MTracey podcast - Forget "MeToo" -- we're in the "Zombie Epstein" era

Episode Date: July 11, 2026

In light of recent events, a lot of people have asked me to opine on what stage of “MeToo” we must currently be in. Sorry to quibble, but I think the premise of the question is off — it’s been nearly a decade since “peak MeToo,” which should be considered its own distinct era at this point, and one that occurred in the past. It would shortchange all that is peculiar to 2026 to label it merely an extension of 2017. “MeToo” remains a relevant antecedent, sure, but the term no longer best captures the present, with all its era-distinctive manias and pathologies. That’s why I’m proposing a new term for today: let’s call it the “Zombie Epstein” era, for reasons I begin to sketch out in the attached stream. Yes, this stream was held at the invitation of Richard Spencer, a rather controversial fellow, who is perhaps most famous for endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

Uh, so welcome back. Uh, whenever you're here, we talk about sexual harassment. Yeah, it's a little rape party. Well, I've heard that the, uh, the cold hand of Me Too has actually touched you, Mr. Tracy, that you, you, you have been accused of vile acts by a, uh, entity known as Mr. Pussy. Um, yeah, I'm not even going to talk about that. It's not worth talking about. I'm not going to credit it. I mean, it's just so stupid. So I'm not, I'm not, I'm not either going to address. Okay. Well, I'm just saying if you can't trust a man named Mr. Pussy, I mean, who can you trust? I mean, just leave it there. It's just a joke. So it's not even, it's not even more disgusting.

Okay. Okay. So I wanted to talk about a few things. Platner himself, obviously, and the allegations and where the Democrats are. And I sort of wanted to go a little bit deeper in terms of the morality of Me Too. And what that means. I don't want to just say like, oh, it's mean women who are attacking their ex-boyfriends. That might be the case, if we're honest. But I don't, that's not deep enough. You know, we need to, like, really understand what's happening. But so we can go, we can expand, you know, kind of later in the conversation. But I almost think we have to retire the Mitu acquaintance at this point because it doesn't really capture whatever is going on in this present era.

I mean, we're nearly a decade removed from M-2 at this point. Yeah. And I think whatever has given rise to the Platner thing and related things, recently, I think it's a little bit too simple and even lazy to just kind of refer to it in shorthand as somehow a manifestation of me too. Like it's not Harvey Weinstein being reported on The New York Times and then there's like a cascade of people from the entertainment industry and whatever who get called out. Because like me too was like, oh, you were abusing. by this person, Me Too. Right. I mean, who cares what the providence of it is necessarily?

But I mean, sure, I guess there's a Me Too lineage here, but it is something that's distinctive that I wouldn't want to be too blazee about. Well, let's put Platinum aside for the moment then. And also, you've talked about Platinum at length. So let's go in a different place. So I did do a little background research. Me Too originated as a hashtag. actually 20 years ago.

And it was done by a woman, I think rather genuinely, who was working with rape survivors. And then it resurfaced again with Alyssa Milano and Harvey Weinstein. So it's... Even in 2026,

people are still kind of refuting Alyssa Milano in absentia based on like a handful of tweets of hers from November of 2017. Right. It's kind of like a bizarre, redundant cycle. But I guess,

maybe we should make this distinction because I don't know enough about the woman who was actually using this hashtag at the early days of social media. And I'll just assume that she was like a women's rights NGO person. Yeah. And I'll just assume that she was acting with very genuine motives. And it was about real survivors and helping them out. You know, I don't obviously have any problem with that. But it emerged as sort of social media outrage. And but I think it gets to this bigger, moral problem that we have. It's used politically against Donald Trump against Epstein, Weinstein, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it is intensely political. But I think it gets to this bigger issue, which is how can we be moral today? Because we're moral beings. You know, we want to think that

we're on the right side. We're not a bunch of psychopathic, you know, assholes. We want to feel like we're doing good. The reality is that we live in a situation that has been this way throughout my entire adult life. And that is you date online, you date through Bumble or Tender, you meet people at bars, you have some one-night stands, a relationship, maybe it's the third date, maybe it's the fourth, you have sex, you move into each with each other before marriage, et cetera. We are, let's just say, lax in comparison to other points in world history. And we don't want to give this up, but then we also want to be moral.

And so we've kind of, like, I guess what I'm arguing is that like Puritanism and Victorian morality, et cetera, has sort of found a way through and it's entered our modern age where we are like puritanically judging people while not giving up on the background that has led to problems like Graham found himself in.

A girl, a girlfriend, maybe a side chick, says she wants a butt massage and he comes over and yeah, I've heard of millions of situations like this. I've been in situations like, I mean, it's just a gray area, but we're not willing, we want to be Puritan, Puritans, but we're not willing to give up the historical background that is going to cause problems like this. So do you understand

what I'm kind of putting forward? I think so. Maybe I could address it this way, which is that in the early days of Me Too, what was seen as a quintessential Me Too case or Me Too accusation would have to do with something sexually violative or harassing that was alleged to have occurred in some sort of workplace setting, right? So Harvey Weinstein was accused of doing things in his capacity as a movie producer where he could exert power over younger women who were eager to flatter him or curry favor with him. and that was pretty much seen as the hallmark of Me Too, right? Or the thing that the cultural adoption of Me Too style Mores was supposed to

remediate in some way, or like Matt Lauer, for example, the accusation with him, if memory serves, and I think this is correct, I think there were several because, you know, you would get like a rollout of one after the next, but it was about him having a woman come to his office and there was an allegation that he had like some remote locking device to lock the door from like a button under his desk or something. I think that turned out to me not true actually. That was alleged and it was very sort of vivid in terms of like what it was signified. Kind of like Aaron Stavro Blofeld or something. Yeah, it was almost like what a bond villain would do like as before the final confrontation or something. But it was it was it was it was he was using or alleged to have used his stature

in the employment hierarchy to to solicit sexual liaisons with younger attractive women. Now, I'll make sort of a case, a qualified case for me too here in some respect, right? I mean, it's not that far-fetched to kind of just have a roughly working assumption that throughout the years, especially since women have entered the workplace in mass, since only really like the 70s,

there have been situations, you know, where a male boss does seek to use whatever leverage or power or control might be conferred upon him by virtue of that position to kind of cajole or entice

or even coerce at times women subordinates into engaging in a secular relationship with him that they would not have otherwise wanted or they weren't interested in. Now, of course, there are situations where maybe that power discrepancy or power imbalance could have been something that a woman would have found genuinely attractive or was part of the package that might have she found attractive by the man and then had done so willingly, even though like the new norm became wherever a power imbalance of that kind exists, consent cannot be legitimately obtained.

And the relationship itself is sort of violative. So that kind of removed a whole category of potential like mating partners or a situation whereby mates, mates could encounter one another. But, you know, on the other hand, yeah, I'm sure there were situations where like a woman did feel coerced her or as though she was being compelled to do something through less than her own free will or through less than something that she would have wanted.

I mean, I know I've spoken to women who are not, in any respect, zealously pro me too or liberal kind of ideologues, even conservative women, frankly, who attest to stories akin to this that they have personally experienced, and I have no reason to doubt. People think I don't believe anything that a woman ever alleges. But like, you know, if I am able to evaluate the totality of circumstances, and yeah, it's perfectly credible, you know, some of these, you know,

just pranted anecdotes. I've been told, but I have no reason to doubt the veracity. of the women who told me in certain instances. It's just that, you know, by and large, they wouldn't, like, make a whole political crusade out of it or, you know, do, like, a Me Too Medium Post or, like, some kind of social media spectacle. But nonetheless, I mean, it's something that clearly happened.

So if there was a way in which the, like, in the inculcation of a new set of expectations or mores, having an association with Me Too, maybe at least created some kind of deterrent effect, whereby a genuinely exploitative situation in that category would be less likely to come about because the male, the male power possessor in the situation could feel that it carried certain risks that maybe it wouldn't have carried or they wouldn't have been cognizantively carrying in the past. I don't think that's altogether horrible.

I mean, I think that could be beneficial. But, you know, it's not, but at the same time, it doesn't mean that every, every downstream kind of reverberation of that shift in cultural more is positive. There could be some negative ones. But like, I understand, I guess I'm saying that because you understand the impulse as to why there was like, in terms of like how to be moral, right? That's how you sort of introduced this. Yeah, but I think that we are in a puritanical situation. And I would go a little bit further here. I mean, like, yes, I can imagine.

I'm trying to run a thought experiment where I'm trying to be as generous as possible toward a pro, a pro-me-choo sort of person here who's like increasingly hard to find, maybe in like circles that we're familiar with. Right. Don't you think there's something natural to the power imbalance? Like, isn't power an aphrodisiac in the words of Henrik Kissinger or something? I mean, is it totally outrageous that a professor would have a sexual liaison over the summer with his students.

Like, isn't this the most natural thing in the world? And the idea that that is treated as criminal, maybe, but this, like, stepping way over the bounds, I think just kind of shows that we're out of touch with human nature and human history. No, I agree. I thought I, you know, I thought I had made reasonably clear in my little solo before,

but I'll try to make even clearer. Okay. that certainly as human nature, if nothing else would tell us, there are situations or it's not exactly uncommon for a woman to find as legitimately attractive whatever quote unquote power imbalance might exist between her and a certain male. I'm just saying that, come on, I mean, it's not crazy that there could also be situations where the power imbalance was leveraged in a way that. that a woman did not want to, did not find attractive or did not find something that would literally alert her, that legitimately alert her to a male,

and it was kind of like something that was exploited and abusive, especially if you're holding over her head, her standing within a corporate hierarchy or employment structure. So that's all I'm saying. I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that I'm dismissing in any way,

the possibility that the existence of such a power dynamic It could consensually result in a dynamic that breeds some kind of mutual sexual attraction. Of course, it could. And yes, it is true that one of the new more I seem to have been inculcated, you know, first in these sort of more left liberal sectors of societies, NGOs, academia, what have you. of course, gradually seeped into just kind of mainline corporate culture as well. And it is taken now as something presumptively, quote, quote, problematic for there to be a power dynamic whatever. And it's assumed that no consent could be freely given such that these sorts of relationships have to be barred in the first instance by like,

HR codes and things. Yes. And they can even be used after the fact if there's like maybe some kind of ancillary political motive that should arrive to even allege something like assault. Because the idea is that even if a woman in a situation where there seemed to be an impermissible power dynamic contemporaneously believes herself to be freely consenting to something, she is still endowed with, you know, the right to claim after the fact that although she had given every, any signal that you could think of of like consent, the existence of the exploited power dynamic means that it was not, in fact, consent freely given. And therefore, any sexual act that might have occurred in that context can be justifiably characterized as something.

abusive or assaultive or even rape. And that's kind of what happened with their Swalwell. And, you know, which we can get into because it's directly relevant to Platner. But so, so yes. I mean, I think, you know, I've, I did a tweet that I think I might have subconsciously plagiarized from an earlier tweet that I saw somewhere. But, you know, essentially, I think, I think it's roughly true. I plagiarized like the concept anyway, but I think I would have phrased it differently.

But the idea was that like, you know, nine times out of ten, it was some kind of like hortatory statement on Twitter slash X where somebody, you know, somebody who's like right toid leaning is saying, look, everybody, you're so obsessed with what it is and is not problematic. But if I surveyed like nine out of ten of your grandparents as to how they met, By contemporary standards, it would be problematic and not entertaining of you would never

have been born, right? Right. Millions would not exist if sex in the workplace or sex age gap relationships, authority gap relationships were outlawed. And maybe we could change or something. But it's just that very fact seems to just be an argument case closed about what we're doing. And I think we're in this weird situation where we're sort of criminalizing sex while everything is permitted. I guess that's what I'm saying.

Because, you know, like previously in human history, if you had, if a man, say, an adult had sex with his secretary once, you know, they just did it. he could still be considered a moral, if flawed human being, if he maintained his marriage and had a family and so on. People make mistakes. However, if he were homosexual, no, all bets are off, that's over. If he had sex with interracially, you know, with an African-American woman, absolutely, that's totally immoral. But now we're in this sort of weird situation

where we've decriminalized those kinds of things. Interracial relationships, interracial marriage, or of course, you know, on board, homosexuality, wonderful thing, et cetera. But that sex with the secretary has now become criminalized. And so we're sort of like... It might have been, it might have been, you know, quote unquote, criminalized.

meaning not in a formalistic sense in the past, just in that infidelity, marital infidelity might have been taken much more seriously as a violation. I mean, it's not true across the board, right? But like, it happened. Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, if you talk,

if you hear people whose parents were divorced when no fault divorce became more, allow widespread or like when the laws were liberalized around divorce. Right. You'll hear them talk about like they were the only kid they knew in their town who had parents who were divorced. So they felt that they were stigmatized or that they were carrying around like a scarlet letter or something. And obviously that would be nowhere close to the case now. So I don't know.

I guess I'm just thinking it through in that if there was a, if marital infidelity is what led to that, you know, hypothetical kid in the 70s parents getting divorced, maybe there would have been a certain kind of moral probrium attached to it in the sense of breaking your vows or something. I get it. And in Christian imagination, it's a power dynamic violation. Right. It's a power dynamic violation. And so we've sort of everything is permitted in a way. But the new like moral center of sex in the modern age has to be.

be consent. And so you can do what you can be in an interracial, thruple, homosexual relationship. And that's great. So long as you don't cheat or you get consent constantly. And so we're, we're just in this new realm. And I don't think we can handle it. And so we're grasping for a kind of puritanism. Because that's what I find here, this attack on Graham Platner is, it's just, it reminds me of people in the middle ages wanting to put him into the stocks or Victorian moralist attacking someone who is cool to be honest or, you know, throwing Oscar Wild into prison. Although that was kind of his fault. We're honest about it.

But you get my point. I get your point, but I think maybe what is a hallmark of the present era, however we want to describe it, which, you know, I do pause it. We should figure out a way to kind of distinguish from the Me Too era. Me Too would be a, an antecedent, but it doesn't, it doesn't exactly capture. But it's now everywhere. It's now relationship. Because I'm saying consent, you would think, is kind of the decisive variable that everybody agrees upon as to what makes a sexual encounter or any kind of romantic situation acceptable. However, I mean,

the swabble thing is instructive here because we had it some of the allegations quote unquote all that were for example him in a car with a woman who yes was a staff a younger staffer so there you go power dynamic violation but yet what was the what was the offending act

that got blasted out into the media and then within like 36 hours led to his ruthless defenestration when he was leading the polls in the California gubernatorial primary. Not by a huge margin,

but he was leading the polls. He was a leading candidate. And he would have to obviously withdraw from that race and then resign his seat in the house entirely because there were threats to actually expel him. For the House of Representatives

to use this very rare tactic or intervention of expulsion, which, you know, if you go and look on Wikipedia as to when how many times members of Congress have been expelled, it's like, you know, less than 20 since the founding of the United States. So this is what was seen as something that rose to the level that would warrant an expulsion from the United States House of Representatives.

Okay. He was in a car with, I think the woman may have been 21 or 22. She, he, he, he was report, this is what was reported in terms of how she apparently told it to some journalist. I think was the San Francisco Chronicle, he asked her if she would perform oral sex. She agreed to perform oral sex. She then began to perform oral sex. And then in the midst of the act,

she stopped performing oral sex because she became worried that some passerby might see them because they were in like a parking lot or something. Right. So that was the extent of the allegation. So that is, that's a scenario where,

by all accounts, even probably during the peak of the Me Too era, right? 2017. People might have objected on the grounds that it's a lewd. Swalwo's a boss, well, not even on the grounds of lewdness. They would have objected on power dynamic grounds

in that Swalwell was the superior. He was to quote boss and he was doing this with a subordinate, right? But like it wouldn't have been, I don't think, as far as I can cast my mind back to them, I don't think it would have been denounced as some kind of ipso facto of sexual assault, right? But that's how this was framed as of April of 2006

when the shit show erupted around Swalwellwell. So consent, so we're now even past the point where consent can demarcate what conduct is seen as morally defensible. I don't know how, I don't know what

stratosphere we're now in or how to like distill it into like a pithy short-hand descriptors. We're now attacking sex. Yeah. Because I think the whole consent thing, I mean, Look, I could get in trouble for saying this, and you don't have to agree with me in the slightest bit. But everyone's, every woman has said no at some point.

And it's a sort of natural dynamic. Now, I'm not saying that rape is not a real, I get it. I know at what stage, though, like, what I'm saying is that there's a little bit of a gray area of, oh, go, you know, no, we can't do that. Go away. That's like during a flirtation, though, or a courtship, right? I get it. That's what I'm saying. Consent is not given, though, if we're taking this, like, verbal qualification.

Now, it is what it is. I mean, look, I'm not saying this to be, like, a libtard, but, like, I guess I am of the mind that, like, that if a woman, if a man seeks to insert his penis into a woman's vagina, and in the moment before he goes to do that, she says, no, don't do that. Like, that's a no that would probably carry some weight, right? Yes, I get it. I've never experienced that myself. Like if the man did that, hypothetically. Oh, yeah, I'm a hypothetical situation. And if the man then did go ahead and do it despite her objections, okay, that's in it. That's something that we can incredibly say is like a problem.

Yeah, I, I definitely get it. But I, again, you don't, I'm not going to force you to agree with me or something, but let's just say that in romance throughout the ages, there's been a little bit of rebuffing and resisting. Oh, I don't mean. Oh, no. And that's just sort of where it is. And we still maintained, even though everyone accepted that, we still maintained concepts, legal concepts, and ethical concepts of rape.

So it didn't prevent us. We weren't just like morally diabolical, outrageous people. We actually were sensible and reasonable. What's the movie? High Fidelity? I never actually saw this movie, but the quintessential image of it is John Cusack with the boombox outside the girl's bedroom window, right? Right. Yeah. Now, I always sort of inferred that that was because he was chasing after this girl.

She had rebuffed him or maybe rejected him, but he was so persistent that he was willing to show up outside her window with a boom box to get her attention, right? And that was seen like when did that come out, 1993, something like that? that was seen as like just charming, a charming example of like male persistence. Uh, it, and what would it be today? It would be,

it could easily be sexual harassment or whatever foul, you know, um, uh, um, you can think of like, it would definitely be in the realm of bad. Um,

now I'm not, I'm not endorsing anybody to go about doing that to like, you know, live a tried life or something. Just noting, you know, one maybe small, uh,

indicia of, uh, the changing mores that's obviously me too expedited. Especially that was one of the purposes of it. I mean, it was always the decentralized thing. But to the extent that you could lean a central aim behind it, that was one of the purposes. So that that succeeded to a large extent,

even if there later came somewhat of a pushback, they kind of moderated whatever they were attempting to do. And then whenever we're in the midst of now, is also aiming to push those moral boundaries even further in that direction. I call it the zombie Epstein era. I don't know how better to describe it. Yeah, but aren't we criminalizing sex itself now?

Like, we've almost gone at least heterosexual sex. I mean, I'm sorry. Like, we've almost gone beyond consent, which in my mind has gray areas in it. And we're now attacking the notion of getting a blowjob and a limousine. I mean, like, what is... I mean, are the only, in my mind, legitimate perspective of criticizing that is if you are a genuine traditionalist Catholic or upstanding Protestant or Muslim and you say, no, that act itself is wrong. Well, I mean, didn't they, they, they don't think that act itself is wrong. That they, in, in certain circumstances, people who are part of this movement that were, we're, we'll just use the name me to just so we can, you know, keep track of things.

They think that's great or wonderful. Like, when can we have sex now? Because they seem to be attacking sex itself or at least heterosexual sex. Well, Catherine McKinnon, the feminist, what would you call her? Scholar, a writer, something. I believe this is correct. I hope I have the right figure. It might be one other person that maybe I'm mixing it up with, but I'm pretty sure it's

Catherine McKinnon. It was either in the 80s or 90s where she was. she introduced a theory that didn't become a majority view in feminist circles, but had somewhat of a following, which is that the very act of heterosexual sex or intercourse between a male and female is inherently violent, just given the nature of the act, meaning the manner in which the act is carried out is itself in a form of violence. Obviously, that's going to the conceptual extreme, but like if you just go a few steps sort of removed from that

and then like see what kind of behaviors are sweeping up into whatever morally condemnatory sort of paradigm that kind of animated that theory of hers. I mean, you could see, anyway, I'm just kind of like teasing out something that gets to the point that you're, you're sketching. Well, I think that's sort of true in some kind of poetic way. You know, I mean, Shakespeare described orgasms as a little death, and he wasn't alone.

We use sort of poetic metaphors for these things. And Andrea Dworkin, thank you. Somebody corrected me. Yeah, that's right. It was Andrew Dorgan, not Catherine McKeown. Yeah. I kind of agree with her on some level of metaphor of, you know, the man's on top, the man's entering, the woman is being violated on some level. Now, only a madman would call, or what madwoman in this case would call like all sex, you know, brutally violent, obviously.

But I think there's almost like a, what's the right word, almost like autistic, like taking a metaphor literally or something, finding one aspect that is true and then claiming that it's all a crime or something. I yeah but it does seem like that's almost where we're headed I mean like how or at least where the Democratic Party is headed at least where the Democratic Party is headed yeah I don't know I don't know in Maga if they would necessarily abide by this is quite the same strictures no of course not and I would they would endorse it as as political retaliation against their adversarial though they would endorse it for their own lives yes I've actually heard that there's a lot of wife swapping going on at like Trump rallies. I've heard this. I've actually never been to a Trump rally, but I've been to quite a few. I can't see I had any first-hand experience of witnessing at it.

Maybe the polls have sort of flipped in a way. Because, you know, growing up in the 80s and 90s, what it meant to be a Republican, it meant that you were Protestant, that you owned many pairs of khaki pants and you

wore a blue blazer and your dad was a businessman or a physician, and you were an upstanding person. That's what it meant to be a Republican. You were basically Mitt Romney. And the liberal, you know, being a liberal or kind of edgy, you know, like you, you had premarital sex. There was that three way you had that time back in the day. You know, like being, it's almost like the polls have weirdly flipped.

we now have Cheyenne Hunt where I think you could genuinely ask her, seriously ask her a question how am I able to have sex now? What do you find appropriate for me or

millions of people like me to engage in sexual intercourse with a woman? Like how... She is married. I just read, how do I do this? She was profiled yet again in the San Francisco standard, I think it is. Uh-huh.

Um, you know, in that profile, they of course make a point to remark upon how she has, is saying that she's so overwhelmed with their profile requests from all these prestigious media outlets. She doesn't know, uh, what to do with herself. Right. But, uh, apparently she is married. So, interesting.

Maybe she could, she and her husband, who I don't know anything about could like hold a seminar about, uh, what, um, not just, uh, sexual conduct, but like, even just courtship practices. they find it to be acceptable and they are willing to like sign an affidavit in advance will not in like three years from now get hurled against you at a politically

opportune moment if the circumstances seem to call it call for it. Yeah. So I mean seriously because like I mean especially if in this in a courtship type situation like even if there's sort of like an implied rebuff fright or a given take or something

you know given the new standards that seemed to have been inaugurated this year especially there's ever reason to think that could be used by Cheyenne Hunt to to take down a

particular target in her sites yes I don't think this is going to happen for normal people look how this whole thing started with Platner right I mean again this this

me is what kind of is most emblematic of whatever era we're currently in as distinct from Me Too to some degree. That June 4th, New York Times article, which hilariously, even though this conservative, this Republican operative woman, Lindsay, ended up successfully convincing

these two female journalists in the New York Times to just, like, wander her commentaries on Flattner and put it out in a way that it's framed, to somehow suggest something like really horrible happen, but if you like read it carefully, you can't even discern what exactly there is, what it is that Platner was alleged to have done.

And yet Lindsay and like her kind of, her colleagues in this, you know, DC con ink back slapping circuit, they became, they convinced themselves that actually the New York Times did it, did this to, as sort of an underhand,

handed way to support Plattenor? Like it was a catch and kill operation. They have theorized, I'm serious. This is like taken as gospel now in these circles, that they, or, like, they wanted to get out ahead of Lindsay saying something about Platner so that, so they kind of presented her allegations in a way that they found to be not sufficiently crediting of their veracity.

So somehow the New York Times victimized Lindsay and the conservative conic DC kind of networking social network by laundering her claims and getting the ball rolling that within about a month led to Platner getting like the fatal blow

delivered, right? Anyway, the marquee allegations in that your time story to the extent that there are already that you can discern are these women who Platner had dated, right, or had been on and off relationship.

relationships they'll call them. So just like casual, I guess, you know, semi quasi romantic kind of acquaintances, let's say. They're not like sometimes it'll be called girlfriends. I don't even know if that's quite right, right? Whatever you want to call them, right? So what the New York Times did was they weren't waiting around to see if they would got a tip about some younger female support that maybe having some kind of grievance

against an older male in her kind of corporate or NGO or whatever, congressional office hierarchy. No, what they did was they made a point in these two women journalists to set out on this grand expedition of

investigative journalism whereby they just like started indiscriminately surveying anybody that he ever dated or had been in one of these kind of situate, you know, romantic kind of situations with. I don't know if I have the right word for it, because maybe they don't

even consider it dating. And just to see whatever they could sift out, right? So they didn't, they didn't even really start with a premise of some kind of wrongdoing that then had to be like further investigated. They were just doing this blanket, you know, forensic examination of anybody that could get their hands on who might be able to attest to have things, some kind of like personal or intimate encounter with, with Platner. And then the best they could come up with after what they say in that New York Times article on June 4th was months of reporting by a team of reporters. Pretty much the best they could come up with was the Republican operative saying and I think maybe two or three others, basically being invited by these journalists to produce like an emotional narrative of their recollections of their relationship with Platner from, you know,

a decade or more ago. So that's, so you had the woman who then, then would level these rape accusations this week. Jenny Rasko, I think it's, Rasko,

I think it's how you pronounce it. It's like a strangely, it's a strange French sermon. I think she's like, I think she's a Acadian. So like the French descendants in Maine. It's up in Maine.

So, anyway, so, but she, in that New York Times article, she had been quoted in that article, right? And in that article, the extent of her allegations at the time was, again,

her describing what her perceptions now are of the nature of the relationship that she had carried on with Platner from years before. I think in her case, it was like 2019 to 2021 or something. And she says,

all she, and she only, and she like just imputed sort of abstract characterizations to Plattenor. It's almost like they're doing like a psychological profile of the guy where she says that, you know, she at times would find his behavior, at times found his non-specified behavior unsettling and, uh, and reckless. Okay. And now, and Lindsay, I think said toxic. She also said that she now surmises that Platner, quote, hated women. This is a Republican operative, right? When that Platner had been, quote, contemptuous women's emotions. But that's about the best they could come up with. Now, there was like a, a little vignette that they got from Lindsay where she says during one night together like he

there was some kind of I don't know confrontation or dispute where he ends up sort of physically kind of bring her into a room and like having her and have her like sleep something off and she closed the door like okay not it wasn't like something that that was like the extent of any kind of physical

allegation but by in by and large if you go back and read that article it's like it's these like subjective emotionalized reinterpretations of things that they're giving to the New York Times in like May or June, 2006 in light of his now, his new political stature. So that, to me, there's got to be something new about that, right? And then it shouldn't be a huge surprise that as little as there was to go with initially, again, after this exhaustive investigation, we're told happened, that like you could have,

now, I think I'm going to coin a new term, which is like accusation escalation, like you could have this phenomenon that whatever minimal accusations has been aired initially that were really just in the realm of kind of like some kind of psychic extrapolation or some therapeutic

kind of rendering of the past conduct all of a sudden within a span of a month you know through mechanisms that we can discuss if you'd like I mean I don't have the full story but I know enough but anyway through whatever mechanism then interceded in the in that in the month between June 4th,

the New York Times article and then July 6th, then it becomes just a full-blown rape accusation by Jenny. So to me, there's something striking about that because that's the type of thing which you could easily imagine on a smaller scale, obviously not necessarily in the national spotlight, but like also ensnaring others

where, you know, if there's just kind of like a little consensus some merches that, like, you, you did things that some cohort of women found emotionally troubling, right? Or disturbing, at least in retrospect, we don't know really contemporaneously how they felt about much of this. At least in terms of how they're kind of, like, reconstructing things. Then that is as soon as an opening to kind of, like, continue reimagining things until you finally get to an outright rape accusation, which, of course, is like, you know, game over for most people, whatever field there. maybe with the exception of Donald Trump, but like pretty much everybody else,

that's probably going to derail whatever life endeavors. They had thought that they were, had been embarked upon. There's also just the aspect of memory, which I don't think this is controversial to say. Our mind is not a photographic camera. Our mind is not a hard drive. We're reimagining our past constantly

in order to serve the present and the future. You know, when you or I think about our childhood, we'll sort of maybe see it from a different angle and give a different meaning to something that happened or, you know, overcoming trauma in a good way, in a very positive way, means to sort of reinterpret it and understand it in a way

so you can kind of manage something that might well have happened to you. I really think it would be hoot them. To take that into like criminal accusations, is insane. It is truly insane. I really think it would behoove people to familiarize themselves

with the literature on the on the unreliability of human, the fallibility of human memory. And, you know, journalists in particular, okay, because they clearly, you know, take things totally of phase value

if they're told, here's my first, here's like, like my, like, they will attribute some kind of like corroborative, evidentiary value, something that they're told,

which is like a memory of a memory of a memory, of a reinterpreted memory with like a political valence now like imbued to it. And that's enough for them to like, you know, put out a blaring headline. But like any person, really, I think would benefit from being more familiar with this. Because, you know, there was a famous experiment run

by Elizabeth Aloftus, who is a professor of, uh, of neurology, neurobiology or maybe psychology something in that vein at the University of California Davis and she's somebody who has almost become notorious

because she's one of the few expert witnesses that are available to defendants to testify on their behalf in a criminal trial or a civil trial where the defendant is seeking to refute claims of things that had been remembered from

years or even decades in the past right so Elizabeth Lopter's testified on behalf of Delane Maxwell. She testified on behalf Harvey Weinstein in one of his trials and there are many other high profile cases.

But she ran an experiment I want to say maybe in the early 2000s where the test subjects were told that they had that as children

they had been lost in a grocery store maybe or they were with their parents somewhere as small children and they had been separated from their parents and that this had then been gone down in like family lore. And it was to fabric, they were told of fabrication.

Like this didn't actually happen. But then, I might not be explaining like the mechanics of the study 100% accurately. But the takeaway was that the people who had been kind of implanted with a totally, like a purposely fabricated memory about something that took place in their childhood, came to unswervingly believe that it did actually. actually happened to them, right? Because yeah, especially from early childhood,

obviously it's especially susceptible to kind of suggestible introduction of purported memories. And yeah, so now we have and so again, that's just like one example of many I can give you about this fallibility

of memory, but like it can be extended out into so many different fields. There's the classic one. It even costs me to like try to like be rationally doubtful of my own memories. Oh, yeah, you should. Yeah. Yeah. There are many cases where eyewitnesses have, they truly sincerely believe that they saw

someone at the scene of a crime and that person's alibi is foolproof. Because they, again, it's not a photograph. It's not a hard drive or mine. We're recreating the past in order to serve the present of the future. You don't need this expert. You can just read Nietzsche. I mean, I guess that's my answer to everything. But there's another famous experiment, which you probably heard of, which is they asked people,

you went to Disneyland when you were 10, right? And they're like, now, do you remember that time that you and your mom got photographed with Bugs Bunny? And they're like, oh, yeah, of course I do. All you had to do is suggest that Bugs Bunny. Now, Bugs Bunny is not at Disneyland, because that's Disney and Warner Brothers or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yes, yeah, I've heard of this one. All you have to do is a little bit of a suggestion.

your mind has already created that photograph. I think that might have been Elizabeth Loftus too, actually. It probably was, yeah. Yeah. And so, again, memory is active. It's not passive. And this whole platinum situation is just an example of it, where there's an escalation of the memory.

There's memory escalation. It's what we've just seen this summer. It doesn't even have to be memory. It could be, the memory could itself be kind of stable. in terms of their ability to access it, but it could be kind of impuged, imbued with different meaning, especially given how extensive concepts of consent,

even rape, you know, trafficking, which is like a big one for, you know, Epstein and more, um, power dynamic,

what does it mean to have given consent or not? Uh, when that can kind of like be retroactively, uh, applying to the memory, even if you're, even if you have a reasonably accurate memory of just like whatever, had impinged on your like, you know,

your sensory organs in terms of like how you captured whatever it is that you experienced. Just assigning it, reframing it with an entirely different meaning or context is alone enough where you don't even have to necessarily tinker with the memory per se. It's just like the emotional content of the memory, you know? And, you know, that's a huge aspect of the, of a lot of the Epstein stuff.

Actually, in terms of like what might distinguish this current era from me too. Well, we're having a bit of a research now in recovered memories. So whenever recovered, like, recovered memories, it had been kind of, it became consensus at least into like the 2000s, right,

that recovered memories were no longer credible or could not be used as admissible evidence, especially in criminal trials, for the most part. Like by maybe 2009, 10, that had been pretty much agreed was not something

that the courts could could act to just in terms of the scientific ambiguity of it, right? But now there's been a bit of

an up surge around recovered memory as something that people are citing or have faith in. I don't know of it really being reintroduced

necessarily into criminal trials as much anymore but you know, one thing that I've, you know, something that I discovered early on when like what the first phase of the Epstein files came out in the December of last year. And I still haven't done like the full story on it.

But like it's a work in progress is that it's shocking how much recovered memory, how much of a role of recovered memories or purported recovered memories plays in the Epstein saga writ large. But in particular, as relates to one of the central claimed victims that the government actually hinged Epstein's 2019 federal indictment on. I think I might have discussed with this this with you a little bit when whenever we last spoke about the Epstein stuff maybe in February. But yeah, it's the

the government was prepared to again hinge its case against Epstein federally on a on a purported victim who later has disclosed that she bases her perceptions of her victimhood on recovered memories that she says she only realized that she had when they were implanted in her by others,

meaning others in the Epstein sort of like survivor click or network. And then that also kind of, you know, and then the, the Swalwell thing, right? So the first wave of accusations were, these women who had been either his younger

staff or who he had met through some political function, right? Or like in his more professional capacity. But then there came, there was another woman who was debuted who the, you know, media outlets ran wall to wall, her press conference with Lisa Bloom,

the daughter of Gloria Alred, where they were seated together at a table solemnly in Beverly Hills. And this woman says that Swalwell Albright raped her in 2018. And when Lisa Bloom, the lawyer representing this accuser, would go on to elaborate on the nature of her client's accusations against Swalwell,

she confided that the client had undergone EMDR therapy with the express intent of, if not recovering a memory, somewhere something like recovering of memory meaning crystal. It's this therapeutic technique that was invented by a woman in the 1980s, a therapist who claims

that she was on a walk in the woods one day near her home. And she realized that if she moved her eyes around, that that would have some effect on kind of like stabilizing her emotional state

or somehow affect her ability to kind of cognize her emotions. Right. So they came up with a technique where like an instrument is waved in front of people's eyes to get like movement in their eyes. And then that's supposed to like unlock some capacity in their brain to release memories or sensations or things that had been stored in their brain. But otherwise you wouldn't have access to. It sounds like mesmerism.

It's quackery. I mean, it's quackery. I mean, there are people who say that they got some value from EMDR therapy if they say they have PTSD or something, but there's no real evidence that they're finding sort of method in EMDR therapy, meaning the waving of like a instrument in front of the eyes to like get the eyes to flutter, that that has any kind of salutary effect. So the people could just be attesting to, okay, they're in a therapeutic environment and they're talking about stuff and whatever. Maybe that has some benefit. But, but. But the quackery becomes like all the more sort of pernicious if it's being claimed that it is being used to discover memories that then can be used to add to this snowball, you know, snowball effect against the guy who's being, you know, run out of town with these mounting accusations. And that's what happened in April. Now, did anybody cover that critically at all? Of course not. I mean, maybe it's because they didn't like swallow. I don't know. I never particularly cared for him politically, but like, sorry, when this kind of stuff gets just allowed to persist without challenge, then we get a new precedent or a new moray, right?

And then, you know, one thing leads to another in Platner's being, Platner gets called toxic because there's something that happened in 2015. And all, and, you know, the next thing you know, his, his ability to secure the most democratic primary votes for any Senate candidate in the history of Maine is just summarily overridden. and his career is over. And his life may be, I mean, his reputation is obliterated. So, I mean, I see kind of like the Swabo thing.

I mean, the Swallow thing has to be looked at in the same continuum, not least because Cheyenne Hunt, who you mentioned earlier was like literally this, she literally facilitated both. I mean, she facilitated the Swallow thing

or she claims that she played an integral role in it. Then she starts an NGO. She said, she openly declares, okay, next is my next, my next target is Platner, and then she pertains to do what she did with Platner. By feeding the new, like the victim from the New York Times story with like newly intensified or, you know, dramatized accusations.

And she's the one who says, hey, Politico, here you go. Hey, CNN, here you go. Let's make sure that we have this PR offensive where we have the Politico thing out. And then like within an hour, we have her, you know, or, you know, touching interview with Jake, very sensitive, of Jake Tapper on CNN. What do you think? Because we've been treating this matter as a moral panic in some way and as sort of organic in some way. And I think that that is correct. And I don't think,

even if it were a political scheme, it wouldn't work if there wasn't some organic moral panic. But what do you think is, I mean, let me just throw some things out there. And these are these are too broad or too easy, but is it just the case that Platner is calling out the Gaza genocide and people in the Democratic Party are like, no. Let's get rid of him through hook or crook. What do you think about that?

No, I don't buy that. It's kind of conventional wisdom, but I guess I don't, I don't see a basis for that, really? Yeah. I mean, there have been a recent spate of victors in Democratic congressional primaries who in some cases unseated incumbents. I was surprised that

for example, this guy, Adriano Espayat, who's, you know, pretty well-established, a member of Congress from basically Harlem, was ousted by this woman who mostly was emphasizing their differences on

Israel. I think APAC, what I've noticed watching somewhat casually to all these primaries, but APAC is something that the winning candidate will mention, like, right up front. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Dan Goldman was so proud not to be, you know, APAC is over. I'm so proud not to have received a dollar from them.

Yeah, I mean, Dan Goldman was trounced in his primary by Brad Lander. And again, the main point of emphasis by Lander, really, was their differences on Israel, you know, Lander's criticism. that Goldman would refuse to say genocide. I would refuse to say that as well because I don't even buy the whole concept of genocide as conceptually coherent any longer, but that's another subject. Would you be a great politician, Michael.

I'm certainly not the first one. I know, I know, exactly. I would run on my not anti-genocide policy from the standpoint of opposing a particular purported genocide, but opposing the terminological construct. That's a winning way. So, I mean, I know a lot of people would like to believe, because it would like flatter their sense of beleaguered political sort of self-righteousness.

Right. That Platner was ousted because there was a target on his back over his stance on Israel. I just don't think that really holds up. I mean, I think that these tactics can be ruthlessly employed against, you know, parapsychical, Democratic Party men, regardless of where they happen to fall on the party's ideological spectrum. So like, Andrew Cuomo is not really in the same quadrant ideologically as Platner, within the Democratic Party, but like, you know, pretty much not quite the same tactics.

I mean, Cuomo was never accused of outright of rape, but like a similar kind of snowball effect thing where like you chisel away at his ability to do with, you know, et cetera. And, you know, but Cuomo is actually interesting parallel because I argued at the time, of course, because nobody else would cover it. And at one point, like the entire New York press corps was like in revolt against me because they thought I was being fed stuff by like Apo researchers for Cuomo, which I wasn't. but my my thesis at that time was that Cuomo because New York, there's no term limits for the governor of New York, right?

And Cuomo in that point had been in office for around 10 years in 2021, and he was, by all accounts, preparing to run for another re-election in 2022. And although his popularity among Democratic legislators had been serious, diminishing because in 2018 the new class of Democrats had been like in one of the like the first sort of DSA wave right so they they were hugely antagonistic toward Cuomo

and they're all kinds of disputes right actually that was when Zoran Mamdani was first elected as a state assemblyman and so actually Zoran himself was part of this effort to galvanize calls for Cuomo to resign the instant that anything at all was alleged

not even any kind of like sex not even an assault. Just being Italian. Yeah, I mean, we don't have to get into all the details, but like it was so silly what, like the first sort of like things that were you going to allege, but that was in that was itself. Well, now for his oron to say, Como must resign, you know, whatever. But my thesis was that the depth, like the kind of the quote unquote progressives or

socialists or like more leftward elements of the Democratic Party in New York who were antagonistic to Cuomo would have to recognize. that they were not going to be able to defeat Cuomo electorally, okay? He had had progressive primary challengers in 2018, in 2014. They got much hype by the media, like the New York City heavy, kind of like left-y-type media.

Cynthia Nixon and Zephyr Teachout, and it was a bust. I mean, he overwhelmingly wins because he, like, we got 90% in the Bronx black voters, and like, you would do well in Buffalo and then in the enough in the suburbs. And like, he might lose, like, you know, Manhattan or something, but he would still

win the Democratic Prize. or handily. So in lieu of defeating him electorally, what are these, what is this cohort of newly kind of emboldened Democrat, quote unquote progressive legislators do? Well, they seize upon the first possible opportunity to dislodge him through an alternative, an alternative political method that's incredibly high salience from the Democratic Party coalition, if you'll edge any kind of impropriety that has a sexual component, right? And that they, they, they, I think, calculated, would it be eventually enough to compel his removal that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to obtain through ordinary electoral means, just given his kind of like

command over the party infrastructure at that point over the course of a decade. And so I think you saw something similar here, not quite the same circumstances, but like, again, Platon just won what anybody would have to say is like if anything would exist as an electoral mandate in the context of like a Democratic primary contest. Boats. Yeah, yeah. Ever in a Democratic primary. Yeah.

But not only that, he was so formidable in his political influence, right, that the incumbent Democratic governor, whom Chuck Schumer and others of that ilk courted to run against Platner, she didn't even bother, she, she came to a recognition that there was so little chance of her even being competitive with Platner that she had to withdraw her candidacy, sitting incumbent governor like a month or two in advance. And, you know, there was, there was a campaign event where the, the, all the Democrats running for governor of Maine in 2026. So all the Democratic primary candidates for Maine prior to the primary, they all appeared

with Platner, like on the same stage, as, even as they were running against one another, because they all wanted to share a platform with him and, you know, be, be bolstered by his you know, remarkable generation of Democratic Party enthusiasm, right? So they couldn't get rid of them through that means. And so what did this woman, Cheyenne Hunt, do? Who knows who exactly

she was coordinating with? She launched this NGO of hers reckoning action in May alongside like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other members of the Democratic Women's Caucus. So it would stand a reason that she's like in touch with some of the these people. Who knows? I'd like to know more. But what do they do? They execute an op of sorts to to defeat Platner through a tried and true political method that's hyper salient within

their co-the-eat-eat, at least the elite strategy of their coalition. And I know I'm asking you to speculate, but I actually agree with you that we should dampen the sort of Zionist angle because the Democratic Party. this is happening everywhere. Is it just, is it because he's so rough and tumble that they feel like he might be a liability, like maybe an electoral liability or a liability in Congress? He can't be controlled because he, I mean, look, the guy is flawed. I mean, he's a bit of a wild man.

I mean, is Susan Collins flawed? I mean, people say, oh, he's a flawed person. All right. I mean, is Susan Collins flawless? Was she just boring? He's not boring. He's, you know, he, is that it? or is this just an attack on heterosexual white men?

I mean, you know, I think it would be overstating it a little bit to say it's just a full-scale, you know, broadside against all heterosexual white men. Yeah. What does tend to be the case increasingly in the Democratic Party is if any heterosexual white male has any semblance of a kind of liability in terms of their personal. history or their dating record or anything to do with that sort of like area of life, then that could be seized upon in a brutally effective way by their opponents. But then it's presented as though it's just this noble defensive like women as such or that you're defending some higher principle, which of course it's it's not. although the fact that so many of the most activated kind of Democratic Party coalition members,

not so much to quote grassroots like the Democratic primary voter, although a lot of them would agree, but I'm talking about people who, you know, would be the ones who would be in a text chain with somebody who they would be demanding had now to rescind their endorsement of Platner, like within 20 minutes of the Politico article coming out. So like the operative class or, you know, consultants or media. Do they just want boring people?

I know this is very kind of flippant to say this. But say what you will about Grand Platner. He's not boring. And they actually want everyone to be boring like them. It's a revolt of the midwits. It's, you know, Ortegaicasse, you know, revolt of the masses. It's like the revolt of the middle against anyone who's interesting, whether they're rough and tumble like Grand Platner or kind of fallen elite in a way like Grand Platner,

or they're just kind of cool. Like I'm being really deadly serious because we are driven by resentment and rage that's sort of hidden often, and it leads us to a bias, and they just want to attack anyone who's interesting. You know, I think I don't think that quite captures it either. Okay, I think that some of the trajectory of this is like, is Sue Gineris to Platner. But that then interfaces with the

overall dynamic of how certain taxics can be employed against any heterosexual male with the liability as to their personal life, right? But so the, before the revelation, quote unquote, that he had a Nazi tattoo in October as far as I was able to ascertain I wasn't following it that closely but even even the kind of more

rad lib women rights segments of the Democratic Party were kind of enthused by Platner or like or happy to cheer his seeming rise in popularity right but then

all of a sudden comes out this you know bombshell of a quote unquote Nazi tattoo. Now, think about what political, quote, a little moment we're in. I hate that cliche. But like, these, these people, Democrats who are like going to be the ones who are real invested in following a main Senate race over a year before it takes place, they're going to be disproportionately the types of people who had thought of themselves as like on

the bleeding edge in the fight against Trump and fascism. We're not like oral literal Nazis. Like perhaps including yourself, Richard. Meaning in that I'm saying in their perceptions. Right. Like it would be weird if I had a Nazi, I mean, I don't have any tattoos, but like that would sort of like fit the script. But then they elect a guy who actually has one.

Like if I ever went to a tattoo parlor and I saw a Totenkov, I might be like, it's a little too on the nose, but Grim Platner did it. Now, you of course have a hammer and sickle. on your ass as we as we all know so hopefully no it's too hairy you can see any tattoos so

I never bother but like but the moment that the moment that the quote unquote Nazi tattoo became a quote thing then that

was the moment that blue sky okay in which I out of morbid curiosity have found myself checking in with just to like just to absorb

whatever whatever quote vibes they have have going on over there Platinum became like their number one enemy. Platterman might even surpass Donald Trump as the the person who was most loathed by Blue Sky. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yes. Interesting. It's it's it's it was almost it was almost unanimous on Blue Sky that Platner was this menace that it was shameful for anybody to

countenance his being embraced by the Democratic Party as some kind of you know, tribune of what it means to be progressive in the Trump's second term. They, they, they, and that did and, you know, blue sky is very, you know, the demographics of blue sky as far as I could tell are very heavy on like, um, gender fluid

folks, trans, lots of, you know, it's definitely, it seems to skew heavily women. Um, so I do think that bound up in their resent, in the resentment that was prompted by the revelation of the quote unquote Nazi tattoo was also a resentment toward this idea that Platner was this model Democrat that the party was desperately in search of to appeal to, I don't know, younger, to appeal to people who were more masculine in their kind of cultural coding.

And they didn't like that because they view that as almost itself connoting some kind of accommodation to fascism. Right. And, but, you know, at a certain point, like, even though that they have, you know, there are a lot of misgivings, and I'm generalizing about the entire platform, but this is pretty much it. At a certain point, like, you know, they, you could tell them maybe they're a bit resigned to Platner becoming the nominee and, you know, although they had misgivings, they didn't really believe them about the tattoos, so they're going to, like, keep a close eye on him.

But then, you know, when, when some kind of sexual misconduct could be alleged, starting with the vagaries of the New York Times article, then they smelled blood, right? Then they knew that there was a real way that they could dispatch with somebody whom they already had these cultural animosities

toward or whom they resented the Democratic Party for, as they saw, kind of bending over backwards to kind of integrate into their coalition as like the new face of what the progressives should be. so yeah i mean i don't i so if there had been no revelation of the nancy tatu i don't think you would have had set into motion the chain of events that then led to the rape claim just

so um again it some of that's got to be sui generis to platner i'm not sure how many more prospective uh democratic senate candidates would have a quote unquote nazi tattoo so you might be alone or a sort of anomalous in that um but like it's in the context of this kind of like versioning resentment toward what not just what he represents, but what they take it to mean that the Democratic Party is so eager to showcase him or hold him out as like this, this emblem of their, their Trump second term political, you know, project. And so in that context, they could go in for the kill the minute there was any kind of, there was any whiff of sexual impropriety. Yeah. Let me ask you a few questions as we bring it to a close

of going forward. First off, just as a political prognosticator, Susan Collins, is she going to roll into victory now? Or not? Maybe, I don't know. Does this help the Democratic Party? Because they don't have to deal with this guy whose life is messy to put it mildly.

I don't know. You got to think that there is going to be some segment of the people who voted for Plattenor who are angered enough about this. That, because I mean, look at what Platter himself said in his video where he at least says that he intends to withdraw

his nomination. He hasn't done or his candidacy. He hasn't done so formally yet. He hasn't submitted the paperwork to the Secretary of State's office. So who knows? Could have a plot twist by the deadline on Monday. But, I mean, look at what he says. He says the party establishment

colluded with the media to destroy our movement. This is always happens when anybody challenges status quo, etc. He gave a very strident you know, unapologetic statement and he said that the claimant outweigh fabricated, okay?

So, I mean, there are going to be some people now because like this has been, this has been one of the top most nationally fixated on Senate races now for some time. And then in Maine, which is not a huge state, even more kind of saturated

in its coverage. So people, there's going to be some segment of these voters who, who felt, you know, some kinship with Platner, who I think are going to be not just, you know, blithely willing to vote for whomever they can field against Collins.

Now, it's not going to be the people who are like hardcore Democratic partisans, maybe, like, who are just, you know, are overwhelmingly just... There's enough people who are against the Democratic party and I think Plattener was running against the Democratic establishment to a very large degree. There are enough people who are demoralized or who get that kind of negative polarization where they're just like, fuck you. I would rather have Collins as a outright enemy than have a turncoat wishy-washy champion. And that is a real human emotion. I mean, yeah. I think Collins is

is going to walk into victory. That's my prediction. And there's a certain kind of like hardcore Democratic partisan in Maine. Let's say it's like, you know, prototypically would be, I don't know, like a 70-year-old, you know, a crunchy liberal cable news watching woman who for years and years and years has had more and more resentment fester against Collins because although she will not align with Trump,

you know, 100% of the time, still is still by her very presence in the Senate allows the Republicans to control the chamber and we'll vote for a Supreme Court nominee

like you know Kavanaugh, et cetera. So there are people who in Maine and you see them quoting in a lot of these kind of like just man on the street type campaign reportage stories where they say they don't care

about anything else than beating Collins whatever the cost, right? But that's not going to be the entire yeah, that's not going to be what comprises the entirety of whatever coalition was behind Platter to deliver him that, you know, history making a victory, right?

So, yeah, I could see some of them being, being too chastened to vote for whoever they replace him with. And, you know, Collins, if you recall, in 2020, right, Democrats were convinced, you know, the Democratic intelligency was convinced that that was the year that they were finally going to do away with Collins, right?

And the polls actually showed it, neck and neck or even the Democrat Democratic nominee leading and Susan Collins hilarious and this is the funny like this is just the straight out funniest outcome of the 2020 election she ended up winning like by a landslide she won by nine points I think it was

now that was a presidential election so it's entirely different electorate I think this is going to be a sizable democratic wave year and you know what I know this is going to people are going to say oh you're just saying this because you're contrarian I think that there is a non-trivial chance.

And I'm talking about like a, the floor of like a 30% chance probably, or at least a 30% chance that Platner could have still won the election. Oh, yeah. I mean, first of all, he says that the allegations were fabricated. Unless he's just like a total psycho, then I don't know. Why doesn't he say,

make a statement saying that the statute of limitations, in Maine as of 2021 for any for sexual assault per the statutory you know code is was 20 years so there should be no barrier to this being reported to the police and then we can have a proper investigation and then you know et cetera et cetera so like there's a there's a chance right that the claim could be investigated and it would prove platner to be vindicated um for one thing but even if that even if there was no no vindication in that sense i don't know I mean, I still think that, you know, just buoyed by the national environment, it's certainly possible. Like, it's not impossible, right, that he still could have won the election.

So I don't know. I just think, I'm uncertain. You know, Susan Collins now is like kind of has this mythology around her where she, like, defies all the odds. And she has this, just, you know, place in the, in the lore of, like, main politics. or something where she can win whatever the whatever the circumstances but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case forever, right?

So I don't know. I think what I would be willing to say is like the people who would just like declare stupidly that there's just no chance that Platter could ever win under any circumstances in spite of the quote accusations, whatever their merit, right? I think that's silly.

I totally agree. Do you think that there's going to be a move away in the Democratic Party from what Plattenor represented, which, you know, if we're just going to be honest, like, let's find a Democrat. He's pro-choice. He's against Trump, et cetera. He's more in line with health care policy, all that kind of stuff. But he's coded right wing. This is sort of Tim Walts. Military service. He was not not perfect for that. But it was 100 percent Platner. So he reads red, but his policies are blue.

He's white. He goes hunting. He's... But he actually did that stuff without doing it to, like, strategically signal anything. Like, so that was what made him unique, right? It wasn't like John Kerry going quail hunting. Right.

A week before the 2004 election in, like, camo gear. Right. And it just came across as, like, totally contrived, right? Yeah. Platter, I mean, by all accounts, you know, actually did, you know, commercial fishing work and, you know, was into the more.

masculine, coded sort of like cultural milieu. Right. Without having to kind of... Like when Kamala Harris competed in that paintball competition. I mean, I didn't buy it. Did she? I don't remember that. I'm joking.

Oh, okay. I mean, you know, that actually didn't sound implausible enough for me to realize you were joking. I can imagine some dopey, overpaid Democratic consultant telling her to do that. Move away. I don't know, I'm not sure with that, you know, I think just in the narrower circumstances of this main thing,

because what's going to happen now, if he does go through with the formal withdrawal, is that a very unspecified, kind of opaque process gets triggered where the party kind of apparatchiks can just devise some ad hoc process to install some new nominee. So I'm certain that there's going to be some contingent

within who's ever in the kind of decision tree there to say, look, I mean, to atone for our sins, we have to nominate a woman, like, That's not even something that can be argued. Now, will they do it? I mean, I see somebody in the running potentially as this guy, Troy Jackson, who appears to be a male. So who knows?

But I'm sure that will at least be kind of like a school of thought, right? Look what happened when Al Franken was kind of compelled to resign during the peak of me, too, right? Part of the logic there for Democrats in terms of why they came to agree that for the good of the party and the in the nation, you know, and to sort of solidify their moral standing against Trump, was that, yes,

Al Franken, although he had done a wonderful job, you know, at the Senate committee hearings, he did have to resign, and then he would be duly replaced by a woman. I don't think Waltz was the governor at that time, but I think it was maybe Mark Dayton.

So, yeah, Mark Dayton says, yes, of course, he'll appoint a woman, so they put in this kind of generic woman, Tina Smith. and that's kind of the logic.

And yeah, I'm sure there will be demands for some kind of like penance to be done on. I mean, actually, there's this, there's this intra-party now almost like purging thing going on where anybody, any consultant who had been party to Platner's ascendance is being, like their past are now being scoured through to see if there's any like anything harassing that maybe they did like five years. years ago. And so there's going to be like some kind of reckoning, you know, to quote Cheyenne Hunt's organization, where it will be argued that the faction that had been sort of the masterminds

of Plattenor's emergence is going to be told, look at this fiasco that you beset us with. Yeah. And they're going to, they're blaming like Bernie Sanders and, you know, because Bernie is like the big first endorsement that he got because this, you know, 27-year-old supposed it's Fengali, you know, boy genius, Morris Katz, who was behind, you know, who advised Zoran on media strategy.

He then, you know, swooped into the main thing. And he facilitated, was involved in facilitating, you know, Bernie coming to Maine over Labor Day last year and like being the first big endorsement rally for Platner. So, I mean, there's going to be a way in the, there's some like score settling in terms of, like, factional disputes. but in the party.

But like I just, I think overall, I mean, look, how would it be effectuated, right, that the part, for the party to move on

from platinum types? Like what, what in particular would any particular, like, faction do to, to realize that? That's kind of what, I'm clear on.

I think, I think Joe Biden was settled on by the party. And remember, he was losing those early primaries and things like that. I'm just going to say it, because he was an old. white guy. It's like Trump is a well, okay, well, hear me out.

Trump is a dangerous white nationalist. Bernie Sanders was pretty old and he won the primary in a, in a landslide. Yeah. The only way to defeat him is with a really, really old white man. And they they thought Hillary lost because

she was too feminist or cringe or whatever. And they moved to an old white man and then they sort of they got rid of him. very similar in the ways that they got rid of Plattenor. And they went to a woman. I voted for Kamala Harris.

And I don't even think her campaign was that terrible. I thought it was pretty good when you judge it. I did not, just for the record, in case any comments. This is sort of funny in a way. But I proudly voted for Mamala. But I recall that. I recall being very inspired by your endorsement statements. Yes. But they're just going to go back to the well. Again, I don't, I don't hate Kamala Harris. I think she's fine. But there, there, I get the fact that this giggling, you know, biracial woman who does, I get it how that can turn off people in central Ohio. And they're just going to keep doing this.

forever because that's the only safe option and that's the only person who could never be accused of rape. And again, I'm not even, I'm not dunking on Kamala. I'm just saying the reality. Right. Oh, Tara Reid. Yeah. So just so I make sure I understand, what you're suggesting is that although Democrats in theory might like to nominate a. masculinity projecting older male candidate.

It's kind of like just a classic president archetype, right? They feel that it's no longer tenable, so they're going to keep going back to some sort of like POC woman? Yes, and they're going to lose because of that. And I say this with sadness in a way. I don't know. I mean, Joe Biden won the Democratic primary in 2020, like going away when we were told all along when he seemed to be,

seemed to be struggling. He only had like a modest national lead in the polls that this was because the Democratic primary electorate was hyper-focused on the identity traits of the candidates. Right. That's why Kamala was seen as like an early favorite. That's why Nate Silver in like January of 2019 infamously came out and said like Kamala Harris is the frontrunner.

Her campaign totally was a was a, it was a botch in the primaries. right um because like you know Nate silver just thought that a uh a half uh half Jamaican half Indian a former prosecutor from Berkeley California was like going to immediately connect on identitarian grounds to like church going ADOS uh AADOS uh black people in South Carolina um no not quite uh who do they who do they move for overwhelmingly Joe Biden the old guy would have a older white guy and so I don't know I think I think there was kind of like there were pundit prognostications in terms of how that primary process would shake out that were totally dispelled by the actual voter behavior um I mean even Bernie was it was it was if you went like if you took that identitarian theory to the fullest extreme he too was considered a quote old white guy I guess I know he's Jewish but like that's how it was presented and

And, you know, he won the New Hampshire primary, convincingly and arguably tied with Buttigieg in Iowa. I just, I don't know, I don't think, I don't think that's going to have, I'm not certain that that's how we would pan out. Like, I think a person like, you know, Assov, I could easily see a situation where he becomes a consensus pick for the party. She's not exactly coded masculine, if I'm being honest. Masculent enough. Yeah. Like he's not like a platinum, right, where he's going to enrage these blue sky, they, thems.

Right. Just by virtue of his identity. But he could be magical enough that like some of the, some people in the party, okay, say he's. Talarico is maybe an example of this. I mean, like, you know, he looks a little bit like a choir boy. He's kind of neutralized. Like he's not going to rape anyone.

Yeah. I mean, this is basically. On the other hand, I mean, I don't know. Everybody's so hyper-fixated on this one Senate race that, like, tell me if you were even aware that the Democrats basically, the Democratic kind of leadership structure in the Senate, just without fanfare, recruited Roy Cooper, who was the former two-term quintessential, older looking older white male Democratic governor of North Carolina to run for the Senate seat. He seems to have a pretty comfortable lead. They brought back Sherrod Brown, older right guy to run in Ohio. seems like he's got a pretty good chance of winning.

So those people are more just sort of classical politicians. They are older white men, and the party was 100% on board with, again, hardly anybody even raising a question, that they were the best candidates to field for those races. On a presidential level, I mean, yeah, I do think, you know, I got a mixed minds about it because it seems almost a certainty to me that anybody, any, any, any heterosexual, any male, probably more often a white male, but, you know, they, they managed to oust John Conyers at the height of Me Too, who was like one of the most, like the lions of the House of Representatives have been in, you know, in office since like 1962 or something. Because of some sexual harassment thing that got, ended up being alleged. And then like he had died shortly thereafter. I mean, was kind of.

kind of remarkable, almost callous. And this is like one of like the, you know, this guy was like a civil rights hero, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You'd think if anybody was going to be immunized from the, uh, the onslaughts of Me Too, it would have been him, but nope. So, um, real quick, because I, I do want to bring it to a close because we're, we're almost here at two hours. Do you think Me Too is going to burn itself out?

Or do you think that this is the, tried to explain this to you. It's already been burned out. I'm postulating that we are in a distinct era. So when I say me too, I'm not, you understand, I'm using that as a term that categorizes like the whole thing. Because obviously these are genealogically connected. The whole thing like what, starting in 2017 or starting like non of humanity?

No, starting in 2017. Okay. A new type of morality that is. distinctive and do these things burn themselves out or is this actually kind of a paradigm that we're going to be in for a while? Again, I think like me, me too, as it would have been understood as a cultural political phenomenon, circa 2017, 2018 did kind of burn itself out. Obviously, it's still settled into the cultural and political ether to some extent where it could

have like kind of more uh it could have certain manifestations that just kind of draw on like the lineage of it um but you know i i'm i'm i'm i'm postulating that we're in what i'm calling the zombie epstein era because we just went through a year of like legitimate moral panic and mass stereo over yeah ever present pedophilic predation like a petio behind every bush trafficking can mean anything to anyone anytime anybody who you know, so much as sent him a cheeky email in 2015, had to, you know, issue a brawling statement and perhaps resign and probably lost a lot of business contacts and what, you know, etc.

I think that is more the more proximate caused here kind of layered onto Me Too than Me Too alone. I mean, look at what Cheyenne Hunt, Shaihan Hunt through her organization, reckoning action, put out a thread today on X where she, they came out and said

that the, their, their, their proximate motivating cause for why they went after Swallow him and then set their sights on Platon, the way they did was because of Epstein. Wow.

For the reckoning that is due, long overdue around Epstein and how, you know, Platner might have railed against the Epstein class, but it turns out he was actually deploying the abusive power, the sexually exploiting, the sexually exploitative kind of power that is characteristic of the obscene class to undermine our righteous efforts to actually oppose the absent class,

something like that, right? And then even in terms of why everybody, even why there was like a frenzied sweepstakes that broke out, the afternoon the Politico story broke, is because you have guys like Aosoff, nationally ambitious male democratic figures, Rokana, who is like central to it, but also in your, Ruben Gallego,

who, you know, have been rehearsing these prospective presidential sump speeches where they're invading against the Epstein class. So that means that they're going to have high exposure risk to hypocrisy allegations if they're not instantaneous in their willingness to disavow or repudiate or call for the termination of the candidate of somebody, candidacy of somebody who has been accused of anything like this. So I don't know. So we're not burned out. on that moral panic at all. Because like it's hard, it's not even conceptualized widely. I mean,

unless you happen to like subscribe to my substack pretty much, and granted it's gotten a little bit more, um, traction in the past couple months. But, uh, unless you're, like,

you're kind of, a, aware of some kind of like niche online commentariat, uh, you know, spaces. I don't even know that you would, um,

be conceptualizing Epstein as having been a moral panic or a mass hysteria, or that it could have these kind of cultural, um, more more subtle cultural and political ramifications. So, I mean, and you gotta remember like how, I think we might have talked about this, but like in terms of, there's a reason why that story has been so salient.

It's like a pop culture story as well, right? You know, it's something that like, the 19-year-old on TikTok are super into, you're not going to be super into the main Senate race, right? But this thing, I think, has had these has had a lot you know

especially after the mass release of Epstein spots have had you know reverberations that we haven't fully appreciated and I think this

this wall to platinum kind of thing in terms of how they were their demises were executed is just one of

them I don't see any sign of that burning out anytime soon because it hasn't even been grappled with yet

I mean you tell me if I'm wrong yeah I agree with you I think saying that it's, I mean, I was speculating, actually, before you got on air that we're going to enter a sort of new mode of sexuality. There was the sexual revolution, which was very shocking and paradigm changing in the 60s. And we sort of ended up where we were for most of my adult life, which was that you are free to have sex here and there.

you can go on apps, you can have a one-night stand. No one's going to really judge you. You can move in with your partner before you get married, et cetera, et cetera. And I think we're actually exiting that period. I mean, these things sort of have like generational 30-year waves. And I don't know exactly where we're going to be. And I know this is speculative and might even strike some as hysterical. But I wonder if we're entering some.

ironically puritanical age in which sex itself released heterosexual sex is criminalized or demoralized, delegitimized and looking at people the wrong way. I mean, basically it's going to be some bizarre Muslim-like society

where there's interest in covering or the men will be wearing the burkas this time and women. I don't know what it is. Mandatory of a victimist? Mandatory vasectomy male burkas. And I know this sounds outlandish, but history changes, you know? Like things do, things like this happen. And there was a pre-Islamic society before there was one where women are completely covered.

And it's not outrageous to think in these ways, but it is speculative. and maybe I'm being a bit outlandish, but I wonder if we're going to enter a world where, you know, it's like, it won't be what the trads want, but it's going to be, because the, people like Cheyenne Hunt, they've got legitimacy on their side.

It's going to be their world, but it's going to remarkably and ironically resemble an Islamic society. I don't know if I'll go that far, but like quick, quick concluding thought here. Okay. Just for something for people to sort of think about, that might bear on this thesis as to what era is now dawning.

In terms of how proper sexual conduct is being circumscribed, there was a class action settlement that was finalized or approved by a federal judge in New York in April against Bank of America, by the same sort of crew of plaintiff's attorneys who sued all kinds of entities like financial. institutions and the ups in the state when attracted to the giant financial settlements. So they have a new one that's underway now in terms of them seeking claimants for their approved class action settlement. So one thing that they told the court that they are going to do and that the court has agreed that they are required to do in the process of sort of setting up this class action

settlement structure is to go to Europe and put advertisements or put notices in newspapers in Poland and other places where in the Russian language, in other languages where they're attempting to locate women who can claim that they had been trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein between 2008 and 2019. That span of years is notable because between 2008 and 2019, the only women whom Jeffrey Epstein had ever even been accused of having any kind of relations with whatsoever were exclusively adults. Pre-2008, different story, okay, but 2018 to 2019,

which is the time period that this lawsuit covers, that the pool of potential victims who can say that they qualify under the criteria that's been set up to designate trafficking, they would have been all adults, right? And they would have been overwhelmingly people, women who believe themselves contemporaneously to have been engaging in consensual conduct

but they were they were receiving you know amenities, travel whatever money, certain things that have now been construed as the component parts of a sex trafficking venture and of course like with the financial incentive there's all the reason for them to come out the woodworks and you know

get a couple million dollars tax-free from Bank of America, which kind of just buckled and agreed to this settlement terms without really much of a fight. So, now, look at the, look at now,

like what is, it's, the criteria for what can supposedly establish a trafficking situation is so loose and so ever expansive, so elastic, that anybody who exchanges a, thing of value.

Anything, exchange the thing of value. Like, it doesn't even require transportation. I don't want to get to the whole speech that I have on this right now.

But like, it's just so amorphous, right, that it can encompass so, such a broad range of potential sexual encounters or even like prospective sexual encounters

between male and female that it's going to, it's going to now prohibit or preclude lots of ways in which people had previously gone about obtaining sexual romantic companionship because who wants to be even run the risk of being labeled a trafficker, right? That's kind of like nobody even knows really what it means, but like it seems to mean something real bad. So you're going to probably forego any situation where, hey, it might be nice to see if this attractive,

young woman wants to do XYZ, but like if that means I could be branded a trafficker and be like embroiled in years of litigation and maybe even criminally prosecuted for a sex trafficking conspiracy, probably not worth the gamble. Now, I'm not saying everybody's aware of this,

of the terms of this Bank of America suit. I'm probably the only maniac who actually read it. But I'm saying it still has kind of, it's instilling these shifts into the legal architecture of the country that kind of coincide with changing cultural

just mores and political political mores. So that's just like one little data point for people maybe to consider in terms of how, again, the domain of what is seen as permissible sexual conduct is being like, is being newly demarcated as we speak.

Absolutely. Because we are in the, we are in the zombie Epstein era. There's an, Epstein angle to everything. Yes. Michael, thank you for coming back on.

I really enjoy speaking with you, and I'm sure the audience does as well, and this is really enlightening stuff, and it's something you can't get everywhere. You can only get it at a few places. So thank you for doing this. If any of you crazy people actually sat around, listened to that for two hours,

at least, you know, maybe consider subscribing to my own substack. Definitely. It's nice, but you don't have to. send everyone you're right. I don't ask for much. Yes. So thank you, Michael. And you're doing God's work,

and I will be in touch the next time one of these. All right. Sounds good. Is this video just going to be freely available? It will be totally available. Okay.

As your prayer of your request, yes, yes. Won't hide any people. I'm glad I impressed that upon you. Okay. Take care. Thank you. Bye.