Sunday, September 07, 2025
American Radicals Cannot Afford to Ignore the Epstein Scandal
September 5, 2025
Court records show hundreds of millions of dollars being paid to Epstein by Wall Street big shots and billionaire tycoons like Leslie Wexner and Leon Black for tax advice he wasn’t even professionally qualified to render. Photograph by Leiada Krözjhen.
Not long after Donald Trump had the Department of Justice unceremoniously torpedo its own investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the President’s longtime friend and fellow member of the predator elite, Bill O’Reilly, announced something that I found to be disturbingly telling. During an interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, Bill revealed that he had discussed the Epstein files with the President at the White House months before it reentered the headlines. “I talked to President Trump, man-to-man, eye-to-eye, on St. Patrick’s Day about this… And he said- and I agree- ‘There are a lot of names associated with Epstein that had nothing to do with Epstein’s conduct… They maybe had lunch with them or maybe had some correspondence for one thing or another… If that name gets out, those people are destroyed, because there’s not going to be any context.”
It was one of those moments that felt too absurd to exist anywhere but cable news. Here were two career newsmongers, jettisoned to the ghetto of the legacy media for their own predatory sexual appetites, chatting with great concern about how deeply disturbed the accused rapist in the White House is over the reputations of fellow oligarchs who chose to associate with a convicted sexual predator. But beyond the bizarro world vibe of this sharply dressed slice of locker room logic, I felt that O’Reilly’s revelation actually cut to the very core of the Epstein scandal on many levels.
It reveals the bloated sense of self-importance carried by the elites in this country, it reveals the fluid bipartisan nature of their lives behind the scenes, but perhaps more than anything, it reveals the fear they have of their own supporters. The general gist of Bill O’Reilly’s defense of Donald Trump’s decision to betray his own voters was that your average yokel couldn’t possibly understand the need for powerful men in both parties to socialize with a sex fiend confirmed by their own government to have ran a vast criminal empire trafficking in teenage girls without first being provided with the proper context by the very news media that Trump was elected twice to rail against.
Even more telling was Bill’s dire warning that such unfettered access to the truth would destroy what’s left of the reputation the powerful hold in this country and on this I am in full agreement with that neocon dinosaur. However, it is my strongly held opinion that every motherfucker who ever played golf with Epstein should be destroyed and not just because I’m a collapsitarian anarchist or even because I’m a survivor of childhood sex abuse. Jeffrey Epstein was not a billionaire who just happened to sling underage girls on the side. Jeffrey Epstein was a sexual predator who appears to have become a billionaire by providing other billionaires VIP access to the local schoolyard.
Court records show hundreds of millions of dollars being paid to Epstein by Wall Street big shots and billionaire tycoons like Leslie Wexner and Leon Black for tax advice he wasn’t even professionally qualified to render. JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in America with tentacles reaching into every administration since its inception, made over 9,000 transactions payable to Epstein and his associates between 2005 and 2019 with a combined value of $2.4 billion dollars and these transactions continued well after a 2008 plea deal officially made Epstein a registered sex offender.
To put it simply, there is quite literally no legitimate reason for the most powerful people on earth to even associate with such well-renowned lecherous scum and yet associate they did, over and over again. Former president and former friend of Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, rode on Epstein’s Lolita Express on 27 known occasions and invited the man to the White House four times during his presidency, he even visited the bastard in prison after his first arrest for procuring a child. Not to be beat, former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, held three dozen meetings with the by then convicted child predator between 2013 and 2017, at one point hooking up once a month for eleven months straight.
This isn’t fucking normal, and you don’t have to be paranoid to want some goddamn answers here. Even if these relationships don’t qualify as criminal they are at the very least indefensibly immoral, as is the Donald’s own account of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
According to our president’s own recent tarmac barkings, he was aware that Jeffrey Epstein was poaching teenage employees from Mar-a-Lago as early as 2000 when Trump admitted that he caught his former friend ‘stealing’ his 16-year-old towel girl from him. However, three years after this event Donald Trump was recorded by the New Yorker Magazine praising that thief’s prowess with young girls, calling Epstein a “terrific guy” and stating “No doubt about it- Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” That was in 2003, the same year Trump signed his old golf buddy’s birthday album with cartoon tits before telling him “May every day be another wonderful secret.” And it would still be another four years before Jeffrey’s membership to Mar-a-Lago was canceled.
Yet, the mainstream media in this country consistently tries to downplay this story even while they cover it; gaslighting anyone suggesting that this could possibly be anything bigger than a midterm embarrassment for Donald Trump as indulging in MAGA conspiracy theories. They also keep telling us that public interest is drifting away from the scandal and maybe it is. Still, a lot of powerful people seem to be working very hard to change the subject. I’m not just talking about Donald Trump’s desperately provocative military occupation of the nation’s capital.
I’m talking about Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s bizarre decision to cut the last session of the House short before a bipartisan vote could compel the DOJ to release its files on Epstein and the fact that this maneuver received zero pushback from Democratic House Minority Leader Hakem Jeffries or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. I’m talking about the fact that Epstein’s lead accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, was sent to carry out the rest of her twenty-year sentence for felony sex trafficking at a white-collar club fed after being recorded declaring to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton were perfect gentleman innocent of any “inappropriate conduct” in her company.
However, in spite of all these efforts or quite possibly because of them, something about this case remains deeply unsettling to the much-maligned deplorables in Donald Trump’s base. While Google searches for Jeffrey Epstein may be down this week, the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently released a national poll showing that Trump’s handling of the Epstein scandal has done significant damage to his standing among his core supporters, with 47% of those who voted for him in 2024 showing strong disapproval and 26% of that group indicating that they would not vote for the man again if given the opportunity.
These were the same people utterly unfazed by every scandal, real or imagined, that has dogged Orange-Man-Bad from Stormy Daniels to January 6. The people who seemed willing to follow this asshole straight into the ninth circle of Hell. The American news machine, from Bill O’Reilly to Anderson Cooper, continues to be mystified by the whims of such trailer dwelling proles. Still, these people are my neighbors, my parents and the parents of pretty much every member of my backwoods Queer found family. While I will be the first bitch to admit that they are far from enlightened, I also happen to know for a fact that many of them voted for Trump largely because they felt like it was the best way to flip the bird to assholes like O’Reilly and Cooper who have gotten rich lying them into one bad trade deal and bullshit war after another.
The entire MAGA brand may be a pitiless grift but much like the Blackshirts and the Bolsheviks, it is a grift built on the exploitation of a very legitimate populist disenchantment with the current order.
So, why did it take Jeffrey Epstein to finally break the spell? I can’t tell you that with any certainty, but I can tell you from very personal experience that a disturbingly high number of Americans including myself have fallen prey to sexual abuse and that most of our abusers remain untouchable due to institutional power. Every 74 seconds someone is sexually assaulted in this country and every nine minutes that person is a child. One in six American women are victims of rape as well as 3% of men.
This means that while your average deplorable may be far from woke, it is also very likely that they and/or at least one person they love has fallen prey to a man like Jeffrey Epstein and now they finally seem prepared to accept that Donald Trump is one of these men too.
This is a recipe for the kind of populist furor that anyone committed to revolutionary politics should embrace as a rare opportunity for critical mass. As an anarcha-feminist committed to bottom unity, I can’t tell you how many freshly defrocked Trump supporters I’ve encountered in the last month who appear to be shockingly prepared to confront rape culture in ways most liberals fail to even comprehend. Coastal cosmopolitans in both parties can scoff at these people all they want but they are smart enough to realize that their system is rigged and now they realize that Trump too is a part of it.
I see no reason why anarchists and leftists shouldn’t convert this collective anguish into a rallying cry for a very personal revolutionary retribution, and I say we begin this retribution by making Bill O’Reilly’s nightmare a reality and letting the bodies fall where they stand at the country club. Release the files, all of them: destroy the elites, all of them.
Trump Deporting Russian Asylum Seekers
September 5, 2025
Image by Arnepi Stocker.
According to a September 3, 2025, article in the Guardian, during June and August, U.S. immigration authorities deported approximately 80 Russian asylum seekers, shackled and handcuffed, to Egypt. Upon arrival, they were forced by Egyptian and Russian authorities onto ICE planes heading for Moscow, where they were immediately turned over to the FSB (the dreaded Russian Federal Security Service).
Among these asylum seekers was Andrei Vovchenko, a former Russian soldier who, in October 2022―the first year of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine―fled his military post rather than fight in Putin’s war and made his way to the United States. After the Trump administration ignored his asylum appeal and deported him to Moscow, he was immediately arrested and confronted with a 10-year prison term. “He begged not to be put on the plane to Moscow,” a witness recalled, but Egyptian police “restrained him and tied him up.” Bound to his seat, “he cried the entire way from Egypt to Moscow.”
“People in need of protection, fleeing Putin’s war and dictatorship, FSB torture and repression, have ended up in US prisons, dressed in orange jumpsuits and shackled during transfers like criminals,” observed Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist. “Some of them have been handed over to the FSB and other security services. This is cruel and shameful.”
Currently, about a thousand Russians are seeking asylum in the United States. Given the U.S. government’s indifference to their fate, prominent Russian opposition figures in exile (including Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Putin’s murdered presidential rival, Aleksei Navalny) have called upon the Canadian government to grant asylum to Russians currently subject to deportation orders, and specifically to those whose antiwar activities are clear. Otherwise, they warned, the Trump deportation policy “threatens to destroy the lives of many decent and innocent people.”
And there are enormous numbers of Russians who have defied the Putin regime by opposing the Russian military conquest of Ukraine. Beginning on the evening of February 24, 2022, the date of Russia’s full-scale military invasion, many thousands of Russians staged nonviolent antiwar demonstrations across their nation. On that first night alone, the police made 1,820 arrests of peace demonstrators in 58 Russian cities. As the demonstrations continued, prominent cultural figures and politicians spoke out against the war, a million Russians signed an antiwar petition, and Russian soldiers began refusing to fight in Ukraine.
Infuriated by the resistance, the Russian authorities responded with mass arrests (19,478 during 2022 alone), huge fines, violence, and new laws providing 10 years imprisonment for spreading “fake” news and 5 years for “discrediting the army.” Putin denounced “the scum and the traitors” who opposed the war and promised that the Russian people would “spit them out” like insects that had flown into their mouths.
As the first year of war moved on, Russia’s mass antiwar movement did decline. One reason for a loss of momentum was the intense repression by the Putin regime. But massive pro-war propaganda and activists’ gathering sense of futility also played a role in dampening public activism. In addition, vast numbers of Russians, appalled by the war or unwilling to participate in it simply fled from their homeland – with estimates ranging from 600,000 to 1.3 million departing during 2022 alone.
Even so, in subsequent years, smaller peace demonstrations continued to worry the Russian authorities. In February 2024, there occurred a protest against military mobilization by the “Path Home” movement in Moscow and a protest against military service near the “Black Tulip” memorial in Yekaterinburg. That September, the “White Scarves” (relatives of mobilized soldiers) held an antiwar demonstration outside the Ministry of Defense building in Moscow. In these cases and in others, the security forces made arrests of participants and, also, of the journalists who covered the events. According to OVD-Info, a leading Russian human rights organization, “as of 17 February 2025, we are aware of 1,185 people facing criminal prosecution for anti-war statements or actions.”
Also, courageous individuals continued to speak out publicly against the war and the regime. The opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, for example, who had somehow survived two apparent poisonings by the regime in previous years, was charged with spreading false information about the Russian army in Ukraine and, subsequently with high treason over a series of public speeches he made that criticized Kremlin policies and the Ukraine war. In 2023, in his final speech to the court, Kara-Murza struck a defiant tone, declining to ask for acquittal and saying that he stood by everything he had said. “I only blame myself for one thing,” he declared. “I failed to convince enough of my compatriots and politicians in democratic countries of the danger that he current Kremlin regime poses for Russia and for the world.” Kara-Murza, designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, was thereupon sentenced to 25 years in a strict regime penal colony.
In September 2024, after 11 months in solitary confinement, Kara-Murza was awakened in his cell at 3 a.m. and marched outside, convinced that he was about to be executed. Instead, it turned out that he was part of a large prisoner swap with Russia arranged by the Biden administration. Soon, he was winging his way westward to safety.
It’s a shame that the Trump administration, through its treatment of courageous Russian war resisters and other dissidents, has reversed the process.
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