Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 902: How the men in the Epstein files defeated #MeToo and The Price of the Epstein Frenzy

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

https://web.archive.org/web/20260219135910/https://www.theverge.com/tech/874721/epstein-thiel-musk-trump-metoo With The Price of the Epstein Frenzy

This episode of Cognitive Dissinence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glorgyhole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is Cognitive Dissinance. Every episode we blasts anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to a

topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at. Today is Thursday. March, let's see, fourth or so that you're listening to this. It's in the Marchish region of France.

March 4th. March 4th. March 4th and do good. Yeah. Yeah. Too better than Epstein. That's not hard to do. Literally just, you know. Hey, don't rape kids.

Maybe don't rape kids. I think like that's your... And that's the show. That's it. That's the show. That's the show. Hey, everybody. A couple jazz hands.

Damn. So, see, so we got a couple of stories we want to talk about. One of them is from The Verge, how the men in the Epstein files defeated me too. And then a, uh, fucking the grossest apology. Apologetic, I should say. Not apology. Let me rephrase that entirely.

The grossest apologetic ever written by Lawrence Krause. This is from Quillette and it is called the Price of the Epstein Frenzy. And what he really means is I did bad things and I don't want to pay the price. Yeah, that's pretty much it. We'll get to Krause later.

Yeah. Because they think Krauss is like a minor player and all this. So minor. So minor. But somebody who's involved in our sort of niche, so it's important to talk about him at least. But let's go back to the main story here.

This story from the Verge. By the way, I just want to say this. The Verge has had some excellent reporting. Yeah. This is like an organization that had not been on my radar until fairly recently. And I've read a handful of articles, like longer form articles from The Verge, in the last probably year or so. And I am impressed with the writing is good, the research is good,

the analysis is good. They've done a nice like this is like on my radar now as somebody to pay attention to journalistically. Yeah, this is a great article too. This one really does sort of do a sort of medium dive into the email

tranche that was released. So it's 2 million documents, 3 million documents gets released. And these are a lot of Epstein's emails and you know, his personal communications. These get released out into the public. And I think that it is important. to point out that just because your name appears in there doesn't necessarily mean you had any

wrongdoing. I think if your name appears in there any time after 2008, it's very questionable. We know what happened in 2007 and eight was when he was charged with essentially a rich person's way of saying child rape, right? That's what it was. It's solicitation of an underage prostitute. that's not a real thing. That's a made-up thing so people who commit crimes can feel okay about putting it on a resume.

That's literally what it's on there. Like when I have to confess my crimes to other people in this very high-end social circle, I can say a very softened thing about what I did. Yeah, you know, I was listening on my way here. I was listening to No Rogan experience.

And you guys did a really great job covering a bunch of like, Joe Rogan's stuff that he had said and guessed that he'd had on about Epstein. And one of the things that, like, Rogan said, and also I just bring this up because it's kind of baked into the charge itself, the charge, which by the way, he was convicted of. He pled guilty. He pled guilty. So, you know, like, Joe Rogan dismisses this as, like, statutory rape, as if statutory

in front of the word rape makes it a lesser-than version of rape. Sure. And I think that that's the same thing here, where it's the same thing here. It's like, well, it's solicitation of a minor for prostitution. That's raping a child. It doesn't matter if you paid that person after you raped them. Like, I don't care what present you give somebody after you rape somebody. It's still rape.

It doesn't matter if it's like, well, I raped this person because they were drunk, or I was able to rape them because they were young, or I was able to rape them because I was physically stronger. None of that. All of that is just the context in which the rape occurs. But there's this social idea that if you put a what people I think who are shit, they imagine that to be some kind of a lesser than qualifier, which like blunts the edge. I honestly think we should just stop the differentiation.

Yeah. It's just rape. Yeah. Like that's what it is. And in this case, it's child rape. Yeah. And I don't think that there should even be such a thing. They should not even be a charge called solicitation of a minor for prostitution.

a minor cannot be a prostitute. And it's important, too, to point out that this is not, this is a ongoing long abuse of minors by this person, enough so that like 200 people have collected funds from being abused by Jeffrey Epstein, from either the government, from local authorities, or from his estate. Yeah.

So this is a lot of people have, sued Jeffrey Epstein's estate or other places and have won money specifically from him abusing them. This is a wide network of him abusing these young people. He's done it and he did it for a very long time. We know he groomed these people from before. So if he was continually raping them after they became legal, they were still being raped afterwards. Yeah, they're just now being sex trafficked. Yeah. It's just a different type of thing. The other thing you have to remember, too, is that he pled guilty. Now, some people plead guilty because they're forced into that situation.

Often people will do that if there's like a public defender or something like this. You don't see a lot of billionaires pleading down cases. Billionaires have enough resources and they have enough connections where these things don't matter. And we can see that here because he was only charged with one. thing that he pled down to when we know there was a myriad number of things that he did. And he got nights and weekends in prison. Yeah, man. I mean, that's such a good point.

I think I want to add, like, plus one to that. Imagine how strong the evidence was that a billionaire was like, I'll take an L. Yep. Even a little bit of an L. Because I'll tell you what, like, if you, if you're a billionaire and you're like, there's nothing here, here, you would rip that fucking. prosecution apart publicly to exonerate yourself in front of everybody. Even if there was, chances are you might get off on it.

We've seen so many people who are rich be able to manipulate the system enough to give it enough of a wedge to not actually pay any consequences. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the very fact, like it is, it is in many ways more damning that he took that lesser than, which nobody, and this is like a central part that I think we should have. is the foundation. Nobody looking at this from the outside, and I'm looking at you right now, Lawrence Krause, nobody looking at this from the outside should read his conviction that he pled

guilty to his conviction and think that is not child rape. That's something smaller than that. That's just child rape. He's a child rapist. Everything else is context. But context doesn't really matter when you're raping a kid. You know, that's like, well, I raped him in a room where the walls were blue. Like, what is that? That's nothing. There's nothing that you, there's no like ameliorating circumstance to child rape that lessens it. But there's all, there is an attempt and this, these articles really are about like much broader, but there's like, there is a real active working network of people who are trying to minimize what it means to abuse women and girls. Sure. And to normalize and renormalize the abuse of women and girls. And to sort of

shift society away from holding people accountable and trying to work toward equality. What really made me think when I was reading this particular article from The Verge, there are so many mentions of all these really rich and powerful people. Musk and Teal are mentioned multiple times because they were in communication with Jeffrey Epstein. They also support this very anti-woke, me too movement that popped up. I don't know if you remember this. I certainly do.

There was definitely a schism in our community around this and even before this from the atheism plus people and the free speech people. I don't know if you remember, but there was a weird dichotomy that built itself up in the free speech group that was like, hey, you should be able to say whatever you want. It should be able to hurt whoever you want. you should be able to be, you know, like basically use language however you want. Language doesn't mean violence, et cetera, et cetera. And then there was another group of people who were like, hey, man, you're being a misogynist, you're being shitty.

You know, you're probably grabby at conferences, et cetera, et cetera. That's a real shitty thing to do. And there was a schism, right? There was a genuine schism in the community around those things. And one side played it as a free speech thing. And one side played it as a misogyny type thing. Right. Yeah.

And not played it because literally that's what they were pointing out. Recognize it. I mean, they're just recognizing misogyny. I don't mean to say, I don't mean to downplay it by saying playing. But I definitely know that that's how it was framed, right? And what happened was, is I think that the people who were on the outs, these really rich people, they recognized that there was an inn, not just in our community, but in all types of communities all across, a misogynist, shitty.

in that they could then discredit me to by latching onto and promoting this free speech movement. And this article really shows a good, it does a good job of showing this free speech movement as the opposite of that other movement that was involved in the two movement, right? It does a good job of showing it. So it's like trickle down rape from these, from these billionaires. Yeah, man. They went out of their way to manipulate this and change this whole thing so that they could reframe the argument around free speech and they caught so many people in it. Yeah, man. Think about back to when we first started how important free speech was to this community.

There was like this whole specifically centered around being able to talk frankly about religion. Yeah, right. It was a real important piece. And I remember after Trump got elected, a very specific moment on our Facebook page, where we had posted something about like the first hundred days and we had done a show on it. And a bunch of people had listened to it. And this guy came on who had never heard the show

but had found it through somewhere and posted and typed a really mean, shitty message on our Facebook comment thread and then told everybody in that comment thread not to listen to us, go listen to somebody who's good at this, listen to this other person. And I remember deleting the comment.

And I remember getting into an argument with people on our Facebook page saying, hey man, that's free speech. It's not free speech. I built this platform, right? Like the platform is mine. I'm the one who built the platform. I'm the one who went out of my way

to continually post to social media so that there were thousands of people reading these things. I did all that work. That person doesn't get to come in here and use my megaphone to talk shit about me. I don't get to, I don't allow that. And it became a schism in our own community.

We lost a bunch of listeners because they thought that you guys were anti-free speech. I'm not anti-frey. That guy can say whatever he wants. Absolutely. He just can't use my microphone to say it. That's the difference.

That's the difference between the two things. And they couldn't parse that out. They couldn't put those two things together. And there was this huge schism in our community around free speech and the lengths that you could take free speech. Remember the Sargon about cod stuff. Yeah. The teaching your pug to say, like, freak out when you say gas the Jews.

You know, all that stuff, all that free speech stuff, that hate speech stuff. that was included. That was all included back then and it was all fueled, I think, a lot by some of these guys. Some of these guys were really deep into that and thought this is the way in which we can, we can lessen all the things that we get in trouble for. Yeah. I thought this, I never put these pieces together, but it is, this article does an amazing job of making a case for the idea that what the Me Too movement did is it, it created a, situation that was very exploitable by the intellectual dark web types and the free speech absolutist nuts who all had the same thing in common which is that they did not want to be held accountable for their hate speech their racism their misogyny they did not want to have any social consequences because i think it's important to be very clear nobody got well nobody is going to jail no here right so everybody still had free speech the government did not

impose laws, right? That's super important piece of this. Yeah. So the government did not impose any laws. What people wanted was a social consequence-free space where they could continue to victimize, abuse, and hurt other people without anybody calling them out on it. Because that's the world that they got to live in prior to Me Too. And what Me Too did is it said, hey, look at all these people behaving badly. They are going to reap consequences for that. Some of them are going to reap legal consequences when that's appropriate. And other people are going to suffer social consequences for their bad behavior. But bad behavior will no longer be tolerated. And we're going to expose this. And like, there was a huge pushback to that, but only by assholes. Like, no good person in your world,

No good person in your life. Nobody that is like genuinely unimpeachably non-misogynistic had a problem with me too. None of them. There was no, there's no principle stance here. All the people who like fall in this principle of like, well, I want to be able to say anything, it's because they already were saying and doing shit

and they were afraid of getting caught for slapping asses and abusing people and being shitty. I literally can't think of anybody where you're like, yeah, that person just unappreciable moral character. Also, you can't pick anybody out of that lineup where you're like, that person's life was ruined. Yeah, right.

Who can you pick out? Who can you look at and be like, you know, I can look at some people who have had the social consequences of social media who could not withstand it because they were not popular, right? There's a great book, so you've been publicly shamed,

where they talk about a few people who had been socially attacked beyond, you know, but they weren't, they didn't, they couldn't withstand that because they never had a social base to begin with. They were just a normal person

who was suddenly thrust in front of everybody in this social media world and then they were attacked. That's a different type of thing. I'm talking about a famous person who was famous, right. Who didn't commit a crime,

like an actual crime, who at this point is like crushed because of this. Yeah, they have all bounced back. Because who can you point to? I'm happy to hear it. Like if somebody in the audience is like, oh, but that guy or oh, that fella, I'm happy to hear it.

But I can't think any right now. There's none that coming to my head. I can't be like, oh, you know, sure, you could say Bill Cosby, but Bill Cosby was convicted of a crime, right? Carvey Weinstein was convicted of a crime. Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of a crime. So those are people who had to withstand consequences, admittedly, with fucking nights and weekends in prison, which isn't really that much of a consequence, to be perfectly frank, your own

wing of the prison, to be honest. Yeah, when your cell phone plan mimics your fucking response? Exactly. Come on. It's ridiculous. But at least there's some consequences there. But the rest of them, I don't remember. And I want to read a part of this article that talk to say social consequences oddly

seem to have freaked these guys out more than anything else. That was where the cancellation panic came from. a fear that people might use their right to freedom of association to avoid people who, for instance, palled around with known pedophiles. It's not illegal to do that after all. It's just gross. And that's true, right? It's just gross to hang out with these people. All these people that hung out with Epstein afterwards, right? They either you knew or you should have knew that he raped kids. Right. After 2008, either you knew or you shouldn't know, you should have known. Because, I'll tell you what, look at his logs with some of these really popular politicians. Those people weren't hanging out with him

after he got convicted of this. Right? Those people stopped hanging out with him after he got convicted of this. Now, don't get me wrong. Some really powerful pay lots of money, own lots, have lots of say and influence and power and money in the world didn't.

They didn't stop doing it. And all the pilot fish like Lawrence Krauss, they all hung out with him too. Right? Lawrence Krauss knew where his fucking bread was butter. That's all, that's a hundred percent for sure. And you can find that out when you hear his article. It's so gross.

Because you can tell, because he's talking about all the money that Epstein did. And it's, you know, oh, he was, he was all, he basically said he was sorry or whatever. And that's the end of it. But like, these people knew what the snake was. They knew what Jeffrey Epstein was. And then when you dig into these emails, you find that a bunch of these people were trying to figure out how to get out or how to attack me too. And they were talking shit about all the people who were in the Me Too movement because they're all a bunch of pigs.

Yeah, man. They're all a bunch of shitty gross people. And look at what gets uncovered. Like if we set for a moment, if we set aside the criminality and look at some of the language that these folks use when they talk about women, it tells us everything about what they really think about women. They are not, these are not like good people. These are people like who like Lawrence Krauss, I think, it says something like, oh, it's like an older lady, not one of these like young me too bitches.

The way that they speak about women when they look at their private email, even when they're not talking about like, you know, having sex with anybody, they're derogatory. They're otherizing. They're minimizing. They are treating women like they are props to be used in, you know, to show up at a party, to be a sex object.

they are people who hurt the lives of who's actually important, which is the men doing the work out here. They're appalled by it. Yeah. And they don't want to have to deal with women as people. What they want is to be able to have women as sex objects, and that's it. And any time that they have to deal with women as people, that gets in the way of the important work the men folk are doing.

Yeah. And like that just tells you everything you need to know about the world these powerful men want to build for you to live in. That is, because these are incredibly powerful people. Peter Thiel is one of the most powerful human beings walking around on legs today. And the world Batman wants to build is not a world that includes 50% at least 50% of the human beings on this planet. That should be a fucking problem for all of us, for all of us. There's a section of this where they're talking about the CBS portion of this, because Barry Weiss became the news director, executive director, or whatever it is, the news executive editor, the news of CBS, right? So she is somebody who's

very powerful and in charge at CBS. She hires on Peter Atia, former Joe Rogan guest, who happens to send messages, like here's one from Peter Atia, social consequences are the main ones that matter in the Epstein file drop. Anyone with an internet connection at a little free time can find out who's exchanging these friendly emails with an evil man. Take Peter Attia, one of Barry Weiss's newly named contributors to CBS.

Now, I did see that he stepped down after this. Who spent a great deal of time sending crass emails to a convicted sex criminal including notoriously one that said that noted, pussy is indeed low carb. Awesome. This dude's great.

Yeah, awesome dude. Here's the thing, man. understand this, right? I have in my private messages with friends said off-color things, 100%. You can find, you can dig through my stuff. It would be mildly embarrassing to find some of the off-color things that I've said in those messages. Those people saying things back to me, it would be mildly embarrassing for them to say, you know, like there might be some off-color thing that I have said, right? I think you could dig through everything I've ever done and it wouldn't be misogynistic.

I think you could dig through everything I've ever done and it wouldn't be a thing, a case of misogyny that you could pull out of there. You could probably pull some off-color shit that I've said that might be, you know, a little too soon about somebody who died or something like that. But for the most part, it's not anything.

It's literally, it would be barely embarrassing for me if these things got leaked out to the public. It wouldn't be an issue. Right. You'll also find nowhere in there, me conversing with a convicted, pedophile about sex. Thank you.

You'll never see that in my messages, right? You will see that in this guy's messages. In Lawrence Krause's messages, you'll see him workshopping ideas on how to get out of sexual harassment that now he's saying he sent to everybody. Well, you know, you included in your fucking CC was a convicted pedophile, dude. Thank you. Dude, a few things. One, I have a crazy conspiracy theory about Barry Weiss that I'm inventing.

that I invented in the car ride on the way here. Okay, cool. So here it is. So I wonder if Barry Weiss is not looking around and saying, I can transform CBS into a full network version of OAN or whatever. Because like those are sort of periphery cable shows. And if I'm Barry Weiss, I think she might be saying, you know what I can do?

I can seize this moment. And I can turn CBS to be full network maga. And what a market that is, because right now, all of that is for cable news. Cable TV shows cable Fox, not your local affiliate Fox. I wonder if she is not seeking to build a network, straight network version of a MAGA network, you know, and seeing that opportunity. I don't disagree. That's my crazy conspiracy. It's not.

That's not. Because I think that's what she's objectively doing. But like maybe I'm just pointing it out. Maybe she won't go full MAGA, but I think she will because she's. It seemed to be objectively doing that. Yeah. But like, I feel like when you, when you look through this stuff, I, like, I want to add to your, your comment, like, just like there would be no racism in my text messages anywhere, right?

Like, and that would be expected. It would be, like, I think, I think we have given ourselves too much social leeway to be a little hateful toward women. Like, men seem to have, like, kind of allowed. this sort of like a little bit of hate of hate toward women is okay we sort of know that like no amount of like racist shit should be found if you have like any racist comment like well that's fucking problematic but if it's like just a few like horrible things you said about women it's like it's locker room talk right locker room talk is the is is the phrase that was used to sort

of minimize trump saying you can sexually assault women if you're famous And America bought it. Yeah. Because in the back of all, in the back of our sort of social collective consciousness is this idea that like it's okay to be misogynist in a way that it is not okay to be racist or not okay to be anti-Semitic or not okay to be, you know, many of these other like problematic things that we've sort of socially said we're not doing anymore. And I think me too, one of the things that was so upsetting to so many people is they saw themselves reflect. and it was a that the Me Too was supposed to do. I think Me Too's strength and power was the incredible number of people who said, hey, that happened to Me Too.

And anybody with any fucking introspective sense should take that moment and say, oh my God, did I ever? And I probably did. And maybe I did because I was young or was unintentional or I didn't understand the moment or the dynamics were confusing to me, or I grew up inculturated in a rape culture, and I didn't fully understand it, or maybe it was intentional,

or maybe whatever. We all should have taken that moment to have a moment of real introspection. But there's a huge group of people who said, but if I introspect, I will lose power. And instead, what we can do is we can band together in the pariahs club, literally a phrase that Jeffrey Epstein used,

the pariahs club, and we can say, rather than introspect and change, for the greater good, what we can do instead is defeat this movement. We can contrast it to your point before. We can contrast it with free speech. We can take something that everybody grew up thinking was a widely held value, and we can say these values are now at odds.

Which side do you want to be on? And that was never a real choice. It was never an honest choice, I should say. It was always a dishonest framing. Clever framing. Clever fucking framing. And then what you have, is a group of people who are now making a case,

Lawrence Krause among them, but many others, who are now trying to make a case for why it is not like a disqualifying moral feature of another human being to be a pedophile. Yeah. And like Lawrence Krause's primary thing is, well, what if you get a bunch of money from it? Yeah. What?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to read two things about the famous people, you know, famous wealthy people. this is about Teal says that seems to have been a wake-up call to his associates like Teal who set out to undermine the movement

to make even rich men answerable for their crimes Teal's influence campaigns such as it was was less about cultural power and more about actual power it was smarter than Epstein's but also seems in retrospect modeled on the Edge Foundation

the so-called vibe shift the reemergence of slurs as edgy and feminism is cringe may have been at least partially funded by teal. And you see that, like, this is all free speech stuff, right? Talking bad about feminism, like, that was, if you go back to all those free speech warriors, right, everybody who was posting on YouTube at the time,

all those YouTube guys, like Thunderfoot and the amazing atheist guy and the, and like, I know some of these guys have changed and turned over a new leaf. Like a couple of these guys have changed their ways. But back in the day, those two guys, and then Carl, that Carl Benjamin guy, the guy who tried to shoulder you and almost fell down, broke his little, tiny little guy,

given his best. Little Carl. Poor little guy. Anyway, that little shit, those three guys. And then you have like that guy, that guy and that shoe on head. I know again, like they might have changed their colors since then a little bit, but they were,

at the time, these people, what they were, were anti-feminists going after a thing. Gaming at the time was the big thing, right? Feminism and gaming, they were going after this as a huge piece to grab a huge piece of their audience to collect a bunch of these disaffected young men who felt attacked by Me Too, who felt attacked, and this was before Me Too, who felt attacked by feminism in general, right? They were attacked by the idea that a woman, could have power. That shocked

the shit. Oh my God. No, we can't have this. We have to push back. And all these dudes followed these people and people like Peter Thiel and all these other people. They saw this as an easy in. This is so easy for us to continue on with this old boys club if I keep

demonizing these people. If I convince through all these YouTube mouthpieces that feminism is cringe, then I win. I get to win because now these are just a bunch of shrill ladies who are upset that things aren't going their way. And now I get to make fun of them.

I get to attack them. And Joe Rogan is exactly the same type of person, right? Back in the day, I've actually listened to some of his shows where he does come off as, you know, maybe not feminist, but at least sympathetic to the cause. And then you listen to him now and he's like 100% not that guy, right? He's 100% against that stuff. Elon Musk. Here's a piece about Elon Musk.

A day before Business Insider reported that he had sexually harassed a flight attendant, Musk announced he was joining the Republican Party. Because he gets cover. Well, because like that's the cover for it. They want to be a misogynist. If you don't like feminism, where are you going to go? Yeah, that's your house, man. Where are you going to go?

They knew that this was a party for them. They knew that they could capture this. And think about how easy it is to capture a party. Listen to all the people who, said how easy it was to capture the Democratic Party. Well, it's just as easy to capture the Republican Party and be able to fight against half the world's population, right, to subjugate half the world's population. They love it. They love it. Yeah. And like, I think one thing that's really important that you read a moment ago was that Peter Thiel may have funded these, like,

this is not an, this is not a grassroots thing. This is coordinated and funded by billionaires. Yeah. And the reason they do it. Like, I think, I think, I think, sort of like feminism has always had to scratch and claw and fight from it always always always always I do think that it had some momentary sort of like a wedge of social acceptance when it started to become apparent to everybody that economically it would be beneficial we've not built an economy that works on a single income so now we have to create space for us to accept the labor capital of women. And we can only do that if we build enough space for them to work.

But then we did not then want to contend with the freedoms that are incumbent with that same labor and the money. So there's now a space that is being carved out, I think, where people are trying to have women's cake and eat it too. They want women to be educated enough and attend to the work for. force to contribute financially to the household and still be subjugated to the man of the household. Boy, that's a fucking big ask. That's what? And then women are looking around saying, well, what's in it for me? And that's all happening sort of at the ground level. And that is a sort of

fight among the sort of like the people, the Vox, right? That's like the Vox populates happening. But like the billionaires are looking around saying like, well, as long as they're squabbling down there, I don't really have to worry because what they're all doing is consuming for me. and they're pushing that income and the money up to the top. Where they got involved, I think, was in me too. Or it was like, wait a minute, we could get in trouble. Now I could get in trouble because I've been insulated. You guys have been squabbling down here, but I don't care because you're buy, buy, buy, buy.

The money still funnels up to me. The only time that the billionaires got involved was when all of a sudden they had some accountability. And now they had something to lose. Because as long as they created this sort of like social tension, for the masses, there was nothing for them to lose. Yeah. And then all of a sudden now, oh, no, my guys are getting in trouble. I could get in trouble?

Oh, shit. Hang on. Let me go ahead and find a way to quash this. And it's easy because all you've got to do is convince the masses of something that they want to believe. Right. Yes. Yes. They want to believe it anyway.

They want to believe it anyway. Yeah. People, those people, it's not like they convinced Sargon of Akad that he should be a fucking shitty misogynist fuckface. He was already that. Right. It's not like he transformed. It's not like Peter Teal made a wish on a star

and fucking Carl Benjamin transformed it to a regular person into the mouth breathing fucking loser that he is now. Right, right. He was already a mouth breathing fucking loser. Yes, he was. Yeah, you're right. All they had to do was harness this matter. What they did was they found Rudolph.

And they put him in the front of the fucking the sleigh and he was able to fucking pilot them through me too. Which was the foggy night they needed to get through. I love your metaphor. So that's what he was. They saddled all these idiots because they were useful idiots to all of that. And so they fucking amplified their message. And probably in some cases, because we've certainly seen it, maybe even funded some of these people.

Yeah. Right? We know we've seen it when it comes to literally spouting off Russia's talking points when it comes to Ukraine. We've seen those people make fatty banks. We've seen those people fucking rolling in the cash. $400,000 an episode for some jackass with a fucking cap on his head who can't find his ass with both hands. But he sure as fuck can read a PowerPoint from Putin.

That's for damn sure. Yep, yep. Some guy who hates his own gayness so much, he's going to go out and scream about how the Republicans are right about everything. And I'm classically liberal while he's literally sucking on the teat of fucking Putin. Yeah. Putin's walking him around with a fucking. moo-moo and hold them while he's just drinking the fucking mother's milk in 400,000

increments. It's exactly. Right? It's exactly it. Right. It's not hard to think. These aren't conspiracy theories. These are true facts.

These are literal true fucking facts. It's not hard to interpret here. That these other people didn't get thrust into all of our consciousness and boosted by media specifically because. they had the same viewpoints as these billionaires. Because literally, of course they did. Like, if there is a conspiracy, and there is, the conspiracy is a conspiracy of wealthy men who are gathering together to say, how can we continue to hold power?

That's the conspiracy. It is emails exchanged between wealthy men saying, hey, I heard you've got some problems. Let me connect you. Let me help you. Let me workshop your bullshit. Let me make sure that you don't suffer consequences from your actions because we can't build a society where men suffer, where rich people are also accountable. They never gave a shit when it was like regular people getting in trouble for stuff, right? That never fucking mattered.

This really only started to matter when celebrities and wealthy people and powerful people started to eat shit. soon as the wealthy and the powerful start to eat shit, then very clearly they literally banded together to try to figure out ways to escape responsibility and to shift the narrative and to focus people

using the, like your point, like using the carls and the other idiots, using those people to try to create a counter-narrative. The counter-narrative wasn't even a direct response. That's what made it clever. That's what made it clever. Because I was thinking like, you know, the free speech, oh, you should be

able to say whatever you want. Yeah, okay, like let's say I buy that. Let's say I say you should be able to say whatever you want to whoever you want. If the thing you want to say is hateful, that still makes you a bad person. Like, that seems to be the element that they simply will not, and intentionally so, will not understand or acknowledge. Like, even if, even if there's nothing in the world but space to say all the things that you want to say, I can say whatever I want. Yeah, you can. But like if you want me to hear that, I will pass judgment when the things you say are fucking awful. And I don't know why there's that sort of like, I should be able to say it. Well, yeah, you can. You can. You did. And you did. And you did, man. I heard it, man. We fucking

heard it. Right. You never shut up. Like, what we're not, like, what, what we're interrogating is their ability to say it rather than why do you want to say it? Yeah. Why? Because like, I don't want to say hateful shit. Because I don't have hate for people in my heart, like, demographically, individually, very much so. Yeah, no, yeah. Super dark space. Yeah, absolutely.

In fact, most of the people I just mentioned, I don't like you. Right, yeah. My heart is actually mostly hate. I don't fucking like you. Right, but it's very laser-focused. I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. If I could go back in time and take a swing at Sargon, I don't think I would because I would have gotten a lot of, I would have got arrested. You got arrested. You got arrested. But he did hit you first. I wish he had. really hit you.

Yeah. Really hit you. I really do. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like you'd have probably stuffed him into his beer camp. That is a dream. That would be a dream come true.

I feel like that's probably what would have happened. You know, the other thing too that I think happened with this is people got drunk on popularity. And I think that's happened. We had a, there was an inflection point in our podcast where we could have easily continued to gather people to listen and continue to shoot ourselves up in, you know, in the podcast world if we were to compromise on our morality. If we were to compromise a little on our beliefs, we could have lifted ourselves up. And we decided not to do it. Right. Like, no, that's stupid. Like, no, this is who we are. I'm not going to pretend to be someone else. Why, I'm not,

I am not someone else. I am me. This is a, this isn't a product. This is a conversation between friends who have been friends for 30 years. That's what you're hearing right now. This is a real genuine conversation between two guys who genuinely love each other, right? That's a Three decades, man. There is no, I'm not making any of this up. There's not a character. There's no character. I'm not pretending to be somebody who I'm not.

And when something bothers me, I'm not going to pretend it doesn't. And so there was a moment where you could have. But I wonder about some of these other people who were involved in the movement who latched on to this because they saw it, got them some modicum of success. Yeah. And then they said, well, success means more to me than who I am. Success means more to me than my morality. success means more to me than my moral compass

so I'll do it I'll take it I'll do it I'll keep repeating back to you what you want to hear instead of what I want to tell Yeah yeah well I mean look at how If you wonder whether that's true or not You can move away from that sort of like Look at look at the way Peter Thiel literally created The political career of JD Vance

Yeah he literally built that career Great point himself he said I will take you I will build you up I'll pay for your fucking Senate run I'll pay for your campaign. He made J.D. Vance. He formed that fucking gollum out of the fucking shit clay that is his money. So like, yeah, man. And I think it like, that's a really interesting.

There was, there really was a moment. And I think it did. It corresponded in timing so neatly with me too. And that like 2015, 16, 17 kind of timeline where there was this sort of rise of the micro celebrity in these niche spaces. And these niche spaces were sort of like the new creations of the like confluence of the social media and podcast explosion. And those things kind of all happened all at the same time between 2015 and I would say like 2018 where this sort of like micro celebrity didn't really exist in the same way before. And now it did. And I think what these

guys also saw is, oh my God, look at all these cheap microphones we can buy. Look at how easy these people are to manipulate. Yeah. Yeah, man. 100%, dude. It's fucking cheap. How expensive is a fucking Super Bowl ad, man, versus a fucking Dave Rubin. Yeah.

Right? Yeah, man. Dave Rubin's fucking cheap as free. You can buy, and you're getting like an hour long of him talking about this stuff. You can't pay for an hour long Super Bowl ad. No. Yeah. It's possible.

Right. And then if you artificially boost his numbers through media. through connections through other things, and you paid him to say the shit you want him to say, how fucking easy to get that message out there? It's fucking easy. Look, I also recognize, too, that some of these people believe it. And I recognize, too, that, like, it's not just misogyny.

I think the other thing, too, is it's not just misogyny. And in this very specific article, they talk about how Epstein's like a eugenicist too, man. Yeah, man. That was new to me. Like, that's not, like, if you read through these things, they're talking, he's talking with AI researchers, and he's talking about all these different types of things, getting into arguments about eugenics with them. And, you know, there is a, certainly

when it comes to billionaires, they weren't sure if he was kidding, but like him talking about impregnating a bunch of people down in his ranch. But we've seen the army of people that Musk already has that he's sired children with. So like, we know that some of these billionaires also think that populations are going down. They push the, the great replacement. theory all the time. That's literally something that they push all the time. And I can't be sure. I don't know that they're pushing it specifically because they're afraid of it or if it's because it's useful to them. Because just like this, who knows, whether it's just useful or not. But the one thing, too, we've got to remember is that they're always out for more money. And I want

to read this piece. This is from the end of the article. This is at the end. It says, of course, that's an opportunity, as Epstein pointed out to Teal in 2016. Quote, Brexit is just the beginning, he wrote to Teal, returned to tribalism, counter to globalization, amazing new alliances, you and I both agree, zero interest rates were too high, and as I said in your office, finding things on the way to collapse

was much easier than finding the next bargain, end quote. That's a fucking email, he wrote, me. I know, man. That's a fucking email he wrote. I was just thinking, is there anything, genuinely, is there anything more dangerous than an unsatisfied

billionaire? Because holy shit. Yeah, man. If you're an unsatisfied billionaire, you, I mean, like I would say, like, you cannot be, like, there's no such thing as a socially ethical billionaire, right? But, like, if you were an unsatisfied billionaire,

like, there's no possibility for you to not be no bullshit evil. Because now you want something else different and more than what you already have, which is essentially unlimited power. So, holy shit. Holy shit. An unsatisfied billionaire, Cecil, is an ideologue. It have to be.

They have, definitionally, you have to be an ideologue if you were an unsatisfied billionaire. I cannot think of anything actually more dangerous than that. A person who reaches that status who is not actively working to give away enormous amounts of their money and find ways to do good with that money, like an, who is just like, how do I make more of this? Holy fuck, man. That's a fucking ideologue. And we should be worried about ultra-powerful ideologues.

This is right in their wheelhouse, too, because you can't, I don't think you can be a billionaire and not be able to manipulate people easily. I don't think that it's, I think it's impossible for that to be the case. I don't think you're a socially awkward billionaire. I think you have ways in which you manipulate people. And I think like you learn those ways and you're able to turn that charm on to manipulate whoever you want if you're a billionaire. I think it's like a superpower for these people. So I think that this just falls right into their wheelhouse.

It falls right in their wheelhouse to manipulate all the rest of us on this thing. And there is person after person after person sending him messages about the Me Too movement. him talking to these people about the Me Too movement. There's a point in one of these articles, and it's a different article, I'll supplement it, I'll put it in the notes. But there's another message,

this was when he was contacted by a person by the name of Peggy Siegel. So he and this person who's like a, they call her a famed publicist in this other article. This is a Guardian article that I'm talking about. It'll be in the notes. But there's a part where

there's an email exchange to the two, and Epstein complained, he didn't understand why the reporter of a page 6 story, which called Epstein, a reviled billionaire pedophile, was so hostile. Siegel advised Epstein to make donations to women's causes. Me too, crazies, want blood and death. It's barbaric over their reaction and behavior

that just ran its course, she wrote. I had conversations with you to give back. Did you ever set up the scholarships? The women's health? Care for single mothers? anything, that would make you a hero, end quote. And it's because they have so much power, so much wealth. They can spend that money in places to convince people that they're good people.

Let's talk about Lawrence Krause for a few minutes. We talk about Lawrence Krause. Lawrence Krause was in communication with Epstein. And I want to read a couple of pieces from this article because I think it's really important to get his position here. Now, this is a piece he specifically wrote. after all the documents got released. So he released this piece on Quillette. It's not open to the public.

So you have to pay at least $10 to read this entire piece. You can't just go there and read it. You can read the first five paragraphs, but after that, you don't get anything else. So it's not important enough for him to publish this in a place where he could get his entire message out. Yeah. Understand that.

Yeah. Before you read from it, I do want to just ask you, Like, this is so bad. Don't you think he probably should have workshopped this with a pedophile first? I feel like what we need to do is we need to get Peter Thiel to create an Epstein AI so that he could then workshop his sexual harassment emails with an AI, like a pedophile, like a pedophile AI. There's like three million documents. You could seed an AI for Jeffrey Epstein better than you could most anybody. There's an enormous trove of information.

You could make a digital Epstein. Be the safest Epstein ever. Which one's more evil. Yeah, right. Right? Which one? Just don't give the robot any hands. I don't know.

But in any case, there's a piece here that starts, it's in the beginning of the article. And this is something you can read that's out on the public page here. It says, well before Epstein pled guilty to soliciting a 17-year-old for the purpose of prostit. Do you notice how he put the age in there? I do. Do you notice that the age is in there? Trying to qualify, man. 17-year-old for the purpose of prostitution in 2008, he supported various programs at these universities where I taught.

He never directly supported my research, but in the 2000s, he provided some support for a major conference I organized on Cosmast. So he wants to separate himself and he wants to have his cake and eat it too. He also wants to lessen the crime that he pled guilty for, neglecting to mention that there were dozens, dozens of people that he sexually abused enough for them to sue him at a later date and he had to plead down to one case that was less than enough for him to pass in social circles as somebody who wasn't an absolute fucking piece of shit like he was. It was a qualifier to allow him.

And either you're too fucking stupid and you recognize that and you thought that was the actual thing or you cared more about the money and you want to get out of it. Now those are your two options, man. I don't think there's a third fucking option here, Larry. Nope, that's it, man. That's it. The fact that he put the victim's age in there, I think, like to your point,

what he's trying to say is, look, she was almost legal and like, you're not that uncomfortable with it, right? Because, like, you're just waiting for girls to turn 18 and then they're fair game. That's the subtext of that, right? There's no other reason to mention her age except for to try to lessen the fact that she was a minor. The fact that that was a minor. That's why it's solicitation of a minor for prostitution.

Dude, he fucking groomed these girls. Yes. Like, they went to the fucking high school. to get the girls. Like it was at high school was where they were recruiting these girls from. So like don't fucking try to lessen it

in your shitty fucking article to be like, oh, by the way, she was almost there, man. She was like nine-tenths of the law. Yeah, I dude. And if like I'll like, personally from my own personal morals, if that girl was 18,

I'd be like, that dude is still a piece of shit. That dude is a piece of shit. Between these people is so great. It's like, look, man. The age, the power, everything about this is just rapy. It's so different, man.

You're basically saying, well, you know, that's just how the cookie crumbles. There's fucking pictures in his fucking birthday book of little girls hanging out and Jeffrey's standing by them. And then it says like 10 years later, they're giving abscina massage. And someone drew that out, man. Yeah, I know. So from the jump in Lawrence Krause's article, the very first thing he's trying to do is lessen Jeffrey Epstein's crimes

and make them smaller so that you as the reader are more sympathetic to Lawrence Krause. Because he's not trying to whitewash Jeffrey Epstein here. He's trying to rehabilitate his own image. Of course. Epstein's dead. Yep.

Doesn't matter. He can try to rehabilitate his image. But you come off like a, a fuck stick in this article, you piece of shit. You're a trash. Listen to this other piece. As Epstein was nearing the end of his 13-month jail sentence in 2009, 13-month, again, he keeps on like, he's talking about these things as if they're not a lot, right?

Most times when you hear rape, it's years and years and years. But it's only 13 months, so it wasn't that big a deal. He's also a fucking billionaire. Yeah. He also, of the 13 months, didn't serve three-quarters of that into jail. Because he's a billionaire. Yeah. Yeah.

he had learned he had learned that I moved to uh he called me he had learned that I moved to ASU and that I was hoping to establish some program jail time he said had convinced him that making money should no longer be his primary goal he wanted to support science and science education and he wanted advice and where to direct his money he expressed an interest in supporting the stuff I was doing I told him that the conduct for which he had been convicted had been, aside from its illegality, highly inappropriate and plainly stupid. I also thought that his plan was laudable and possibly redemptive.

Give me money. That's what's redemptive. Never mind that, like, Lawrence Krause's work has nothing to do with the crimes at all. So how does it redeem if it doesn't have any connection to raping a young lady, right? And like, to call raping a girl like plainly stupid,

an inappropriate? Hey, it's really inappropriate. It's an inappropriate. That's a real bone and inappropriate thing to do to rape that your lady. That was inappropriate. That's what they said to that guy who shot Renee Good in the face. That is inappropriate. Absolutely not.

What the fuck? This guy, this guy, can you believe the fucking audacity of this motherfucker to write this down and think this is going to exonerate him. That's what I was like, you think this looks good. This is the best telling of events. Like, it's you.

It's you. You could have wrote anything. You could have written anything down, Lord. It's like he only had refrigerator magnets that he was allowed to use to write this. Fucking amazing. I don't have the words disgusting and reprehensible. I'll have to use stupid and inappropriate.

There's another, there's another article that we that again we it's like it's on the side right where Chomsky is is related to me so Chomsky's related in some ways and has been involved

and at one point Chomsky says because they question him at 2023 Chomsky said in part I have no pause about close friends who spent many years in prison and were released

that's quite normal in free societies end quote. And he got to be like, hey man, the way you framed that is if he was some sort of political refugee. I know. Like, dude, he fucking raped kids, you old prick. He raped kids. And you're just like, yeah, you know, sometimes people in free societies just spend time in prison. I am one of these people. I do think there is redemption after prison. I really do believe that. I think you should be able to redeem yourself. Show me any time in Jeffrey Epstein's life after 2008. and also a guy who gets charged and eventually dies by suicide in custody

from essentially the same crimes changed his ways, turned over a new leaf, was a brand new person. None of that stuff is true. He got away on a sweetheart deal and continued to do the exact same thing he'd been doing all along. Yep. And people didn't care. This guy, Lawrence Krause, didn't give a fuck that this. guy was a rapist. Yeah, man. And like, I will say, I was disappointed to hear that Noam Chomsky is an

apologist here as well. That's fucking disappointing. That's how the fucking cookie crumbles, though. Like, people who are shitty for becoming apologists for child rapists are garbage people by proxy, right? And that's not a, that's not painting a fucking brush. Everybody who ever shook hands that Jeffrey Epstein is terrible. No, but if you're walking around being like, I don't think, what that guy did was that bad? If that's your fucking take on it, if Noam Chomsky's take here is like, hey, I've associated with other people

that have gone to jail, dude, yeah, 100%. We have a really corrupt justice system. It unfairly targets people who are poor and in minority communities and in vulnerable situations. They oftentimes go to really horrible conditions. There's a lot

of problems with our justice system. We should not throw everybody out just because they went to jail. But we should throw out people who are absolutely irredeemably happy to continue to commit the same reprehensible crimes. Like, there's no redemption arc. Yeah. There's no, this is not like, well, you know, like there's this person and, you know, they got caught out. They were in a poverty-stricken community and they got caught up in gang violence.

They did something stupid when they were younger and they've dedicated their life to, you know, social justice. Yeah, man, like that dude or lady or whatever, like that person. can be a person in society again worthy of our respect and our trust 100%. But somebody's like, yeah, I fucking raped kids and I spent a bunch of money so I don't really have to go to jail except for at night in my own private cell. And then as soon as I got out, Jelaine Maxwell, who's convicted of doing this? So this isn't Tom just talking. Continue to find kids to find other kids from my enormous sex trafficking operation

that lasted for decades until, like that guy, no, there's no redemption arc. There's no redemption arc for that guy. And to do anything other than to be like, hey, it's morally disqualifying to associate with fucking pedophiles. I don't, like, I don't know what to do with you anymore, you know? Like, what? I want to sort of wrap this up. Yeah. And I want to wrap it up with a piece at the end of Lawrence Krause's article.

Because it wraps it up with the free speech and all of the mongering that was going on with that stuff. So let me read the last line of this article. But retrospective virtue signaling in response to the press-promoted Epstein hysteria is leading to destruction of wonderful programs like ones that benefited students and the public at large. He mentions a program. I'm not going to mention. So what he's saying, listen to the word choice Lawrence Krause is using here. This is the intellectual dark web trash that has been polluting us for a long time, fed by billionaires,

promoted by media personalities that are paid by billionaires to trick all the rest of us that virtue signaling is the thing that is the most important piece of this, not the rape of children and the protecting of the pedophiles. Yeah. And I want to zoom in too on his use of specific and purposeful use of the word retrospective virtue signaling. Because what he's saying is there was no way for us to know. Hindsight is 2020 about that. No, man, Lawrence Krause. you personally were in contact with Jeffrey Epstein asking him for his help as a fucking sex offender, a child sex offender.

You were going to Jeffrey Epstein and saying, hey, man, help me workshop my way out of these allegations. This is not like Lawrence Krause was just like, oh, we, I don't know, we did some work together and he funded a program. You were email, you, Lawrence Krause were emailing this guy because you knew this was a person who could help you get out of trouble.

because he himself had gotten out of trouble. What the fuck? Retrospective virtue signaling? That's just lying, man. Yeah, that's all it is. It's just, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, we are all waiting for that trickle down from these billionaires who are controlling the whole fucking thing. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

All right. That's going to wrap it up. And we're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy healing,

water, downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch, late-night info docutainment. Leo Pisci. cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death and towers, tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls, bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy,

double-speaks stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. thrust your hands bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonancepod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and threads, all under the handle at DissinancePod.

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