Why Is Tucker Hysterical?

For the past couple of days, I've been hearing clips, quotes, and soundbites of Tucker Carlson's remarks at the Turning Point USA 2025 Student Action Summit that's wrapping up today in Tampa. Oddly, I'm having a hard time finding YouTube segments carrying his specific remarks or any sort of written transcript, but I do see references to his complaints that, for instance, they've gotten men out of women's sports, but homeless people are still sleeping on sidewalks, so nothing really good has happened, or something like that.

The best I've been able to come up with is a five-hour YouTube of the whole first night, which is embedded above. Tucker's presentation starts at 4:15. The first thing that struck me was his annoying high-pitched giggle. But then he got right into Epstein -- it's wrong to say it happened a long time ago, it shouldn't be a big deal. That wasn't what he voted for, and he almost never votes. His argument implies that he voted for Trump to uncover the Epstein stuff, Trump is now saying we should be paying attention to things like the Texas floods, so he's betraying us, or something like that.

He darkly hints that Epstein was working for a foreign government, else where did the money come from, and nobody is trying to get to the bottom of it, especially now Trump. But once he comes right out and says Epstein was working for Israel at about 4:32, his tone becomes genuinely shrill and hysterical. His facial expression and hand gestures become increasingly angry and wild:

At 4:26, he says, "don't call me a lunatic", but he's acting like a lunatic. At 4:30, he gives a creepy Hannibal Lecter cackle out of a horror film. He's spent 15 minutes, fully half of his presentation, on Epstein, who died six years ago. And the applause at his applause lines is actually quite tepid. At 4:34, we get to the words everyone is pointing to,

You spend all day telling me it's so important that, you kmow, boys not play in girls' soccer teams, or whatever. I agree. I hate the trans stuff passionately. I think you sbhould keep the boys off girls' soccer teams. But I don't know. It kinda sounds like you're feeding me appetizers. At some point I want to look around and see a better country. . . . I don't want to see people sleeping on the sidewalk. I don't want to see people ODing on drugs.

But then he drifts into questions of whether interest rates are too high and whether people can pay their credit cards, and his point isn't completely clear. His talk is a little less than half an hour, and his big concrete point is about Epstein, which he somehow ties into the Iran B-2 raid, and he then complains that, essentially, Trump's first six months, which commentators across the spectrum have called the most significant of any recent president, are just appetizers meant to distract us from problems not being solved, such as houses are too expensive.

And he does it angrily. His voice often trails into a screech. I asked the web where Tucker lives, and it replied,

Tucker Carlson owns homes in Boca Grande, Florida, and Woodstock, Maine. He purchased a 2,870-square-foot home in Boca Grande in 2020 for $2.9 million, and a neighboring house for $5.5 million in 2022. He also owns a property in Woodstock, Maine, where he has spent summers for decades.

He comes from generational wealth; at the time of his separation from Fox, it was generally observed that he didn't need whatever Fox paid him, he was tired of working, and he was gonna pull the plug anyhow. Yet he feigns sympathy for people who can't buy a home at 35. What on earth is he really angry about? It can't be that. Nobody sleeps on sidewalks anywhere near his homes. The same for ODing in his neighborhood, unless it's a rich addict in a pool cabana.

Now he seems to be taking a line not much different from Elon Musk, that Trump, the father of MAGA, has betrayed MAGA. And he's big time angry about it. Third-party angry. He rambles on about starting an I'm-not-going-to-pay-my-mortgage party that will bring the banks to their knees. When did Tucker ever have a problem with the mortgages on his multimillion-dollar homes? Will his kids? I'm sure they already have trust funds.

Maybe it was the acoustics, maybe it was the mics, but I don't get the feeling he was getting the applause he wanted. He was the headliner, the top event of that show, but the crowd didn't seem all that enthusiastic. The great conservative commentators of prior generations, Buckley and Limbaugh, spoke with both wit and detachment. Carlson speaks with neither. He just isn't in their league. That may be part of what makes him so mad.

Big Nothing Over Epstein

JUST IN: FBI deputy director Dan Bongino took the day off after "clashing" with AG Pam Bondi at the White House over the Epstein files, according to Axios.

The alleged fight erupted after a 10-hour video was released with a minute missing.

Some "insiders" believed Bongino quit;… pic.twitter.com/mDo8RdOTWA

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 11, 2025

Yesterday morning, Sundance posted at Conservative Treehouse:

For a significant -albeit unknown- portion of President Trump’s support base, the case against Jeffrey Epstein was/is a strong part of how they positioned their MAGA support. That coalition is now furious and threatening to withdraw support for President Trump on all other policy areas.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche affirmed today the conclusions within the DOJ/FBI memo about the Epstein matter are factually the conclusions shared by all leadership within the Dept of Justice and FBI.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino are all telling the same story.

But that fell apart almost immediately with the reported "clash" between Bongino and Bondi at the White House. In the real world, if you "clash" with someone at least two levels above you on the org chart, you're out. According to NBC News,

Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino is considering leaving his job after a heated confrontation with Attorney General Pam Bondi over his frustration with how the Justice Department has handled the Jeffrey Epstein files, according to a person who has spoken with Bongino and a source familiar with the interactions that Bongino and FBI Director Kash Patel have had with Bondi.

“Bongino is out of control furious,” the person who has spoken with the deputy FBI director said. “This destroyed his career. He’s threatening to quit and torch Pam unless she’s fired.”

Wait a moment. Bongino has a career? According to Wikipedia,

Daniel John Bongino (born December 4, 1974) is an American conservative political commentator, radio host, and former law enforcement officer who has served as the 20th deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) since 2025. He hosted The Dan Bongino Show on Rumble and previously hosted Unfiltered with Dan Bongino on Fox News until April 2023.

Bongino began his career as a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer from 1995 to 1999 before serving as a U.S. Secret Service agent from 1999 to 2011. He later unsuccessfully ran for Congress three times as a Republican. On February 23, 2025, President Donald Trump announced that Bongino had been named the next deputy director of the FBI. He assumed office on March 17, after concluding his commentating roles on March 14.

Which career has this destroyed? He was a police officer and a Secret Service agent. Then he was a three-times-unsuccessful candidate for congress. Then he was a talk show host who never quite caught on. Then he was able to persuade someone that he should be a deputy FBI director, a job he might have kept if he wasn't such a hothead. The NBC story continues,

. . . This came after a confrontation Wednesday at a meeting with Bondi and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles during which Bongino and Patel were asked about a news story suggesting they were dissatisfied with the decision not to release any additional Epstein files, according to the source familiar with the perspectives of DOJ leaders and an additional source familiar with the meeting. The meeting was first reported by Axios.

The meeting “got pretty heated,” another source who was briefed on the meeting said.

“Bondi, [Deputy Attorney General] Todd Blanche, Patel and Bongino were on the same page on this all along, until the criticism started to come in,” the source familiar with DOJ leaders’ perspectives said. “Bongino couldn’t take it.”

. . . Investigators involved in the case have said for years that there is no Epstein client list and there are no secrets buried in unreleased files.

. . . A DOJ statement from Monday said its review “revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

In the end, the source close to DOJ leaders said, Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche accepted those findings, knowing that releasing them would result in criticism from Trump supporters. They believed Patel and Bongino were with them, but that may no longer be true.

As of yestersay, Bongino was making noises that it was either he or Bondi:

BREAKING: Source close to Dan Bongino tells me it’s either him or Pam Bondi, and that he won’t stay at FBI if she stays at DOJ.

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) July 11, 2025

Other sources said FBI Director Kash Patel was maybe or maybe not considering going out the door with Bongino, but The Gateway Pundit reported,

However, investigative journalist John Solomon of Just the News set the record straight with an update on Friday night.

According to Solomon, Patel is overseeing one of the largest criminal conspiracy investigations in FBI history—a decade-long look into the coordinated effort to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidency, re-election, and comeback bid.

It quoted from an interview with Solomon on X:

Now, it is true — Dan Bongino is taking a few days to reconsider whether he wants to stay in the job. That’s his decision. He’s gone through these things before. There have been times when he’s been on radio, he got mad, took a couple of days off. I bet you he’ll come back when it’s all done.

But Kash Patel is going nowhere.

. . . There’s a big case that’s been built by the Justice Department and the FBI.

It’s been masked by a lot of this infighting and drama and soap opera. The matter is — MAGA-base Americans are going to be happy when they see where this is all heading in the next few weeks.

Kash Patel is going nowhere. I hope Dan Bongino isn’t going anywhere either — but I do think he’s going to take some time over the weekend to think that through.

I suspect, though, that Bongino is a little too much of a grandstander just to calm down and get back with the program. From the Wikipedia link,

Bongino was criticized by former colleagues at the Secret Service for using his Secret Service background as part of his run for political office and for his claim of having secret information based on conversations he overheard in the Obama White House. A former colleague accused him of "trying to draw attention to himself and...hijacking the Secret Service brand." Bongino said he had access to "high-level discussions" in the White House.

I suspect Bongino has proven himself too much of a loose cannon in this episode, especially if his colleagues and superiors had assumed he was with the Epstein file program, which I can't think is any but the correct view, and people in the White House inner circle like Susie Wiles will find a way to let him ease himself out with minimal fuss. Certainly this is what happens in the real world.

Epstein, Wittgenstein, And The Dershowitz Conundrum

Alan Dershowiotz is now claiming, of all things, that Jeffrey Epstein did in fact have a "client list", that he's seen it, but he's bound by confidentiality not to reveal who's on it. This goes to the question of what in fact is a "client list". The link says, "A new FBI, DOJ memo released on Sunday concluded Jeffrey Epstein did not have a client list that he used for blackmail." This strikes me as a key distinction. According to CNN,

The search for explosive deep-state secrets hidden inside the federal Epstein investigation began coming apart weeks into the second Trump administration.

By mid-March, as hundreds of FBI agents were ordered to work overnights and weekends to review thousands of pages and hours of video from the investigation, there were no bombshells in the files. It became clear that officials had no reason to change the conclusion reached under Attorney General William Barr, who had himself reviewed some of the materials, that the sex offender had died by suicide, according to people familiar with the matter.

. . . But a major problem soon emerged: Most of the material still being held by investigators could not be released under federal law, which protects the privacy of Epstein victims and people not charged with crimes. FBI and Justice officials realized that releasing thousands of pages blacked out by redactions wouldn’t help resolve the issue on right-wing social media, where Trump allies have fanned conspiracy theories about Epstein.

In other words, after Epstein's death, his numerous residences apparently contained an enormous volume of disorganized records, which I suspect even now have never been adequately sorted and characterized. They may well have included tapes or photos of untoward activity by Epstein or others, but they also would have included bills, receipts, letters, memos, time sheets, financial statements, and heaven knows what else from secretaries, pool cleaners, attorneys, carpenters, painters, pilots, investors, gofers, housekeepers, gardeners, and any nunber of others who did business with Epstein but had nothing to do with sexual misconduct.

It's actually hard for me to imagine a single list among all this undifferentiated stuff that contains just the names of specific individuals whom Epstein was either blackmailing or conspiring with for purposes of trafficking. Why would anyone create such a record? This alone suggests to me that Attorney General Bondi is sincere in her claim. In any case, what's come up here must be thousands of names that could on one hand include victims, but on the other must also be a much greater number of people who aren't charged with crimes, neither of which category can be released.

Right in the middle of this we find Alan Dershowitz, who by his own admission met with Epstein numerous times and even visited the island for purposes that never appear to have involved trafficking.

Mr Dershowitz said that Epstein had lent his Florida home to him and his family, noting that he “would have never allowed” his grandchildren to stay at the house if he knew about Epstein’s crimes.

“That eventually turned out to be the location for so many questionable and illegal activities,” he said. “And yes, I was on the island. Once my wife, my daughter and I were on vacation in the Caribbean and he had just bought the island ... He asked us to come and say hello ... No young people on the island, no Lolita Express or anything.”

. . . Flight logs have previously revealed that Mr Dershowitz flew on Epstein’s private jet – nicknamed the “Lolita Express” – multiple times between 1998 and 2005. In 2015, he admitted that he had once received a massage at Epstein’s home.

Since then, he has repeatedly defended the massage, saying that there was nothing untoward about the encounter – telling The Hill TV’s Rising show that it was carried out by a middle-aged woman named Olga.

Dershowitz's problem has been that

In a December 30, 2014, Florida court filing, [Virginia] Giuffre alleged she was sexually trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein, who lent her to people for sex, including Dershowitz and Prince Andrew. The motion claimed that Dershowitz was also an eyewitness to the sexual abuse of other minors.

A multi-year series of lawsuits and countersuits ensued, with all parties eventually reaching a settlement in 2022.

Giuffre said that, given the traumatic circumstances of being trafficked by Epstein and her age, she realized that her identification of Dershowitz might have been a mistake.

So why would Dershowitz now claim that he's seen "the list", but he can't disclose who's on it?

🚨@AlanDersh said he saw the entire Epstein list while proving his innocence:

"Documents are being suppressed to protect individuals. I know the names of the individuals. I know why they're being suppressed. I know who's suppressing them. But I'm bound by confidentiality." pic.twitter.com/2bx7SwozN3

— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) July 10, 2025

In his interview with Sean Spicer, he's simply going the long way around of saying the names he's aware of include both victims and Epstein associates not connected with or charged of crimes, which by federal law and confidentiality of court proceedings neither he nor the Justice Department can release. If that's "the list", then it isn't really "the list".

What's particularly incongruous is that by his own assertions in the matter of Giuffre, Dershowitz himself was wrongly harmed by being falsely identified as among Epstein associates, even though he committed no crime. But in his latest public remarks, he simply acknowledges that any so-called "list" would include the names of people who had committed no crimes, and these would be everything from pool men to Harvard donors.

What intriges me is that, although I'm highly sympathetic to a neo-Thomist like Edward Feser, I find myself in reflecting on current events more likely to fall back on the analytical linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein (photo above). The idea that there is a "list" of Epstein "clients" is a problem of language, not a problem with an empirical solution. Every time we try to ask "who" is on the "list", we get an answer that we have no actual idea who qualifies to be on the list, because almost any name we come up with is probably not connected with Epstein's sex trafficking, but certainly can't be convicted in any trial at this stage.

This includes Bill Gates, Alan Dershowitz, Steve Bannon -- probably even Bill Clinton as well. Heck, the DOJ has just cleared Prince Andrew. But considering the damage Virginia Giuffre did to her own credibility over the past decade, it's likely that any assertion she made in a putative trial of anyone on "the list" would not survive cross-examination. Publication of names on any "list" would be nothing more than an exercise in defamation, something the MAGA far right won't acknowledge -- but neither will Dershowitz, nowithstanding he spent years clearing his own name. This is all nothing but a will-o'-the-wisp, or as Wittgenstein would put it, the solution to the problem is seen in the disappearance of the problem.

I Don't Get The Panic Over Musk, Either

At The Hill:

Senate Republicans fear Elon Musk’s beef with President Trump could become a wild-card factor that could cost them seats in 2026 if Musk follows through on his threat to create a new political party to compete with the GOP.

GOP lawmakers note that third-party candidates have swung presidential and Senate races in the past and worry that Musk’s bid to establish an “America Party” is likely to peel off more Republicans than Democratic voters in key races.

First, I think "Senate Republicans" overrate the performance of third-party candidates. most recently John Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in 1992. According to Wikipedia,

Although the Carter campaign feared Anderson could be a spoiler, Anderson's campaign turned out to be "simply another option" for frustrated voters who had already decided not to back Carter for another term. Polls found that around 37% of Anderson voters favored Reagan as their second choice over Carter. Anderson did not carry a single precinct in the country.

. . . By the end of the campaign, much of Anderson's support came from college students. . . . Anderson capitalized on that by becoming a visiting professor at a series of universities[.]

Regarding Ross Perot in 1992,

Though there were widespread claims that Perot acted as a "spoiler", post-election analysis suggested that his presence in the race likely did not affect the outcome. According to Seymour Martin Lipset, the 1992 election had several unique characteristics. Voters felt that economic conditions were worse than they actually were, which harmed Bush. A strong third-party candidate was a rare event. Liberals launched a backlash against 12 years of a conservative White House. The chief factor was Clinton's uniting his party, and winning over a number of heterogeneous groups. In 2016, FiveThirtyEight described the theory that Perot was a spoiler as "unlikely".

But there's a bigger problem: Trump, who got to know Musk well after the election, and whose instincts about people tend to be accurate, says Musk's recent public remarks mean he has gone "off the rails." Musk had media attention in the early months of the Trump administration, not necessarily all that favorable, since DOGE was often portrayed as arrogant and insensitive -- but to Musk, it was attention, and he basked in it, notwithstanding it was bad for the Tesla brand.

But on one hand, he was forced to end his role as a special government employee at the end of May, which inevitably took him out of the spotlight. He'd also begun to wear out his welcome with Trump's inner circle via episodes like his demand that all federal employees send a weekly e-mail documenting five bullet items covering what they'd done:

Federal workers across the U.S. government received an email on Saturday afternoon asking them to account for what they did in the past week — and Elon Musk says they will lose their jobs if they don't respond.

. . . "Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump's instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week," Musk wrote on X, which he owns. The post ends: "Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation."

. . . But some agencies told employees to ignore the missive.

New FBI Director Kash Patel sent a message to the FBI workforce that the agency will review its own processes and employees should hold off on responding to the email from OPM. The FBI email was confirmed by an individual at the bureau who isn't authorized to speak publicly.

The State Department also let its employees know that the department plans to respond on their behalf, so employees aren't required to report their activities directly to the OPM email, according to a screenshot of the communication obtained by NPR.

Musk seems to think he's enitiled to operate this way, I assume because some key people think he's a genius. But not everyone agrees, even in Muskworld:

Linda Yaccarino announced on Wednesday that she's stepping down as CEO of X, offering little in the way of an explanation.

The link quotes a New York Times story behind a paywall that says,

Yaccarino’s exit caps a tumultuous period at X, which has been remade in Mr. Musk’s image since he bought the platform for $44 billion in 2022. Since then, Mr. Musk has shed three quarters of the company’s employees, loosened speech restrictions on the platform and wielded X as a political megaphone. Advertisers to X were at one point spooked by the changes and the social media company’s ad business declined.

In fact, Musk's purchase of X was an impulse buy that threatened disaster for his empire. Only rescue financing from Larry Ellison averted this, but the instability at X in many ways presaged Musk's time in the Trump administration. The link concluded,

The rest of the article essentially suggests Yaccarino's job was partly to handle Musk, who has "frequently made her job more difficult, including using expletives to tell advertisers that he would not be changing his ways.

Given what's gradually come out from Musk's time with the administration, he seems to be an unstable guy who often acts impulsively. The most recent episode was yesterday, when Musk responded to a post on X by Roger Stone noting that Steve Bannon had spent time with Epstein before his 2019 arrest by saying, "Bannon is in the Epstein files."

This appears to have been quickly deleted or made private, since I can't embed it (I'd love to see the letter from Bannon's attorney to Tesla's chief counsel). But it's an indication that despite what must be urgent demands from the Tesla and SpaceX boards that Musk focus on business, he can't resist keeping himself in the public eye, no matter how bad it makes him look:

Elon Musk’s favorability dropped again this past week amid his renewed feud with President Trump and move to launch a separate political party.

In the last week, Musk’s net favorability in the aggregate kept by Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) dropped 3.4 points, falling just more than 20 points in the negative. The percentage that view the onetime Trump ally unfavorably reached its highest point of the president’s second term at 55.8 percent, while the percentage that view him favorably reached its lowest point yet, at 35.4 percent, as of Monday.

For Musk to have any success starting a third-party movement, he would need to assemble a team of savvy political advisers, especially if he intends to be its standard bearer -- but even there, notwithstanding anything else, he can't run for president himself a la John Anderson or Ross Perot, since he isn't a native-born US citizen. If he sonehow intends to have surrogates run for congressional seats, he's going to need people with good political instincts.

As Rush Limbaugh used to say responding to people who asked him why he didn't run for office, "I know how to get a radio audience, but I don't know how to get votes." Musk has a somewhat similar problem: it isn't completely clear if he knows how to run a business, because his bad instincts often get in the way. But it's even less clear if he knows how to get votes, and preliminary data suggests the one thing he's good at is wearing out his welcome.

I Don't Get The Epstein Conspiracy Theories

I've long been skeptical, most recently here in 2023, that Jeffrey Epstein was running a blackmail operation, or indeed that he was a spy. Only in James Bond thrillers do spies draw attention to themselves. Beyond that, by the time of his death in 2019, he had been yestersday's news for more than a decade. Whether it was a sweetheart deal or not, his 2008 guilty plea to two sex offenses severely cramped his style. His Lolita Express plane had been grounded since 2016.

The continuing allegations from MAGA that Attorney General Bondi has been covering for the deep state are based in some measure on the idea that Epstein was highly successful as a blackmailer, with tapes of high-ranking people to prove it, and her failure to release any such tapes or incriminating evidence like a client list just proves those allegations. The problem is that Epstein's heyday was certainly before 2008, almost 20 years ago at this point, and most such names, even if they existed on an actual client list, would now be dead or faded from prominence.

I also suspect that the names most closely associated with Epstein, like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Prince Andrew, have already been outed, mostly from other sources. Yes, Bill Clinton was on the Lolita Express, but he'd already been exposed by women like Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky. The same with Bill Gates: any escapades with Epstein had little or nothing to do with his divorce or his quiet departure from Microsoft. The same applies to Prince Andrew, whose various affairs and troubled marriage had been controversial throughout his adult life, though his association with Epstein didn't help at all.

As I've been saying for quite a while, Trump's judgment in the Epstein matter has been underrated. At the time of Epstein's death, Trump said he hadn't spoken to Epstein for 15 years, and he had apparently barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after his 2008 guilty plea. Just this week, in response to complaints about Attorney General Bondi's claim that there was no Epstein client list, Trump said,

Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years.

. . . The comments appeared to signal continued job security for Bondi and amounted to a striking rebuke of members of Trump’s base who have called for her resignation and mocked her for what they believe to be her failed commitment to release incriminating files from the Epstein investigation.

I think this reflects an understanding that any Epstein client list, if it existed, would be nothing but old news. If Epstein's heyday was before his 2008 guilty plea, then the biggest and most current names might be from the Dubya administration. Any cabinet secretaries from then, if their names turned up, would excite litle more than a yawn. Celebrities? I asked the web who were the biggest male celebrities in 2005 and got Johnny Depp, Keanu Reeves, George Clooney, and Tom Cruise. Frankly, I doubt any of them needed Epstein to find what they wanted. My bet is any actual client list would just be cheesy has-beens.

So if Epstein wasn't a blackmailer or a spy, how did he make his money? We can be pretty sure that part of it came from Les Wexner:

In a 2019 New York Times exposé titled “How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria’s Secret for Wealth and Women,” a team of journalists found that in the 1990s Epstein served as an adviser to Les Wexner, Victoria’s Secret chief executive. (Wexner stepped down from the company in 2020.)

. . . The two were introduced by insurance executive Robert Meister in the mid-to-late 1980s, and the New York Times story noted that Wexner eventually “authorized [Epstein] to borrow money on his behalf, to sign his tax returns, to hire people, and to make acquisitions.”

A number of Epstein's estates appear to have belonged to Wexner but at some point were transferred to Epstein, for instance. Another source of income appears to have been via brokering donations to Harvard and MIT.

Harvard University received nearly $9m in donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein before his 2008 guilty plea to sex charges, but rejected a proposed gift after his conviction, according to the institution’s president, Lawrence Bacow.

The largest of Epstein’s gifts to the university was $6.5m in 2003 to support the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Other gifts totaled about $2.4m. Epstein did not attend Harvard.

. . . The disclosure that Harvard declined Epstein’s contributions after he was convicted for soliciting a minor are in marked contrast to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and its Media Lab, which has been rocked by revelations that it accepted more than $7.5m in donations from Epstein or people connected to the university through him after his conviction.

Amid a review of Epstein donations to MIT, the university’s president, Rafael Reif, acknowledged Thursday he apparently thanked Epstein in a note in 2012 in response to one donation.

Bacow, in his message, also noted that Harvard had recently learned that Stephen Kosslyn, a former faculty member and a beneficiary of Epstein’s philanthropy, had designated Epstein as a visiting fellow in the psychology department in 2005.

“We are seeking to learn more about the nature of that appointment from Dr Kosslyn, who no longer works at the university,” Bacow said.

As best I can determine, and as implied in the reference to MIT at the link, Epstein's strategy appears to have been to bundle donations to Harvard and MIT from third parties, apparently pitching his influence at the universities that might help the donors to get whatever else they needed there. In return, Epstein took some sort of a skim or management fee, so that figures like up to $9 million to Harvard probably represaent a larger amount paid to Epstein from third parties.

So the one worthwhile question remaining about Epstein is how he made his money, but as time goes on, it's less and less interesting. In my view, he definitely wasn't a spy, and anything he had on some prominent person would by 2019 have been stale information, not worth having him killed. Exactly how he snookered Harvard and MIT might be fun to learn, but those institutions are already in much bigger and much more current trouble.

Bondi and Patel have dropped Epstein and are now after Comey and Brennan. Trump clearly thinks this is a better use of everyone's time.

Just War Theory And The Book Of Jonah

Last month I looked at the objections of just war theorists, especially the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser, to President Trump's threats against Iran in the runup to the raid on its nuclear sites. The fact that the raid proved closely targeted and didn't lead to further US involvement seems so far to have kept Prof Feser from expressing further objections. But I keep running into scriptural problems that make me wonder if just war theorists have all the answers.

For instance, just this past Sunday's gospel reading, Luke 10: 1-12, 17-20 contains a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah, which I've compared in the link to the destruction of a nuclear attack:

8 And into what city soever you enter, and they receive you, eat such things as are set before you.

9 And heal the sick that are therein, and say to them: The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.

10 But into whatsoever city you enter, and they receive you not, going forth into the streets thereof, say:

11 Even the very dust of your city that cleaveth to us, we wipe off against you. Yet know this, that the kingdom of God is at hand.

12 I say to you, it shall be more tolerable at that day for Sodom, than for that city.

But this reminded me of the task the Almighty put to Jonah when He sent him to warn Nineveh in Jonah 3: 1-4:

1 The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time:

2 "Set out for the great city of Nineveh, and announce to it the message that I will tell you."

3 So Jonah made ready and went to Nineveh, according to the LORD'S bidding. Now Nineveh was an enormously large city; it took three days to go through it.

4 Jonah began his journey through the city, and had gone but a single day's walk announcing, "Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed,"

The NAB has a footnote here that makes the context plain:

[4] Shall be destroyed: the Hebrew expression reminds the reader of the "overthrowing" of the wicked cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, by a special act of God.

As it happens, both the citizens and the king of Nineveh saw the error of their ways, repented, fasted, and wore sackcloth and ashes. By the end of the chapter:

10 When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out.

As far as I've been able to determine, the only cities in scripture that the Almighty Himself destroyed were four of the five cities of the plain in Genesis 14, Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim. God spared Zoar, the fifth. This leaves out Jericho and an unspecified number of other Canaanite cities that God instructed Joshua to destroy, burning them to the ground and killing all the men, women, children, and animals.

But now we see at least two threats elsewhere in scripture, the one in Luke 10: 12 from Jesus Himself, and the one in Jonah 3: 2-4, from God through Jonah, promising destruction equivalent to Sodom and Gomorrah. But Prof Feser finds even threats of mass destruction immoral:

As they routinely do, Trump’s defenders may suggest that his words should not be taken at face value, but interpreted as mere “trash talk” or perhaps as exercises in “thinking out loud” rather than as final policy decisions. But this helps their case not at all. War is, needless to say, an enterprise of enormous gravity, calling for maximum prudence and moral seriousness. Even speaking about the possibility must be done with great caution. (Think of the chaos that could follow upon trying quickly to evacuate a city of nearly ten million people, even if there were no actual plan to bomb it.) A president who is instead prone to woolly thinking and flippant speech about matters of war is a president whose judgment about them cannot be trusted. (And as I have argued elsewhere, he has already in other ways proven himself to have unsound judgment about such things.)

In that paragraph, he links to an entry on his blog criticizing Trump's thinking-out-loud over annexing Greenland:

Even if Trump is merely bluffing, the point of the bluff would be to frighten Denmark and Greenland into making an agreement they would not otherwise be willing to make. But this is sheer extortion and gangsterism. Moral common sense and traditional natural law theory alike hold that an agreement cannot be licit or binding if made under such unjust duress.

But how do we differentiate the threat God has instructed Jonah to make to Nineveh -- straighen up or I will, in effect, nuke you -- from the putative, much vaguer threat Trump is making against Greenland and Denmnark, sell Greenland to the US, or else. Aren't both extortionate? Let's recall that to a Thomist like Prof Feser, scripture is inerrant, and God is perfect. God is threatening Nineveh with nuclear-equivalent destruction, as is Jesus, who threatens worse for any city that rejects His messengers. I can only assume Prof Feaser will argue that in these cases, God's cause is just, and the threats are justified,when they would be evil and immoral if made by Trump or Truman.

But isn't the whole point of the Jonah story the long and difficult struggle Jonah undertakes in recognizing both the underlying justice of God's cause and, more important, the need for him to play a role in bringing it about? And let's not forget that even though Jonah finally does what he's told, he goes to Nineveh and delivers the message, but then he gets angry when Nineveh hears the threat, cleans up its act, and God relents! A footnote in the NAB says,

Jonah is selfish in bemoaning his personal loss of a shady gourd plant without any concern over the threat of loss of life to the Ninevites through the destruction of their city. If God in his kindness provided the plant for his prophet without the latter's effort or merit, how much more is he disposed to show love and mercy toward all men, Jew and Gentile, when they repent of their sins and implore his pardon! God's providence is also shown here to extend even to animals.

By the end of the book, Jonah still hasn't quite figured out God's will. The only thing I can conclude is that on one hand, if you're destroying cities or even threatening to do it, if it's in a juat cause, it's neither evil nor immoral. God or His designees do this in scripture. On the other side of the coin, it's not a simple thing to recognize your cause is just. Jonah may well wrestle with all the implications of his own story for the rest of his life. Isn't this a major point of Jonah?

Just war theorists want to sit in judgment over Truman or Trump without recognizing that both are in difficult, highly ambiguous situations, certainly in Truman's case not far from being in the belly of the great fish. But also, in Trump's case, Prof Feser consistently criticizes Trump for seeming to be about to do things he never actually does -- and so far, he hasn't gotten around to analyzing what he may have missed in doing so.

Treasury Secretary Bessent Sees Musk The Same Way I Do

As I did yesterday, I keep saying that Elon Musk's main problem is with the boards of directors for each of his companies. With everything he's done since November, he's been digging himself a deeper and deeper hole. Yesterday in an interview with Dana Bash, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said,

BASH: He (Musk) announced this weekend that he is starting a new political party. Does this worry the Trump Administration?

BESSENT: Look, the principles of DOGE were popular. If you looked at the polling, Elon was not. The Boards of Directors at his various companies wanted him to come back and run his companies, which he is better at than anyone.

So, I imagine those Board of Directors did not like this announcement yesterday and will be encouraging him to focus on his business activities, not his political activities,

It's worth revisiting a story from a month ago that reported a physical altercation between Musk and Bessent:

According to [Trump insider Steve] Bannon, Bessent dared to say that the billionaire's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was a failure, since Musk didn't root out the $1 trillion in wasteful and fraudulent federal spending he promised he would.

'Scott said, "You’re a fraud. You’re a total fraud,"' Bannon said.

That's when Musk body-checked Bessent, who hit the world's richest man right back, according to Bannon.

Reaction from the financial world to Musk's announcement of a new third party was immediate:

Azoria—a prominent investment firm with deep ties to tech and AI innovation—has yanked its support from Tesla ahead of a planned ETF launch, citing CEO Elon Musk’s surprise announcement that he is launching a new national political party, “The America Party.”

The Azoria Tesla Convexity ETF, which was set to go public next week, would have offered investors a strategic vehicle for exposure to Tesla’s high-growth potential.

But that plan is now shelved indefinitely. According to Azoria CEO James T. Fishback, the abrupt decision was made in “direct response” to Musk’s political pivot, which Fishback says undermines confidence in Musk’s leadership at Tesla.

Fishback also released a formal letter addressed to Robyn Denholm, Chair of Tesla’s Board of Directors, calling on the board to immediately evaluate Musk’s political ambitions and whether they are compatible with his duties as Tesla’s CEO.

The letter, dated July 5, bluntly states that a ‘political party not only fails to complement Tesla’s mission—it actively undermines it.’

Last week I noted that Tesla owners have several choices of bumper sticker they can put on their cars to tell potential vandals that although they'd bought a Tesla, they don't support Musk -- but this is hardly a sure remedy. The best option is not to buy a Tesla and expose it to the risk.

I first saw a Rivian more than a year ago, in the Kaiser parking lot. It was headed to the physicians' parking area, and that struck me as about right, a Rivian is a doctor's high-end electric car. Since then, I've seen very few Rivians on the street, but a fair number of Teslas. All of a sudden, just yesterday, we saw two Rivians on our way to mass, but no Teslas.

It stands to reason that people in the market for a new high-end electric car are going to get a Rivian, not a Tesla. Musk has done more for the Rivian brand thsn any conventional endorser. The Tesla board must be painfully aware of this. As usual, Trump shows insight:

I am saddened to watch Elon Musk go completely “off the rails,” essentially becoming a TRAIN WRECK over the past five weeks.

. . . No more EV Mandate. I have campaigned on this for two years and, quite honestly, when Elon gave me his total and unquestioned Endorsement, I asked him whether or not he knew that I was going to terminate the EV Mandate – It was in every speech I made, and in every conversation I had. He said he had no problems with that – I was very surprised!

I suspect Secretary Bessent has had Musk's number from the start -- he's a fraud. I've always had a sense that the other things we know about Musk -- his really weird sex life involving farming in vitro embryos with his various wives and girlfriends out to surrogate mothers, with at least 14 children he's acknowledged and apparently many more he hasn't, plus his unworkable crackpot ideas of colonizing and terraforming Mars, simply aren't compatible with the mindset of a responsible business manager, much less a political leader.

I can only think Secretary Bessent was being nice when he said Musk was "better. . . than anyone" at running his companies. We have the case of Musk spending a quarter billion supporting Trump, whose policies are bad for Tesla's business model, and expecting things somehow to work out in the end. But on top of that, he's a businessman who's suddently become a controversial publicity hound, when someone at his level should be staying out of the news, not making it. The last guy like that in the auto business was John DeLorean.

I think that's about where Musk will wind up, and actually pretty quickly.