Really grateful for the opportunity to chat with Normal Men! We were supposed to record this the previous week but my wife went into labor when we were due to record. So thank you @proptermalone.bsky.social @ed3d.net @rickywlmsbong.bsky.social @peark.es for being understanding and accommodating!

What did the press know about Donald Trump's pedophilia and when did they know it?

remembering during metoo when the secretary that he slept with (who was also his best friend and chief of staff's wife) came out and said essentially "nah he's fine"

Gavin is a fuccboi, not a sleazebag, important distinction.

There's a tendency among a certain type of poster to assume everything they hate about politics and the state can be blamed on avarice, and I'm here to tell you it's actually worse than that.

Why the fuck is this framed as “teenager chose to prostitute herself and ruined the career of innocent congressman”

So I guess the idea is that Ghislaine Maxwell got transferred to a country club prison that someone with her sentence would never go to and gets all sorts of perks but that’s completely coincidental, that just happened unrelatedly

Every now and then you will discover that there is a senator named like Jim Justice who youve never heard of and think that cant be real, but you know what? Thats good. Thats normal. I dont want to have to know all these freaks

What a fun little amuse bouche for the Files we got today

I am putting my bets on Summers being the first Epstein correspondent to be interviewed by Chotiner: he has exactly the right mix of arrogance and self-righteousness

if purported law enforcement were to attempt to kidnap a federal judge, i would hope that the matter would be settled kinetically rather than in court

remember when he put it in his paper that he was mad

The thing is I'm self employed and I would still think twice about defending my employer in public on social media

I guess it would look especially bad if Trump had, say, spent decades cultivating ties to sleazy tabloid journalists and gossip columnists. Trading various favors including exclusive access in exchange for killing stories about his sexual exploits. Maybe culminating in 34 felony convictions...

Dec 2015: Epstein to Wolff: 'Trump knew, what should I do?' Dec 2015: Wolff to Epstein 'blackmail him!' Mid-2016: Wolff gets full access to the Trump campaign and then White House. Hmmmm

I have some fresh questions about how Wolff got almost 18 months of unrestricted access to both the Trump campaign and, later, the West Wing to write his book (that curiously doesn't mention this at all to my knowledge)

no see using these photos would be beneath the Times, which would never take material from a dubious source, unless it was, say, hacked documents showing that a guy born in Africa had put 'African-American' on his application form for a university he didn't get into. You know, something important.

the two classes in American politics that display the greatest degree of solidarity are journalists and billionaires

The thing is, no one made you go out and run out and defend a person you do not and a circumstance you were not privy to, and so I don't really feel badly if you're having gone and done so fucked your menchies and DMs but good

Questioning the judgement of the editors that approved this piece is misogyny.

i have, on several occasions, been personally involved in the aftermath of my employer fucking up, and know what happened. on some occasions it was fair; on others it was unfair. on every other occasion when i was not personally involved, i had no idea. i assume this is true of everyone.

a decade of working for an employer which was the subject of major public controversy throughout has given me less than zero sympathy for people who affirmatively make the decision to freelance defenses of their employers when they fuck up

these are not even the files lol

right darth that's the wildest shit this is just an email dump from his estate that people apparently felt comfortable sending to each other on gmail

it is basically impossible to avoid that level of knowledge if you are, for instance, a Jew who has ever taken a comparative religions class or dated a Catholic which is kind of like taking a comparative religions class

you need to know enough about Catholic thought to have a strong sense that Vance is not only Doing It Wrong but is Doing It For The Wrong Reasons

Sarah McBride isn't an authentic voice for the trans community because she focused on saving transition care for the needy instead of important trans issues like backing my favorite Middle Eastern war criminals against their sworn rivals, slightly different Middle Eastern war criminals.

i have said this before but i think that the people who were “charmed” by epstein wanted to be charmed

*sigh* 4/5

this nerd usually has one or more of the following attributes and obsessions: - a beard - catholicism - a favorite history podcast - housing policy - advanced degree

Jesus Christ I'm older than this guy

I just saw a DM I recieved a couple of months ago from someone who was mad about a post I immediately deleted, which I probably just thought was like dumb or unimportant, because he thought it wasn't nice to David Bier, and I wish I hadn't deleted it so I could post it again

You just know that “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” bit would have done NUMBERS in this little clique

The last 48 hours have been incredible if you're a hater

The attorney general and the FBI director, a manosphere podcaster bro, pulled into the situation room a member of Congress best known for getting kicked out of a Beetlejuice musical for drunkenly giving her date a handy, in order to pressure her about the president's child sex trafficking scandal.

the reporter assigned to cover epstein and his connections to trump was from the finance desk. also he was more or less on epstein's payroll.

the average first-time home buyer age is the highest it's ever been at 38. that's because nobody has the money to afford a house anymore. except, apparently, the people who pick our fruit and clean our homes

I'm reading between the lines on Flitter here but I have no problem believing that she was told that she hadn't found sufficient support to print stories about Trump/Epstein.

if your standard moves according to the political needs of any particular faction, it's not really a standard, is it

the key problem here is that the threshold for "publishable info" is a moving target and it moves to Trump's benefit

This is what male solidarity & collective action to oppress women looks like: Artist Andres Serrano--successful, but nowhere near the same class as Thiel & other billionaires in the files--stating that he'll vote for Trump, despite his politics, out of *sympathy* with T's sexual assaults on women.

The People are The Dumbest

we have an addiction in America when we have a crime syndicate in control of the federal government and people still think they are the ones who are tough on crime.

You really don't have to come online, today, and act like shit don't stink at the Times. You work or worked for the Wal-Mart of journalism in ways large and small. That's just what it is.

I cannot begin to properly articulate how upsetting it is to have had people baselessly accuse trans people of being groomers and pedophiles only for it to come out that they were deliberately doing this as part of a project to provide cover to actual groomers and pedophiles in positions of power

'the apparatus of power is mourning him, therefore he must be someone worth mourning.' this is made funnier by that the right was able to keep this up for all of a week before forgetting about Kirk.

Klein's "Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way" line is particularly telling here. It had nothing to do with the facts of Kirk's life and actions, and everything to do with belief. If Kirk *wasn't* doing politics the right way, Klein's own interactions with him seem naive and foolish.