Of course it was a honeytrap. Was, "Was it a honeytrap?"

 

Delia Kane, age 14 at  The Exchange Luncheon, Why is her photo up here on this thread? Well, it'll become more apparent below, but we now know that the Playboy mansion had a minor who grew up in it, and whose fell into vice about it, tried to write about it, and who had those writing suppressed by Playboy.  Additionally, from other sources, which won't receive as much press as the current A&E documentary, Playboy actually promoted the sexualization of female minors in its early history to such an extent that the result of an independent European study caused this to cease before it became a matter they addressed. This was apparently through its cartoons, but it's worth nothing that apparently at least one Playboy model was 17 years old at the time of her centerfold appearance and another, who later killed herself, was a high school student, albeit a married one.  Girls and young women were accidents of unfortunate labor early in the 20th Century. But the late 20th Century, they were the target of pornographers and sex exploiters.  Which is worse? (From a prior post, but one which is related to this one, and which we'll explain in an upcoming post).

We posted the question yesterday, and did an entry on it.

Lex Anteinternet: Was it a honeytrap?: Never get into an elevator with a Polish blonde” David M. Evans, Consular/Economic Officer, Warsaw, 1964-1967 Cold War era Greek poster warn...

After that, it really occurred to us the question wasn't, was it a honeytrap?   The Epstein teenage girl platter was of course a honeytrap.

The question is, who benefited from it?

We've made the classic suggestion, it was espionage.  But there are other types of espionage other than the clandestine statecraft type.

Industrial espionage is one.

Now, frankly it looks unlikely to be that, but it's possible.  And engaging in spycraft for nations doesn't preclude engaging in it for industry. There are indeed examples of men and women who have done both.

Which takes us to our next item. What if all the effort to stock a Caribbean island with desperate nymphs was simply to advance Epstein himself, much like bootlegging was to advance the bootleggers.

That could have worked in several ways.  One was simply a chance to offer teenage girls to men who wanted to screw teenage girls in exchange for something. . . money, connections, or whatever.

But it goes without saying that if a person set that up, blackmailing them would become very easy to do.

Indeed, why wouldn't a person who had reached such a state of moral depravity take the next step and do so?  Only for a couple of reasons, really.  One is that it might endanger the entire enterprise.  The second is that it might backfire and cause you to end up dead.

And while it's unlikely, it's possible just that occured.

Blackmail, whether as a goal, or accidental byproduct, is indeed part and parcel of an operation such as this.  Epstein had desperate teenage girls available for sex and rich associates who wanted to screw them.  Once they did, he knew that had occured. They had to depend upon his confidence and he upon theirs. The latter was easily acquired as nobody wants to end up like Prince Andrew.  The former, however, could very easily have come at a price at any point.

And the need for confidentiality on the part of the guilty is so strong, that the forces that purchased it are still at work.  By this point, we know why the entire files aren't being released.  When half released, lives are being destroyed.  Andrew lost his theoretical crown.  Peter Mandelson is now out of the House of Lords.  Bill Gates is fighting allegations he deems absurd but which his ex wife Melinda is at least somewhat crediting.

In the end, whatever it is, didn't work out for Epstein twice. The first time it certainly did, he practically got a get out of jail free card.  The second time he lost his life, most likely by his own hands.  Whatever else is in there people are fighting to keep secret.

Which brings us back to something distressing but frankly necessary.

We're never going to know what happened on Epstein Island and in his homes until all the names are released, accused as well as victim.  I know that the victims don't want that, but it's necessary.  Their anonymity keeps them subject to blackmail.  Once their names are out, and those of the accusers are out, if ever, they're free of the threat that chains them and can tell who violated them.  

And as a final note, when the "Me Too" movement broke out it emphasized believing the women who were telling their stories.  Now women do lie about crimes, just like men, and women have lied in the past about rape.  But here there seems to be a widespread acceptance that the worst stories just aren't true.

Why is that?

I'm not saying they are, but if you'd told me fifteen years ago that there was a man who ran a white slavery ring for the wealthy and had his own island where the rich and powerful frequented and sampled the offerings, I wouldn't have believed that either.

Related posts:

Was it a honeytrap?

Labels: Donald Trump, Ephebophilia, Epstein Scandal, Espionage, Harry Dexter White, Harry S. Truman, Hebephilia, McCarthy Era, Playboy, Poland, Russia, Sex, The wealthy, Vladimir Putin

Was it a honeytrap?

Never get into an elevator with a Polish blonde”

David M. Evans, Consular/Economic Officer, Warsaw, 1964-1967

Cold War era Greek poster warning Greek officers not to yield to oddly friendly women.

The British newspaper The Guardian seems to think so, but The Guardian tends towards the salacious.

It would explain, however, a lot.

We speak, of course, of Epstein Island and the ongoing cover-up of what occurred there.

Yes, cover-up.  The U.S. government is covering it up.

A honey trap is an age old espionage technique.  A country sends somebody, make or female, to have compromising sex with the target.  Once he's compromised, he, and it's almost always a he, is really compromised.  Sexual sins can be amongst the very worse, even in this libertine age.

The Soviet Union was a master at the honey trap. Max Hastings, in his book on World War Two espionage, details this quite a bit and well known examples abound.  While not often put this way, Soviet recruiting in pre World War Two and early Cold War Britain was based on honey traps, with the added element that they wer\e homosexual honey traps.  Homosexuality was illegal in the UK at the time as well as devastating to a person's reputation, but surprisingly common in the "public school" system.  The Soviets learned who would be well placed at some point to be a spy, and provided the sexual target to bring the person in.

The more common female honey trap is of course well known, and was also well deployed by the Soviets, as well as other nations.

Maria Butina is a recently example who buddied up to the Trump administration and the National Rifle Association to gather intelligence from Conservative power brokers, although there's no accusation that she employed sex in her efforts.

Fang Fang, as Christine Fang had sex with two US mayors and targeted Democratic politicians in what US officials believe was a political intelligence operation run by China.

Why wouldn't the Russians use it?

What we know about Epstein Island at least gives us every reason to question whether or not it was a honey trap.  The number of very wealthy and connected men that went through it, from all over the globe, made it somewhat unique, although the wealthy and powerful travel in certain circles and there are likely other places that meet this criteria.  What those other places probably didn't have, however, was mid to late teenage girls who were on the dinner menu.

There's utterly no way that the Russians did not know this.

We are told that just because men traveled to the island doesn't mean that they had sex with underage teenage girls.  Quite a few men whose names have been exposed denied every doing that, or denied every knowing that this was going on.  No doubt, that's true min many instances.  Mere wealth is enough to cause some of the wealthy to go to a place. The appearance of wealth attracts the wealthy like shit attracts flies, and I use that analogy intentionally.  But that doesn't mean ever single man who went there ended up in bed with a 15 year old.

Having said that, however, it's clear that girls about that age were there for the offering, and that's the next point.  A honeytrap isn't a rape of the target, it's an offering that tempts the target.  Some men might very well go through a place, particularly perhaps like Bill Clinton did with his wife, and never be tempted, maybe, or even know what's going on.  But to not have some clue strains credibility.  One thing that's showing up, and thank to the Guardian you can see them, is photos of the young girls.  Their faces are blacked out, and in some cases their boobs, but what's interesting is they are of a type.  They're thin girls and look like teens, not the heavy chested women of the Playboy magazine type.  They look, even in the redacted photographs, just like what they were, thing flat chested girls who should have been in high school.

They look like the girl that Donald Trump drew on Epstein's birth card.

And all the more appropriate for a honeytrap.

World War Two Navy era poster.  If the Honeytrap thesis is correct, it's not the girls who were actually the spies. They were only used to compromise the targets, if that happened.

If you are attracting the flies in this fashion, you have to have something to attract them to, and something that compromises them.  Back in the 1970s illicit sex alone would have done that, but in the 2000s?  Maybe not.  And on top of it the guests on Epstein Island were flying in and out, although some did that quite a bit.  Offer a super model up on the plate might not work for a variety of reasons, one being that the supermodel would probably say no.  You aren't going to get any Kate Uptons on Epstein Island.

But  you might very well get the desperate and confused.  Pretty girls on the economic and domestic edge, whose parents are desperate as well.  They'd make ideal entries on the sexual menu.  They are like the prostitute who is murdered to set up the Senator in The Godfather, Part II.  Girls with nothing who "never existed".

You only have to offer them up to the willing, have a camera around, and voila, the target is compromised.

Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre, need we say more.  Posted under fair use exception.

What we know for an absolute certainty is that there were a lot of rich and powerful men who went to Epstein Island.

We also know for sure that a selection of them screwed teenage girls there.

We know for certain that the first time that Epstein was arrested, he got a mysteriously sweetheart deal from a Federal Prosecutor.¹  He was being protected.

He was being protected, because his clientele was being protected on some level.

We also know that people who claimed to be horrified about what was going on and to have cut off their connection with him, didn't when they claimed to.  Even while he was in prison he was receiving contacts from the rich and powerful.

We know that right now only a little over 50% of the materials the government has on him has been released and we are informed that the rest will not be.  We've learned of more of the names, but we haven't learned the names of the girls. Their anonymity isn't protection, it makes them a hostage.

We now that there's been a diehard effort to keep material from being revealed and that the names of the victimizers have not been fully revealed, or even really slightly revealed.

What we just don't know, is why.

What we also know is that early on Trump claimed to be for releasing the files.  He radically changed his view when he was in office, but we don't know why.  It could be that his name shows up more than he thought it would, even if so far nobody has come out and said this material shows he screwed teenage girls.²   Or it could be that there's something so compromising in these files that its hugely damaging to somebody he's protecting.

Without a full release of the files, we don't know what that is.  But it'd have to be pretty bad.  

Sex with underage males will still bring a figure down, we know this.  The story of Kevin Spacey proves that.  But what about teenage girls?  A lot of the men that are in Trump's circle already, including Trump himself, have lived a life of sexual license, would teenagers be the line they couldn't cross?

Well, maybe.  Coerced sex proved the downfall of Harvey Weinstein.  Drugged sex brought down Bill Cosby.  Maybe teenage sex is still a bridge too far. We can all hope so.  And frankly somebody who would stoop so low as to engage in this activity in this situation may have well brought additional perverted elements into this.

But what would espionage do?

First, is there any evidence of it at all.

It does turn out that there were girls from what had been the USSR who showed up on the island.  Model  Ruslana Korshunova went there at age 18, and then went out a balcony window three years later in what was ruled a suicide.  Model Anna Malova is known to have flown with Prince Andrew to the island, but at the time the now 52 year old woman would have been 25.  And there are other accusations, but they are pretty murky.

There's enough, however, that Poland is launching an investigation into connections between Epstein and Russian intelligence.

Would this mean that Trump was compromised?  No, not at all.  But it might very well mean that somebody in his orbit was, and he's protecting him, or them.  There's precedent for that.

It's pretty clear that Truman attempted to bury information that the Roosevelt Administration had been compromised by Soviet spies, and frankly, the Democratic Party of the late 1940s and 1950s pretty much succeeded at that effort. The Roosevelt Administration was definitely compromised, but the effort to squash the efforts to reveal that were so successful that they destroyed the reputation of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and have caused there to be a common belief that all of his acquisitions were baloney.  They weren't.  They were pretty much dead on.

And this would somewhat explain Trump being extraordinarily careful with Putin.  He's not always in Putin's camp, but he often is.  It's been hard to grasp, although there are other explanations for it.  Keeping a lid on whatever is in the Epstein files might be good for Trump. . . and Putin, and really bad for both of them if it turns out that the US, and perhaps other Western, governments were, and maybe are, heavily penetrated by Russian intelligence.

And, as a final wild note, for years now people have claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered.  The accusations frankly are not credible, but if you are going to entertain them, why isn't a Russian connection a possibility?  MAGAs have claimed that the Clinton's had him murdered, which is absolutely absurd. Frankly, it's make more sense for the Republicans to have him murdered, which would also be absurd, but make a little more sense.

If anyone was going to murder him, the Russians make the most sense.

Now, I don't think that occurred.

But I don't think Harry Dexter White was murdered either.  Just compromised.

A Russian honeytrap?

We really don't know, but it is an interesting possibility.

Footnotes.

1.  Chris Christie spoke about this on the last This Week, noting he was a U.S. prosecutor at the time and that all the U.S. Attorneys wondered what on earth was going on.  His comment was "now we know".  He didn't say, exactly, what we know, but what he meant was that we know that something was going on inside the Administration at that time that secured Epstein a deal where he was allowed to go home every day and just slept in the prison.

2.  It's not true that he hasn't been accused of that.  He has been, but so far law enforcement has not found those accusations credible, and they're never going to find them to be credible during the current administration, no matter what the situation regarding them may be.

Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one, additional labels, part two.

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 112th Edition. Clinton calls Trump's bluff.

One of the things about the release of some Epstein materials recently is that Bill Clinton was in them, to nobody's surprise.

One of the things about Trump Derangement Syndrome, the real deal, not the MAGA claim that the vast majority of people on earth are demented as they realize Trump is demented, is the odd ability to take anything that's bad news and claim its good.  Here, the bad news was the massive redaction of the files.  MAGAs immediately claimed; "look, the left is burned as Clinton is in the files".

M'eh.

Nobody cared about that.

But it did cause Bill Clinton to come in and demand that all the files be released.

So. . . . you have Clinton never really saying anything about them, Trump as a candidate supporting their release, his acolytes demanding they be released, then Trump desperately trying to keep them from being released and claiming they're a hoax, to Massie forcing their release. . . to the Trump administration not complying with the legally set deadline, to MAGA's trying to claim that Clinton was in them was a big deal, to Clinton demanding they be released, with Trump once again claiming they don't amount to anything.

Just release them.

Something is in these that really hurts Republicans somehow.  We don't know how, but it must be bad.

And one thing we've learned is that the American BS about wealth being super good and helping everyone is just BS.  People can be too wealthy for their own good. 

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 111th Edition. Letting Healthcare Fail, How War Really Works, Those Epstein Files, Calling names, Bear Care.

Labels: 2026 Wyoming Legislature, Crime, Epstein Scandal, Health Care, religion, The Second Trump Administration, Venezuela, War, Wyoming Freedom Caucus, Yeoman's Fifth Law of History, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History, Zeitgeist

Froma Harrop: How Low Can Deviancy Go?

 

How Low Can Deviancy Go?

Epstein survivors issue urgent plea to Congress, Trump now wants materials released, and the ultimate corruption of money.

Hmmm. . . that's interesting.  Trump's now okay with it.

Trump and his acolytes went from demanding their release, to absolutely opposing it.  Now they're in favor of it again.

What gives?

Well one thing may simply be that so much time has gone by, these files are now scrubbed.  Sounds conspiratorial, I know, but files can be scrubbed, or lost.

The problem here is that the whole thing sounds so, well, all over the place that an effective scrubbing might be impossible.

Another one is that Trump might already know it won't get past the Senate.  Just yesterday loyal flunky John Barrasso stated he wasn't sure if they'd vote on it or not.  Figures like Barrasso figure their Senate seats are so safe that they're untouchable.  They aren't, and he was running pretty scared last time, but they tend to think that way.

Or it just isn't worth the political capital that it was burning up.  That would suggest that whoever is getting protected just isn't worth this level of damage, particularly that some formerly loyal MAGA's have gone overboard into the lifeboats.  The Republicans only barely control the House now and are set to lose them in the midterms.  If only two or three more Republicans in the House abandoned ship, Mike Smarmy Johnson is done for and the GOP would start to break free of King Donny.  Two Republican House members, including amazingly Marjorie Taylor Greene, are openly poking the king and he's been able to do nothing about it.

Yet another is that, related to above, Trump just intends to lie his way out of whatever they say, if they're damaging to him, and so far we have no reason to believe that in spite of his personally gross behavior towards women, that he's implicated in kiddy diddling.  At the worst, it's possible that he knew what was going on and didn't do anything about it,  and there's likely a lot of rich and powerful people in that boat.  Or maybe he actually didn't.  Epstein was a creep, but just having young bikini wearing women on the premises doesn't necessarily mean that diddling is going on.  So whatever is in there, he may be confident won't touch him directly, and whomever it does, well he can always say it includes Democrats too, which it probably does.

Which may be, after all is said and done, the biggest lesson.  Since Ronald Reagan this country has followed the absurd notion that's what's good for the wealthy is good for everyone.  As Oliver Bullough has stated; "All money corrupts, and big money corrupts bigly".   

Businessmen plotted to take over the government and install fascism in the 1930s.  The plot failed, and nobody was prosecuted.  Reagan sold the American public the idea that vast wealth trickles down.

Epstein hung out with the rich and powerful. Some of them he supplied with teenage girls.  The money didn't trickle down, and its not trickling down.  Rather, it's morally corrosive and effectively the Business Plot ultimately won out with the election of Donald Trump, aided by the Democrats prime strategy being a judicial coup rather than an oligarchic one.  

There's still time to reverse that. This might be a good place to start.

Blog Mirror: You Can’t “Protect Children” While Defending a Predator. And, also, What's in those files?

You Can’t “Protect Children” While Defending a Predator

How much longer can Republicans pretend not to see?

We of course also wrote on this just yesterday.

Lex Anteinternet: The dog that hasn't barked.:   By the way, by odd coincidence, they've given Ghislaine Maxwell a therapy dog. None of this will matter.  People will say this doesn...

What is going on here?  Something sure is.  Trump's called out all the stops, even bringing in Lauren Boebert to the Situation Room to pressure her.  Beobert, who is somebody in the MAGA camp, is apparently refusing to go along with Trump.

That in and of itself is remarkable.

What we know is that up to 1,000 girls were raped in association with Epstein.  We don't know all of the details of that by any means.  Some of the rapes were pressured "statutory rapes", but others may have been physically violent rapes of female minors, based on what little we know.  In either instance, the entire thing is horrific.

Was Trump a rapist?  So far we have no reason to believe that, other than the "where there's smoke there's fire".  Trump has, a long history of hanging out with those who have an interest in screwing teenagers and who have carried out their interest.  Epstein wasn't the first in that category.  The first that we know of, and probably the first significant person, was John Casablancas, who owned a modeling agency. Frankly, modeling agencies tend towards being morally dubious in some instances, but Casablancas was personally so.  He divorced his first wife due to an affair with model Stephanie Seymour whom he began seeing when she was 14 years old. At age 50 he married 17 year old Aline Mendonça de Carvalho Wermelinger.

Casablancas  represented Ivanka Trump when she became a fashion model at age 15.¹ 

It's worth remembering here that Trump is nearly 80 years old.  He was born in 1946, which means he turned 20, as a rich man, in 1966, and 30, in 1976.  Trump, therefore, had wealth right in the era in which American sexual morals really began to plummet and he was in his 70s when the clubbing scenes in New York was in full swing.²  People complain about the US being a moral sewer now, but that's because their memories are bad.  The 70s were really a decade of rank libertinism.³ 

They were also one which winked at Hebephilia and Ephebophilia, or rather, more accurately accepted the gross sexualization of early teenage girls  and men preying on them, with that getting advanced at first by Playboy which really flirted with the lines of illegality with its centerfolds.⁴   Advertising in the era really dipped down into the younger years, for girls, in a way that you couldn't and wouldn't now, for instance:

How old do we think that girl is?  Not old.

Brooke Shields as a young woman was shown only in her "Calvin Klein's" and portrayed a 12 or 13 year old prostitute in the 1976 film Pretty Baby (which she now detests) and a castaway in Blue Lagoon who grows into, I guess, a teenage common law marriage portrayed as the natural ideal.  Shields regards herself as having been exploited, which she truly was.  Only slightly older, 1968's Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zeffirelli featured Olivia Hussey' topless visage, albeit briefly, in a quite sexualized portrayal of the Juliet character. She was 14 years old and later sued.⁵

In spite of the horrors of such things as transgenderism, the re-creation of the lower class Victorian "common law" marriage arrangement in a new form in the American lower middle class, and the overall breakdown in sexual standards in the Western world, the outright aggressive exploitation of women sexually has really retreated.  Retreating with it was a fairly open acceptance of what we'd now call "date rape".  The concept that pressuring women into sex by way of position and power constituted rape flat out didn't exist.  Even as a teenager myself in the 1970s, I can recall that jokes based on "get 'er drunk" were really common with the suggestion that happened relatively commonly, and that it wasn't regarded as rape.  For that matter, as early as the early 1980s, I can recall instances of men in certain positions being caught in sexual relationships with underaged teens and simply losing their positions, quietly, over it.⁶ 

The point of all of this is that maybe a person could party down with John Casablancas while being a self admitted libertine and avoid picking the teenage fruit that others were picking, but most people who would find that morally reprehensible, which would be most people, would avoid hanging out with such people pretty quickly.  For one thing, the behavior is gross and disgusting. For another, hanging out with kiddy diddlers would cause a person to run the risk of being regarded as a diddler.

Be that as it may, Trump went from Casablancas on to Jeffrey Epstein, whom he started hanging out with in the 1990s, some twenty, more or less, years after Casablancas. Epstein shows up in a Mar A Lago party's video footage in 1992. That party featured NFL cheerleaders. Trump flew on Epstein's private jet at least seven times in the 1990s.  In 1997 Trump and Epstein were photographed together at a Victoria's Secret "Angels" party in New York.  In 2002 Trump made his now infamous comment that Epstein was a "terrific guy" they shared interest in "beautiful women".  Trump noted that Epstein's interests were in women on the "younger" side.  In 2003 Trump drew a nude figure, with oddly small breasts, in a birthday card for Epstein, with a really enigmatic comment, and signed his name as, basically, pubic hairs.⁷

Now we know that Epstein had commented that Trump knew about the "girls" and that Epstein claimed, in a private email, that Trump knew this due to Virginia Giuffre, the teenager who would be supplied to Prince Andrew.. Giuffre's father worked as a maintenance manager at the Mar-a-Lago property and helped Giuffre obtain a job there.  Maxwell recruited her to Epstein from Mar A Lago.

None of this proves in any fashion that Trump was diddling.  Indeed, Giuffre states that Trump never touched her.  Other women who were associated with Epstein have claimed that, but all of those claims have remained basically on the fringes of this story.  So all that can really be said is that Trump has lead a life of moral dissolution with adult women, and he's hung around with men who had an extremely creepy attraction to girls in their teens, but there's no evidence that Trump personally crossed that line.

But there sure is a lot of evidence that he doesn't want the Epstein files released.

Indeed, he's downright desperate about it.

Why?

Earlier on Trump indicated he wanted the files released.  Releasing the files became sort of a MAGA crusade, with MAGA's convinced that they'd provide damaging information on Bill (and maybe Hillary) Clinton.  Indeed, as recently as a couple of months ago a MAGA I know maintained that the files were being kept secret due to what they'd show about Clinton, and maybe Obama (who is in no way implicated in any of this), thereby making the bizarre assertion that the Republicans are keeping material secret to protect a former Democratic President they detest.

Eh?

Given Trump's change in tune, what probably is in there is one of two things.  One, the most likely, is that it's been pointed out that some rich and powerful person in the Trump circle is implicated, and badly.  Trump may be protecting that person or persons, and if he is, there's some connection either with Trump or the GOP that must really be needed for protection.

The other possibility is that he knows, which he didn't before, that he's implicated as somebody who really knew something grotesque.  Epstein himself, in his emails, noted that he apparently told Ghislaine to knock something off, and Trump has maintained that had to do with raiding staff from Mar A Lago.  But what if what he knew is something worse, that women were being recruited to be sex slaves, which is basically what these poor girls were.

Whatever it is, we don't know.

The files are going to be released, which brings up these two things.

Trumps willingness to act illegally is now so pronounced that there has to be a strong suspicion that the files are being scrubbed.  When they are released, and they will be, there's a good chance that some of the contents will be gone.  This did occur to some extent with the files on the Kennedy Assassination, although I personally don't believe in the various conspiracy theories in that area, so it can definitely be accomplished.

For that reason, and for others, I also feel that the files should be released as is, complete with names of the victims.  I know that's not the norm, and why, but the whole truth here is never going to come out if we don't know who was subject to this barbarity.  And, ironically, in this instance releasing the names protects them.  As noted earlier, Trump was sued by an anonymous woman who withdrew her suit after being subject to much pressure.  There may perhaps be nothing to those claims, but the fact is, at this point, that we're dealing with men who are enormously wealthy and powerful, and have the means to threaten their victims as long as their identities remain unknown.

Footnotes:

1.  On this, Trump has famously remarked about going back stage in, I believe, Miss World, competitions, or some such competitions, while the competitors were topless. These young women would, however, be of age.  This is still pretty creepy.

2.  The New York club scene was famously a cesspool, and heavily associated with drugs.  There is, however, no reason to believe that Trump has ever taken illegal drugs.  Indeed, due to the exposure to alcoholism provided by his brother, Trump does not drink.

3.  As a minor note, the culture of the times reflected back in the form of music.

Rock music has been regarded, probably pretty inaccurately, as sort of countercultural.  More accurately, when it was really popular, it reflected the cultural influence of people ranging from their teens into their thirties.  Real rock music is pretty much dead now.

The 1970s and early 1980s saw a fair amount of rock music that outright endorsed ephebophilia and hebephilia.  Ted Nugent's 1981 Jailbait outright did, with the female subject (victim) declared to be 13 years old. Kiss' 1977 subject was a bit older in Christine Sixteen. The Police hit the subject with Don’t Stand So Close to Me in 1980, which involves a teacher being attracted to a female student. That song is particularly creepy given its reference to Lolita and due to the fact that one of the members of The Police had been a teacher who admitted to having been attracted to female students, but not having acted upon it.

ABBA, which is regarded as sort of a bubblegum rock band, touched on the topic in 1979's Does Your Mother Know?, with the protagonist outright expressing torture over the advances of an underaged girl.  The Knack's 1979 song Good Girls Don't at least kept the behavior down at mutual teenage level.  Aerosmith broke into popularity with 1975's Walk This Way which is a tour de force of sexual double entendres all celebrating teenage sex. The story was flipped in Rod Stewart's 1971 Maggie May in which a teenage male regrets being seduced out of school by an older woman. 

So that's a bunch of song, but were they that popular?  Some really were, at least by my memory.  I don't recall Nugent's song at all, but the only song of Nugent's I recall being popular wsa Cat Scratch Fever, which is about prostitutes.  And Kiss was regarded, where I lived, as sort of juvenile joke more popular with junior high kids than us mature high schoolers, so I don't remember their song either.

The Police's Don't Stand So Close To Me, however, was hugely popular, although not with me, mostly because I can't stand that band.  ABBA's Does Your Mother Know? was also big.  Walk This Way was so big that even though it had been released in 1975, it was still really popular in the early 80s, which at the time was amazing as songs aged quickly.  Maggie May shares that status as it was popular over a decade after its original release.  Good Girls Don't didn't age well at all, in contrast, but it was huge in 1979.

Almost all of these songs, or maybe all of them, are outright reprehensible, which is the point.  Amazingly, they were heard all the time in the 70s and 80s, and nobody really said anything about it. The only time I recall anyone condemning the lyrics of a song was in 1977 when a Parish Priest lambasted Only The Good Die Young by Billy Joel from the pulpit.  I don't know where he'd learned of the song, but the Church was associated with the school, which went up to 9th Grade, and I now wonder if it was there.  I was in junior high myself at the time and I had no idea what he was talking about.  My father didn't either, and asked me about the song after Mass.  It'd be years before I heard it, and like every Billy Joel song, I was underwhelmed.

4. We've touched on this before, but Playboy got in trouble in Europe as it was viewed as encouraging ephebophilia and hebephilia, and moreover being in that category while barely disguised as not being.  It actually changed some of its content, notably its cartoons, as a result.  Nonetheless, some Playboy models, such as Frances Camuglia were barely legal teens when photographed, and in fact a few were younger than 18 years old.  One model's photographs went to press when she was still 17, with it apparently being the case that Playboy was unaware of her actual age, while it still played up that she was just out of high school.  Another was outright known to be 17 when she was photographed with the magazine holding her photos until she turned 18.

5.  All the then teenage actors in these films later maintained, probably correctly, that they suffered lifelong emotional trauma for having been in these films.  Shields has been particularly critical of her mother for pushing her into them.

6.  More specifically, I can recall three high school teachers in this category.  Neither was arrested, they were simply let go.  Another was a National Guard officer who was a local businessman.  He was quickly discharged from the National Guard and there was as criminal proceeding, but the charge never hit the news and the resulting sentence was minor.

7.  Trump has denied this, of course, but there seems to be no doubt.  Assuming that it is Trump's, it's impossible not to conclude that he at least knew of Epstein's unrestrained lustful conduct.  There was at least one other drawing, by somebody else, that alluded to the same thing.  The thing here is that Epstein was strongly attracted to teenage girls, and if you know that the guy is strongly attracted to females sexually, and his targets are. . . well.

Postscript:

I thought about predicting this, but thought it too icky.

The last few days, as this has been breaking, I thought that, at some point, MAGA commentors would come out and basically start excusing ephebophilia.  I should answer the question, first, on "what's that" although its been explained here before.  According to Wikipedia:

Ephebophilia is the primary sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19 and showing Tanner stages 4 to 5 of physical development.

And now its happened.

Megyn Kelly "There's a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old…”

Well, yeah, there is, in more ways than one.  A 5 year old is particularly gross as a victim and technically that's pedophilia.  But ephebophilia is pretty darned disgusting as well, and rape in that context, which much or all of this would be by modern definitions is horrific.  Moreover, according to some of the testimony, some of these girls were 14, or even 13, which is hebephilia and creeping right up n the edge of pedophelia.

And it's being excuse.  That's what I thought would start to happen.

So, what we're starting to see, so that it's clear, is "yeah. . well, sure, they were jumping little teenage girls, but that's okay. . "

It's not okay.

And not only is it not okay, these people are starting to make the excuses now, without anything actually saying that Trump did that.  We know of course that somebody was. . . but we don't know who.

What a moral sewer.

Related threads:

The dog that hasn't barked.

Labels: Donald Trump, Ephebophilia, Epstein Scandal, Hebephilia, Monarchy, Oligarchy, United Kingdom, United States

The Epstein Files. What's in them that Trump wants to keep them hidden?*

Labels: Donald Trump, Ephebophilia, Epstein Scandal, Hebephilia, Sex, Teenagers, The Second Trump Administration, Women, Zeitgeist

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 97th edition. The Epstein Connections.

Labels: Donald Trump, Epstein Scandal, flap de jour, Sex, Teenagers, Women, Zeitgeist

The Madness of King Donald. The 25th Amendment Watch List, Third Edition and Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 98th edition. The Perverts and Fellow Travelers Issue.

Labels: 25th Amendment Watch List, Donald Trump, Epstein Scandal, Ezra Klein, J. D. Vance, National Conservatism, Populism, Republican Party, Scandal, Stupidity, Teenagers, The Madness of King Donald, The written word, Women, Zeitgeist

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 96th edition. The Epstein Files.

Labels: 1980s, 1988 Election, 2020s, 2025, Bill Clinton, Crime, Donald Trump, Hugh Hefner, Pamela Jo Bondi, Playboy Philosophy, Scandal, Sex, Sic transit Gloria Mundi, Standards, Teenagers, The written word, Virgin Islands, Women, Zeitgeist

The dog that hasn't barked.

 

By the way, by odd coincidence, they've given Ghislaine Maxwell a therapy dog.

None of this will matter.  People will say this doesn't prove that Trump was screwing a teenage girl, and it doesn't.  It just says one was there and he knew about the girls.

But knowing about them is a lot.

This is more proof, as if any was needed, that we live in an oligarchy.  A big chuck of the population has basically accepted that the rich and powerful can have teenage sex slaves. . . it's okay. . .they're rich.  They basically occupy the same position that kings once did, complete with underaged concubines if they wish. Ironically, our former colonial overlords, have decided that its not okay, not even for a prince.

Kiddie Porn and the library.

People reading my comments on the illegitimate claimant to the Oval Office and the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, and indeed the general drift of Republican politics in this state, all of which are causing the ghosts of Mussolini and Franco to wonder "aren't they a little extreme?", may simply assume I'm a liberal, and that I oppose everything conservatives are doing.

They're wrong, I'm a social conservative, but anyhow. . . 

For those holding that view, this post will surprise.

October 14, 2025

Panel advances legislation restricting sexual content in Wyoming library books: The Judiciary Committee voted 11-2 in support of the measure, and the issue unified Wyoming Freedom Caucus lawmakers with Republicans not always aligned with them.

Committee Adopts Bill Greenlighting Lawsuits Over 'Sexually Explicit' Library Books

Here's the bill:

I have my doubts about the constitutionality of this effort, but I think this effort is worth it.

In spite of what people might say, some of these books are absolutely horrific.  Without detailing how I know it, two of the books that keep coming up in this discussion, Gender Queer and This Books Is Gay do not belong in the children's section of any library and frankly should only be in a limited adult section at that.  I don't overall object to them being in a library, but frankly the common assumption that they are aimed at "young adults" is correct.

Gender Queer is a "graphic" book, i.e., cartoon.  It depicts a scene in which a friend instructs another teenage friend how to stick a finger up a vagina, and that's not all.  This Book Is Gay is basically a homosexual sex manual for young people, complete with badly done illustrations.

Seriously?

This gets right to the roots of the culture wars.  Basically, the authors of these books believe that you are a homosexual from the second you are born, if you become one later, or even really if a person ever ponders such activity.  This is to "help" them get past what the authors regard unfortunate mental roadblocks.

The psychological support for such a view is basically nonexistent.  Homosexuality itself, while it occurs in all cultures, is particularly prevalent in the cultural West, so much so that in China its regarded as a Western thing.  At one time it was so associated with English public (that is to say private) boy's schools that it was called "the English disease".  We really don't grasp it all that well.

And frankly what we don't need to do is to push teenagers who might be pondering it, outright into it, which as a society is exactly what we are in fact doing.  Books like this help to do that.  They're Gender Queer is practically designed to do that.

Libraries have always restricted sexual content to the young. . . until recently.  I remember years ago reading an article in the Denver Post about how the Denver Public Library kept Playboy and a Buddhist sex manual in an area where you had to ask for them, with those publications being the two most requested in that section. The point is, they didn't keep bound volumes of Playboy down in the children's sections for teenage boys to peruse, even though a person could argue that it was just as instructive as those struggling with their sexuality as these texts.  And, moreover, any teen asking for either one of them would have been told to pound sand.

All this comes, as these articles make plain, against the background of a lawsuit over the topic that was just settled.  Not "won", but settled.  One ironic element is that the librarian spoke out hoping that her settlement, which is a settlement (i.e., she didn't win, or lose, the suit) would discourage the legislature from passing this bill.

Really?  It ought to encourage them to pass it.