Music Go to the next hour, guys. You are in for a real treat. Long time, it's been years since I've had Michael Tracy on the show. If you're not familiar with his work, follow him on X, M Tracy. You have a stepstep correct? Yes, correct? Yes, M-Tracy.net. Michael, you, I think, are one of the most unorthodox thinkers in the social media space. I don't know anyone else who so consistently calls balls and strikes as you and you have no problem pissing everyone off. And the through line, I think, through all your work, is exasperation at the endless stupidity of human tribalism. And I know you might be not a fan, like my mentor Harvey P. Carr of the word curmudgeon, but that certainly kind of seeps through a little bit. The reason I have you on this week is I've had two friends of mine who don't know each other

independently say you have to have Tracy on to talk about the Epstein stuff because no

one's been killing it like him.

And let me tell you where I came from on this fairly ignorantly and I really want you to fill in. I haven't been following it that much at all and I had Lucry Kowski on the show a couple months ago and I said to him, I was scared to say this, I didn't get pushed back. I'm like,

there's a big difference to me between high school girls sleeping with powerful married men for money and children imprisoned being violated. And it's not to excuse one verse the other, but to compare them, I think, is absurd. And I felt that if I say this, it's like, oh, you're in on it.

Oh, you're OK with this.

Oh, you want people dismembered blah, blah, blah, blah. Luke said to me, no, no, no, you're wrong. There are children, miners. This isn't just some kind of, oh, she slept with the prince so on and so forth. At the same time, I was very confused because if there was smoking guns, I thought they

would surely have been destroyed long ago.

And if there was smoking guns, I thought they would surely have been destroyed long ago. If there were smoking guns against Trump, the Biden people would have leaked it. But if the Biden people didn't leak it, why was Trump fighting it so hard and then flipping so quickly and extremely? So that's where I come from. I would love to hear. I will feed the floor to you and please. Thank you. We're to begin. You know, there's a lot that's confused and confusing about this whole tangled mess of a story. So I'm not surprised to hear you rehearse all these confused sort of contradictory sentiments that you have toward him, which is what I often tend to hear because it's gone to the point now where when I just strike up a casual conversation with somebody or if I meet somebody new almost invariably, I don't know, this is the life I chose, I guess, but almost invariably now becomes me having to recapitulate my kind of elevator pitch on Epstein. Okay. That's not something I necessarily consciously chose for myself, but maybe I'm not totally in command of my subconscious sort of compulsions. So, look, one thing that I has to frame this whole discussion is that there's nothing more visceral. There's nothing that provokes more of like an animalistic, wrathful reaction among people. And anything to do with illicit sexual activity and children. Yes. Okay. Yep. That it just automatically makes people deactivate their critical faculties and enter into sort of angry mob sort of mode of thought. Actually, come to think of it over the summer, I wrote something on what I've come to call as the, you know, the perpetual panic.

And that's not to dismiss or deny that there are sometimes instances of bona fide adults praying upon or sexually harming bonafide children. Obviously it happens and you

know I'm just as normal person as everybody else watching this and that I have a very deeply negative reaction to such things when I hear about them okay. There's no normal people watching this I sure. Okay well maybe not. I spoke too soon. If anybody wants to make an actual pro-farting by all means, that's not really my angle. But it just struck me as so interesting because Dave Smith, who, you know, I've generally had cordial interactions with over the years, but they seem to have gotten more cantankarous lately, not to personalize this at all, but he just said something that was so emblematic of what I'm talking about when I refer to this kind of perpetual panic gets just a little bit of a coinage that I came up with, which is that he said something like whenever he hears about a controversy or if he, if there's a news story about illicit sexual predation upon children, pedophilia, et cetera, he immediately in to literally wanting to join in Angry Mob and go just violently track down whoever the guy is who supposedly perpetrated the heinous offense. This was actually now that I'm thinking back. It was in relation to that little flare up over the Israeli official. I've got busted in a, and what I think was an entrapment scheme in Las Vegas where on an adult's only app, this guy, hook up app, this guy got involved with a police decoy on her profile, her quote unquote, her profile had broadcast that she was 18. And then, the cops claim that he actually knew that she was not 18 even though it was an adult police decoy. We don't have to get to relevant to that. But it was just like one of these recurring sort of like outrages that caused people to just become so blithering in their frenzied sort of angry reaction. And you know, he tied it in as well to the Epstein thing. And obviously to him, the through line there was at least to some degree the involvement of Israel, which we could talk about if you'd like. But I think the more sort of paramount like variable here in terms of why people are so incessantly sort of crazed about this story on an emotional level. And then obviously one's emotions can transcend into political fervor as well is the notion that there was a rampant pedophilic sex trafficking ring that was orchestrated at the highest levels of government was international in scope, was enforced by blackmail, implicated some of the most powerful titans of industry, the most powerful academics, influential entertainers, etc. And that it was all mellowly covered up. Now, if that rough sketch of the Epstein story were actually true or, let's say, substantiated by a preponderance of credible evidence, then I would agree that would be a blockbuster story, and I'd be rushing to be among the first to cover it. But that's just really not what the facts align with and if you are able to comport yourself so you're taking a dispassionate perspective on any of this. I think that's the unavoidable conclusion, but it's hard to reason with people on this subject because because it really has something for everyone. There's sort of a crude, partisan angle where the most normy Democrats now, Chuck Schumer and whomever are having to perform their outrage about the Epstein files vis-a-vis Trump, because they're always looking for something that they can screech without rage about vis-a-vis Trump.

It's almost like they're new rush a gate

in terms of the intensity of their focus.

But there's a right-wing variant as well

that was maybe a bit more pronounced under Biden

than maybe like earlier in the summer

before it became kind of more tightly interwoven

with the standard kind of reflexive partisanship.

But my theory is that the kind of right wing id sort of sort of just fundamentally needs there to be a constant trafficking ring going on somewhere that's being covered up by depraved elites. I don't know if somehow it kind of like orient their worldview in some weird way, at least the more kind of populist tinged elements of the right wing coalition, QAnon, just being one, you know, recent example, and then there are some thematic continuities between QAnon and Epstein, but what makes Epstein distinct, and so like, enduring in its intrigue is that there actually is like something of an actually existing sort of factual predicate underlying it, right? As opposed to the phantasm like you and on. You have people on, you know, you have a Me Too element. So people forget that when the Epstein story was really kind of reinvigorated in the public mind in 2018. It was at the peak of Me Too, and it was because of a series of articles in the Miami Herald by this journalist, Julie Kay Brown, who openly credits the sort of clamor around Me Too as catalyzing this renewed interest in Epstein and actually catalyzing the renewed federal prosecution of Jeopardy Epstein that then led to him getting indicted by the feds in July of 2019, so you know six or eight months later. And then like on then like on the online, and so that sort of me two elements, the anti-Trump element, I think really plays a big role in why the more mainstream elements of the media are 24 or seven Epstein still now for how long has it been since July? Six months, something like that. It's not literally 24 or seven, but it's, yeah. If not the dominant story, definitely up there. And it certainly is again, this week, you have, you know, the kind of left liberal instinct to look through, look at the story through the lens of abusive power dynamics. Yeah. Obviously, believing women, they need to elevate survivors. We've heard that term now come into such popular usage. It's no longer just victims. It's survivors. So it's like this empowering nomenclature that we're all supposed to just buy into like a new sort of religious tenant or something. I don't know. It seems to me to invoke like Holocaust survivor or something, which is pretty much how the quote, quote Epstein survivors and their supporters or, you know, boosters seem to the view themselves in terms of the historic like annals of major catastrophes. It's kind of like a kin to the Holocaust to them in that sense, not literally people on being obviously being a bit facetious. And then in terms of the online media, podcast type oriented media and social media, the intelligence intrigue, right? That's right. The honey, the massage honey pot or maybe it's some other intelligence agency or maybe the kind of sex trafficking network runs so deep and is so tied in with shady intelligence actors that it becomes almost a rosetta stone to understand how the United States and maybe even the world is fundamentally governed. So you have a crazy confluence of all these sort of drivers that impel people to get wedded to the story and ensure that it remains top of the agenda and has such a helpful kind of like emotional, political, social residence to it. Which is why even though I have a, let's say, minority of you on the larger Epstein saga, I never begrudge people for taking such a keen interest in it. I have a hugely keen interest in it myself. It's endlessly fascinating. I've been up all night reading the latest production of Department of Justice, quote unquote, Epstein files. And even if none of it is necessarily some kind of explosive, you know, dispositive evidence or smoking gun revelation about the trafficking operation that implicates, you know, Donald Trump and Bill Gates and Bill Clinton and, you know, even Michael Jackson was in the latest slew of photos, even if it doesn't produce anything that rises to that level of kind of like evidentiary sort of satisfaction. There's still plenty there that's incredibly intriguing. And also to me, intriguing is how this story tends to function, you know, discursively. How it kind of has vacuumed up all these sort of disparate sentiments in the populace how it sort of has taken on the sort of it's become almost like a totem for people to project their anxieties onto it definitely foments a lot of moral panic and mass hysteria which in my judgment has a lot of extremely deleterious effects which I tried attention to. But in the main, I know I've gone on for a long now with my sort of introductory spiel. It's still incredibly fascinating. So I for one welcome are never-ending Epstein National or maybe international melodrama. There was an experiment done by a psych-college psychiatrist years ago. It's not the Millogram experiment, but it's analogous to

it, where a bunch of people were in a room and everyone's an actor except for the

mark and they were given two lines and everyone had to say which line is bigger

than the other and all the actors were told to say the smaller line and in many

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