You Can’t “Protect Children” While Defending a Predator
How much longer can Republicans pretend not to see?
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.
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