Actually this is probably better filed under the following category: Are You Fucking Kidding Me?
“Epstein didn’t kill himself” has become an Internet and Social Media meme since his death, and it is funny on different levels.
- Surveillance footage from outside Jeffrey Epstein’s cell during his first suicide attempt was destroyed, as originally claimed. After that claim, authorities reversed themselves and said it had been preserved, but they now had to admit that, due to a “record-keeping error”, MCC staff preserved footage from outside the wrong cell, so the Epstein footage is gone.
- There was a backup system for jail video footage – but that wasn’t working, either.
- Epstein was sharing the cell with former police officer, a Mr Tartaglione, who is facing the death penalty for quadruple murders involving a Mexican cartel.
Seriously? They put a guy like this – who had god knows what information about the good sexual times he’d shared with all his pals, including royal figures, heads of state, celebrities and billionaires – in the same jail cell as a dirty cop already up for 1st degree murders based around a Mexican drug cartel. To be fair, Tartaglione claims he saved Epstein’s life that first time, which is why his lawyer is pissed off about the missing video that might help his client.
This is in addition to all the other weird shit about Epstein’s eventual death, with more surveillance camera failures, guards falling asleep and so forth. And all this happening with a stack of rich people on the outside world terrified of what he might have said in his testimony.
 |
| It’s not personal Jeff. It’s just business |
Like the rest of the Internet I try to laugh about this whole thing, and have done so, but it’s dark humour at best.
Epstein had already been arrested in 2005, signing a plea agreement in 2007 with the Florida Attorney General’s Office, accepting just one charge of soliciting prostitution – while agreeing to pay dozens of young girls under a federal statute providing for compensation to victims of child sexual abuse. He also got a 30-month sentence and had to register as a “Tier 1” sex offender with the U.S. Virgin Islands where he lived. The sentence allowed him weekend furloughs from his minimum security “prison”
Over the years I’d made occasional references to Bill Clinton’s flights on “The Lolita Express“, Epstein’s private 737 plane stacked with whores and nymphets. This information had emerged years ago as a result of such things as FAA records as well as FOIA requests that had revealed Clinton declining the standard Secret Service protection for an ex-President as he flew off.
These stories were dismissed and ignored of course, since Clinton was a protected species (D) for some time. You were never going to find Feminist celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred sitting in front of TV cameras with his victims, or those of Sen. Bob Menendez (D), Sen. Al Franken (D), and Rep. John Conyers (D).
But it was also ignored because of the long 60’s counter-culture hangover message of how only conservative squares and Bible Bashers were so down on sex, man –
as France is finding out:
The French writer Gabriel Matzneff never hid the fact that he engaged in sex with girls and boys in their early teens or even younger. He wrote countless books detailing his insatiable pursuits and appeared on television boasting about them. ‘Under 16 Years Old,’ was the title of an early book that left no ambiguity.
Matzneff, now 83, spent decades as a French literary darling. His work was supported by leading newspapers and literary publications. He’d appear on highbrow TV shows where he’d regale interviewers and audiences with the sublime pleasures of having sex with children in France and on sex tours of southeast Asia.
He’s only been outed now because one of his victims has written a memoir, which includes the ugly details of what Matneff did to her when she was 14 and he was in his 50’s. As she said:
“He was not a good man… He was in fact what we’re taught to dread since childhood: an ogre.”
Well sure, but given the accolades he got, it would seem that few others agreed:
In his book Under 16 Years Old, Matzneff writes, “To sleep with a child, it’s a holy experience, a baptismal event, a sacred adventure.” The book was first published in 1974 but was republished, apparently with no controversy, in 2005. In 2013, Metznaff received a major French literary prize.
This can join the file of, Are You Fucking Kidding Me?
How was this sort of celebration even possible? Well, Matzneff was a “Child of ’68” – a product of the “May 68” movement that hit France in the late 1960s. You’ll have almost certainly seen B&W video and photos of these protests that at the time seemed to be joined up with similar protests throughout the West. A vast upheaval of The Baby Boomer Youths as they revolted against the post-WWII world of their parent’s generation. And that did not just mean the military, “democracy” (said with a sneer), entertainment, media, drugs, sex and free enterprise; it meant everything:
These radicals subscribed to the idea that anything smacking of traditionalism or bourgeois morality was backward. Conventional sexual morality was part of the same rotten edifice as imperialism and racism…. “It’s forbidden to forbid” was a rallying cry.
“… most of the right wingers cheering about his monologue would push their mother down the stairs in order to be invited to sit at the hollywood cool kids’ table.”
This!
That whole attitude about the “cool kids” – especially the ones who stick it to traditional and bourgeois morality while also being “smart” and wealthy and celebrity-successful, is just more of the 60’s counterculture where the famous line is applied to the Culture Wars: “We Won, You Lost“. You see this sneering attitude expressed all the time in comment sections and articles towards …. well, let’s call them Deplorables:
Sociologist Pierre Verdrager, the author of L’Enfant Interdit, or Forbidden Child, which chronicled the politics of pedophilia in 1970s France, told Onishi: “There was an aristocracy of sexuality, an elite that was united in putting forth new attitudes and behavior toward sex. And they were also grounded in an extreme prejudice toward ordinary people, whom they regarded as idiots and fools.”
But it’s limited to approved ideological targets (“The problem with teaching Fanny Hill is not to do with sex, but power.”), as Gevias alluded to during an interview:
“The new puritans aren’t 60-year-old women in twinsets and pearls, the Christian right trying to make us turn off our televisions because they don’t like it. It’s a younger crowd with trendy haircuts, who you’d think would have left-leaning liberal sensibilities, who have invented this new term “hate speech”.’
[Desmond] the New York 11 year old has become the toast of the town, appearing on mainstream shows like Good Morning America and Today to spread the “inspiring” and “trailblazing” (seriously, their words) news of the sexualization of children for the cause of LGBT liberation. Progressive allies shriek that there’s nothing sexual about child drag queens, that it’s only about expressing femininity. I think some of them actually believe that b.s. That image above, with which I lead this column, is taken from Desmond’s Instagram feed. It is an image of him dancing for money at a Brooklyn gay bar.
In other contexts it’s called “grooming”, but that is an offensive term.
Is it really all that hard to see how French culture went berserk about child sexual exploitation from 1968 until pretty much today? And how we Americans, while not as extreme, have our own shame on that front?
You don’t need a conspiracy theory when everybody in your circle thinks the same way.
No Minister 