Breaking History - How Clinton, Trump, and Epstein Rewired America’s Moral Compass

Episode Date: November 26, 2025

We revisit the scandal-soaked 1990s—Packwood, Thomas, Clinton—and explore how failing to enforce norms around abuse of power helped create the world in which the Epstein scandal could flourish. This episode traces the unraveling of political accountability from the Clinton impeachment to the Trump Access Hollywood moment, and finally the global Epstein reckoning. We show how feminists in the ’90s and evangelicals in the 2010s made parallel bargains—each excusing their champion’s abuses for political gain. The result is a culture that normalized impunity for the powerful, and primed America for a populist revolt against a ruling class that protects its own. ----- CREDITS Executive Producer: Poppy Damon Associate Producer: Adam Feldman Sound Designer and Composer: Tony Peer Original theme songs by Eli Lake Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Well, anyway, we've got a good episode for you because in this episode, we examine the defining scan, of our populist era, Jeffrey Epstein. Unlike most lurid sex affairs, the target is not a single public figure. Epstein indicts the entire ruling class. So how did America get here? Well, the story starts with one of Epstein's former pals, Bill Clinton. What the naughty 90s tell us about the Epstein scandalabra next. Babel, the part you got this next year's model. Lee Harvey-Arving, Berlin,

What happened once happens again? At St. John's College, students study 3,000 years of human thought in an inclusive community devoted to shared inquiry. In undergraduate and graduate seminars, students read the great books that built our civilization, from Plato and Aquinas to Locke, Lincoln, Einstein, and Douglas, in a culture quick to forget, St. John's develops memory, reason, and renewal because understanding history is how we change it.

St. John's College, a better place, a better world, at sjc.edu. When it came to the Epstein files, for a while now, the pressure has been on. And as I've said many times, it is long past time. to release the Epstein files. Let's have transparency and get all of this out into the public so that we can finally put the Epstein chapter behind it.

Are you going to release all the information about that? Senator, we are working through that right now with the Department of Justice. When you think you'll have it done, cash? I think in the near future, sir. Like before I die? And it finally happened. On this vote, the yeas are 427.

The nays are one. Two-thirds being in the affirmative, the rules are suspended. The bill is passed, and without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table. The House and Senate voted last week to release the emails, interview transcripts, recordings. The federal government has pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein. Without objection, so ordered. Senate has now passed the Epstein. bill as soon as it comes over from the House.

This is a watershed moment for the MAGA coalition until two days before Congress voted, President Donald Trump was urging Republicans to back off. He brought prominent GOP lawmakers to the Oval Office to get them to reverse themselves on what was known as a discharge petition to release these files. Here he is in July, explaining that it was all a big Epstein hoax, as he called it. Well, I haven't been overly interested in it. You know, it's something, it's a hoax that's been built up way beyond proportion. I can say this.

Those files were run by the worst scum on earth. They were run by Comey. They were run by Garland. They were run by Biden. And by the way, I never went to the island. And Bill Clinton went there, supposedly, 28 times. I never went to the island, but Larry Summers, I hear, went there. He was the head of Harvard.

And many other people that are very big. big people. Nobody ever talks about them. I've never had the privilege of going to his island. The jockeying and drama led Trump to break up with one of his superfans, Marjorie Taylor Green, the former QAnon Believer, who won congressional elections in Deep Red Georgia in 2020 and 2022. I've never owed him anything, but I fought for him for the policies and for America first. And he called me a traitor for standing with these women. and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition. A few days after that, she announced she was resigning her seat in January.

So Trump may have space-lasered MTG, you could say, but she won on the substance. The president reversed course on the evening of November 16th, posting on truth social that Republicans should now vote to release the files. I don't care, he wrote in all caps. This was a rare time when Trump failed to impose his will, on the Republican Party. So it's worth asking exactly why the scandal of Jeffrey Epstein has become such a potent

vessel for our country's populist rage. To start, it's not just a run-of-the-mill scandal. Here is a public service announcement where his victims, now grown women, show pictures of when they were girls and had met Jeffrey Epstein for the first time. I was 14 years old. I was 16 years old. I was 16. 17, 14.

years old. This is me. This was me. This was me when I met Jeffrey Epstein. This is me when I met Jeffrey Epstein. There are about a thousand of us. So off the bat, you have a serial statutory rapist who happens to have an Illuminati-level Rolodex. Epstein was friends with the people who run the world. Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Woody Allen, Alan Dershowitz, Ehud Barak, hedge fund Titans and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors. And while Epstein himself has been dead for six years now, after he managed to hang himself in his prison cell despite being under the watch of guards for 24 hours a day, we still don't know much about whether his pals were implicated in his sex crimes. And in this respect, the Epstein scandal is not just about a handful of power

players. It's an indictment of our entire ruling class. And that's why Epstein is the perfect storm for a populist moment. He and his fixer, Galane Maxwell, have been tried and convicted. That is true. But what about all the other elites who bedded 14 and 15 and 16-year-old girls that were passed around like party favors? Who else was on the private plane? The Lolita Express. Who visited this guy in his private island, his townhouse in Manhattan, his ranch in New Mexico? Here is a 2019 interview with Virginia Guffray, one of Epstein's victims, who sadly took took her own life earlier this year, explaining her encounter with Prince Andrew, who was recently stripped of his title.

The first time in London, I was so young, Gieland woke me up in the morning and said, you're going to meet a prince today. I didn't know at that point that I was going to be trafficked to that prince. And then that night, Prince Andrew came to her house in London, and we went out to club tramp. Prince Andrew got me alcohol. It was in the VIP section. And it was, I'm pretty sure it was vodka.

Prince Andrew was like, let's dance together. And I was like, okay. And we leave Club Tramp. And I'd hop in the car with Gieland and Jeffrey. And Gieland said he's coming back to the house. And I want you to do for him what you do for Epstein. Prince Andrew, as he was then titled, gave a calamitous interview denying these claims to the BBC. I have no recollection of ever meeting this lady.

None whatsoever. You don't remember meeting her. There are a number of things that are wrong with that story. One of which is that I don't know where the bar is in Tramps. I don't drink. I don't think I've ever bought a drink in Tramp whenever I was there. She described dancing with you and you profusely sweating and that she went on to have bath, possibly...

There's a slight problem with the sweating because I have a peculiar medical condition, which is that I don't sweat. This is editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine, John Podoritz. You have the mix of prominent politicians, prominent industrialists, prominent businessmen, and very rich people.

who seem to have been engaged in private hijinks with each other involving illegal sexual activity. I don't know what could possibly be any more involving hypnotic, frightening, titillating than that. What we have here is actual rape of underage girls in which a prominent, wealthy person who made it a habit of making contacts and establishing relationships with former presidents,

heads of corporations, the most important industrialists in the 20th century, like Bill Gates and others, interwove himself into society at a very high level in multiple ways. And the currency appears to have been trafficking in criminal sexual activity that involved raping underage girls. So much of what we know about the Epstein scandal looks like a tip of a very large iceberg. There are so many unanswered questions.

Let's start with his finances. When he killed himself in 2019, Epstein was worth more than half a billion dollars. How? Why? We know that a former hedge fund CEO, Leon Black, paid Epstein $158 million for what he claimed was tax advice and estate planning, really? But Epstein is a college dropout who was fired from his job at the prestigious Dalton School as a math teacher after only three years in the mid-1970s. We also know that Les Wexner, the founder and CEO of L Brands, trusted Epstein with managing his portfolio and gave him a lavish Manhattan townhouse. Now, leaving aside the money, the friends that Epstein accumulated over the years

are a who's who of politics, law, the arts, and the media. Recent emails disclosed through the House Oversight Committee and the Epstein estate show that Michael Wolfe, the chronicler of the rich and powerful, was an Epstein confidant, and Catherine Rumler, the current Chief Counsel for Goldman Sachs, was also a buddy. Even the populist mastermind and Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Steve Bannon, was caught up in Epstein's web. He provided media coaching to Epstein in 2019 as he was facing his second indictment from the Justice Department recently released documents show. The most prominent elites who were once chummy with Epstein were two presidents, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. There is a kind of

dark poetry in that. The two families that squared off in the 2016 election were both friends of Epstein. Clinton flew on Epstein's jet 26 times, according to reporting from 2016. He also visited Epstein's townhouse in New York. Trump was close to Epstein for years, Dilley broke off the relationship around 2004. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Trump signed Epstein's 50th birthday book with a drawing of a naked woman. He charged that prompted Trump to sue the newspaper for defamation. So how do we get here? Only 30 years ago, our country was embroiled in a sex scandal that really seems PG compared with the lurid exploitation detailed by Epstein's victims. Back then, it was Bill Clinton who was at the

center of the storm, and while his affairs obsessed Washington at the time, he was not a trafficker, and his paramours were old enough to vote. I'm Eli Lake, and you're listening to breaking history. After the break, how Bill Clinton survived the kind of sex scandal that used to leave political careers in ruin. It's the Nissan Black Friday event where you can... Wait, wait. Isn't it like a month long now? Nissan Blackfri-Mondh? Does that work?

It's the Nissan Blackfri-Mond event. On remaining 2025 Rogan Centra, get 0% financing. Plus, get $1,000 Nissan bonus on kicks models. This Black Friday, you've got a whole month to catch all the exclusive offers waiting for you. See your local Nissan dealer or nissan.ca for details. Conditions apply. The sex scandals have been a part of American politics since the founding of the country. In Thomas Jefferson's first term, a disgruntled former ally named James Callender,

first broke a story that obsesses historians to this day, Jefferson's affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. Jefferson dismissed the story at the time as a miserable lie, but of course it was true. Grover Cleveland nearly lost his first presidential election in 1884 after the Buffalo Evening Hellegraph broke the news that Cleveland had raped and impregnated Maria Halpin. This prompted the Republican slogan, Ma, Ma, Where's Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha. Cleveland almost certainly had a child out of wedlock,

though it's disputed whether the child was the result of a rape. Moving on to the 20th century, there was the corrupt Warren G. Harding. I would say the modern era of presidential sex scandals, people might point to say things we found out about President John F. Kennedy later, but I would say it's Warren G. Harding. This is historian Christine Rosen, who is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. There were accusations made in the very partisan newspapers of the era in the early days of the Republic. But the Warren G. Harding scandal was a scandal, the first scandal in sort of real time,

where accusations were made about a long-time affair with one of his good friends' wives when he was in Ohio. And then once he was in the White House, a scandal involving a secretary at out of wedlock, child. And in fact, all of it was true at the time, although the woman in question, the secretary was smeared as a liar and a traitor and all these other things. In, I think, in around 2016, 2017, DNA evidence showed that actually her child was Warren G. Harding's baby. Harding was the last real-time presidential sex scandal until Belklin, meaning it was a sex scandal that emerged while he was in office. But plenty of presidents cheated on their wives and conducted private lives that would shock the voters if it ever got out. It's just that the

scandals were covered up at the time. Here is former White House intern for President John F. Kennedy, Mimi Alford, reading from her 2012 memoir on NBC, Once Upon a Secret. And here she reveals atrocious behavior from JFK when he was the commander-in-chief. He had been guilty of an unforgivable episode at the White House pool during one of our noonday swims at the end of the summer. Dave Powers was sitting poolside while the president and I swam lazy circles around each other. The president swam over and whispered in my ear. Mr. Powers looks a little tense, he said. Would you take care of it? It was a dare, but I knew exactly what he meant. Take care of it. That was a challenge to give Dave Powers oral sex. I don't think that. I don't think

the president thought I'd do it. But I'm ashamed to say that I did. It was pathetic, a sordid scene. Dave was jolly and obedient as I stood in the shallow end of the pool and performed my duties. The president silently watched. We should say Mimi Alfred was only 19 years old for that incident. So powerful public figures were largely protected for most of the 20th century by the journalists who covered them. This is Christine Rosen again. They were all in the same class. Many of them had gone to school together. The people who worked in these White Houses were friends with the newspaper men and the editors

of the major newspapers. So collusion is actually the right word. But I would say it was a kind of polite, manners-based collusion of, well, we just aren't going to talk about that. So that's unseemly, because look at this president is doing this important work. And so we're not going to get down in the gutter with these accusations or even acknowledge them when they're brought to our attention. This was also, again, this was particularly with Kennedy.

the feminist movement was not really, had not really gained steam yet, certainly with FDR as well. So there is a big shift in terms of what is brought to the public's attention once you have a very activist feminist movement starting to discuss this stuff as a matter of protecting women's rights and protecting women's integrity. And so that's where cultural shift will eventually have an interesting and serious impact on politics. Now, the rise of feminism as a social and political movement explains part of the story. More women became politicians, and the norms for workplace relationships evolved as well. It was no longer okay for the boss to come on to his secretary or intern. They get a flavor of how these norms were changing. This is a snippet from a 1970 interview on the

Dick Cavett show with feminist writer Susan Brown Miller. I think we're probably more optimistic about the ability of men to change. We think there's going to be a struggle, and we don't think that men are going to give up their power and privilege easily because they benefit from oppressing women. They really do. Hefner has built an empire based on oppressing women. One lady that we spoke to who is a member of your movement would not come on tonight with you, Mr. Heffner, because she said it would be like putting Stokely Carmichael on with George Wallace. I don't know which of you is flattered by that, but... Feels like Wallace, ain't that's... I don't know which of you is which, but have you had this reaction

before tonight? Yes, I think Playboy's been singled out along with, you know, the Miss America contest and some other things as, you know, as the extreme example of what the new feminists feel is the wrong image for women. But, you know, having been described as an oppressor, can I respond just a little bit? All right. I'm more in sympathy than perhaps, you know, the girls realize with... Women. I'm sorry. Yes, I'm 35. Than the ladies realize. I use girls. referring to women of all ages. You should stop. I want to be called a boy.

Oh, I see. Okay. Hugh Hefner actually was on the set during the interview, sitting on the couch. And as Susan Brownmeller said that, you could actually see him grimace. Okay. So another factor was the effect of Watergate. That's the scandal that made stars of Bob Woodward

and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters, who defied the Nixon White House to pursue the story of how Nixon's operatives spied on the Democratic Party headquarters in 1972. The effect was that the old model of journalism, being a courtier to the powerful, was replaced by the defiant muckraker.

The politician was no longer the source so much as the target. Kennedy would carouse with his journalist friends, knowing that they wouldn't reveal his personal life secrets in the press. After Watergate, though, the rules changed. And this meant that for about 20 years, sex scandals were a potent way of taking down public figures. Just look at Senator Gary Hart. He was the frontrunner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, but his campaign was cut short after the press snapped photos of him with a woman who was not his wife.

Here he is dropping out of the race in 1987. I'm not a beaten man. I'm an angry and defiant man. I've said that I've been, but I don't break. And believe me, I'm not broken. A few years later in 1991, Clarence Thomas nearly lost his nomination to the Supreme Court after allegations from one of his former staffers, Anita Hill, emerged that he discussed pornographic movies and made unwanted advances when she worked for him at the Department of Education and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I'm concerned, as far as I'm concerned,

it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks, who in any way deign to think for themselves. And then in 1992, the Washington Post broke the story to how Senator Bob Packwood, a Republican from Oregon, would chase female staffers around his office like it was a frat house. After the Senate Ethics Committee voted unanimously in 1995 to recommend his expulsion from the Senate, after compiling evidence that he made 17 unwanted sexual advances toward his female staff, Bob Packwood resigned. It is my duty to resign. It is the honorable thing to do for this country, for the Senate. So by the time we get to the early 1990s, you have a pretty powerful feminist argument that's been made first in the academy that's then trickled down into more feminist activist groups about. sexual harassment, about workplace sexual harassment in particular. Again, this is Christine

Resin. This has now become something that the culture is wrestling with, what kinds of new norms need to be developed. And the trajectory of this was very much that men need to change their behavior. And there's absolute truth in a lot of that critique. Now, more radical feminists wanted to see much more control of men's behavior. They wanted to see the criminalization of things that, you know, looked to a lot of people more like flirting or more like consensual involvement. So those tensions existed, they still exist. But I think what was interesting about the Packwood case and the Clarence Thomas case in particular is that you had very well funded, very well organized feminist groups who decided these people are going down. And they did a very good effort at doing that. And in both

cases, it was about workplace sexual harassment. It was about Packwood chasing people around his desk. It was about the allegations against Clarence Thomas. By, it should be. be noted, a Yale-educated woman who would come before Congress and testify to what had happened to her. And in each of these cases, I think it's important to note that the accusers who feminist groups tended to champion looked a lot like the feminists themselves. They were usually well-educated, upper-class women who had gotten into the workforce at a time when a lot of this male behavior was just considered normal, and they were fighting against it. So I think, the context of sexual harassment law and a lot of the debates about how norms needed to change

were the underlying, the substrate, if you will, of a lot of these debates, and then we get to Bill Clinton. So that's the context of Bill Clinton's first of many sex scandals as he became a national figure. By 1992, the Democratic Party, we should say, was in shambles. Ronald Reagan thumped his opponents twice in 1980 and 1984, and in 1988, George H.W. Bush won easy against Mike Dukakis. That's 12 years of wilderness for the Democrats. Clinton was the governor of Arkansas, and the only real national exposure that he had was a disastrous speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention that went on so long. The biggest applause line that he received was that he said, in closing. In closing.

So that's the context of Clinton's first scandal. He didn't really have. have a public record, and he was vulnerable. One of the many paramours of his past, former television news reporter and Arkansas state government employee named Jennifer Flowers with a G, came forward to the star tabloid to discuss her affair with Governor Clinton. She had tapes of their time together as well as phone calls. Remember, only five years ago, Gary Hart's political career sunk after far less evidence of his affair with Fawn Hall. But Bill Clinton was made, you could say, of tougher stuff. A crisp evening in 1992.

Across the nation, families are gathered around their TVs, many just finishing the Super Bowl. But now for something a little different. On CBS, 60 Minutes, cuts to a segment that will make history. It's been quite a week for Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. On Monday, his picture was on the cover of Time magazine, anointed by the press as the frontrunner for the Democratic. presidential nomination.

Six days later, he's trying to salvage his campaign. Sitting on a modest set side by side with Hillary, she's in an aqua turtle neck with matching jacket, gold earrings, a 90s headband, Bill is with his salt and pepper good looks. The lighting is soft, the camera tight on

their faces, capturing every glance, every measured expression. She's a legend and is described in some detail in a supermarket tabloid what she calls a 12-year affair. And here's Bill Clinton. That allegation is false.

Bill denies what Flowers says. Well, he's careful to deny the 12-year affair part. But now the coast, Stephen Croft, turns to their marriage, becomes a little more coded. You've said that your marriage has had problems, that you've had difficulties. What do you mean by that? What does that mean? Is that some kind of help us break the code? I mean, does that mean, you were separated?

Does that mean that you had communication problems? Does that mean you contemplated divorce? Does it mean adultery? I think the American people, at least people that have been married for a long time. I know what it means and know the whole range of things that it can mean. And here comes an even more careful response. Are you prepared tonight to say that you've never had an extramarital affair? I'm not prepared tonight to say that any married couple

helping me should ever discuss that with anyone but themselves and it works because Hillary is sitting there nodding right beside him in other words it's none of your business america i have acknowledged wrongdoing i have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage i have said things to you tonight and to the american people from the beginning that no american politician ever has i think most americans who are watching this tonight they'll know what we're saying they'll get it, and they'll feel that we have been more candid. And I think what the press has to decide is, are we going to engage in a game of gotcha? By and large, people found that it was real.

Bill Clinton had humbled himself. Flowers, of course, was furious. She held a press conference to reiterate her claims and played those secretly taped phone conversation she had with Clinton as proof, but the Clinton campaign responded, and they worked to discredit her. A few weeks later, Clinton came in second in New Hampshire. While the evening is young, and we don't know yet what the final tally will be, I think we know enough to say with some certainty that New Hampshire tonight has made Bill Clinton the comeback kid. From there, he ended up winning the Democratic nomination and ultimately

the 1992 election in a three-way race. By the way, Clinton's handling of the flowers affair seemed to kick off a trend in the 1990s. Men caught doing bad stuff and then owning it. Remember Prince Charles admitting to his affair with now Queen Camilla in 1994? Did you try to be faithful and honorable to your wife when you took on the vow of marriage? Yes, absolutely. And you were? Yes. until it became irretrievably broken down. Or look at Hugh Grant after he got caught with a sex worker in 1995 on Jay Leno. I think you know in life pretty much what's a good thing to do and what's a bad thing.

And I did a bad thing, and there you have it. I think it's hard to remember just how big a deal this was for royalty presidents and aims. listers admitting their mistakes, saying, yeah, I'm human. So a more humble man might have learned his lessons from Jennifer Flowers. Clinton survived, but it was a close call. But of course, Clinton did not learn those lessons. What his staffs would end up calling bimbo eruptions kept coming for Bill Clinton. There was Kathleen Willie, who alleged that Clinton placed her hand on his genitals inside the White House. There was Paula Jones, who settled her sexual harassment case with Clinton out of court after Clinton paid her $850,000, but the biggest scandal of the

1990s that defined Clinton's presidency was, of course, Monica Lewinsky. This is how it started when the allegations were first made. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never. These allegations are false, and I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you. The people applauding in that clip were First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and other White House staff.

They were gathered for a child care event when Clinton made a last-minute appearance to deliver that denial. But here's the problem. Bill Clinton was lying. So the story was that Bill Clinton took advantage of a 21-year-old girl working in the White House as an intern, as a married man in his late 40s. This, again, is John Podoritz.

And everything that we knew and everything that we had been taught in the previous 20 years about power dynamics and the way workplaces were, if it were anybody but the president of the United States, if this were the head of Citibank, if it were the head of General Electric, if it were the head of Xerox, if it were the head of General Motors, and such a scandal came out, they would have been fired or at least, you know, raked over the coals by their, once it became public, by their board of directors, fired, sued into non-existence, their lives, destroyed. because they had done something that they knew perfectly well they were not supposed to do,

and that if you add in, you know, an extant marriage and a marriage that's part of the political portrait of the person who was engaged here, Bill Clinton, you know, you have a scandal that anybody else in a position of authority in the United States would have been brought down by. You have to understand that after Monica comes forward, and she has evidence, a blue dress with Clinton's seaman on it, the affair obsessed Washington, much like the Epstein scandal obsesses our country today. Clinton's depositions were released by Congress, leading to this infamous example of political hair splitting. The statement of your attorney, Mr. Bennett, is the Paul of Jones deposition, the statement that there was no sex of any kind in any manner. shape or form of President Clinton was a utterly false statement. Is that correct? It depends upon what the meaning of the word is. Yes.

Eventually, Bill Clinton did have to apologize for real. I agree with those who have said that in my first statement after I testified, I was not contrite enough. I don't think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned. Now, that was not enough to stop the House from impeaching Clinton, which they did in 1998. And for a month or so, it looked like his presidency was in real trouble, once bitten twice shy, so to speak. But in the end, the Republicans didn't have enough votes to convict him in the Senate trial. Clinton survives. But he survives not just because he was a masterful political communicator.

He also survived because the norm enforcers on his own side, in this case, the feminists, movement, largely rallied behind him. Perhaps the most famous defense came from Gloria Steinem, who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in March of 1998. In it, she argued that Clinton's behavior for women like Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, and Kathleen Willie did not meet the threshold for sexual harassment as legally defined. She insisted that Clinton's advances stopped when the women indicated disinterest, framing this as evidence of consent and concluding that the president had earned what critics later called the one-free grope standard. If the president had behaved with comparable insensitivity toward environmentalists

and at the same time remained their most crucial champion and bulwark against an anti-environmental Congress, would they be expected to desert him? I don't think so. If President Clinton were as vital to preserving freedom of speech as he is to preserving reproductive freedom, would journalists be condemned as inconsistent for refusing to suggest he resign? Forget it. Sinam wanted to distinguish Clinton from other harassers and abusers in the 1990s.

There was and is a difference between the accusations against Mr. Clinton and those against Bob Packwood and Clarence Thomas. Commentators might stop puzzling over the president's favorable poll ratings, especially among women if they understood the common sense guidance. line to sexual behavior that came out of the women's movement 30 years ago. No means no. Yes means yes. Betty Friedan, founder of the National Organization for Women and the author of the feminine mystique, took a similar stance.

She argued that the investigations into Clinton were a right-wing plot aimed not at protecting women, but at dismantling a presidency aligned with feminist legislative goals. One effect of all of this was that Republicans had now become the party that in fact that enforced private morality for public officials. After Republicans lost many seats in the 1998 midterm elections, House Speaker Newt Gingrich stepped aside, opening up a new leadership election for the Republicans in the House. The frontrunner at the time was Bob Livingston,

chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee. But when it emerged that he too had an affair outside of his marriage, Livingston dropped out of the race. To my colleagues, my friends, and most especially my wife and family, I have hurt you all deeply, and I beg your forgiveness. I was prepared to lead our narrow majority as Speaker, and I believe I had it in me to do a fine job. But I cannot do that job or be the kind of leader that I would like to be under current circumstances. It was a shocking development, and that cleared the way for a former high school wrestling coach named Dennis Hastert to become the next speaker of the house. Now, in one of history's cruel ironies, we learned much later that Denny Hastert had led a far more scandalous private life than either Livingston or Clinton approaching Epstein levels.

It all goes back to the 1970s when Hassert was a popular Illinois high school wrestling coach. and allegedly sexually abused several teenage boys on his team. These boys were 14, 15, 16 years old. Jolene Burge told ABC News, her late brother, Stephen, was one of his victims, which he revealed to her when he came out as gay. I asked him, Stevie, when was your first same-sex experience? I mean, he just looked at me and said it was with Dennis Astard. After the break, what Clinton's legacy has wrought and how it brings us back,

to Jeffrey Epstein. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear off about transferring your business. when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do. Business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. One of the fascinating things about the Clinton impeachment

is that the president's job approval rating peaked at 73 percent in the middle of it. In December of 1998, according to Gallup. Part of that was because America was going through a boom economy before the first internet bubble burst. And part of that was because Bill Clinton was an extraordinary politician. But it was also because the leaders of the feminist movement gave liberal Americans permission to look past Clinton's dalliances. So for a lot of us at that time, who considered ourselves mildly, you know, feminist, maybe we didn't ally with every point in the feminist movement, But for many of us, myself included, when he called Monica Lewinsky that woman and the feminist left rushed to defend him, that was it for a lot of us. This is Christine Rosen again.

Many of them really admired Hillary Clinton. Ironically, even though she attained power initially by marrying it, she then, of course, ran for office herself later. But she was his staunch defender. She helped organize the trashing of the women who were accusing him and certainly of what happened to my husband. Monica Lewinsky. And then they had a villain in Ken Starr. They had someone who they could draw attention to as being overly zealous and out to get him for political reasons. So for all of those things, it still came back to the fact that they traded their moral high ground with regard to what's the correct way to treat women in a workplace for the political expediency

of keeping Bill Clinton in office. This is not to say that feminism was over, but the Democrats were no longer a party that could credibly call out the kind of piggish, misogyny that the feminists had built their movement around in the 1960s and 1970s. Bill Clinton was considered an elder statesman after his presidency ended. Hillary Clinton was a U.S. Senator and the frontrunner for the presidency in 2008. And we should also notice that it was in the 1990s and 2000s that Jeffrey Epstein's crime spree was at its peak. The culture had moved on. We were in many ways a coarser society after the Clinton era. This was the era of entourage, a male fantasy, about an A-list actor and his friends from Queens betting beautiful starlets with zero consequence.

We saw the rise in internet pornography in the 2000s. It took the emergence of Donald Trump in 2016 for the Democrats to relearn the old lessons of feminism from a generation earlier. I got to use some TikTok just in case they start kissing her. You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful. I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Whatever you want. Grab them by the p. I can do anything. That was, of course, the infamous acts as Hollywood tape released right before Trump's second debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was shocking enough that some Republicans felt they had to distance themselves

from their own party's presidential nominee. Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House, sent on a conference call with leading House Republicans three days after the story hit that he would not defend Trump and would not expect other Republicans to defend him either. And in a way that made sense, Republicans remember, where the party that thought Clinton's affairs and lying about his affairs was an impeachable offense. Nonetheless, many Republicans stood by Trump after the Access Hollywood tape. Here is Jerry Falwell Jr., then president of Liberty University, and one of the country's

leading evangelical Christians. Unlike Hillary Clinton, I have faith in the intelligence and the savvy of the American people, of evangelicals, and they better than anybody else understand that Christianity is about forgiveness, it's about repentance, and they've seen the change in Donald Trump. I've seen it personally. He's not the same person he was one, two, three, four, five years ago. So he's learned so much from the people. You can see in that clip how many social conservatives made the same calculation as the feminists in the 1990s. The ends justified the means.

And besides, the Democrats defended their norm violator first. This is John Pidaritz again. It follows the Steinem argument in this sense, which is, oh, you get to do whatever you want. Yes. And you still get to get elected. but we are supposed to hold ourselves to a standard that you don't hold yourself to. Well, uh-uh, sorry, buddy, we're not playing that game anymore. You're not taking us out by holding us to a standard that you are not going to hold to.

We're going to happily go and we'll vote for Donald Trump, and we're not going to kick him out of office. Trump knew just what to do when the second debate finally came around. He brought special guests like Paula Jones and other victims of Bill Clinton, And when he was finally asked about his candid remarks, here is what he said. That was locker room talk. I'm not proud of it. I am a person who has great respect for people, for my family, for the people of this country. And certainly I'm not proud of it.

But that was something that happened. If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse, minor words, and his was action. His was what he's done to women. There's never been anybody in the history of politics. politics in this nation that's been so abusive to women. So you can say any way you want to say it, but Bill Clinton was abusive to women. Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attack them viciously, four of them here tonight. To repeat a longstanding cliche, that's how we got Trump.

At this point, all bets were off. But after Trump wins in 2016, the Democrats did revive that workplace feminism of the 80s. and early 90s, and with a vengeance. The Me Too movement was born, and like a pittard hoisted in error, the blast radius was mainly on the left. Prominent Democrats went down, from the vile film producer Harvey Weinstein to Senator Al Franken, whose sin was a tasteless photo he took while performing for troops overseas, where he appeared to be grabbing the breasts of a woman who was sleeping. The Me Too era, of course, tried to target Republicans. Of course it did. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh became the Clarence Thomas of his era when Christine Blaise Ford

testified that he had participated in a sexual assault of her back in high school, but she couldn't remember key details nearly 40 years after the fact. Kavanaugh was eventually confirmed. Me Too kind of caught up with Bill Clinton as well. Here he is in 2018, sitting for an interview with NBC about a new mystery novel he had co-authored with James Patterson when he has asked whether he ever personally apologized to Monica Lewinsky. But you didn't apologize to her? I have not talked to her. Do you feel like to hold her an apology?

No, I do. I do not, I have never talked to her. But I did say publicly on more than one occasion that I was sorry. That's very different. The apology was public. Now, one of the problems with Me Too was that it snowballed into a moral panic. Men were accused of heinous crimes without any semblance of due process. What began as believe women became believe all women. Innocent men became pariahs.

And while I don't wish to defend the many friends of Epstein, particularly those that aided him after his first conviction, it's also true that some of the private emails from people like Larry Summers don't disclose a crime so much as horrendous personal judgment. Even with Bill Clinton, there is no evidence that he actually committed statutory rape with a girl trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell. So were compromises that excuse the bad behavior of Trump and Clinton worth it? As a purely political calculation, yes, it was. Trump delivered on policy for the pro-life movement. He appointed three originalist Supreme Court justices. And in 2022, Roe v. Wade, the decision that made abortion legal nationwide was overturned. Just as Bill Clinton advanced

feminist policies when he was president and appointed pro-choice justices. And at the same time, we should remember that politics is not a zero-sum game in our republic. There is value in upholding norms even when it's politically disastrous to do so. And one of the reasons why our politics has coarsened so much in the Trump era is because of the compromises made for Clinton a generation earlier. And this does bring things back to Jeffrey Epstein. As Trump said in that infamous Axis Hollywood tape, When you're a star, they let you do it. That is a very ugly truth about how things work in America.

When you are wealthy, famous, and have all the right friends, you get away with things the rest of us wouldn't dream of. Epstein only served 13 months in a private wing of a Palm Beach, Florida jail, the first time he was convicted of soliciting prostitution and the procurement of minors. to engage in prostitution. He was allowed a kind of work release for 12 hours a day during the time that he served. This was in 2008. After his release, Jeffrey Epstein was still a member in good standing for the global elite. That does explain the populist rage more than anything. The feminist let Bill Clinton get away with his sexual predations and the evangelicals let Trump

get away with his. Are we surprised that both of these scoundrels once considered Jeffrey Epstein a friend? All three were stars in their own way. And all three got away with it. Tired of the hot taste, the babble and the bitter. The who said what, dude, that's a love, because it trends on Twitter. Tired of the online, Manic pitch reaction Let's dive into the context Of the moment as it happened Re-education

Handcrafted dedication The best in podcast excellence The Eli Lake Experian Ah freedom from the nonsense Domestic propaganda They putting out that bullshit And say they dropped a bangor Freedom from the gossips, freedom from the skull,

freedom from the ones with guns repeating what they turn. The best in podcast, excellent, the Eli Lake Experian.