A singular theory for the Epstein network

I’m still making my way through the newest batch of Epstein files released by the Department of Justice last month. Even though we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg, more is coming into focus about his digital footprint and how he used the internet to broker deals, find victims, and, eventually, launch a global political revolution.

As I wrote last week, his interest in technology really escalated after his first arrest, in 2008, likely due to the fact Google search results and Wikipedia listed him as a sex offender.

He was very interested in Occupy Wall Street. In October 2011, his brother Mark emailed him, writing, “Looks like the revolution you predicted 30 years ago is about to start.“ He would meet with 4chan founder Christopher “Moot” Poole only a few weeks after this. Which feels relevant, considering 4chan was one of the early hubs for the hacktivist group Anonymous, who were involved with the Occupy movement.

Even though Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick initially claimed he didn’t really know Epstein, it turns out they were working together as of 2012. Lutnick and Epstein both invested in a digital advertising firm called AdFin Solutions Inc. Which was likely connected to Epstein’s larger interest in tracking and manipulating internet activity.

By the middle of the decade, Epstein was successfully worming his way into Silicon Valley, while also trying to make a direct connection with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2013, former Prime Minister of Norway Thorbjørn Jagland tried to set up a meeting between Epstein and Putin. Epstein wanted to help Russia “leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21st century.”

And we now know more about who he was meeting with in the American tech world. He emailed himself a photo taken at a 2015 dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Joi Ito, Peter Thiel, and other Silicon Valley leaders. He invested in Valar Ventures, a venture capital fund run by Peter Thiel. Which secured multiple contracts with the British government.

Epstein was also interested in Pokémon Go, impressed by its augmented reality and geomapping technology. He emailed Qatari Sheikh Fahad bin Abdullah Al-Than and Deepak Chopra about it in July 2016. Pokémon fans discovered a Poké stop on Little Saint James, which was removed by Niantic this week.

We also know more about his political aspirations, which were very clearly focused on financial deregulation and crushing the Me Too movement. Speaking of which, he was connected to the Hollywood-based Me Too spin-off Time’s Up.

One of the whole far-right populists to not have a direct connection to Epstein is India’s Narendra Modi. I’ve long thought of Modi’s Facebook-powered electoral win in 2014 as patient zero for the right-wing takeover of the 2010s. We do know that Epstein was watching Modi, however. A week after he became prime minister, Epstein emailed businessman Tom Pritzker, writing, “Should we do India together, [Finance Minister Arun Jaitley] and Modi.”

Epstein kept an interest in Modi. In 2018, he was emailing with an unknown sender seemingly connected to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and pushed Steve Bannon in 2019 to connect him with Modi. (Which seems to imply Bannon was contact with Modi.)

According to texts between Epstein and Bannon, Bannon was also communicating with former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in the weeks leading up to the country’s 2018 election. At the time, Bolsonaro claimed his campaign had no connection to Bannon, calling it “fake news.” But in a text exchange in October 2018, Epstein told Bannon that he was worried about how fast Bannon’s far-right populist revolution was moving. “I don't like the momentum. Recall I think Icarus was jet lagged,” Epstein wrote. “I didn't like Bolsonaro calling any association with you ‘fake news.’ Though I understand. I’d prefer a [Make Brazil Great Again] hat.”

To which Bannon replied, “Got to keep the Jair thing behind the scenes. My power comes from not having anyone defend me.”

In November 2018, likely after the unwanted scrutiny that Bannon got from Brazilian media, he told Epstein he was considering turning his operation into a non-governmental organization. Epstein convinced him not to and, instead, start a media company. “The NGO gives you little. And is old thinking,” Epstein wrote. “Press. Private. Protected. Access, legal niceties. (Salaries, etc.)” Bannon would launch his War Room podcast a year later.

And, in January 2019, Epstein outlined how a Trump presidency would help facilitate international money laundering, more evidence that his statecraft was primarily a business play.

But the deeper researchers and journalists go into the files, the more questions there are. There is evidence that Epstein was working on a Las Vegas real estate development project directly across the street from Mandalay Bay, the hotel where Stephen Paddock would carry out the deadliest mass shooting in American history in 2017. No motive for the shooting was ever found by investigators.

According to a September 2018 email thread, he met with Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman. Two days later, Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Again, more questions.

The weirdest thing I’ve seen in the files, however, was created by the US Attorney’s Office. The Justice Department’s archive isn’t just emails and text messages, but also various documents pertaining to the investigation, like the press release from the US Attorney’s Office announcing Epstein’s death. Which is dated “Friday, August 9, 2019.” Which is certainly odd considering Epstein was pronounced dead on Saturday, August 10th, 2019.

The biggest unanswered questions, though, pertain to who Epstein was working for. Was it Russia’s FSB? Was it Israel’s Mossad? Was it the CIA? We do know that Epstein filed a Freedom Of Information Act request to find out if he had any CIA affiliation between 1999 and 2011. He was “Glomared,” basically told that the CIA could not “confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of records” relating to his request. The NSA sent him the same response to a FOIA request in 2014.

According to the files we have access to, Epstein was affiliated with so many — oftentimes competing — intelligence agencies that calling him a double, triple, or quadruple agent doesn’t even really do it justice. Based on the thousands of emails I’ve now read between him and his network, I have come around to what I think is a fairly plausible singular theory of what Epstein was doing — and who he was working for. He was effectively running a large-scale elder abuse scam and blackmail honeypot operation on the world’s various oligarchs as a way to fund his extensive sex trafficking operation. Best exemplified by his recorded conversation with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, where pitches Barak on Palantir the way you’d share a stock tip. Espionage, Silicon Valley, populist politics, artificial intelligence, surveillance technology, cryptocurrency, culture jamming, these were all just financial opportunities that he could offer his elderly clients. Which should terrify you. The world’s most powerful people, when offered the collapse of the global order, were more than happy to invest.

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Is your fitness tracker still asking if you’re doing a workout while your heart’s pounding during a meeting? Before you walk back to your desk and accidentally see your best employee looking at other jobs?

You know you disagree with the LinkedIn posts about LLMs being an amazing replacement for managers. You know you can be a good leader, and your job is more than just approving vacations, or sitting in meetings. But also what… is your job, exactly?

If you have no idea (listen, it’s OK) or a pretty good idea (and still struggle with giving hard feedback or being confident), you should come to BPX. It’s the best online management training in the world. 

—by Adam Bumas

On Sunday, Turning Point USA streamed an independent concert called “The All-American Halftime Show,” at the same time as Bad Bunny’s actual Super Bowl halftime show. Like most things TPUSA does, it was clearly meant to be a topic of online discourse more than an actual event. While Bad Bunny was commanding his army of walking sugarcane, the alternative headliner, Kid Rock, was lip syncing his pre-taped performance of “Bawitdaba” — what’s he saying? Speak a language I can understand!

And since the concert was a pure play for attention, people are trying to use viewing data as evidence of its success. The only problem is, it’s hard to come up with numbers that are meaningful or even consistent. The Athletic reported the official YouTube livestream peaked at 6.1 million concurrent viewers, but our GDMI source, Playboard, reports it as 5.3 million. 

This would still be one of YouTube’s most popular English-language streams in history, which isn’t quite supported when we look at other engagement figures. For example, the stream received fewer likes in its first 12 hours than last year’s Victoria’s Secret show, which only peaked at 2.5 million concurrent viewers. If we look at the most-viewed stream in the past 12 months, Kid Rock gets left in the dust, as the first 12 hours brought over 100,000 more likes to that stream (which was, ironically, a Dominican music show) that peaked at 3.5 million concurrent viewers.

We also have strong evidence Playboard’s numbers are susceptible to viewbotting, which would explain the enormous view counts for TPUSA’s video not measuring up to its still-impressive likes. Streamer xQc had similar suspicions, reporting the live chat was barely active during the event. We’d need a lot more evidence than YouTube is willing to give to be sure, but we can definitely dismiss people reporting that TPUSA “won” over the Super Bowl, which is now watched by more people than the moon landing.

[Want more of this kind of analysis to support your organization? Email GDMI Director Lester Feder at [email protected].]

Braden Peters, better known to the world’s worst men as Clavicular, was arrested in Arizona this weekend. He was charged with using a fake ID in a nightclub and possession of a prescription drug. But you may have missed a few of the the other disastrous things that happened to him:

This has been your weekly Clavicular update. See you next week.

AI video has evolved extremely quickly over the last few years. But even though AI models can generate whole scenes there is still a core problem with most AI video I’ve seen. What I call the “scene test,” as in “can an AI render a complete scene?” Most AI videos I’ve seen just look like extended trailers because, I assume, they’re all trained on movie trailers that were ripped from YouTube.

Well, ByteDance’s new seedance 2.0 AI model has finally passed the test. The videos users are making with it look like complete scenes, not montages. Which should definitely worry you a little bit. The Chinese film world, contrary to Hollywood, has gone all in on AI, so expect to see more developments in this space.

The band is called Dead City and they’re from Los Angeles. They played in front of the LA ICE detention center last week. You can watch a behind-the-scenes video over on the band’s Instagram page.

P.S. here’s a very talented octopus.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***