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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Jan 4 • 3 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
The new Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell court documents show nothing of importance, say the media. In fact, they shed new light onto Epstein's sex blackmail operation. What's more, the evidence strongly suggests that Epstein & Maxwell were working for intelligence agencies. Image
Jeffrey Epstein Ran Sex Blackmail Operation For Intelligence Agencies, New Evidence Suggests

Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell used a puppet to entrap Prince Andrew, victim claims in unsealed court documents

by @galexybrane & @shellenberger
Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister and head of military intelligence (left); Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell (center-left); Prince Andrew (center-right); and William Burns, Director of the CIA (right). (Getty Images)

The release of new court documents from a lawsuit related to Jeffrey Epstein yesterday “provided little, if any, new fodder for conspiracy theorists who remain fixated on Mr. Epstein’s dealings more than four years after his death,” according to the New York Times. The documents, the Times claimed, reinforced what the public already knew, namely that pedophile financier Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell made young and often underage women available for sex to powerful men.

In fact, the documents offer new evidence and insight into how Epstein and Maxwell appeared to be blackmailing powerful individuals, albeit to mysterious ends. A judge ordered the release of the court documents, which were from a case brought by Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre against Maxwell in 2015. The parties settled in 2017. Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.

It’s true that some of the information released yesterday had already come to light. Last April, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported that the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns, had scheduled three meetings with Epstein in 2014. At the time, Burns was deputy secretary of state. According to the Journal, they met in Washington, D.C., and at Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan. The Journal based its reporting on Epstein’s own emails and schedules.

In 2019, reporter Vicky Ward for the Daily Beast wrote a story about the Justice Department’s 2007 “non-prosecution agreement” with Epstein. Where others might have gone to prison for similar crimes, Epstein made a deal with the US Attorney’s office and avoided federal prosecution for sexually abusing young girls by pleading guilty to state prostitution charges in Florida. Under this agreement, Epstein avoided a potential life sentence and served only 13 months in a work-release program.

That same year, another of Epstein’s victims alleged that he had cameras in his house to monitor people. That claim lent further credence to the theory that Epstein was collecting compromising material on influential figures.

But the newly unsealed documents include powerful new evidence that Epstein and Maxwell were deliberately blackmailing people. Johanna Sjoberg, another one of Epstein’s victims, recounted that he and Maxwell had created a Prince Andrew puppet for Prince Andrew. They presented it to him and used it to guide him into taking sexual photos with Sjoberg and Giuffre.

“They put the puppet on Virginia’s lap,” Sjoberg testified, “and I sat on Andrew’s lap, and they put the puppet’s hand on Virginia’s breast, and Andrew put his hand on my breast, and they took a photo.”

It is a remarkable passage since Maxwell and Epstein appear to be engaged in a kind of psychological operation, framing Andrew, to himself, as their puppet. Maxwell and Epstein apparently played it off as a joke to Andrew, and he played along, copying his puppet’s behavior and groping Sjoberg.

Epstein’s sex blackmailing also required coercion. Sjoberg testified that Maxwell directed her to have sex with Prince Andrew. Another filing alleges that Jane Doe #3 was “forced to have sexual relations with this prince when she was a minor in three separate geographical locations” and that Epstein told her to “give the prince whatever he demanded and required Jane Doe #3 to report back to him on the details of the sexual abuse.”

The court documents also contain allegations against billionaires Glenn Dubin and Tom Pritzker. Prizker currently serves as the CEO of the Pritzker Organization and as executive chairman of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation and is a member of the Aspen Institute. Giuffre alleges that she had sex with both Dubin and Pritzker under the direction of Maxwell and Epstein.

Johanna Sjoberg, one of Epstein’s victims, said Epstein told her that former President Bill “Clinton likes them young, referring to girls.” White House visitor logs show that Epstein had visited the White House 17 times while Clinton was president, often accompanied by attractive young women.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz is also named by Epstein’s house manager, who stated that Dershowitz was at Epstein’s home in Florida “pretty often” and received massages there. Dershowitz has repeatedly denied allegations of misconduct in connection to Epstein and Maxwell.

Other individuals include magician David Copperfield, celebrity hairstylists Frederick Fekkai, deceased former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and former president Donald Trump. Trump appears in a document in which Epstein allegedly said he invited Trump to meet him at a casino. In another document, a witness states that she did not see Trump in Epstein’s home.

The Epstein scandal has implicated many powerful people. Melinda Gates told reporters last year that her husband Bill’s connections to Epstein had been part of the reason for her decision to seek a divorce from him. "I did not like that he'd had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no," she told Gayle King.

Bill Gates said Epstein tried to blackmail him. “Mr. Gates met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes. Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr. Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates,” a spokeswoman for Gates told the Wall Street Journal last year.

Epstein and Maxwell appear to have been running a large and well-funded blackmail operation. Why would they?Image
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More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 31, 2023
NPR is promoting a fentanyl addict's addiction-enablement ("harm reduction") as a model for dealing with record-breaking drug addiction deaths.

And NPR is using parents whose kids died from fentanyl to promote more fentanyl addiction.

This is pathological.
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People say the drug war doesn't work.

What drug war?

There's obviously no "war" against fentanyl, carfentanil, and xylazine.

If there were, they wouldn't have increased drug deaths from 20,000 in 2000 to 112,000 in 2023.

There's no drug war, there's only drug enablement. Image
The claim from the New York Times, NPR, and Soros Inc. (e.g.,"Harm Reduction Alliance" and "Drug Policy Alliance") that fentanyl, carfentanil, and xylazine are abundant and cheap because of too much law enforcement is a psychotic lie of gigantic proportions.
Read 12 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 31, 2023
Totalitarian regimes use repression to maintain lies, which is something they have in common with Harvard, the New York Times, and the American Anthropological Association (AAA).

Harvard’s president rose to power after attempting to force a black economist, Roland Fryer, out of the university on the basis of weak and poorly substantiated sexual harassment charges, when her real motivation appeared to be Fryer’s research findings on racial inequality and policing, which were antithetical to Woke ideology.

The New York Times fired its oped page editor for doing his job, and AAA canceled a panel after approving it. These episodes are invariably characterized by activists who use anger and fear to bully cowardly administrators into canceling or firing people.

But totalitarian regimes exercise their power most through the manipulation of language, which is less visible, more subtle, and more difficult to stand up to than overt repression.

George Orwell in his famous novel about totalitarianism, 1984, characterized totalitarianism as a kind of restriction of language, but it is also an expansion of it.

Totalitarians use words so that they have double meanings, implied meanings, and implications that aren’t immediately apparent to the people being manipulated by the language.

The manipulation of language is perhaps the most creepy aspect of Woke totalitarianism because the words the Woke are using don’t mean what they appear to mean, and agreeing to use them often suggests agreement with a far more radical agenda than is implied through a straightforward interpretation of the words. Agree to use opposite sex pronouns, in order to be polite, and the next thing you know you’re expected to agree that one’s sex is a spectrum, and can be changed.

Harvard’s president appears to have risen to her position through her manipulation of language. She even created, or oversaw, the creation of a “Glossary of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB) Terms… to serve as a starting point for communication and learning.” In framing the conversation, Gay and her colleagues were attempting to set limits on right and wrong forms of thinking identical to the kinds described by Orwell as “newspeak” and “wrongthink.”

The glossary tells Harvard professors and students what it views as the right and wrong ways to think and speak. The ideas are extremely radical, and yet the glossary, like Woke leaders in general, makes clear that they are not up for discussion. The glossary is a set of demands to be acted upon, not a set of questions to be debated.

The Harvard glossary encapsulated much of the Wokeism contained in the New York Times’s firing of its opinion editor and the AAA’s censorship of a discussion of sex. The glossary proposes a racist and sexist hierarchy whereby “victims” are morally superior to “oppressors,” and the two groups are determined by race, sex, and other genetic factors. It designates those people who agree with this hierarchy, despite being subordinate due to their race or sex, as an “ally.” The glossary demonizes as “ableism,” the idea that “being able-bodied is ‘normal,’” even though is normal, at least by its standard definition, which means typical.

The glossary promotes the pseudoscientific idea of “cultural appropriation,” which imagines that particular forms of music and food “belong” to certain racial or ethnic group, despite overwhelming evidence that most music and food, including ones designated “ethnic,” are a result of mixing traits and ingredients.

Dishonestly, the Harvard glossary holds up “accessibility” as a value, which it defines as the “degree to which a product, service, or environment is accessible by as many people as possible,” even though Harvard is one of the most exclusive institutions the world, accepting just 1,666 students out of the over 40,000 who apply.

In 2020, as Dean of Arts and Sciences, Gay created a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage to reduce the imagery of white men on campus and re-name rooms and programs, including ones named after Harvard’s founder himself. Such presentism rests on the irrational idea that values we today view as abhorrent, such as white supremacy, are somehow promoted when long-dead scholars are memorialized in paintings and sculptures.

In these ways, Woke totalitarianism advances values that are contrary to the ones it espouses. It claims to be opposed to racism and sexism and yet promotes them through perpetuating the idea that people, by dint of their race or sex, are either victims or oppressors. It claims to be liberatory and empowering of those individuals designated victims while promoting the idea that they cannot escape their victim identity. And Woke totalitarianism promotes the notion that it is wise and truthful despite promoting such monstrous lies.

While it may seem strange that such a deceitful ideology could take root in institutions dedicated to the pursuit of the truth, it makes sense when you consider how much intellectual and ideological effort, and thus wealth, is required to deny reality and promote delusions. As of this year, there are 7,024 full-time Harvard administrators, more than the total number of Harvard undergraduate students. President Gay is just one of them.
It's only a matter of time now before Harvard's president will be forced to step down.

This will go down as one of the worst scandals in its history.

From a member of Harvard's Honor Council: "I Vote on Plagiarism Cases at Harvard College. Gay’s Getting off Easy." Image
6 more plagiarism allegations
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 30, 2023
The activists who hang banners that say, "Trust your despair" think they're helping the planet, but they're not. They're increasing anxiety & depression. It's yet more evidence that progressives create, affirm, and worsen psychiatric disorders, particularly among kids.
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Photo credit: @lwoodhouse
Location: Berkeley, California

On "Reverse CBT" by @HelenPluckrose

"CBT [cognitive-behavioral therapy] teaches people not to catastrophize and not to read negative meanings into everything. This decreases anxiety and improves one’s functioning in the world. Applied Post-modernism trains people to do precisely the opposite. It cannot help but increase anxiety and decrease ability to function. Lukianoff and Haidt provide much evidence that that is what’s happening. A similar pattern has emerged within feminism where again everything is seen in terms of a system of Patriarchy which hides beneath a benign surface. The job of the feminists is to detect it. Going through life in order to direct it detects ways in which men are belittling you is unlikely to lead to female empowerment. Teaching young women that society is hostile to them is probably not going to increase women’s engagement with the public sphere. One way in which the Post-modern understanding of hidden power structures works in society, is to see everything in terms of a scale. I’m sure some of you have seen some of those pictures of pyramids where at the bottom you’ve got asking a woman for coffee or complimenting her and at the top is rape and murder because this is understood as one big system of patriarchal rape culture—the manifestations of it of last and becoming increasingly torturous. This is largely to do with what’s been happening in scholarship over the last thirty years since the initiation and diversification of various types of theory."

source:
wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Group_Identity…
They insist it's not a death cult: Image
Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 26, 2023
Harvard, the New York Times, and other elite institutions say they're about the truth, but they're not. Over the last few weeks, they've been caught spreading lies. The power of Woke totalitarianism, like all totalitarianism, lies in the manipulation of language and emotion. Image
Totalitarian Manipulation Of Language Behind Woke Destruction Of Harvard, New York Times, And Other Elite Institutions

It's time for counter-Wokeism

by @shellenberger
AG Sulzberger, owner of the New York Times (left); Claudine Gay, President, Harvard (center); Roman L. Pérez, President, American Anthropological Association

For hundreds of years, truth, wisdom, and intelligence have been the highest values held by Harvard, the New York Times, and other elite institutions. Harvard’s slogan is veritas, Latin for the Truth. The New York Times motto is “All the news that’s fit to print,” which refers to the paper’s ambition to be an accurate reflection of reality. And the mission of many academic and scholarly associations is the same or similar to that of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which is to “advance anthropology as a discipline of scientific and humanistic research, practice, and teaching that increases our fundamental understanding of humankind.”

And yet these institutions have all of late been caught flagrantly denying fundamental realities about humans and the world, spreading misinformation, and thus undermining their own mission. Investigative reporters have exposed a pattern of plagiarism by Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, that directly violates the university’s policy. The former opinion page editor of The New York Times revealed how employees making false claims of being physically at risk from an op-ed drove the paper’s owner to lie about the oped and force out the editor. And activist anthropologists motivated the AAA to prevent other anthropologists from discussing the biological category of sex.

It is reasonable to ask why any of it matters. There are just 1,666 Harvard undergraduates this year, most Americans don’t graduate from college, and many people already roll their eyes at the mention of the school, viewing the people associated with it as out-of-touch snobs. Most people don’t read the New York Times, and citizen journalism enabled by the Internet is increasingly challenging mainstream news media in terms of both size and influence. And academic associations are not particularly relevant or influential outside of disciplines, and anthropology is perhaps less so than most others.

But it does matter. Harvard remains America’s, and arguably the world’s, most famous premier university, with outsized influence over science, medicine, and many other fields of knowledge. The New York Times remains unrivaled in size and influence and ability to shape how people think and what people we talk about. And anthropology, with its four subdisciplines (archaeology, cultural, biological, museum), is the scientific community for legitimate fundamental knowledge of who humans are and where we came from. For these institutions to be led by individuals whose whose work has been fraudulent, who have been censorious, and who have lied about their behaviors.

What’s more, each of these examples is emblematic of what is best understood as a form of totalitarianism. It is true that life in the United States remains far from the worst of totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. But major institutions of cultural and political life are being led by people who not only hold pseudoscientific, racist, and irrational ideas, but also demand that those ideas be held and acted upon to the point of censoring, excluding, and punishing the pursuit of accurate, scientific knowledge, information, and policies in ways very similar to what past totalitarian regimes did, and to widespread cultural and political effect.

In both fascist and Communist nations, the government imposed mediocre anti-social individuals as the heads of important cultural institutions, such as universities. That is not what happened in the case of Harvard, the New York Times, or the AAA. The leaders of those institutions were, in the case of Harvard and AAA, selected from the institutions themselves or, in the case of the New York Times, chosen by the family that owns it. Over the last year, we have seen the dangers of when the government imposes censorship, and oversees disinformation campaigns. But the recent examples show the dangers of powerful institutions promoting censorship and disinformation on their own.

Sometimes, public intellectuals, journalists, and administrators pooh-pooh charges of Woke totalitarianism as an exaggeration by referring to much worse past regimes. Others will point to evidence that Wokeism has peaked and is losing power in the culture. I agree that past totalitarian regimes were far worse than today’s woke stranglehold over elite institutions and that Wokeism may have peaked.

Either way, if we are to avoid a further slide toward totalitarianism, we need to understand how it gained so much power over institutions ostensibly dedicated to values contrary to it, starting with truth, honesty, and accuracy.Image
Please subscribe now to support counter-Wokeism and to read the rest of the article!

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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 23, 2023
We must prevent people from voting for Trump because he attempted insurrection, the media say. But he didn't. January 6 was a riot from failed security, not a coup attempt. Claims that we must save democracy by destroying it stem from mass psychosis after years of brainwashing. Image
Hatred, Brainwashing, And Mass Psychosis Behind Democrats' War On Democracy

We have to break the hypnotic trance destroying our country

by @shellenberger

You no doubt saw the news that the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump cannot be on the ballot because he attempted insurrection on January 6.

You might have paid little attention to it because you heard that the US Supreme Court would overrule the decision, and the holidays were coming up.

But we should all pay attention, no matter your feelings about Trump, because what is at stake is nothing less than our democracy itself.

Before saying why I think that is, it’s important for you to know something:
Please subscribe now to support our defense of free speech and democracy, and to watch the rest of the video!

Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 21, 2023
The media say "misinformation" is more rampant on X than on their websites, but it's not. The mainstream media got every major story of the last several years wrong. The real reason the media are attacking X is because they are losing so many readers to it.Image
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The main sources of disinformation and hate speech are governments and corporate media. They have waged a series of hateful disinformation campaigns and spread wild conspiracy theories to undermine democracy & cover up their failures, eg Covid's origin, Hunter Biden's laptop. Image
Politicians, news media, and advertisers have entered into an unholy alliance to destroy X as a free speech platform.

Their desperate efforts to maintain censorship show the alarming degree to which they controlled information & thought before 2023.

Read 8 tweets

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