Pay No Attention To Those Epstein Conspiracy Theories!

I've always thought that Sam Bankman-Fried was basically Jeffrey Epstein 2.0 -- both had perfected the skill of convincing people they were something they weren't, for instance, good at math. Although he never had a four-year degree in anything, Epstein got his first job teaching math and physics at the exclusive Dalton School, whose headmaster had been William Barr's father, apparently because he convinced "Ace" Greenberg, CEO of Bear Stearns, that he was good at those things.

Epstein went on to build a highly successful career on smoke and mirrors -- even during his lifetime, there was occasional puzzlement over exactly how he made his money, and since his death, there still haven't been satisfactory answers. The one thing we're sure about is we can't be sure about anything. As of 2019, the consensus was something like this:

Now, a new book is attempting to fill in those chilling details - with journalist Dylan Howard and a team of investigative reporters spending years trawling through all of the Epstein evidence.

"Jeffrey Epstein grew up in blue-collar New York City, but soon found his way working on Wall Street - but he left job from job to job in controversy," Howard said.

"He seemingly never had a job but amassed a $600 million fortune.

. . . In his book, Howard speculates that Epstein may have also been an international spy.

"As part of our investigation, we spoke to Ari Ben-Menashe, who is a former Israeli spy," Howard said.

"He said, on the record, unequivocally, that Jeffrey Epstein was working for Israeli intelligence operations, the Mossad, and running a classic honey trap operation: that is, lure people inside, record their activities, and use it to blackmail them.

But here's my question. If Epstein was so good at convincing a Wall Street CEO that he was good at math, what assurance do we have that he hadn't also convinced the Mossad he was good at spying? Isn't a good spy just a spcailized sort of con artist in any case? A story from last year raises this same question without really meaning to:

Joe Rogan thinks that convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein may have been an agent of either the CIA or Israel’s Mossad who was part of a plot to collect sensitive information about the rich and powerful.

. . . “Well, he definitely donated some money to science,” Rogan said.

“You know, but I had a conversation with a scientist who didn’t buy into that Epstein stuff and wouldn’t go to the meetings and stuff like that.”

“And he said, he was really shocked at how little money he actually donated.”

“Interesting,” [his guest Whitney] Cummings said.

“He goes, ‘It wasn’t that much money.’ He goes, it was really like, ‘he was more than that,’” Rogan said.

“He was bringing them to parties. Like it was an intelligence operation,” Rogan said. “Whoever was running it, whether it was, the Mossad or whether it was CIA or whether it was a combination of both — it was an intelligence operation. They were bringing in people and compromising them.”

Wait a moment. Rogan's unidentified informant, a "scientist", whatever that is, is theorizing that Epstein lured other "scientists" into honey traps and blackmailed them in various ways, maybe to transmit the secret Coca-Cola formula, maybe to say vaccines would prevent you catching COVID, whatever. My first question is how, in this day and age, hanky-pank by some "scientist" will damage the guy. I mean, is he a closet (fill in the blank)? Who the heck cares? More than one recent President of the United States or a close relative has been up to one sort of funny business or another, and nobody cared. In some quarters, Dylan Mulvaney is a courageous pioneer. Honey traps are so 1950s.

In fact, Let's say Epstein was running honey traps. Let's take two examples of public figures who may have rubbed up against the Epstein operation the wrong way, Bill Gates and Alan Dershowitz. Let's say there were cameras secretly filming every last indiscretion, whatever may or may not have been alleged. Dershowitz fought his own allegation and was able to make it go away. Gates wound up divorcing his wife after a photo emerged of him and Epstein with a few other people, fully clothed, at a dinner.

Gates maintained that's as far as anything went, and no secret camera footage emerged to contradict him. Yeah, his wife divorced him, but it appears there was evidence he was propositioning female subordinates completely independent of anything Epstein may or may not have had on tape. I doubt if anything he may or may not have done under Epstein's auspices had much of anything to do with the divorce. In any case, Gates is as rich as he ever was.

We've had recent new evidence of Epstein meeting with Ehud Barak on a monthly basis:

Former Israeli Prime Minister and head of Israeli Military Intelligence Ehud Barak visited Jeffrey Epstein’s New York City apartment dozens of times between 2013 and 2017, documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal reveal.

“After Epstein was arrested in 2019, photos were published in newspapers showing Mr. Barak, the Israeli politician, entering Epstein’s townhouse in 2016,” WSJ reported.

“The documents provide new details about his scheduled meetings,” WSJ continued. “They show that between 2013 and 2017, Epstein planned at least three dozen meetings with Mr. Barak. They had appointments every month for 11 consecutive months starting in December 2015, the documents show.”

As well as meetings with a CIA director:

President Joe Biden's CIA director William Burns met multiple times with Jeffrey Epstein, years after the late financier was publicly accused of grooming underage girls for sex.

Burns met Epstein in Washington, D.C., and at Epstein's New York City townhouse in 2014, when the spymaster served as deputy secretary of state, according to the Wall Street Journal. A CIA spokeswoman said Burns met with Epstein for "general advice" on the financial services industry and for career advice on his transition out of government.

So a future CIA director went to Epstein for career advice. On one hand, I might well agree this isn't a bad idea -- consider that Epstein, without a four-year degree in anything, was able to get a job teaching math and physics at an upper-crust prep school and then parlay that into a phony Wall Street career. I'd probably take any financial advice he gave me seriously, too, considering he was able, by another account, to do things like convince people he'd donated big money to Harvard when he hadn't.

On the other hand, I wouldn't get on the Lolita Express or go near Ghislaine without wearing a hazmat suit, but that's not really the point. As a con artist, I'd listen to anything Epstein told me on the trade.

But whether a high-level intelligence expert would take anything Epstein, a highly successful con artist, told me at face value would say something about my own professional competence. What this all says about our current elites is troubling, but it doesn't have much to do with whether he had secret cameras in his town house. It just tells us how easily the gentry can be duped.