For decades, the survivors of predation by the Trump-Epstein circle could see what we could not. For their vision and clarity they should be held in awe.
virginiaheffernan.substack.com/p/all-the-fe...
<3
In constrast with the Cheney "greeted as liberators" line about how everyone's cheering that the Times is pushing, this is the Indepedent and Guardian rn:
Had Rees on the podcast not too long ago!
virginiaheffernan.substack.com/p/how-americ...
The Times seems superpsyched about getting its war on again
Did Chomsky change, or is this who he was all along?
I'm also offering 85 PERCENT OFF an annual subscription. $15/year.
Get a whole year for politics for English majors* at .04 cents/day!
*That is, anyone who has ever read a poem.
virginiaheffernan.substack.com/p/wtf-was-no...
It says they're on Jeffrey Epstein's plane?
Got it. yeah, fon't want to be paranoid.
New piece @newrepublic.com today: What’s Behind Noam Chomsky’s Obituary-Marring Epstein Friendship? newrepublic.com/article/2070... via @newrepublic.com
The windows of the plane don’t track, do they? Maybe private plane windows happen at jaunty angles
It’s insane, no? I know her a bit and she is a reserved, even icy, married artist in her 50s-60s and it’s impossible to imagine her in this posture.
Stewart Brand helped found Edge.
This is one of a set of dozens or more photos from the 2002 flight to TED and the “Billionaire’s Dinner” for Brockman’s Edge club, which Epstein sponsored. Photos of the other Edge dinners and conferences (like the one feat. David Brooks look similar).
That is, survivors of predation by the Epstein class.
I’m seeing some young sleuths sort out which Epstein-class survivors were on Epstein’s TED-bound plane in 2002 and maybe connecting the hands and traces of obscured figures to the real girls and women who were there.
This isn’t my strong suit but I can tell you that Brockman and Matson, the figures in black, are married and this photo is theirs. Looks like they might have put their images over other figures.
Photo of Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and two others aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s plane. It looks obviously doctored.
Very weird photo of Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s plane. Looks pretty obscenely doctored. Were other figures, just maybe, sitting on Dennett’s lap (wtf) and side-hugging Pinker?
I’d love to take credit but “First we normalized the hair” is a @pithywidow.bsky.social special.
The other episode is with @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social in which we explore reactionary hermeneutics, including how QAnon is actually a projection of real experiences of sexual predation within Christian fundamentalist communities.
But because doctrine cannot be questioned, reality must be.
Yep.
I respect this point. But this is about Jeffrey Epstein, who was not neurodivergent. He styled himself as a supergenius even as
he couldn’t read a book. That’s probably bc, like Trump, he was hustling early on, didn’t go to class, cheated in school, then dropped out for a life of crime
I suspect that by caricaturing this anti-democratic sentiment, and attributing it to everyone from Dean Acheson to PR agencies, Chomsky kind of *conjured* the sentiment & attitude so he could seem to expose & oppose it. Thanks for reading!
Ah—I linked the wrong half of that interview. The quote is here, at 3:37. Chomsky claims to be paraphrasing Reinhold Niebuhr but he misreads Niebuhr & takes the point in his own direction (using “we”):
youtu.be/yO3z_zBADRk?...
More than 40k in a retirement fund…
Thank you, Victor. It’s also clear that the intellectually sound work was being done in other domains and departments, like your own — i.e. the ones being shut down. Soundness is a big threat to unsoundness
Excellent piece by @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social on Epstein's intellectual circle and how it pushed racist, misogynist and intellectually vacant arguments into the political mainstream.
www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...
Quotation marks because the field isn’t famous. The other thing is well-known sophistry
I realize. Epstein elided all of that with bafflegab because he was a clinical moron
I’m afraid not - rape has many angles & the quote imagines the most humiliating one
Um the women of the civil rights movement would like a word
