major scandal in the Netherlands.

Viewer discretion is advised regarding this interview, and especially the film, which has sex scenes that we discuss in detail.

You can follow Stefan, Jini, and Christiane on X, subscribe to KIRAC’s YouTube channel, or support them on Patreon and get their other films here. I’ve never been much of a connoisseur of performance art, but what KIRAC has done with Honeypot is give us the best version of it, provoking in this viewer at least thoughts about what women really want, the state of contemporary politics, and the various sorts of men who end up on the right in opposition to a left-wing elite monoculture.

One may watch for the implicit commentary on modern conservatism, but there are more generalizable lessons here on relations between the sexes, and also how the personal and political are not so easily separable.

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I never paid much attention to the Jeffrey Epstein thing. The idea that he was some kind of spy obtaining blackmail material on powerful figures by trafficking young girls to them has for years been pushed by figures like Tucker Carlson, Jack Posobiec, and Eric Weinstein, which convinced me that there wasn’t much to look into, since I can’t recall a situation where this crowd has ever been correct about anything.

But until I read Michael Tracey’s recent article on the topic in Compact, I didn’t realize how flimsy the conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein actually are. He joins me to discuss.

If anything, it appears that the establishment took sensationalist claims surrounding Epstein’s behavior way too seriously, which led to large payouts for alleged victims while stoking conspiracy theories. As it turned out, our society does not go out of its way to cover for sexual abusers. Especially since the MeToo era began, we’re too credulous about these things. So we have globs of money going to Epstein accusers and their lawyers, while nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s handling of the issue has caused a major headache for the MAGA movement. As someone who has constantly harped on the misinformed and conspiratorial nature of modern conservatism, I’m enjoying the poetic justice of seeing the chickens coming home to roost. Figures like Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Trump himself have gained power by playing to the paranoia of their gullible supporters, and now that they’re running the government they have nothing to offer them. I’ve often gone back and forth on whether the problems I point out with the Republican Party will get better or worse after Trump is gone, and this entire episode has convinced me that the next iteration of the right is probably going to be even stupider than the one we have now. The Trump Cult is the relatively non-conspiratorial wing of conservatism!

The left seems to see an opening. In an era where more voters appear inclined to prioritize a conspiratorial worldview, it is probably naive to expect Democrats to completely refrain from swimming in these waters. One wonders if we’ll see them continue to harp on Epstein’s connections to Trump, which are more well-sourced than almost everything MAGAs believe about him. Just as liberals have had to inch away from woke in order to be better positioned to win future elections, becoming slightly more conspiratorial might be another way to meet voters where they’re at.

After going through the nonsense behind the Epstein story, Michael and I discuss the wider culture of hysteria over pedophilia and sexual abuse. I bring up the online “pedo hunters,” QAnon, Epstein’s role in the cosmology of Rogansphere types, and how all of these things fit together. We also debate how much this will actually hurt the MAGA coalition. On the mood at the Turning Point USA conference, see this story. Also, I speculate a bit on whether there was anything in the Epstein materials that was embarrassing to Trump, based in part on this claim by Michael Wolff that he saw pictures of him with topless girls that were in Epstein’s safe.

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Today, I’m excited to welcome on the podcast State Senator Scott Wiener. He serves as Assistant Majority Whip and chairs the Senate Budget Committee and the Senate Housing Committee.

Senator Wiener joins me to discuss AB 130 and SB 131, the newly passed reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

We explore what these laws do, including how they affect single-family and multifamily housing, what density and affordability standards apply, and what else remains to be done. The conversation gets deep into the weeds, as Senator Wiener explains why these reforms passed as part of the budget process and discusses the crucial role played by Governor Newsom, as well as the broader political and activist ecosystem — including YIMBYs, environmental groups, and the influence of public narratives like the debate set off by Abundance. I ask how much of the housing affordability issue could be blamed on CEQA, and he gives me a ballpark estimate.

I never cease being amazed at how dysfunctional housing policy has become. Senator Wiener provided me with a surprising new tidbit, explaining that if your porch is rotting in San Francisco, you need to jump through hoops to make sure you do not cause too much damage to the environment when fixing it.

Beyond housing, we talk about other abundance issues. He brings up energy and childcare, and I, more excited about the libertarian aspects of the philosophy, ask where occupational licensing and immigration fit into his thinking.

This conversation also gave me an opportunity to ask about the nature of power. How exactly do environmental groups influence legislators? Is it persuasion, intimidation, or some combination of the two? And why have environmental organizations been so bad on housing, as seen in the “NASCAR letter”? Given that the abundance movement has prominent spokesmen like Senator Wiener, and the arguments on its behalf are being made in the most prestigious, well-read outlets in the country, where are attempts at persuasion coming up short?

Finally, I ask Senator Wiener whether the time he got his cell phone snatched in San Francisco, before he bought it back from the thief, influenced his views on criminal justice issues.

As someone who lives in California and is raising three children here, I’m glad to see legislators taking the issues facing the state seriously. I hope you find the conversation as useful and informative as I did.

Links

My interview with Derek Thompson

Institute for Justice on occupational licensing

Story on the cell phone robbery

The “NASCAR letter” from environmental groups