How Long Did It Take Them To Kill Big Bird?

On news that the rescissions package had passed the Senate early this morning, including elimination of federal money to public broadcasting, I decided to check how long the idea of "killing big bird" had been in the public imagination. It's been at least since the 1990s:

“Every time Congress comes at public broadcasting, Big Bird is held up,” Sesame Street creator Joan Ganz Cooney told an interviewer in 1998, “as a crucifix is to a vampire.” Three years prior, when Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) took the floor to argue against proposed cuts to public broadcasting funding, he brandished a small Big Bird doll. “Don’t kill Big Bird,” he extolled, “because public broadcasting works, public broadcasting is good for the American taxpayer, and good for the American people.”

From the Tampa Bay Times in 1992:

Columnist George Will has had his fill of Sesame Street.

"Does Big Bird need a subsidy?" he asks.

Heritage Foundation scholar Laurence Jarvik hates the whole antique structure of the thing.

"Public television is a relic," he says. "The high priest is Bill Moyers. The sacred symbol is Big Bird. And you have people always asking you for offerings."

The same story quoted Bob Dole, who noted that people were complaining to him that Republicans, by holding up a financing bill, were threatening "to derail democracy, tear up Sesame Street, kill Big Bird and starve the Cookie Monster."

In other words, the idea of "killing big bird" had been in the language at least by 1992, but I'm almost certain I'd heard it before then. Still, this at least means the phrase was 20 years old by the time Mitt Romney brought it up in the 2012 presidential campaign:

Sad news, Sesame Street fans. That meanie Mitt Romney wants to cut funding for PBS, the public television network that has broadcast Big Bird and her fellow Muppets since 1970. "I like PBS, I like Big Bird," he claimed during Wednesday's [October 3] presidential debate. "But I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for."

Although Big Bird had been a metonymy for PBS by at least 1992, the exploitation of cloying characters from its childrens' programming went back to 1969, only two years after its founding:

On May 1, 1969 Fred Rogers, host of the longtime children's television landmark Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, appeared in Washington before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications to express his disagreement with a proposal by President Richard Nixon to cut federal funding for public broadcasting from $20 million to $10 million.

. . . Over the course of Rogers' passionate yet respectful testimony, Senator Pastore's gruff demeanor slowly softened. The chairman even said that, though he was "supposed to be a pretty tough guy," Rogers' fervent plea had given him "goosebumps." Pastore effused: "I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful," and, after a slight pause, he made his conclusion clear: "Looks like you just earned the twenty million dollars."

In other words, PBS's "for the children" defensive strategy had been successful for at least 56 years, and Big Bird had been part of that strategy for more than half that time. Another part of that argument was that the PBS budget was only a rounding error in the federal deficit, and any cut would be meaningless.

As far as I can see, up to Trump 47, Republicans had simply conceded these arguments. But all of a sudden, Big Bird is dead. Except it wasn't Republicans who killed it:

[W]ith the rise of streaming, it became difficult for the preschool staple to maintain being on PBS due to licensing fees once DVD and video sales tapered off. "Sesame Street" simply couldn't maintain staying on PBS without the revenue needed to produce the show, which is when HBO stepped in. But after completing their five-year deal, HBO, now known as Max, is shifting its focus to content for adults and families according to Variety.

On one hand, times changed. But on the other, congressional Democrats, even in this year's budget debates, with Sesame Street canceled by HBO, still fell back on Elmo to try to keep funding for PBS. But for the first time in nearly 60 years, Republicans finally won that symbolic fight. Under Trump. I can't disagree with him here:

I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore.

Something's truly hinky here. Cutting funding for PBS had been a small but symbolic item on the Republican agenda since Nixon's first term, and only Trump finally accomplished it -- but B-list Republicans are drowning it out with Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. I'm scratching my head.

The Problem Has Existed For Generations

The sign in the photo above is a bit of 1990s nostalgia, it was prominent on San Diego area freeways back then as a warning that illegals might dash across traffic, but eventually the highway department seems to have decided the warnings were redundant, or maybe just a bad look, and it removed the signs. As I thought about those signs recently, I suddenly recognized that Californians have been adjusting to the conditions of mass migration ever since I've been out here, starting in the 1960s.

But the other day I saw a news item that made me think things are changing:

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed an executive order Friday to bolster protocols and support immigrant neighborhoods, including offering cash assistance, in response to raids by the Trump administration targeting those living in the United States illegally.

. . . In addition, Bass said a plan is being worked out to provide cash assistance to those affected by the enforcement operations, the Los Angeles Times reported. Cash cards with a "couple hundred" dollars on them will be distributed by immigrants' rights groups in about a week, Bass said.

The wording here is a tacit acknowledgement that there aren't just ethnically Mexican neighborhoods or barrios in California, which has always been the case, but specifically neighborhoods made up of illegal immigrants, a much newer concept, though by no means brand new. But the ICE raids in LA are drawing attention to the problem:

Amid ongoing ICE raids around here in Los Angeles, many immigrant communities are fearful about living their daily lives, like leaving their homes, showing up to work, shopping at local businesses. Freelance journalist Benjamin Gottlieb spent some time in the San Fernando Valley, one of the many hubs of Latino immigrant life in this city.

. . . When I was out reporting, I saw an unusually low number of people milling about, especially on Van Nuys Boulevard, which is this major street in this part of Los Angeles. It felt like a ghost town really. I spoke with about a dozen day laborers and street vendors. Many were happy to chat but fearful recorded or give any identifying information.

. . . Yeah, so it's not just the fact that there are ICE raids. Those happen in Los Angeles. But immigration advocates say more people are being deported in an expedited way. So they might get put on a plane before they have a chance to appeal to an immigration judge.

. . . I walked into a juice bar that Jonathan Reyes and his family owns in Van Nuys. He says people no longer feel safe to go out, and they're just not coming to buy juice.

What this says to me is that the ICE raids, beyond rounding up illegals, are damaging an enormous underground economy that was based on serving illegals, and once you take the illegals out of the equation -- not just by physically removing rhem, but by making them reluctant to go out and spend money -- you're damaging that underground economy. And this economy is huge. At the link above,

This is the largest county in the U.S., about 10 million people. Census data puts the immigrant population at about a third. And there are estimates that as many as 1 million people in LA County are in the country illegally.

So all of a sudden, something like a million people who support low-end ethnic restaurants, pushcart vendors, ethnic grocers, barbers, hairdressers, food trucks -- not to mention drug dealers -- are reluctant to go out and spend money. And if they don't go to work on off-the-books jobs, they won't have the money to spend. So Mayor Bass is going to give them all gift cards? Wait a moment. This is a cash economy. What are these people going to get with gift cards? And this is a million people. How are gift cards with a couple hundred bucks going to fill the gap? Beyond that,

The money will not come from city coffers, but from philanthropic partners, [Bass] said.

Really, how much money are we talking about here? If we're talking about enough to make up for a million people who are afraid to go out, and go to work, this isn't just a piddling amount, it's got to be billions. "Philanthropic partners" won't have pockets that deep.

It also occurs to me that the illegals have in effect set up their own version of the Mexican "informal economy" that I linked to in a post a while ago:

An informal economy is made up of mostly small businesses that are not taxed or regulated, with workers who lack benefits such as health care and pensions. . . . In Mexico, the informal sector accounts for a staggering 24 percent of GDP and 55 percent of employment.

What's happening is that the ICE raids by the mere fact that they're taking place are pulling the rug out from under the California version of the Mexican informal economy. But with the additional funding for ICE and a changed policy direction, many more illegals are likely to be deported, also reducing the size of this informal economy:

President Donald Trump’s deputies have reversed the Democrats’ “catch and release” migration strategy and are now enforcing the federal law that requires migrants to be detained until their asylum claims are resolved.

. . . The ”catch and release” policy was created by the 2010 “Morton Memos” in President Barack Obama’s administration. The Obama policy flouted the federal law and allowed migrants to get jobs while they waited for their asylum hearings. The jobs allowed the migrants to pay off their smuggling debts to coyotes and cartels, regardless of how weak their asylum claims.

In turn, the policy greatly encouraged economic migration into Americans’ communities by reassuring would-be migrants that they would safely pay off the debts and upfront costs of hiring coyotes and cartels needed to get them into the United States.

. . . Trump’s 2025 policy will be an economic disaster for the [interest] group that profits from the cartel-managed migration.

In effect, it was the "informal economy" created by the illegal migrants that's financed the California Democrat machine. Mayor Bass's attempt to replace it with gift cards is a feckless effort on one hand, but it also shows the real damage the Trump policy changes are doing to the vested illegal immigration interests.

Dershowitz: There Is No Client List

Alan Dershowitz, after feeding confusion for several days with remarks like ". . . hand to God, I know. I know the names of people whose files are being suppressed in order to protect them, and that's wrong", has finally clarified what he means. In an interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation yesterday embedded above, he says at 0:12,

No, there is no client list, there never has been a client list. A "client list" suggests that Jeffrey Epstein made a list of people to who0m he trafficked women. What there is is a redacted FBI affadavit from accusers -- there are several of them -- from accusers that accuse various people of having improper sex, and that has been redacted. The names of the people accused have beern blacked out.

This is what I've been saying for a week. It's absurd to imagine that Epstein would create any document, that could be found via a search warrant or discovered in a civil suit, that confirmed the details of serious crimes like sex trafficking or blackmail. On the other hand, Dershowitz is correct in saying there are FBI files and court papers that contain allegations from various parties that say they were trafficked to prominent people like George Mitchell or Dershowitz himself.

Many of these came from Virginia Giuffre, who retracted her own allegations against Dershowitz in 2022, and whose allegations against Mitchell have been contradicted by Epstein's pilot. Circumstances arose at the end of her life that suggest serious investigation of her mental condition may have damaged her credibility as an accuser or a witness, especially if her testimony was ever subjected to cross-examination in an actual trial:

On March 31, 2025, in an Instagram post, Giuffre claimed that her car collided with a bus traveling at 110 km/h (70 mph), resulting in her going into renal failure. Giuffre said she had been given four days to live. Her family later said in a statement that "police were called but said that there was no one available to come to the scene", and Giuffre, who was "banged up and bruised", was subsequently taken to hospital as her condition deteriorated. She was later discharged.

Giuffre died of suicide at her home in Neergabby, Western Australia, on April 25, 2025, at the age of 41. Although the family at first accepted the alleged cause of death as suicide, on May 1 Giuffre's father released a statement discounting the suicide explanation and posting that "somebody got to her".

It seems to me that statements by accusers that haven't been substantiated should be redacted to protect both the accusers and the accused. Dershowitz continues on the redacted names of those accused at 1:00,

I can tell you right now, none of them are public figures who are currently in office. Some of them were previously in office. Some of them are dead.

This is consistent with what I've been saying for the past week, especially with yesterday's post, and I think Dershowitz is referring to most of the individuals named in that post. At 1:50, he says,

I don't know of any information that [Pam Bondi and the Justice Department] could disclose that they haven't disclosed. . . . The vast majority of people who are in the files, I know them all, I've seen all the names, the vast, vast majority of them have already been disclosed.

Again, these are the same people that I could identify with a few hours searching the web in yesterday's post. But then he moves to the other big question at 3:15:

And then there's Tucker Carlson's absurd allegations about the Mossad. There I know it from very, very personal experience. I was representing Jeffrey Epstein. I asked him about everything, including whether he'd had any contacts with intelligence agencies. If he had, he would have been dying to tell me that, because I could have used that to get him a better deal. If he had worked for the Mossad or the CIA, that would have been golden for me, but of course, he said "no". And then I checked it with my sources in Israel. Let me be clear. I once represented the Mossad . . . . I can tell you with absolute certainty, he had no connections to the Mossad.

There was a related deveopment yesterday when former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett posted on X:

As a former Israeli Prime Minister, with the Mossad having reported directly to me, I say to you with 100% certainty:

The accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false.

Epstein’s conduct,…

— Naftali Bennett נפתלי בנט (@naftalibennett) July 14, 2025

None other than Megyn "Me Again" Kelly replied in a post that has apparently since been taken down that "The U.S. Attny who spiked the case, Alex Acosta, is on record as saying Epstein was an intel agent and he was told to get rid of the prosecution." Numerous replies then made the point that there is in fact no public record containing those remarks from Acosta, that this is third-hand hearsay.

The idea that Epstein would have been a serious agent for any professional intelligence agency goes against common sense. If being sexually kinky makes anyone grounds for blackmail, then wouldn't Epstein himself be even more vulnerable than any of his victims? You don't want that guy, of all people, as an agent. But also, he had an insanely high public profile, mansions in Manhattan and Palm Beach, a private island, a private 737, stories in the tabloids -- spies don't call attention to themselves.

It's odd that the Epstein-Mossad story is being pushed mainly by two has-been ex-Fox hosts, both of whose public personas involve heavy plastic surgery (Kelly is 54, Carlson is 56) and lots of extra hair they didn't grow themselves. Notwithstanding, the facts as they've begun to fall out appear to be supporting the Justice Department's line a week ago: there's no client list, Epstein didn't work for the Mossad, and he in fact committed suicide. Charlie Kirk himself, who certainly enabled both Kelly and Carlson at the Turning Point summit over the weekend, has changed his tune:

After the right-wing uproar over the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein memo hit a crescendo this weekend after the president’s Truth Social post calling for the MAGA base to let it go and leave Attorney General Pam Bondi alone, key Trump ally Charlie Kirk declared Monday that he was “done talking about Epstein” for the time being.

Kirk’s announcement comes a day after he spoke to the president on the phone to express his support for Bondi, according to CNN. Bondi has come under extreme fire from MAGA critics, including Kirk, who have blasted the attorney general for releasing an unsigned memo last week concluding that Epstein had no “client list,” died by suicide while awaiting trial and did not blackmail prominent figures who allegedly took part in his underage sex trafficking.

Quite possibly Trump himself also got in touch with Dershowitz and encouraged him to make his views clearer. It seems like Trump's people are gradually getting control of the story in any case.

So If There's A List, Who's On It?

I continue to be puzzled at the reasoning behind the idea that there is an Epstein "list". Let's start with the first question, ehich might actually be more productive: we know that the FBI kept files on figures like Dr King. His FBI file itself was something like 17,000 pages:

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began monitoring Martin Luther King, Jr., in December 1955, during his involvement with the Montgomery bus boycott, and engaged in covert operations against him throughout the 1960s. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was personally hostile toward King, believing that the civil rights leader was influenced by Communists. . . . Under the FBI’s domestic counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) King was subjected to various kinds of FBI surveillance that produced alleged evidence of extramarital affairs, though no evidence of Communist influence.

As far as I can tell, although it's entirely credible that the FBI has maintained an equivalent file on Jeffrey Epstein, which it seems to me might be highly, highly informative itself, that isn't what anybody's asking for. They keep using the word list. For instance,

The US Department of Justice and FBI have concluded that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein did not have a so-called client list that could implicate high-profile associates, and that he did take his own life - contradicting long-held conspiracy theories about the infamous case.

When they use the word "file" or "files", they are using it as a synonym for "client list", as the story at the link does:

While campaigning last year, President Donald Trump promised to release files relating to the disgraced financier.

They aren't referring to any FBI-generated investigative file, but to what they assume is a client list generated by Epstein himself and presumably uncovered during searches of his residences following his death. But why should we imagine Epstein had ever created any such thing? Did he have a program on his desktop that kept track of blackmail payments from his marks, or what?

But isn't it far more likely that the FBI itself had maintained its own investigative file on Jeffrey Epstein equivalent to those we know it maintained on Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Bertolt Brecht, James Cagney, Charles Chaplin, Jules Dassin, Walt Disney, Howard Fast, Lillian Hellman, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelley, Peter Lorre, Groucho Marx, Vincent Prince, Edward G. Robinson, James Stewart, Gloria Swanson, and others?

Wouldn't that be far more informative and far more easily released? But so far, this doesn't seem to be what anyone wants to see, or if they do, they aren't making it clear that this is what they're talking about. Insead, what we're seeing is the product of a surmise that Epstein had some sort of rolodex or e-mail contact list that included a bunch of usual suspects, for instance:

They include not only Trump, but Bill Clinton, who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former Secretary of the Treasury and former president of Harvard University Larry Summers, cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker, Alan Dershowitz, billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner, the former Barclays banker Jes Staley, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, the magician David Copperfield, actor Kevin Spacey, former CIA director Bill Burns, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who reveled in Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia.

But there's nothing new here. Let's go through the names. Trump? At this point if there was ever evidence that Trump was on the Lolita Express or on the island, the press would have been on it like white on rice in 2015. There is no such evidence, and Trump appears to be correct in saying, at the time of Epstein's death in 2019, that he hadn't spoken with Epstein for 15 years.

Bill Clinton? Where's the secret? He was on the Lolita Express in between his own wet T-shirt parties and visits from the Energizer Bunny in his years out of office. Prince Andrew? Where's the secret? It's been in the tabloids for over a decade. Nothing to cover up, as far as I can see.

Bill Gates? All we have is a photo at a dinner in Epstein's New York mansion, everyone fully clothed, at some sort of business meeting. Gates had his own independent scandals, he didn't need Epstein for anything.

Glenn Dubin? Dubin's wife, Eva Andersson-Dubin, dated Epstein for years before she and Dubin married in 1994.

Epstein introduced Dubin to Jes Staley, then a senior executive at JPMorganChase & Co. and now the CEO of Barclays, the big British bank. After JPMorganChase bought control of Highbridge Capital, Dubin’s hedge fund, in stages, starting in 2004, Epstein reportedly received a $15 million fee.

All this really does is give a possible source for Epstein's wealth outside a putative blackmail op on behalf of Mossad -- just a routine overly cozy relationship among big money players. Occam's razor -- the simplest explanation is the best -- weighs in on this version.

As long as we're on Jes Staley, let's take him out of order. After the Epstein scandal broke, he was forced out of his position as CEO of Barclay's based on his relationship with Epstein, but again, where's the coverup? What don't we already know? Where's the secret?

In June 2025, Jes Staley lost his bid to overturn a ban from holding senior [UK corporate] leadership.

Bill Richrdson? He passed away in 2023; as i've been saying, actuarial science says many of the names on an "Epstein list" are going to be dead, like Epstein himself. Independent of Epstein, throughout his political career as Governor of New Mexico and in cabinet-level federal positions, he was damaged by repeated allegations of corruption. Ultimately, he withdrew his 2009 nomnation as Obama's Secretary of Commerce for those reasons. Virginia Giuffre alleged in 2019 that she had been trafficked to Richardson by Epstein, but Richardson's reputation had already been destroyed without that. Where's the secret?

Larry Summers? We know one of Epstein's grifts was connected with donations to Harvard, and Summers was a professor there and ultimately its president.

An article in The Harvard Crimson in 2003, during Summers's tenure as president, detailed a reportedly "special connection" between Summers and Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein pledged to donate at least $25 million to Harvard during Summers's tenure to endow Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and Epstein was given an office at Harvard for his personal use. . . . Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury." Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.

If anything, this provides more alternate sources for Epstein's wealth besides Mossad, and whatever Epstein was cooking up with Summers seems mostly to have involved Harvard. In addition, merely flying on the Lolita Express doesn't necessarily imply sexual activity, although nobody with any sense should have been on that plane in anything but a hazmat suit. Any secrets at this stage are probably Harvard's problem.

Stephen [sic] Pinker? For starters, the writer couldn't spell the guy's name. Pinker worked with Alan Dershowitz, who is known for representing unpopular defendants, in Epstein's 2008 guilty pleas. Other than that, he never received money from Epstein, met with him three times over a dozen years, couldn't stand Epstein, and tried to avoid him.

Alan Dershowitz? As I've discussed elsewhere here, Dershowitz flew on the Lolita Express but claims to have been unaware of the trafficking allegations against Epstein at the time and claims not to have engaged in sexual activity on the plane or the island. Virginia Giuffre withdrew her allegations against Dershowitz in 2022. Afer great effort, he appears to have restored his full reputation.

Leslie Wexner?

Wexner retained Jeffrey Epstein as his financial manager from 1987 to 2007 and was initially the "main client" of Epstein's money-management firm, according to Bloomberg. Epstein ran his business out of a house Wexner owned and sometimes lived in while Advisor of Victoria's Secret.

If anything, as far as anyone can determine, Wexner is one of Epstein's principal victims, not a co-conspirator. He may have been an unwitting enabler, but he's also a credible source for Epstein's wealth besides Mossad.

In August 2019, following Epstein's second incarceration and prior to his death, Wexner addressed the Wexner Foundation, releasing a written statement that his former financial advisor, Jeffrey Epstein, had "misappropriated vast sums of money" from him and from his family.

Elsewhere, Virinia Giuffre filed a lawsuit against Wexner in 2015 and settled in 2017. The judge ordered the documents in the suit released in 2024:

Neither Wexner nor any of the figures whose names are mentioned in the files released this week have been charged with any crime. Their inclusion on the list only constitutes a possible association as a witness, victim or plaintiff or having business or social contact with Epstein and/or Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in federal prison for her conviction.

Ehud Barak:

Barak visited Epstein about 30 times between 2013 and 2017 at his estates in Florida and New York, including a time in 2014 when the former Israeli premier flew with Epstein on his private aircraft from Palm Beach to Tampa, after which Epstein went on to New York. Barak said his wife and an Israeli security guard were also on that flight. He said he flew with Epstein on his private plans on one other occasion, also with his wife and guards.

. . . Barak, who entered a business deal with Epstein in 2015 to fund an Israeli startup, years after the American financier served 18 months for solicitation, has called long-rumored allegations of sex trafficking by Epstein “abhorrent” and said he had officially cut off all business ties with him.

Barak's involvement with Epstein was the subject of an extensive investigation by the Wall Street Journal, which included reviews of Epstein's personal calendar. Barak maintains that his visits with Epstein were business-related, often included his wife, and never involved sexual activity, and the WSJ doesn't appear to have found contrary information. As with Wexner, it appears that Barak was a naive victim.

I'm going to pass over David Copperfield and Kevin Spacey.

William Burns: According to the Wall Street Journal, quoted at Wikipedia,

"Epstein's Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names, Including CIA Chief, Goldman's Top Lawyer". Wall Street Journal. William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency since 2021, had three meetings scheduled with Epstein in 2014, when he was deputy secretary of state, the documents show. They first met in Washington and then Mr. Burns visited Epstein's townhouse in Manhattan. [...] Mr. Burns, 67 years old, a career diplomat and former ambassador to Russia, had meetings with Epstein in 2014 when Mr. Burns was deputy secretary of state. A lunch was planned that August at the office of law firm Steptoe & Johnson in Washington. Epstein scheduled two evening appointments that September with Mr. Burns at his townhouse, the documents show. After one of the scheduled meetings, Epstein planned for his driver to take Mr. Burns to the airport."

There's no indication these meetings had any result. Even after his guilty pleas, Epstein appears to have had enough prestige to meet with high-level figures and propose deals of one sort or another that never materializd.

Mortimer Zuckerman was subpoenaed in a US Virgin Islands suit against JPMorgan alleging that Morgan was aware of the nature of Epstein's traffficking operations on his island. No other specific allegation is involved.

George Mitchell: Virginia Giuffre alleged in a 2015 lawsuit against Epstein and Gislaine Maxwell that they had trafficked her to George Mitchell.

Mitchell denied ever having met or spoken with Giuffre, and stated that he became aware of Epstein's criminal prosecution only through the media.

On November 30, 2021, Epstein's former pilot Larry Visoski named Mitchell as one of the people he recalled flying on one of Epstein's private planes, but claimed to have never seen sexual activity nor indication that such activity had taken place.

Giuffre has since retracted a similar allegation against Alan Dershowitz, and details that surfaced of her life before her passing in Australia suggest she may not have had much credibility as a witness.

Harvey Weinstein is mentioned in a single phone message from Epstein's office records:

“She had on the phone Mr. Harvey Weinstein,” reads one message about a missed call.

Weinstein, then a force in Hollywood, was once part of a media investment group that included Epstein.

“At the time, Epstein was seen as a wealthy power broker with access to many people of various industries and for many reasons,” said Weinstein’s spokesman, Juda Engelmayer. “It wasn’t uncommon for people of that caliber to talk, as we see from the lists that have been coming out. There was and remains nothing more to that.”

And that's the last of the names that a writer thinks might appear on an Epstein "client list". It's worth noting that over just a few hours' work in tracking these names down, it's emerged that extensive documentation of Epstein's client activities has already emerged in legal documents and newspaper investigations. In other cases, all we see is appointments or phone messages that don't seem to suggest anything nefarious -- in most cases, it was while Epstein was seen, rightly or wrongly, as a power broker with a wide range of contacts, and influential people, often naively, interacted with him on that basis.

But my overwhelming impression is that there's plenty out there for researchers to draw a credible picture of Epstein's activities without the need to find a new supposed "client list". The problem is that it doesn't confirm that he was ever running a blackmail operation on behalf of Mossad. It strongly suggests he was a con artist who was able to steal "vast sums" from Les Wexner while running a smaller operation to skim off donations to Harvard and MIT, using prestigious connections at both institutions.

Many specific allegations of trafficking and abuse have come from a single person, Virginia Giuffre, who has retracted one of the biggest, against Alan Dershowitz, while indications are that she was in an unbalanced mental state later in her life. The impression I increasingly have is that any serious investigation into the existing public record on Epstein will indicate that he was not an Israeli agent, and that many who are suspected of being co-conspirators were naive dupes or just victims.

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.