The Bitcoin Coup

How Crypto Accelerationists Engineered America’s Financial Collapse. JD Vance and the Tech Oligarchs Who Want to Burn Down the Dollar.

There are conspiracies that sound too outrageous to believe, and then there are conspiracies so brazen that they hide in plain sight, documented in government filings and boasted about on podcasts. What I’m about to expose falls into the latter category: a systematic effort by some of America’s most powerful tech billionaires to accelerate the collapse of the American financial system because they believe they’ll profit from the chaos that follows.

This isn’t speculation. This isn’t connecting dots that don’t exist. This is based on direct conversations with people inside this movement, people who have explicitly told me that they view the destruction of the dollar as both inevitable and desirable, who see the suffering of ordinary Americans during financial collapse as an acceptable cost for achieving their vision of a Bitcoin-dominated economy, who have positioned JD Vance as their primary vehicle for implementing policies they know will undermine American monetary stability.

To understand how we reached this moment—where crypto accelerationists are actively working to engineer dollar collapse from within the highest levels of government—we need to trace the intellectual evolution I documented in ”The Plot Against America.” What began as abstract criticism of democratic institutions during the 2008 financial crisis has become a concrete blueprint for dismantling them through cryptocurrency-enabled financial sabotage.

The Philosophical Foundation

Peter Thiel’s own public statements reveal the framework driving this project. Speaking at Libertopia in 2010, he described PayPal’s founding vision as an attempt “to overturn the monetary system of the world.” He continued: “We could never win an election,” but technology could “unilaterally change the world.” In 2021, he declared that “Bitcoin is the most honest market we have in the country. It’s a canary in the coal mine. It tells us that this decrepit regime is about to blow up.”

This represents more than economic analysis—it’s a declaration that existing monetary systems are fundamentally illegitimate and that technological alternatives should replace democratic currency governance. Thiel isn’t merely predicting dollar instability; he’s advocating for conditions that would accelerate it. (...)

The Network of Coordination

The financial relationships between these figures make coordination clear. After their PayPal exit, Sacks, Thiel, and Musk’s wealth became deeply interwoven. Sacks launched Craft Ventures and frequently co-invests alongside Thiel’s Founders Fund, with stakes in companies like Palantir and SpaceX. They didn’t just get rich together—they coordinated their investments in ways that create mutual dependencies and shared interests.

As White House AI & Crypto Czar, Sacks holds a special ethics waiver that allows him to influence digital-asset and tech policy while maintaining investments in companies that benefit from those policies. Despite divesting from crypto assets upon entering government, he likely retains holdings in SpaceX and Palantir—companies building infrastructure that could replace traditional government functions with privately controlled systems.

The audacity of their approach is revealed even in their naming choices. The Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE—wasn’t just an acronym chosen for bureaucratic convenience. It was deliberately named after Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency that Musk has relentlessly promoted. When a government department takes its name from a digital currency promoted by the man running it, the agenda becomes transparent.

Dogecoin was itself based on a popular internet meme, but by strange irony, the term “Doge” originates from the title of rulers of Venice and Genoa—elected elites who presided over commercial republics for life. Whether intended or not, this historical reference reflects their vision of governance: efficient, corporate-style rule rather than messy democratic processes.

The Scale of Their Vision

What distinguishes this from ordinary corruption is the scope of their ambition. These men aren’t simply seeking to accumulate more wealth within existing systems. If their vision succeeds—if government currencies collapse and Bitcoin becomes dominant—their early cryptocurrency positions would transform them from billionaires into something unprecedented: controllers of the fundamental infrastructure of human exchange.

This represents the complete transformation of the American political economy. When they speak enthusiastically about dollar collapse, they’re not just making investment predictions—they’re describing a world where their cryptocurrency holdings make them the effective central bankers of whatever system emerges from the wreckage.

The temporary chaos of currency collapse becomes acceptable when viewed as the price for establishing permanent control over the monetary system itself. They’re not just betting on America’s financial decline—they’re positioned to profit regardless of the human cost.

JD Vance: The Ideological Convert

JD Vance’s role represents something more dangerous than typical political opportunism. His transformation from Trump critic to cryptocurrency advocate reflects his genuine conversion to neoreactionary ideology under Thiel’s decade-long cultivation.

Vance has publicly praised Curtis Yarvin, the neoreactionary theorist who advocates replacing democracy with corporate-style governance. Discussing Yarvin’s ideas, Vance has suggested that Trump should “Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people....And when the courts stop you...stand before the country, and say...the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This isn’t standard conservative rhetoric about limited government. This is advocacy for the systematic elimination of constitutional constraints on executive power—exactly what would be necessary to implement the kind of monetary policy changes that could destabilize the dollar.

Vance understands what Yarvin calls “neocameralism”—the vision of society run like a corporation rather than a democracy. In this framework, citizenship becomes shareholding, elections become obsolete, and governance becomes a technical matter for qualified executives rather than a democratic process. (...)

The Succession Strategy

As constitutional crises consume the Trump presidency—particularly around the Epstein revelations where promised evidence has failed to materialize—the crypto accelerationists appear to be positioning for the next phase of their plan.

They have invested over a decade in positioning Vance not as an emergency replacement for Trump, but as the natural evolution—someone who shares their fundamental critique of democratic governance but possesses the intellectual framework to implement systematic change.

Where Trump operates through impulse and grievance, Vance would operate through ideology and systematic planning. He arrives not needing to learn how to subvert democratic institutions, but with a fully developed philosophical framework for why such subversion is necessary and justified.

The Constitutional Trap

Evidence suggests that Sacks may have positioned Trump for exactly the kind of constitutional crisis that would necessitate succession. The mechanism appears to be cryptocurrency-related violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause.

TrumpCoin and World Liberty Financial create potential constitutional violations because they allow foreign entities to provide financial benefits to the president. The Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits the President from receiving any gift, payment, or benefit from foreign governments without explicit Congressional approval. World Liberty Financial’s investor rolls include entities like the UAE, whose purchases could constitute exactly this kind of prohibited foreign benefit.

Cryptocurrency’s structure makes such violations both easier to commit and harder to hide—blockchain creates permanent, traceable records of every transaction. Sacks, with his University of Chicago law degree, would understand these implications perfectly.

While ensuring his own conflicts were addressed through narrow divestitures, Sacks never publicly warned Trump about these constitutional landmines. Instead, he legitimized TrumpCoin on television, describing it as “a baseball card or a stamp” rather than acknowledging its potential regulatory implications. (...)

The Seditious Nature

What we’re witnessing constitutes sedition in its most systematic form. When government officials use their positions to undermine the financial systems they’ve sworn to protect, when they engineer constitutional crises for personal and ideological benefit, when they work to replace democratic governance with privately controlled systems—they’ve crossed the line from legitimate political activity to betrayal of their constitutional obligations.

David Sacks, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and JD Vance are actively working to subvert the constitutional order of the United States. Not through dramatic rebellion, but through the patient capture and systematic undermining of the institutions that make democratic self-governance possible.

Their sedition is particularly dangerous because it operates through legal mechanisms and maintains the appearance of legitimate governance while systematically destroying its substance. They’re not overthrowing the government—they’re reprogramming it to serve their interests rather than democratic publics.

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:

Image: Jp Valery on Unsplash

[ed. For a good summary of where we are and how we got here with crypto, see also: From Truth Social to bitcoin empire: Trump’s $2 billion pivot (PI):]

***

On Monday, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), a publicly traded company majority-owned by Trump, announced that it had acquired $2 billion in bitcoin. Trump is turning a failing media company into a bitcoin holding company. TMTG, the parent company of Truth Social, lost over $185 million on just $3.6 million in revenue in 2024. (...)

Trump’s embrace of crypto provided a sizable fundraising boost. The New York Times reported that Bailey raised $30 million for the Trump campaign from fellow crypto executives. Sacks also hosted a multimillion-dollar fundraiser with San Francisco tech executives. Major crypto investors like Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss donated millions of dollars to various pro-Trump super PACs. In total, the crypto industry accounted for over half of all corporate money in the 2024 election across federal races, raising $245 million. (...)

The financial conflicts in the White House go beyond Trump. Sacks, Trump’s crypto czar, is continuing to work as a partner at Craft Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Sacks that has investments in crypto companies.

A memo released by the White House in March states that Sacks and Craft Ventures divested over $200 million in digital-asset related investments. However, the memo also states that Craft Ventures continues to hold “private equity of digital asset-related companies that are highly illiquid and thus not easily divested.” At the time of the memo, Sacks also had a direct interest in a venture capital investing platform “that may presently have some minor digital asset industry holdings or might in the future.”

Normally, government employees are subject to conflict of interest laws. But the White House has issued multiple waivers to allow Sacks to work in the Trump administration while maintaining his investments. The first waiver, released in the March memo, allows Sacks “to participate as a special government employee in certain particular matters regarding regulation and policy related to the digital asset industry, including cryptocurrency.”

The White House memo acknowledges that Sacks’ work in the Trump administration could affect his investments, but argues that his personal financial interest is “not so substantial as to be deemed likely to affect the integrity of [his] services.”

Tom Gauld

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Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia

“The scientific paper is a ‘fraud’ that creates “a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries.”

This critique comes not from a conspiracist on the margins of science, but from Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar. A brilliant experimentalist whose work on immune tolerance laid the foundation for modern organ transplantation, Sir Peter understood both the power and the limitations of scientific communication.

Consider the familiar structure of a scientific paper: Introduction (background and hypothesis), Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion. This format implies that the work followed a clean, sequential progression: scientists identified a gap in knowledge, formulated a causal explanation, designed definitive experiments to fill the gap, evaluated compelling results, and most of the time, confirmed their hypothesis.

Real lab work rarely follows such a clear path. Biological research is filled with what Medawar describes lovingly as “messing about”: false starts, starting in the middle, unexpected results, reformulated hypotheses, and intriguing accidental findings. The published paper ignores the mess in favour of the illusion of structure and discipline. It offers an ideal version of what might have happened rather than a confession of what did.

The polish serves a purpose. It makes complex work accessible (at least if you work in the same or a similar field!). It allows researchers to build upon new findings.

But the contrived omissions can also play upon even the most well-regarded scientist’s susceptibility to the seduction of story. As Christophe Bernard, Director of Research at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience (Marseilles, Fr.) recently explained,

“when we are reading a paper, we tend to follow the reasoning and logic of the authors, and if the argumentation is nicely laid out, it is difficult to pause, take a step back, and try to get an overall picture.”

Our minds travel the narrative path laid out for us, making it harder to spot potential flaws in logic or alternative interpretations of the data, and making conclusions feel far more definitive than they often are.

Medawar’s framing is my compass when I do deep dives into major discoveries in translational neuroscience. I approach papers with a dual vision. First, what is actually presented? But second, and often more importantly, what is not shown? How was the work likely done in reality? What alternatives were tried but not reported? What assumptions guided the experimental design? What other interpretations might fit the data if the results are not as convincing or cohesive as argued?

And what are the consequences for scientific progress?

In the case of Alzheimer’s research, they appear to be stark: thirty years of prioritizing an incomplete model of the disease’s causes; billions of corporate, government, and foundation dollars spent pursuing a narrow path to drug development; the relative exclusion of alternative hypotheses from funding opportunities and attention; and little progress toward disease-modifying treatments or a cure.

The incomplete Alzheimer’s model I’m referring to is the amyloid cascade hypothesis, which proposes that Alzheimer’s is the outcome of protein processing gone awry in the brain, leading to the production of plaques that trigger a cascade of other pathological changes, ultimately causing the cognitive decline we recognize as the disease. Amyloid work continues to dominate the research and drug development landscape, giving the hypothesis the aura of settled fact.

However, cracks are showing in this façade. In 2021, the FDA granted accelerated approval to aducanumab (Aduhelm), an anti-amyloid drug developed by Biogen, despite scant evidence that it meaningfully altered the course of cognitive decline. The decision to approve, made over near-unanimous opposition from the agency’s advisory panel, exposed growing tensions between regulatory optimism and scientific rigor. Medicare’s subsequent decision to restrict coverage to clinical trials, and Biogen’s quiet withdrawal of the drug from broader marketing efforts in 2024, made the disconnect impossible to ignore.

Meanwhile, a deeper fissure emerged: an investigation by Science unearthed evidence of data fabrication surrounding research on Aβ*56, a purported toxic amyloid-beta oligomer once hailed as a breakthrough target for disease-modifying therapy. Research results that had been seen as a promising pivot in the evolution of the amyloid cascade hypothesis, a new hope for rescuing the theory after repeated clinical failures, now appears to have been largely a sham. Treating Alzheimer’s by targeting amyloid plaques may have been a null path from the start.

When the cracks run that deep, it’s worth going back to the origin story—a landmark 1995 paper by Games et al., featured on the cover of Nature under the headline “A mouse model for Alzheimer’s.” It announced what was hailed as a breakthrough: the first genetically engineered mouse designed to mimic key features of the disease.

In what follows, I argue that the seeds of today’s failures were visible from the beginning if one looks carefully. I approach this review not as an Alzheimer’s researcher with a rival theory, but as a molecular neuroscientist interested in how fields sometimes converge around alluring but unstable ideas. Foundational papers deserve special scrutiny because they become the bedrock for decades of research. When that bedrock slips beneath us, it tells a cautionary story: about the power of narrative, the comfort of consensus, and the dangers of devotion without durable evidence. It also reminds us that while science is ultimately self-correcting, correction can be glacial when careers and reputations are staked on fragile ground.

The Rise of the Amyloid Hypothesis

In the early 1990s, a new idea began to dominate Alzheimer’s research: the amyloid cascade hypothesis.

First proposed by Hardy and Higgins in a 1992 Science perspective, the hypothesis suggested a clear sequence of disease-precipitating events: protein processing goes awry in the brain → beta-amyloid (Aβ) accumulates → plaques form → plaques trigger a cascade of downstream events, including neurofibrillary tangles, inflammation, synaptic loss, neuronal death, resulting in observable cognitive decline.

The hypothesis was compelling for several reasons. First, the discovery of the enzymatic steps by which amyloid precursor protein (APP) is processed into Aβ offered multiple potential intervention points—ideal for pharmaceutical drug development.

Second, the hypothesis was backed by powerful genetic evidence. Mutations in the APP gene on chromosome 21 were associated with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The case grew stronger with the observation that more than 50% of individuals with Down syndrome, who carry an extra copy of chromosome 21 (and thus extra APP), develop Alzheimer’s-like pathology by age 40.

Thus, like any robust causal theory, the amyloid cascade hypothesis offered explicit, testable predictions. As Hardy and Higgins outlined, if amyloid truly initiates the Alzheimer’s cascade, then genetically engineering mice to produce human amyloid should trigger the full sequence of events: plaques first, then tangles, synapse loss, and neuronal death, then cognitive decline. And the sequentiality matters: amyloid accumulation should precede other pathological features. At the time, this was a thrilling possibility.

Pharmaceutical companies were especially eager: if the hypothesis proved correct, stopping amyloid should stop the disease. The field awaited the first transgenic mouse studies with enormous anticipation.

How—with Unlimited Time and Money and a Little Scientific Despair—to Make a Transgenic Mouse

“Mouse Model Made” was the boastful headline to the independent, introductory commentary Nature solicited to accompany the 1995 Games paper’s unveiling of the first transgenic mouse set to “answer the needs” of Alzheimer’s research. The scientific argument over whether amyloid caused Alzheimer’s had been “settle[d]” by the Games paper, “perhaps for good.”

In some ways, the commentary’s bravado seemed warranted. Why? Because in the mid-’90s, creating a transgenic mouse was a multi-stage, treacherous gauntlet of molecular biology. Every step carried an uncomfortably high chance of failure. If this mouse, developed by Athena Neurosciences (a small Bay Area pharmaceutical company) was valid, it was an extraordinary technical achievement portending a revolution in Alzheimer’s care.

First Rule of Making a Transgenic Mouse: Don’t Talk About How You Made a Transgenic Mouse

How did Athena pull it off? Hard to say! What's most remarkable about the Games paper is what's not there. Scan through the methods section and you'll find virtually none of the painstaking effort required to build the Alzheimer’s mouse. Back in the ‘90s, creating a transgenic mouse took years of work, countless failed attempts, and extraordinary technical skill. In the Games paper, this effort is compressed into a few sparse sentences describing which gene and promoter (nearby gene instruction code) the research team used to make the mouse. The actual details are relegated to scientific meta-narrative—knowledge that exists only in lab notebooks, daily conversations between scientists, and the muscle memory of researchers who perform these techniques thousands of times.

The thin description wasn’t atypical for a publication from this era. Difficult experimental methods were often encapsulated in the single phrase "steps were carried out according to standard procedures," with citations to entire books on sub-cloning techniques or reference to the venerable Manipulating the Mouse Embryo: A Laboratory Manual (We all have this on our bookshelf, yes?) The idea that there were reliable "standard procedures" that could ensure success was farcical—an understatement that other scientists understand as code for "we spent years getting this to work; good luck figuring it out ;)."

So, as an appreciation of what it takes to make progress on the frontiers of science, here is approximately what’s involved.

Prerequisites: Dexterity, Glassblowing, and Zen Mastery

Do you have what it takes to master transgenic mouse creation? Well, do you have the dexterity of a neurosurgeon? Because you’ll be micro-manipulating fragile embryos with the care of someone defusing a bomb—except the bomb is smaller than a grain of sand, and you need to keep it alive. Have you trained in glass-blowing? Hope so, because you’ll need to handcraft your own micropipettes so you can balance an embryo on the pipette tip. Yes, really.

And most importantly, do you sincerely believe that outcomes are irrelevant, and only the endless, repetitive journey matters? If so, congratulations! You may already be a Zen master, which will come in handy when you’re objectively failing your boss’s expectations every single day for what feels like an eternity. Success, when it finally comes, will be indistinguishable from sheer, dumb luck, but the stochastic randomness won’t stop you from searching frantically through your copious notes to see if you can pinpoint the variable that made it finally work!

Let’s go a little deeper so we can understand why the Games team's achievement was considered so monumental—and why almost everyone viewed the results in the best possible light.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

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Aaron Copeland

[ed. What a program, what a night (and what videography). Entire concert here.]

When Leonard Bernstein met Eric Dolphy—and CBS captured it on camera.

Did you know that Leonard Bernstein shared the stage with short-lived jazz legend Eric Dolphy. It happened exactly 120 days before Dolphy died (from undiagnosed diabetes).

That surprised me. But the most amazing part of the story is that CBS showcased this event on a national TV broadcast.

You couldn’t imagine this happening today.

Along the way, the general public got to see Gunther Schuller, Don Ellis, Richard Davis, and Benny Golson. Bernstein himself reads a narrative script written by the eminent music critic Nat Hentoff. (THB)

We Are Winning!

Something has changed in the last few days.

In recent months, we’ve been bombarded with millions of lousy AI songs, idiotic AI videos, and clumsy AI images. Error-filled AI texts are everywhere—from your workplace memos to the books sold on Amazon.com. (...)

All Fake

But something has changed in the last few days.

The garbage hasn’t disappeared. It’s still everywhere, stinking up the joint.

But people are disgusted, and finally pushing back. And they are doing so with such fervor that even the biggest AI companies are now getting nervous and pulling back.

Just consider this surprising headline:

This was stunning news. YouTube is part of the world’s largest AI slop promoter—namely the Google/Alphabet empire. How can they possibly abandon AI garbage? Their bosses are the biggest slopmasters of them all.

After this shocking news reverberated through the creative economy, YouTube started to backtrack. They said that they would not punish every AI video—some can still be monetized.

But even the revised guidelines are still a major blow to AI slop purveyors. YouTube made clear that “creators are required to disclose when their realistic content is altered or synthetic.” That’s a huge win—we finally have a requirement for disclosure, and it came straight from the dark planet Alphabet. [ed. who's motto used to don't be evil]

YouTube also stressed that it opposes “content that is mass-produced or repetitive, which is content viewers often consider spam.” This is just a step away from blocking slop. 

What happened?

Maybe the folks at YouTube are just as disgusted by AI as the rest of us. Or maybe we have shamed them into taking action.

My view is that YouTube is (finally) reading the room. I’ve noted before that YouTube is the only part of the Google empire that actually understands creators and audiences. And (unlike their corporate overseers) they have figured out that AI slop is an embarrassment that will tarnish their brand.

The widespread mockery of the fake AI band Velvet Sundown might have been the turning point. This blew up in the last few days, and left AI promoters reeling.

Velvet Sundown is a non-existent AI band that got a million plays on Spotify. These deceptions have occurred in the past, but something different happened this time.

Music fans started mocking Spotify and its alleged promotion of a stupid slop band. The company was subjected to a level of ridicule and angry denunciation it has never endured before.

Journalists called this out as a hoax or fraud. And many speculated about Spotify’s role in the charade. After all, the company has been caught promoting AI slop in the past.

But this time Spotify got turned into a joke—or even worse. They were linked to a scam so clumsy that everyone was now making fun of them, as well as scrutinizing their policies and practices.

Rick Beato’s response to Velvet Sundown got two million views—so more people were watching takedowns of the band than listening to it. An industry group even demanded disclaimers and regulation.

And the jokes kept coming. People mocked the slop with more slop

That must be painful to endure, even for the billionaire CEO of a streaming platform.

Whatever the reason, Spotify started to buckle. It actually began imposing restrictions on AI.

“Spotify has now pulled several uploads from the AI act and the associated Velvet Sundown,” reported Digital Music News on July 14.

It felt like the tide was now turning in the war against slop AI music.

Dylan Smith, one of the best sources on this subject, clearly thinks so. “Velvet Sundown’s Spotify pulldown,” he writes, “doesn’t exactly bode well for forthcoming AI releases.”

I’m focused here on AI’s destructive impact on culture, but there are other signs that growing AI resistance is now forcing companies to reconsider their bot mania.

“An IBM survey of 2,000 chief executives found three out of four AI projects failed to show a return on investment, a remarkably high failure rate,” reports Andrew Orlowski. “AI agents fail to complete the job successfully about 65 to 70 percent of the time, says a study by Carnegie Mellon University and Salesforce.”

He also shared the results of a devastating test that debunked AI’s status in its favorite field, namely writing code. This study reveals that software developers think they are operating 20% faster with AI, but they’re actually running 19% slower.

Some companies are bringing back human workers because AI can’t deliver positive results. Even AI researchers are now expressing skepticism. And only 30% of AI project leaders can say that their CEOs are happy with AI results.

This is called failure. There’s no other name for it.

And it will get worse. The Gartner Group is now predicting that 40% of AI agent programs will be cancelled before 2027—due to “rising costs, unclear business value and inadequate risk controls.”

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more: 

Images: Bridge Chronicle/YouTube

[ed. I'd say temporary setback. The AI industry will eventually figure something out, they've got too much money and tech beavers involved not to. The product will get better, legislators will be lushly rewarded for IP protection and distribution, some hit movie/song will get made entirely by AI, some important (maybe unusual) event will occur and eventually be traced to it, etc. A million things could happen. So calling this winning seems a little premature. Likely we'll just get used to it over time (like advertising), with authenticity mostly a certification issue (if anyone cares. you have to wonder with taste these days). See also: I'm Sorry... This New Artist Completely Sucks ie. how to create a fake song of your own (with just two sentences) (Beato)]

Georges Braque - “Still Life with Pipe (Le Quotidien du Midi)”, 1914

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Gerontocracy is Everywhere

You’ve probably heard it said of American politics: we're stuck in a gerontocracy.

And it’s true. Our political system, especially at the federal level, is largely run by the elderly. The current president is 78. His predecessor, famously, left office at 82. Congress is older than ever, with a quarter of its members over 70. The age of the federal judiciary is a record 69 years old. Senior moments from Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and the late Dianne Feinstein have lodged in the public consciousness and rattled civic trust.

The discourse here is well-worn, but it frequently misses a crucial point: Some of the same forces that have created our political gerontocracy — medical advances enabling graceful aging, combined with a generation unwilling to relinquish power — have also allowed the old to tighten their grip on other areas of American life.

The median age in America is rising, but the percentage of older workers has grown at a faster rate. This is most apparent when you look at positions within elite society, such as tenured academics and corporate executives.

In other words, step outside Washington and you’ll find that gerontocracy is everywhere. (...)

Several years ago, Derek Thompson wrote a piece exploring why our elite workforce is aging. The simplest explanation, applicable across many professions, is that wealthy Americans are living longer, healthier lives. For example, the richest quartile of men has gained 0.2 years of life expectancy annually throughout the 21st century. But Thompson emphasizes that “many positions and institutions are getting older much faster than that.”

One simple explanation that fits across all these fields is that white-collar work just isn’t that physically demanding, which makes it easier for older workers to stick around. But there are also some more specific dynamics at play. For high-status professionals like CEOs, it might be less about physical ability and more about identity. As Derek Thompson puts it, we’re living in an era of “workism,” where the most affluent people have actually cut back on leisure and now report the longest workweeks in the country.

This theory could apply to our aging scientific researchers and academics too, but there’s another compelling explanation worth considering. According to the landmark paper, The Burden of Knowledge, it now takes researchers a much longer time to master the foundational knowledge in their field. For example, Einstein was only 26 when he published the Theory of Relativity, and it’s hard to imagine someone that young making such a seismic contribution to physics today.

There is also a growing body of research that finds a direct link between aging researchers and a slowdown in scientific innovation. Thompson theorizes in his piece that “as academia and funding institutions get older, they develop an implicit ageism against younger researchers, who they assume are too naive to do paradigm-shifting work in established domains.”

And that brings us to the most important question.

How bad is the gerontocracy?

I spoke to labor economists and experts in business management to get some perspective on this question. First, there is strong evidence that older leaders are likely to be less effective decision-makers. Extensive research shows a decline in executive function that begins at age 60. Economists Rosemond Desire and Scott Seavey conducted a survey that looked at CEOs of 17,000 firms between 1992 and 2018. Overall, they found “a strong and consistently negative relationship between CEO age and managerial ability.” Another study by researchers Brandon Cline and Adam Yore found that even after adjusting for the fact that younger CEOs are attracted to faster-growing companies, every additional year in CEO age was associated with a 0.3% decrease in the value of the firm.

This problem isn’t restricted to CEOs. Another study by researchers at Ohio State University analyzed 5.6 million biomedical research publications and concluded that the work of biomedical scientists makes less of an impact in the field as the scientists get older. This is consistent with the finding that we generally become less creatively productive after we leave middle age.

To be clear, this sweeping generalization obviously doesn’t apply to every individual. Warren Buffett is crushing the stock market well into his 90s. Dr. Richard Bond was just awarded the prestigious Shaw Prize at the age of 75 for his research estimating the age and mass of the universe. I’m not asking anyone to quit their job because of their age, nor am I ignoring the fact that ageism is still very real. Gerontocracy might rule at the top, but less senior workers are still regularly pushed out of jobs due to their age. I do think, though, that we need to be cognizant of how an aging elite might handicap our economic and intellectual growth. And how in certain cases, older workers occupying senior positions might deny younger workers the opportunity of career advancement.

Joseph Fuller, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, told me he could see this leading to “a lack of upward mobility for younger academics in certain disciplines.” But also cautioned about making any sweeping statements, because, “It's very occupationally specific and industry specific.”

The U.S. economy is enormous, with millions of workers hired and fired each month, so of course it’s important to avoid over generalizing. But the economist Nicola Bianchi looked at 35 years of income survey data from the US and found that the pay gap between workers over 55 and those under 35 increased by 61 percent between 1979 and 2018. His explanation is intuitive: “Older workers have accrued more promotions and have been occupying those slots for longer, which means younger workers cannot reach those levels anymore.”

Sixty-one percent is a striking number. But even if it’s only directionally correct, it suggests a serious shift in how opportunity is distributed, with younger workers increasingly locked out of the best-paying roles.

The future of the gerontocracy

In each of my conversations about the gerontocracy and the labor market, the topic of generative intelligence came up repeatedly. Whether you’re an AI evangelist or a doubter, it’s impossible to deny that AI will have some impact on the workplace. And I think there’s a strong case to be made that it could either entrench or reduce the power of older workers.

Let’s start with the worst-case scenario.

If AI is at least, as Benedict Evans put it, a collection of infinite interns, then it’s coming for the positions typically held by people one to three years out of college first. But the function of a new associate position at Accenture or a computer programmer at Amazon isn’t just to handle entry-level tasks; it’s also to prepare employees to move towards the middle, and eventually to higher management level positions at the company. Take those away, and you’re not just automating grunt work, you’re cutting off the ability for younger workers to gain a foothold in the workforce.

Guy Berger, a labor market economist and senior advisor at the Burning Glass Institute, doesn’t see this future as inevitable, but he did offer a fairly pessimistic theory: “Organizations find themselves saying this is really good at cutting out young people. We can save resources. And have AI agents run by a bunch of people in their late 30s and early 40s. Then, 20 years later, 70-year-olds are still running things, with no new crop coming in behind them.”

To be clear, there is no evidence that the incorporation of generative AI in the workplace is driving this trend. But there’s been some indication that this future could be around the corner. The accounting firm PwC cut 1,500 jobs and reduced on-campus recruiting after making a billion-dollar investment with OpenAI. Kevin Roose reported that one tech company is no longer hiring for positions below midlevel engineer. The labor market research firm Oxford Economics recently released a report stating, “There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates.” (...)

The comparative adoption rates of AI in the 2020s versus personal computers in the 1980s underscore Fuller’s point. AI is entering the workplace much faster than computers once did. And while this acceleration is driven primarily by younger, more educated workers, a Federal Reserve survey finds adoption is “widespread across gender, age, education, industries, and occupations.” If senior level white-collar workers become quickly fluent in using AI to enhance their productivity, it’s possible to imagine them using it to extend their careers even longer. As a result, the upper-echelon of the labor market becomes increasingly calcified.

Addressing the gerontocracy

There is no single fix for gerontocracy, largely because, as Fuller emphasized, aging labor is a sector-specific problem that will require sector-specific solutions.

For example, the gerontocracy narrative doesn't accurately fit the make-up of the employees or executives who steer our world-beating tech companies. Nevertheless, certain sectors remain dominated by older workers, who cling to power because of status, a hefty paycheck, or some combination of the two. This is having a measurable impact on the wages of younger workers and is likely, to an extent, suppressing dynamism in the American economy. (...)

So are there any fixes?

by Ben Krauss, Slow Boring |  Read more:

Image: New Yorker

sombr

[ed. Given the commercial success of Goyte's Somebody That I Used to Know, you'd think there'd have been more imitators of the formula. Fun facts:]

When Bruce Springsteen was signed to a Columbia Records in the early 1970s, he was among a small group of artists dubbed the “new Dylan.” Decades later, he joked about this nickname while giving the keynote address at South by Southwest:

I was signed as an acoustic singer/songwriter … by John Hammond at Columbia Records, along with Elliott Murphy, John Prine, [and] Loudin Wainwright III. We were all new Dylans. And the old Dylan was only 30. So, I don’t even know why they needed a fucking new Dylan, all right? But those were the times.

Dubbing all of these artists the “new Dylan” is especially funny when you realize at this point the real Dylan hadn’t even released Blood on the Tracks, what many people argue is his greatest record. Still, part of me understands why people were in search of a new Dylan. And it’s not because some people criticize his early 1970s work as inferior. It’s because most people make it on the pop music scene when they are quite young.

• Before Paul McCartney turned 28, The Beatles had already broken up.

• Before Stevie Wonder turned 27, he had released 18 albums, including the flawless foursome, Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974), and Songs in the Key of Life (1976).

• Before Billie Eilish could legally drink alcohol, she had sold millions of records, topped the Billboard Hot 100, and won both an Oscar and a Grammy.

Even Bob Dylan illustrates this trend. By the time he was 26, he’d already redefined both rock and folk music by “going electric,” along with releasing seven records, at least five of which are considered classics. Though music is a lifelong pursuit, pop stardom is a young person’s game. But something weird has been going on recently. ~ The Return of the "Elderly" Pop Star (CGMH)

Land Rover
via: here/here

[ed. Iconic vs. Not So Iconic: Tesla's Cybertruck (designed on a napkin?). Starting at $99,990.]

British Open 2025: Inside the Giant Scoreboard on the 18th Hole. Operated by ... Teenagers

PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — A head girl named Gracie wears a headset—over here, "head girl" means something like "class president"—and the information travels the airwaves from Score Control, a hub near the media center. Not long after the new scores crackle in her ear, Gracie and her fellow students from Coleraine Grammar School and Dominican College spring into action, picking up plastic tiles with letters and numbers and sometimes full names from nearby shelves, and placing them backwards—to their eyes—in the giant structure in front of them. Diffuse light comes through that giant yellow wall, but aside from a few cracks, they can't see much on the other side.

But everyone can see them … or last the result of their work. They're the nerve center of a 50-year-old tradition here at the Open Championship that continued this week for the 153rd edition of golf’s oldest major. These are the iconic yellow scoreboards perched above the grandstands on the 18th green, and Gracie's teen-aged gang are inside them, surrounded by wooden planks and scaffolding and a stairway spanning the three floors of the board. (One thing here—you better learn to duck if you don't want a bump or three on the top of your skull.) It's their job to make sure the fans outside, and the TV cameras, and everyone walking the course in the nearby vicinity, are up to date on the drama of the championship.

The twin yellow giants have become a charming icon of this tournament since they were first implemented in the early '70s, and because they're so instantly recognizable they transport you to a specific place, not unlike the white-and-green manual boards used at Augusta National for the Masters. It's true that the boards themselves, and all the students and advisors within them, could be replaced by something digital, and apparently there was recent discussion along those lines, but the R&A fortunately recognized that there's something irreplaceable and delightful about the analog structures on the final hole.

At the scoreboard, the jobs involve four-hour shifts, with around eight students manning each of the two active floors inside. The top six players in the tournament occupy wide vertical slots that are changed in and out on the top floor, and the bottom floor, where Gracie called the shots, featured players seven through 12, along with the next six players who would be coming to the 18th hole—their names, helpfully, were on full placards, rather than constructed letter by letter like the leaders. Even early on Saturday morning, when the stands were mostly empty and the players were hours from making it to the last, the scoreboards advertised the day's best ongoing rounds.

Remarkably, the students only receive a few hours of training. That happens on Tuesday, when teachers from the Cranleigh School in England, who have been doing this for 30 years, give hands-on instruction to the students, schooling them in the finer points of quick, accurate reporting.

It's one of those jobs that's easy to screw up—put a letter in backward and you risk becoming a meme. There's a friendly rivalry between the two scoreboards to see who can operate with greater speed, but they also look out for each other, peering across with binoculars to make sure there are no errors. Along with the direct headset line to Score Control, handheld radios provide another avenue of communication, and despite the quick onboarding process, it had the feel on Friday of a well-oiled machine.

by Shane Ryan, Golf Digest |  Read more:
Images: Oisin Keniry/R&A; Christian Petersen

[ed. Looks like Scheffler running away with another win this year. Snore. Update: yep.]

Immigration Comes to Yamhill

A Pro-Trump Community Reckons With Losing a Beloved Immigrant Neighbor

Voters here in Oregon’s rural Yamhill County have backed Donald Trump for three presidential elections in a row, most recently by a six-point margin. His promises to crack down on immigration resonated in these working-class communities.

Then last month ICE detained Moises Sotelo, a beloved but undocumented Mexican immigrant who has lived in the county for 31 years and owns a vineyard management company employing 10 people. Two of his children were born here and are American citizens, and Sotelo was a pillar of his church and won a wine industry award — yet he was detained for five weeks and on Friday was deported to Mexico, his family said.

“Moises’s story just really shook our community,” Elise Yarnell Hollamon, the City Council president in Newberg, Sotelo’s hometown, told me. “Everyone knows him, and he has built a reputation within our community over the last few decades.”

The result has been an outpouring of support for Sotelo, even in this conservative county (which is also my home). More than 2,200 people have donated to a GoFundMe for the family, raising more than $150,000 for legal and other expenses, and neighbors have been dropping off meals and offering vehicles and groceries.

“Oh, my God, it’s been insane,” said Alondra Sotelo Garcia, his adult daughter, who was born in America. “I knew he was well known, but I didn’t know how big it would blow up to be.”

“You see the outpouring of love of people just trying to help,” she added. “Now they’re giving back to him what he gave to the community.”

Bubba King, a county commissioner, put it this way: “We want tighter border security” but also humane treatment of families, he said. (...)

Alondra says her dad wept when she was first able to visit him in detention and told him that community members had contributed $25,000 to his GoFundMe — and on a later visit, she told him, “If you were crying at 25K, you’re really going to be crying now, Dad.”

Sure enough, he cried again.

Judging from what unfolded here in Yamhill County, voters may have wanted a tightening of the border and the deportation of criminals — but not the arrest of a longtime neighbor. They wanted Trump to pursue gangsters, not destroy small businesses. Many people here sought some middle ground on immigration and felt they didn’t get it from Biden, but now they find they’re not getting it from Trump, either.

It’s also worth acknowledging that Trump is in office in part because Democrats lost credibility on immigration issues. American voters last year said immigration was one of the issues they cared about most, and in one poll they said by a 13-point margin that they believed Trump would do better than Harris at managing immigration. (...)

Let’s be pragmatic. We can’t admit all 900 million people around the world who, according to Gallup, would like to move permanently to another country. That includes 37 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa and 28 percent of people in Latin America and the Caribbean. Thank God the United States was hospitable in 1952, when my dad arrived as a refugee from Eastern Europe. Of course we need a secure border. And in the United States and Europe alike, voters repeatedly said they wanted a slowdown in immigration. A rule of thumb is that whenever the foreign-born share of a population surges to somewhere around 15 percent, there is discontent. In the United States, the foreign-born share has tripled since 1970 and is now around 15 percent. The top estimate, 15.8 percent, would constitute the highest level of immigrants in America since at least 1850.

We liberals refused to listen to concerns. Sometimes we even sneered at critics, accusing them of bigotry. So fed-up voters, including immigrants and people of color, turned to nationalists and charlatans who are now trying to engineer a mass deportation that would upend society and the economy.

I reached out to ICE, and a spokesman noted that Sotelo had a conviction for driving under the influence and had already been deported once. That appears to be true: Alondra said her father had been arrested around 1994 for drinking and driving. She also said that he had been deported in 2006 and soon returned to the United States.

No one makes excuses for Sotelo driving drunk. But one offense decades ago should not define his life. “Donald Trump has convictions himself, and my dad has practically a clean slate,” Alondra said. “I’m like, ‘How is my dad in there? And how is this man our leader?’”

Victoria Reader, whom Sotelo mentored as a vineyard manager, said that she would welcome the deportation of actual criminals. “But this guy who is doing amazing things and started a business, he’s the one who has been arrested,” she said, adding, “or, as I say, kidnapped.”

Even for Americans who welcomed more deportations, there’s something chilling about the militarization of the crackdown and the echoes of police state practices: plainclothes officers wearing masks, refusing to give their names, grabbing people off the streets and hustling them into unmarked vehicles. Something like that happened to me once in China — but State Security there treated me far better than ICE treats immigrants here.

Consider also the financial cost of all this. ICE says that “the average cost to arrest, detain and remove an illegal alien is $17,121.” Thus the administration’s goal of one million deportations would cost $17 billion — and presumably be repeated annually. For comparison, that’s more than all 50 states spend together on pre-K.

Trump has more than tripled the annual ICE budget to $28 billion, making it the most expensive law enforcement agency in the federal government. Indeed, that’s more than the current annual budgets for the F.B.I., the Bureau of Prisons, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives put together. Trump is also using officials from other law enforcement agencies to build a deportation army, meaning that fewer law enforcement officers are left to deal with homegrown criminals. (...)

The Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated last year that mass deportation could cause G.D.P. in 2028 to be 7.4 percent lower than it would be otherwise.

A Gallup poll released this month suggests that while many Americans thought that liberals overreached on immigration under Biden, they now think it’s Republicans who are going too far.

Only 35 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, Gallup says, while 62 percent disapprove. Indeed, Trump policies may be making people more pro-immigrant: A record 79 percent of Americans say that immigration is good for the United States, and only 30 percent want immigration decreased (down from 55 percent last year).

It has long been clear what a sensible immigration deal looks like: strict border enforcement, deportations focused on criminals, a rethink of asylum and a path to citizenship.

Yet now it’s Republicans who are deaf to public opinion. Instead of targeting the worst of the worst with deportations and making us safer, Trump is damaging America’s economy, shattering families and destroying small businesses. 

by Nicholas Kristof, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Christopher Valentine

[ed.. See also: Race to the Bottom. When a country no longer believes in itself (NYT).]

She Exposed Epstein, and Shares MAGA’s Anger

The reporter who took down Jeffrey Epstein on what’s still hidden.

Julie K. Brown thinks Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone. On this episode of “Interesting Times,” Ross talks to Brown, the investigative reporter whose work ultimately led to Epstein’s re-arrest, about what the government could release that it hasn’t and how the story is bigger than Epstein.(...)

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ross Douthat: Julie K. Brown, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Julie K. Brown: Thank you.

Douthat: So for the last couple of weeks, ever since the Trump administration decided it was a good idea to tell the world that there was nothing more to say about the Jeffrey Epstein story, which has not been true, I feel like we’ve had a lot of these metaconversations about the case, conversations about Trump administration politics, MAGA infighting, theories about conspiracy theories.

I just keep coming back to the man himself and all of the weird questions that, to me as a journalist and news consumer, still hang over this whole story. So I’m really hoping that together we can walk through the story — the actual story of how Jeffrey Epstein the man became Jeffrey Epstein the mythic villain of the early 21st century. I want to start in the middle for him or maybe near the end for him but at the beginning for you. How did you first get drawn into this story? What prompted you as a journalist to start looking into Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes?

Brown: Well, my background was mostly crime reporting. I was on The Miami Herald’s investigative team, and I was covering prisons. I needed a change of pace, so I thought I would try to find a mystery to write about. And the Jeffrey Epstein case had been written about before, mostly focused on the celebrity aspect of his life, who he knew, his plane, his private island.

But whenever I ran across a story about him, it never really explained fully to me why he was able to get away with the crimes that he did. And as I was looking for something to do around that time, Donald Trump, who was our newly elected president, nominated a guy by the name of Alex Acosta as his labor secretary. I knew that Acosta was the prosecutor who signed off on this sweetheart deal, so to speak, that Epstein had gotten way back in 2008.

So I thought at the time that at Acosta’s Senate confirmation hearing, they were going to ask him a lot of questions about this case. And to my surprise, it seemed like everybody had almost forgotten about it. They asked him maybe one or two questions, and I don’t really think he gave very good answers, but they satisfied the senators because he was ultimately confirmed. (...)

So at that point, I thought: I wonder what these victims, who we knew were there — at least a dozen or so — they were children when this happened. But now, with the passage of time, they were in their late 20s, early 30s. And I wondered what they thought about this man who had given their predator really such a lenient deal, and he was now in charge of one of the largest agencies in the country, with oversight of human trafficking. So the story really began as: I thought I would do a reaction of the victims to Acosta being appointed labor secretary. But once I started digging into the story, it was like an onion. I found out more and more and more. (...)

Douthat: And so at that point, the official narrative of Epstein was he had taken a plea deal related to early-teenage girls. What was the actual nature of that deal?

Brown: Well actually, one of the many things I came to find out — which hadn’t been reported before — was that they manipulated and downplayed the scope of his crimes. He only pleaded guilty to a charge of soliciting one underage girl. And they purposely picked a girl who was a little older so that the crime that was on the books, so to speak, was downplayed.

It was only one girl, even though it was clear that he had done this to many, many girls. They also hid what they were doing from not only the public but from the victims. They went out of their way to keep this whole deal secret. He sort of slid into a courtroom, pleaded guilty. Nobody knew what he was pleading guilty to because all the records were sealed. (...)

Douthat: And to clarify, he ends up pleading guilty to two counts of solicitation of prostitution, one of which was with a minor.

Brown: That’s correct.

Douthat: And how long was his sentence?

Brown: Eighteen months.

Douthat: But he only served about 13 months. And so, now you start reporting on the story. You’re talking to the victims that were sort of part of the initial prosecution, and then it becomes clear that there were many more victims. (...)

Douthat: So now I want to go back in time. So this is a flashback, and I just want you to help me through this storytelling. So it’s the 1970s. Jeffrey Epstein is a teacher at the Dalton School, a very prestigious prep school in New York City where the headmaster is Donald Barr, who is the father of Bill Barr, who would be the attorney general when Epstein killed himself in prison. And I cite that detail only because it’s an example of how Epstein’s story is filled with these little grace notes that are gifts to would-be conspiracy theorists.

So as I understand the story: a parent there is friendly with him, helps him get an interview for a job at Bear Stearns, the investment firm, as a trader. Between there and the 1990s, he becomes insanely wealthy.

How did that happen? How did he get rich? You mentioned earlier that this was an open question when you started reporting. But if you were going to tell the story now as you understand it, how did he get rich?

Brown: Well, he was a very smart man. He was a very intelligent man. I think the key to Epstein’s real success is the fact that he would find the weak point that anybody had — whatever they needed or wanted — and he would exploit that. And I don’t know what he had on Les Wexner, who became one of his primary clients.

Les Wexner is a billionaire who owned Victoria’s Secret and also the Limited retail stores at the time. And he somehow met Les Wexner, and Wexner was really his primary client. And as a result of that, his wealth just ballooned.

Douthat: But he wasn’t just an adviser. He wasn’t, like, Les Wexner’s financial adviser. He had power of attorney. He was effectively the hand of the king in “Game of Thrones,” or he’s just making any kind of deal for Wexner.

In some of the arguments about the mystery of Epstein’s wealth, I’ve seen people say: Well, it’s kind of a mystery why Wexner gave him this kind of power, but that does explain how rich he got. Wexner is a billionaire, and I guess Epstein makes tens or hundreds of millions just off this connection. Does that seem plausible to you? Do you feel like the Wexner connection — even if why Wexner loved him is a mystery — suffices to explain how much money he seemed to have by the end of the 1990s, let’s say?

Brown: No, it doesn’t make any sense. And it certainly is something that authorities should have investigated, if not back then, then in the advancing years, they should have looked into it. I always felt like they relied too much on victims to help make their case when they should have followed the money. (...)

Douthat: By the late 1990s, he is building out a playboy intellectual lifestyle. Can you describe the lifestyle that Epstein has?

Brown: Well, he had a lot of salons, so to speak, at his Manhattan home and also at his other homes.

He owned the island off the coast of St. Thomas. He would fly Nobel Prize winners in, for example, to talk about science. He started a couple of foundations and started giving a lot of money away through these foundations.

He really cultivated a number of high-profile scientists. He fancied himself as a little bit more of a scientist and mathematician than I think he really was. But he had so much money, and he dangled a lot of that money. Remember all these scientists and academics — M.I.T., Harvard — they usually need money for some of their projects. So he had money, lots of money. So they kind of entertained him or ——

Douthat: Humored him.

Brown: Yes, in some cases. Some of them felt like he was really just full of it, but they were willing to take his money. (...)

Douthat: I mean, as you said already, it’s pretty straightforward why scientists and intellectuals were interested in hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. Initially, it’s because he was rich and was willing to fund and donate to universities and donate to research and so on. So that itself is not a special mystery.

What about the general cast of celebrity politicians, figures that rode on his plane or supposedly rode on his plane and ended up on his island? People at the level of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton — we’ll get to the Donald Trump connection in a little while. But these people are also just pulled in by the normal reality that rich people like to hang out with famous people and vice versa. What’s your sense of how that worked?

Brown: Well, Epstein was donating political money to a lot of campaigns. So of course he would attract the kind of people that need political donations, and Clinton was certainly one of them. Even after Clinton left the presidency, there was the Clinton Foundation, and so he was seeking donations for the Clinton Foundation as well.

So they went on a long trip overseas on Epstein’s plane to travel to various areas to understand the AIDS epidemic and what could be done. And Epstein envisioned himself as this person that could maybe find things that would help cure cancer or AIDS. So, he felt like he could be a part of that in some way.

Douthat: So let’s make these timelines overlap. At what point does he become connected with Ghislaine Maxwell, whom you’ve already mentioned was his paramour for a while and then ultimately his accomplice in predation? When, when did they first start hanging out?

Brown: After her father died, Robert Maxwell, who was a British publisher. He died under suspicious circumstances himself.

Douthat: Very  suspicious circumstances on a boat.

Brown: They think he just fell off. They found him floating in the water. He had a yacht — he was off the Canary Islands — and they couldn’t find him. And then eventually, someone saw him floating in the ocean. So there are a lot of questions, because after they found him dead, investigators realized that he had essentially raided his whole company — including the employees’ pension fund. Ultimately his sons had to stand trial for this.

Her father had passed away, and Epstein was at an event honoring her father after his death. At the time, Maxwell’s family was in ruin. They had no money, and her mother really was in danger of losing everything. Her mother later wrote a book and explained that there was this New York financier who helped the family. She doesn’t name who that is, but there’s enough of an indicator there that it sounds like it could have been Epstein that came in to rescue the family and helped provide a house for her mother to live in. It is thought that it was probably Epstein that helped the family, and that’s how they met.

Douthat: So Robert Maxwell passes away in 1991 in suspicious circumstances. Epstein is there to help his family. It’s worth noting that Maxwell himself had ties to the Israeli government and to Israeli intelligence operations, I believe. And that’s a thread that then also connects to the conspiracy theories.

You said that Epstein and Maxwell date and then at some point she transitions into this role as procurer for him. At what point does Epstein actually become a serial sexual predator?

Brown: We know that some of his first victims were from like 1996, 1998. There were people that came forward that told me and others that Maxwell realized that she was never going to be able to marry him. There were a lot of rumors at the time that maybe they would get married, but she realized that as she got older that this was not going to satisfy him because he wanted younger and younger girls.

So she was dependent on him somewhat for finances at that point. So she began this quest to find him girls, essentially. That’s how it all started.

Douthat: So Epstein is the playboy financier hanging out with intellectuals and politicians in Florida on private jets, on his private island. And he’s bringing all of these girls through his house, through his life, and taking advantage of them.

Presumably, these things are happening at the same time — up until the point we already talked about, when he’s actually charged and, in a very limited way, convicted in 2008. What happens to his social world — all his high-flying connections — after he gets out of that Club Med-style stint in prison?

Brown: Well, once he gets out of jail, he hired all these P.R. people to remake his image, and there are press releases in archives. The Jeffrey Epstein Foundation put out press release after press release after press release. First it started with, he was giving money here. He was giving money there. So as time went on, he started being able to once again resume the life that he had built before this happened, and he was able to do this in part because of the plea deal.

Because the plea deal was only the solicitation of one underage girl. He was able to say to people: Yeah, I did this. It was bad, but it was only that. And to them that was sort of OK, he served his time. They accepted that explanation that it was just one girl and he made a mistake. Of course, he said he didn’t know she was underage. So it was plausible to a lot of people that he was not this monster that we later know he was.

Douthat: Right. But it was also plausible to people because they knew that he liked to hang out with teenage girls. There’s this now famous line that Donald Trump himself has said that appeared, I believe, in a piece in New York magazine, long before Epstein’s first conviction. He’s talking about Epstein’s social life, and he says something like: He likes women as much as I do, but he likes them on the younger side. So it seems like that was always part of his reputation.

Brown: Right. I had some of the victims tell me that they would be invited to parties with a lot of wealthy people and well-known people, and they would just be told to stand there like statues and to just look pretty and say as little as possible and just kind of fawn over him. He would put some of them on his lap. So yes, people could see. (...)

Douthat: Just Epstein’s behavior alone looks like a version of the Harvey Weinstein story, where you have this rich and powerful man who has all this misbehavior that people tolerated over a long period of time. He gets away with some stuff legally because he has all these connections, and then finally, because of your reporting, because of a change in climate, it come crashing down. (...)

So from your perspective, then, it is likely that there are some set of men in the world who move through Epstein’s mansion — Epstein’s island and so on — who are guilty, who are guilty of essentially having girls trafficked to them and, in part, having sex with minors whose names have not been successfully accused in a court of law.

Brown: That’s correct.

Douthat: OK. So the next question, what do you think about the evidence and speculation that Epstein intended to blackmail people? Because that is the next phase of the theorizing, that Epstein wasn’t just trying to woo and befriend these men, but he also liked the idea of having dirt on the people who had done bad things around him.

Brown: I think he did, but I don’t think he blackmailed people directly like that. I mean, if you just really think about it, if you send a girl over to have sex with one of these men, it’s not like you write it down or that you — I don’t believe he had a list. I just think that he used these women, girls, as pawns in order to ingratiate himself with people that he wanted to do business with.

It was a business transaction to him. That’s what this was. I don’t think that he had this operation where he was essentially saying: If you don’t do this for me, I’m going to reveal that you had sex with so-and-so. I don’t think it was like that in the traditional sense. But if you’re a man and you know that you’ve been doing this ——

Douthat: You know and he knows that you know.

Brown: Exactly, and I think it was more like that. I don’t think it was an official or an outright blackmail scheme like that. I think it was more like: He knows this about me, maybe I better do this.

Douthat: So that leads into the next open question, which is Epstein’s alleged ties to intelligence agencies — either American intelligence agencies or the Mossad in Israel. Earlier, we were talking about Epstein’s lenient plea deal and why Alex Acosta ended up giving it to him. There’s now a famous secondhand quote from Acosta, where he was reportedly told — by someone else in the first Trump administration — to back off Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence.

Acosta has never publicly corroborated that quote. And in other settings, he said he didn’t know anything about Epstein’s possible intelligence connections. But first: Do you think that some form of the intelligence world — and Epstein’s connections to it — played any role in why he got off so lightly the first time?

Brown: I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that’s, in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein, because I just don’t know. I know there’s a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, I try to stick to the facts, and so it’s just something we don’t know for sure.

Douthat: Yeah. I’m drawing on your view about your skepticism around the blackmail narrative. There’s two intelligent stories you could tell: One, Epstein is literally an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence.

So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a conduit of information. But it’s not that he’s being run as a kind of entrapment ring. If we don’t think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.

Brown: Well, let me put it to you this way: You’re talking about what’s plausible, what’s not plausible. It’s the job of our government to find out what’s plausible or what’s real and what’s not real. And the question here, if we’re talking about things that we don’t know and things that maybe we should look into, the question is — there certainly was enough there that the federal government, the D.O.J., at some point should have launched a counterintelligence investigation into what was true, and on that end, are not true.

We’ve known long enough about this Acosta statement that he made. They’ve heard everything that we’ve heard that we’ve just talked about. So we don’t know the answer to those questions, but it’s the job of our federal government to look into those kinds of things. And at some point, one would hope that they did look into some of that. We just don’t know whether they did or not.

Douthat: Good. So that brings me to either my last or next-to-last unanswered question, which is: What do you think, if anything, the government has in its possession, the Department of Justice or anyone else that could shed further light on this case?

Brown: Well, they absolutely have files that they can release. They could release his autopsy report, for example. They could release his plane records, for example — the F.A.A. records of where he flew. They could redact the names of victims, but they could release information gathered by the U.S. Marshals Service, which was supposed to monitor him.

He was a convicted sex offender, but yet he was allowed to fly his plane all over the world, come back into the United States with girls or young women aboard his plane on a regular basis. So this is, to me, more of a story not necessarily about Epstein but about our government and what our government did or didn’t do.

This was a man that was allowed to abuse girls and women for two decades. How did that happen and why did it happen, to me, is the question. Epstein is the character in this, but really these questions, I think, the public and especially the victims deserve to know whether our government did the job that they were supposed to do. (...)

Douthat: If there were a group of powerful men who abused women together with Epstein, who have gotten away with it, why wouldn’t Maxwell have given up some of those men for the sake of some kind of plea bargain?

Brown: I think for the same reason that probably Trump doesn’t want to release the files; I think that it’s just a place where nobody wants to go. These are very powerful men, important men and possibly even, quite frankly, G.O.P. or Democratic donors.

Douthat: But why does Maxwell — we’re going to end with Trump — but why would Maxwell care about giving up a powerful Democratic or Republican donor if it would buy her time off prison?

Brown: You’ll have to ask her. (...)

Douthat: Now Trump himself. We’re going to enter the realm of speculation, but it’s not just that the Trump administration has sort of shut down the investigation or said: Well, we’ve disclosed everything we can disclose. It’s that Trump has come out swinging and saying that this is a hoax. He’s essentially treating a story that had been taken up by a big part of his own base as a story that he wants to not just ignore but publicly discredit.

First, what is your understanding of Trump’s connections to Epstein? (...)

Brown: He was friends with Epstein in the 1990s, and they were in the same social circles together. We see the video of him at a party at Mar-a-Lago. My understanding is there were two things that led to their falling out. One was that Epstein hit on a member’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago and Epstein was banned from Mar-a-Lago.

Douthat: Once again, Donald Trump is standing up for sexual ethics in America.

Brown: Right. And the other involved a real estate transaction, of course, money where they were bidding on the same property — a very big property. And Epstein lost, and Trump won the deal, and so they had a falling out over that property. So those were the two things. But up until then, Trump had been flying on Epstein’s plane. He entertained some of Epstein’s family at one of his casinos. So they were somewhat friendly. (...)

Douthat: He gave an interview during the campaign — I think during the campaign. He was asked about the files, and in part of the answer he said something like: Well, we should release something. But then he said: You don’t want to release things that aren’t true.

My perception was always that other people in his coalition were much more enthusiastic about this story. That this was never one of Trump’s obsessions. This was something his supporters were obsessed with. So it didn’t surprise me that in the end, they didn’t want to do some version of what you’re describing and say: We’re going to go back and find a bunch of other records to release. That doesn’t surprise me. I am surprised, though, by the vehemence of Trump’s reaction to the negative reaction — that is something of a mystery.

Okay. I’ve been trying to cover the unanswered questions. Do you have any other specific questions that you would like answered?

Brown: I wish I understood why our government isn’t treating this like the crime that it is. It’s a serious crime that happened here. I don’t think there’s any dispute. I mean, this is something that actually happened. This isn’t a hoax. This happened to these women when they were very young.

It is surprising to some degree that they’re treating this as such a political issue and not treating it like it should be treated, which is a crime. And if the files are unsatisfactory or don’t contain credible evidence, then maybe they need to look a little deeper.

Maybe the answer is that we still have questions and we’re going to look into this more. But that’s not the answer the government gave. The answer they gave was: There’s nothing here. There’s nothing more to investigate. We’re done with this story. And I think the answer should be that obviously the public has a lot of questions and the victims still want justice, so we’re going to look at this a little further.

Douthat: But in the end, for that to be worth doing, Epstein himself is dead, so your assumption in making this argument — and I think it’s a very compelling argument — but the core of the argument is there are other people out there who are guilty ——

Brown: That’s correct.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; @JudiciaryDems/X via:
[ed. After all the gaslighting and lying Trump has done throughout his life and as president, MAGA finally gets indignant about this? Guess it just goes to show how much conspiracy theories fuel their engines.] 

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