[The difficulty, though, is trying to figure out which marginalized people were exiled to the margins because they told unwanted truths, and which were marginalized because they are honestly bad people. As you know, I am 100 percent against the "No Enemies To The Right" principle, because I am not going to align myself with a true anti-Semite or racist, just because we both hate wokeness, or whatever. It's foolish to expect everybody to agree with you on everything before you agree to be their friend and ally. But there have to be uncrossable lines. For me, anti-Semitism true anti-Semitism, not just griping about the State of Israel is one of them.
At the same time, we can't let our fear and loathing of anti-Semitism cause us to close our eyes to things we would rather not see. I find myself right there with John Schindler, the former NSA spy who writes the Top Secret Umbra newsletter. Schindler who, like me, is a Zionist and supporter of Israel writes that he hates to say it, because he backs Israel, but Epstein was probably a Mossad operative:
There's simply no mileage for American media asking difficult questions about Israel. As a lifelong Zionist and supporter of the Jewish state it pains me to say this, but few encouraged serious examination of who Epstein was really working for. Despite the fact that the dead pedophile's connections to Israel were obvious. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's bestie and victim-procurer, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a British publishing executive and high-level MOSSAD agent (more on him shortly), while Ehud Barak, Israel's former prime minister and top general, spent so much time with Epstein, including whole months at a go, that even the Israeli government found it embarrassing. Merely applying Occam's Razor, without benefit of highly classified intelligence, Israel had to be the lead suspect in any examination of Epstein's foreign connections.
More Schindler:
It's centered on the stunning revelation in 2019 by then-Labor Secretary Alex Acosta that back in 2008, when Acosta was the U.S. Attorney for South Florida, he signed off on Epstein's shockingly lenient plea deal for sex crimes against minors because Justice Department higher-ups in Washington wanted him to go easy because Epstein "belonged to intelligence." Having said the unsayable, Acosta soon resigned from Trump's first cabinet under a cloud.
Acosta's admission was a game-changing event, as I reported in July 2019 when the news broke, in a deep-dive for the New York Observer titled "It Sure Looks Like Jeffrey Epstein was a Spy But Whose?" Based on my real-world counterintelligence experience, my initial conclusion was that, while U.S. intelligence had to be aware of Epstein's crimes perpetrated on American soil, against American victims, to some degree, it was unlikely that U.S. intelligence think FBI and CIA were Epstein's main partners and benefactors. Instead, foreign intelligence services were the likely culprits, probably more than one. Israel was unavoidably the lead suspect, given Epstein's close ties to that country, through Russia's "special services" made the short list too. As I concluded my analysis, "What's not in doubt is that a sex trafficking ring centered on minors, which involved numerous global VIPs in compromising situations, would be of high interest to quite a few intelligence services. The Epstein saga seems certain to get even more unpleasant and interesting."
That it certainly did. However, from the start, the Epstein story, which only got stranger with the suspect's death in his Manhattan jail cell on Aug. 10, 2019, under unexplained circumstances, was too big for the media to touch. It was all too much, with its pervert VIPs, including presidents and princes, sordid sexual perversions, vast sums of somebody's money, plus international intrigue amid hints of espionage. If some banks are too big to fail, the Epstein story was too big to cover seriously for the mainstream media, which instead focused on human interest aspects such as his victims, while avoiding tough questions, especially those two key questions I mentioned.
Few serious people wanted to talk about this, theorizes Schindler, because they didn't want to be smeared as anti-Semitic. But:
Most inquirers have been cranks, conspiracists, and bona fide anti-Semites, who got interested in Epstein only because they hated Jews. Such fringe-theorizing is easy for the powers that be to dismiss, so they have. However, the second Trump administration's astonishingly inept showcasing of the Epstein scandal, only to attempt to smother it, has opened the floodgates, and now a Republican commentator of stature [Tucker Carlson] has said the unsayable, thereby changing the debate.
Schindler is 100 percent right that this recent Epstein blow up is entirely an own goal by Donald Trump. Did you read today that Trump is now saying that those asking questions about Epstein now are "bad people"? Come on! Ridiculous. Now loyalty to Trump is putting House Republicans in the humiliating position of having to vote down a Democratic resolution that would compel the Justice Department to release all its Epstein files.] -Rod Dreher
