From 2019… Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?:
I’m wondering if LGBTQIA is the most popular social justice cause because there is no obvious connection between saying one is passionate about supporting LGBTQIA and having to donate money. If someone says “I care about the poor” and then buys a Tesla instead of a Honda Accord, a friend might ask “Why didn’t you give $70,000 to the poor and drive a Honda rather than your fancy Tesla?”
In the intervening seven years, Teslas have gotten cheaper so perhaps a better analogy is to the $10,000 European vacation. Certainly over those seven years, though, heterosexual Rainbow Flagism, i.e., the public celebration of homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. by white cisgender heterosexuals, has become even more common. Nominally Christian churches in majority-Democrat parts of the U.S. will usually have a rainbow flag even when their entire congregation is hetero. None of these churches have flags or signs out front saying “help the poor by giving them half of your income since you already live at least 2X as well as Americans in the 1950s”.
I wonder if we’re seeing the same phenomenon right now with respect to people indignantly condemning Jeffrey Epstein. Hardly any of these folks were important enough to be included in the Epstein Files and, therefore, they can’t have been personally offended by Epstein’s conduct. If we assume that Jeffrey Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea for “soliciting prostitution” wasn’t coerced by the threat of decades in prison, what has been established is that he had sex with a paid 16-year-old female roughly 20 years ago. (He is often referred to by the Two Minutes Haters as a “rapist” or “pedophile”, but he was never charged with rape, much less convicted of rape, and having sex with a 16-year-old is not an example of pedophilia as the term was previously used in English.)
The Two Minutes Haters often live within a short drive of places where teenage prostitution is going on right now. I’m in a politically diverse Facebook group with a Big Law partner (average partner at his firm earns about $1.5 million/year in post-Biden dollars) who posts daily about his sympathy for the Epstein victims. He lives in an elite neighborhood of Greater Los Angeles that is within a one-hour drive of the street that the New York Times recently identified as having a high-density of juvenile prostitutes:
Ana paced on the sidewalk at 68th and Figueroa, her front teeth missing and an ostomy bag taped down under her hot pink lingerie. … Ana was 19, but the girls on the street reminded her of herself and her sister when they were first put out on Figueroa for sex. She had been 13. Her sister, 11. … Ana had grown accustomed to the protocols of the Blade, a roughly 50-block stretch of Figueroa Street that had become one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States. … The Blade was an eight-minute drive from the University of Southern California … The younger the girl, the more customers would pay, which meant preteens were often being robbed and assaulted by groups of older girls trying to make quota.
My response to one of his recent demands for more action regarding the Epstein Files. I’ll call him “Hassan” since that’s the first name of one of the Somalis charged in the Minnesota welfare state frauds and we are informed that Somalis built the United States:
There are teenage prostitutes whom you can rescue tonight, Hassan. The New York Times tells you exactly where in Los Angeles to find them. I will send you $1,000, Hassan, if you will go to Figueroa St. tonight and take home one of the under-18 prostitutes and keep her safe in your guest rooms for at least one month. This is to offset the cost of her food (I know that it should be a lot less than $1,000 to feed a skinny kid, but I see you more as an Uber Eats kind of person than a competent chef).
His only response to this offer was to take issue with my criticism, admittedly unsupported, of his cooking abilities. A few hours later he was posting the assertion “Donald Trump was actively recruiting girls for Epstein”, apparently made by someone the FBI interviewed in 2021.
The easiest way for authorities to bring the criminal justice system down on men who have sex with “underage” women is to prosecute them for statutory. Then a jury doesn’t need to sort out whether providing a female with housing, private jet rides, clothing, jewelry, spending money, etc. is prostitution or just legal “dating” in our debauched country. The people who engage in the Two Minutes Hate regarding Epstein often live in states where sex with a 16-year-old might be perfectly legal because that’s the age of consent. Here’s my offer to one of the haters who sent me a stream of enraged X messages regarding my failure to unequivocally condemn Jeffrey Epstein:
If you want to work together to lobby the Massachusetts legislature to raise the age of consent in MA to 18, I will be happy to help with that.
He did not respond to this offer.
What we’re seeing is a huge group of Americans who don the mantle of righteous protectors of teenage females because they posted on social media about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, all of whom are now adults and nearly all of whom have been or are being paid $millions, i.e., more than the typical American female will earn in a lifetime of W-2 slavery. See “Jeffrey Epstein victims program shutting down with $121 million paid to abuse survivors” (ABC, 2021):
The Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program, since launching last year, received approximately 225 applications from alleged victims from the United States and abroad. That astounding number was more than double the initial expectations of the fund’s administrator and advocates for the victims. … Of the 150 applicants deemed eligible for compensation, more than 92% accepted the offers. The awards were paid by the executors of Epstein’s estate, but the claims were evaluated independently “free from any interference or control” by the estate, said Jordana Feldman, the program’s designer and administrator.
(75 out of 225 applicants were considered to be obvious liars by the administrators and, therefore, not eligible?)
“Epstein survivors secure a $290 million settlement with JPMorgan Chase” (NPR, 2023):
The lawsuit is one of several targeting banks who serviced Epstein’s financial dealings for years, even after it emerged in 2006 that Epstein was using his wealth to exploit minors and young women. Last month, Deutsche Bank agreed to a $75 million settlement in a similar case.
News of the JPMorgan settlement emerged on Monday, the same day a federal judge granted class-action status to the lawsuit, saying the number of plaintiffs involved could be “well over 100 people.”
Let’s assume it is the same 150 people who will also share the JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank cash. That’s $486 million divided by 150 = $3.24 million on top of whatever Jeffrey Epstein paid them while they were spending time with him. A reasonable person could certainly argue that $3.24 million tax-free isn’t sufficient compensation but it is unarguably far more than the typical teen prostitute receives. Thus my confusion regarding why it’s considered righteous to dwell on Jeffrey Epstein’s victims of 20 years ago rather than try to rescue today’s teen prostitutes.
Maybe the best response is to offer anyone piling on condemnation of Epstein three options: (a) spend time and money rescuing today’s young female prostitutes, (b) spend time and money lobbying to raise the age of consent in every U.S. state and every country where it isn’t at least 18 (you could also argue for 27, at least for women, given recent outraged stories about Epstein and 26-year-old females (e.g., NYT)), (c) spend time and money on imposing alcohol prohibition within the U.S. (my standard proposal for improving a lot of stuff, including sexual behavior), or (d) spend money on a new fund that will give people who say that they were Epstein victims additional money. Perhaps the new fund could find the 75 women who were denied any compensation by the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program and give each of them $1 million?
Related:
- Fox story about Wendy Stephens, just 14 years old when she was murdered by the Green River Killer; Wendy Stephens ran away from home in Colorado and found her way to Seattle somehow. Not only did Wendy Stephens not get paid $millions, but she didn’t get to enjoy her remaining 60+ years of life expectancy. Had the citizens of Seattle shut down their teen prostitution corridor, which is where Gary Ridgway picked up nearly all of his victims, Wendy Stephens would likely be with us today. (The arch-criminal, according to Wokipedia: “Ridgway, who is dyslexic, was held back a year in high school and exhibited an IQ recorded as being in the ‘low eighties.'”)
- “LA County reaches $828 million abuse claims settlement on top of previous $4 billion accord” (ABC, October 2025), a story that interested almost nobody either inside or outside of LA: “Los Angeles County announced a tentative $828 million settlement with more than 400 plaintiffs who claim they were the victims of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of county workers. The settlement is on top of an earlier $4 billion settlement reached on behalf of roughly 11,000 claimants.”
- Are women the new children? (support for raising the age of consent to 27)
AI vs. Groupthink
Would it be possible to use AI to determine whether, as is commonly asserted these days, that Jeffrey Epstein was a rapist of 14-year-old girls?
ChatGPT says that it is fair to characterized Jeffrey Epstein as a “pedophile” because at least some women were under age 18. When asked about Mohammed and his marriage to Aisha, on the other hand, it turns out that the Prophet was not a “pedophile”:
Traditional Islamic hadith literature — especially reports in collections such as Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim — state that:
- Muhammad married Aisha when she was six.
- The marriage was consummated when she was nine.
These reports have been accepted as authentic by the majority of classical Sunni scholars for over a millennium.
…
4) Comparison with Jeffrey Epstein
The comparison is difficult because the contexts differ on multiple axes:
| Dimension | Muhammad | Epstein |
|---|---|---|
| Time period | 7th century | 20th–21st century |
| Cultural norms | Early marriage common | Sex with minors illegal & stigmatized |
| Evidence type | Religious texts & historical reports | Court records, testimony, indictments |
| Pattern alleged | Specific marriages | Large network of abuse |
| Legal framework | Pre-modern tribal law | Modern criminal law |
Because of this:
- Epstein’s conduct was criminal under the laws and norms of his own society.
- Muhammad’s marriage practices reflected norms widely accepted in his historical setting.
This doesn’t make moral evaluation impossible — but it makes clinical labeling across contexts methodologically unsound.
Even if you don’t believe the more lurid stuff (forced childbirth and infanticide, unsubstantiated, as far as we know), you still have to admit that middle-aged people running a sexual pyramid scheme where girls are procuring other girls from their local middle and high schools, and “models” are being recruited and then lent out to married billionaires is totally gross. It also appears to have been sometime illegal, which is why it’s not simply a private matter. How would you feel if your kids’ teenage friends started dating 45-year-olds and their friends for cash?
It’s also pretty alarming that this all seems to have been part of some kind of political influence racket. We’ve got enough problems with democracy right now without elite pedo-or-ephebophile networks doing god-knows-what with total impunity. Epstein is dead. Nobody is terribly worried about what he did, but they are worried about a cabal of influential men doing illegal things to girls and young women with near-impunity.
If you want to find and support a 19 year old sugar baby, there’s not much anyone can do to stop you(even if it’s generally considered a little distasteful), but if you’re going to give Epstein or the next Epstein access to the levers of power because he can reliably provide you with down-on-their-luck 15 year olds, I think maybe society and the legal system should actually step in.
SuperMike: your concern for 15-year-old girls is admirable. If you want to rescue a 15-year-old prostitute this month, rather than project sympathy back 20+ years to adult women who’ve been paid $millions, I will happily give you $1,000 to pay for the rescued teen’s food.
The Epstein affair is not the cause but an indicator of corruption of high degree at the highest levels and one of why we got to the place we are at now, which did nothing good for us in the eyes of God. It is quantatization of qualitative things that were seen and felt at supposedly high places that I once revered, before I got there. It is not an opposite of street prostitution or Minnesota fraud or Islamic rape gangs in UK or insane immigration policy but a complimentary set-up, birds of a feather so to speak. Many involved, for example Bill Gates, were mostly financing stuff that caused all these things, after he ended productive part of his career.
In America, “iustitia non caeca est.” But it should be.
I’m going to add hearing EpsteinSpeak to my growing constellation of Godwin Internet discussion endpoints.
But you know, since I’m here…raising the age of consent (and the drinking age) to 27 has my vote:
Rene Descartes was a drunken fart:
“I drink therefore I am.”
Socrates himself is be particularly missed…
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed!
— Monty Python, Philospher’s Song
Phil, I honestly I found this post a bit convoluted to parse through (even with my Yale law degree). That said, I think I can simplify the gist of what you are saying with a simple personal example: just because my husband Bill was a serial rapist doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person. Do I have this about right?
Hi,
You’re were getting a little old here in 1965, but in 1963 I would have been so into you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton#/media/File:Hillary_Clinton_in_1965_Eyrie.jpg
Eagerly awaiting your testimony in an open forum. Bye now.
@HC
> Do I have this about right?
You have it all wrong. If you ever leave that creep Bill, DM me on OnlyFans (same user id). Or hell, even if you don’t leave him, you owe him a fling or two. I’m a bit busy at the senior center, but I’ll get back to you. XoXo
Lets assume that the Epstein files is just teen prostitution and nothing more.
Why is the DOJ redacting all of the files?
Why not just release the entire files with no redactions?
For the victims, now they can claim more damages and payment for their services.
Nothing sticks to the people that used Epstein’s services, they are above the law, they will never go to jail, so now they can just come clean and admit that they paid for the services of teen prostitutes.
Case closed and everyone can move on.
The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, Rule 6(e) mandates the secrecy of grand jury material. This is a very basic legal protection that witnesses, confidential informants, law enforcement rely on when they give evidence. The so-called “Epstein Files Transparency Act” of 2025 overrode certain though not all protections under Rule 6(e). This legislation is a negative development for American law, to override grand jury secrecy so the screwballs and conspiracy theorists can titillate themselves by reading about wealthy older men seeking sex with younger woman. Now what normal man would desire that?
jdc, my daughter Ashley has chronicled in detail how I raped her multiple times during her childhood. Are you saying I’m not a “normal” man?
jdc, this is not a Criminal Procedure but a Civil Liability or Contract Law. This is matter where the teen victims did not have proper legal representation at the time they negotiated their compensation for there services to wealthy older men. If the fully unredacted Epstein files are released then the victims can seek financial compensation in civil court. None of the wealthy older men will ever be criminally prosecuted but they will loose in civil court. This is not about conspiracy theorists, it is about contract negotiation, where Trump is a genius!
An additional point is that in most U.S. states, the legal age to negotiate and enter into a binding contract is 18, in which case the victims could not legally enter into a binding contract. More civil liability for the wealthy where the they knowingly entered into a contract with a minor that could not legally enter into a binding contract.
Pavel: As noted in the original post, nearly all of the people, regardless of age, who say that they had sex with Jeffrey Epstein or one of his friends have already been paid $millions (per “victim”) and they didn’t need to go to court in order to get paid. It is unclear what damages they suffered beyond what they’ve already been paid. Ordinarily, a human who engages in heterosexual sex is not considered to have suffered more than $3 million in damage. If these women had wanted to get paid amounts that were a proportion of their sex partners’ income they would have needed to throw away their birth control pills, get pregnant, and then either sell the abortion at a discount to the expected child support revenue or push out a baby and then harvest child support for 18-23 years (depending on the state).
Here’s a Deplorable female: “When adult prostitutes call themselves child sex trafficking victims that hurts real child sex trafficking victims.” https://x.com/tmsilverman/status/2022355062568178075?s=20
(I’ve surveyed friends’ daughters who are 16-25. None of them have any sympathy for the adult women who now claim to have been Epstein victims. It seems as though it is mostly older women and white men who want to see themselves as saviors of 16-25-year-old females.)
Phil, thanks so much for standing strong with Joseph Robinette Biden and affirming jdc’s proposition that he is indeed a “normal” man. When I hired Joseph Robinette Biden to be my running mate, I knew he was an upstanding human being of the highest caliber, and of outstanding intellect. Time has of course proven me correct. Allahu Akbar.
Philip, do you think that if all Epstein did was to hook up “elite” johns to adult prostitutes, shouldn’t be those johns be criminally prosecuted? As far as I am aware prostitution is a crime and nobody is above the law. I am sure that johns prefer to settle with “underage” “victims” then go to criminal court. We are all and western society as a whole, including US, Europe and Israel, are the real victims here, affected by corrupt policies baked in places like this.
More from the Deplorable female: “Leftist will accuse their political enemies of being pedophiles and then go try to stop ICE officers from arresting actual pedophiles.” https://x.com/tmsilverman/status/2023051263898746964?s=20
(I agree with her that it would be more productive to concentrate on deporting today’s pedophiles than dwelling on something Jeffrey Epstein might have done 20 years ago.)
perplexed: Should involvement with adult prostitution be prosecuted? The statute of limitations on criminal prosecution for solicitation of prostitution is two years in New York, one year in the Virgin Islands. Even if the statute of limitations were not a bar to prosecution, how would the truth of what happened in a bedroom prior to 2019 be established? Remember that the females involved had multi-$million incentives to spin a compelling tale of abuse. They were pitted against other females telling similar stories and the most dramatic tale-tellers were paid the most from a fixed pot of money.
perplexed: Here’s a NYT article on how 97 percent of LIRR retirees were willing to spin a disability tale in order to get their paws on $250 million in federal cash. https://archive.is/mcqT
Virtually every career employee — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees, including about 2,000 who retired during that time.
—————
The Epstein “victims” had a larger cash incentive than the LIRR retirees. Why do you assume it would be easy to sort out the truth from the lies given that cash incentive, especially when the events in question might have occurred more than 20 years ago and the only person who can falsify the claimant’s claims is dead?
Anyway, of course I would support enforcing the law within the statute of limitations. The law is what the peasants voted for. But we can’t say that the statute of limitations automatically extends out to 25 years merely because some of those who can potentially be prosecuted are rich/elite. A prostitute does not suffer more harm if she has sex with Bill Gates than if she has sex with someone less wealthy than Bill Gates and, in any case, there is currently no hard (so to speak) evidence of Bill Gates having sex with anyone in the Epstein orbit. If someone were sincere about ending prostitution, he/she/ze/they would be working to arrest today’s prostitutes and johns, not digging around in millions of pages of documents regarding Gulfstream maintenance, Noam Chomsky’s cash needs, etc.
Thanks for your tireless support, philg. It is important to pinpoint out the exact nature of my perversity, ephebophilia. You know, I can’t understand all this political division I’m creating. I tried to spread love to, and gather dirt on, elite dems and republicans equally. Plus, I’m dead, and I’m in Hell (which has admittedly gone down hill since I got here). Do I get any points for being a hetero perv?
I wish you all could just be like Melinda Gates and Hillary Clinton, and “move on”. It is black history month, and couldn’t we focus for a while on the fluidity and dynamic nature of black culture, with great new additions like the Somalians? Blacks are feeling less oppressed by authority currently, ICE is only going after brown people and a tiny number of Somalians who are robbing the taxpayers. Society is making progress, although it might not seem like it.
Keep up the good work, Phil and readers. Hell is an eternity of hate, so can’t everybody just forget about me? Let’s all make the new 2 minutes of hate about fighting hate.
@Jeff E
Fiddler on the Roof would be a much different story at the turn of the 21st Century America, that’s for sure. Ghislaine Maxwell as the matchmaker? “Sunrise/Sunset” reimagined? It kind of writes itself. Yours truly, rolling over in my grave.
In my opinion, you left out an important option:
(e) spend time and money into lobbying against artists using explicit sexual behavior or content to promote their music or artwork. [1]
At the very least, there need be a rating system for music and art similar to what CARA provides for movies, so parents can make decisions about what their children are exposed to. After all, TV shows and movies that include sexual suggestive act, smoking, alcohol, or drug use are rated PG or PG-13.
[1] https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2026/02/07/bad-bunny-at-the-super-bowl/#comment-412388