Report Claims Trump Has 'Placed Himself at Odds With the Podcast Bros' Over Jeffrey Epstein
To me, a Boomer just sitting here watching history unfold before my eyes in real time, one of the most fascinating things I've witnessed in my lifetime has been the way the media landscape has been transformed over the past few years.
It wasn't that long ago that you got your news and information from serious people with deep, authoritative voices, perfect diction, nice suits, a professional demeanor and a thick, lustrous head of pH-balanced hair. They stared into the camera and presented what you assume was the info you need to know. You listened and learned. Then you went off and processed it however you chose. Because these people had gravitas. They wouldn't have gotten to park themselves behind that desk if they didn't. You could trust them. They're not like the others.
But all that changed over the past handful of years. It became obvious that they were selling you bullshit. Coming from both directions on the sociopolitical spectrum. Though in my opinion, it came much louder from that end that was telling us Covid came from someone eating a pangolin at a wet market in Wuhan, and not the place next door where they were actually doing unethical research on Covid. You know who I'm referring to.
But that was just one in a long series of things that you had to know wasn't true. Where it took more and more effort to believe what you're being told. Where the "crazy conspiracy theory" you were accused of spewing in April was accepted fact in May. And where it took Herculean effort to ignore how every outlet you turned to was reading off the exact same script:
So I - and tens of millions of other people who simply would like to know what is going on on God's green earth just stopped listening.
And into that vacuum came, of all fooking people, comedians. Sitting down with friends and people they find interesting. Having rambling, random, often incoherent conversations that can last over three hours. Not interviews. Not parroting scripted bullet points. And definitely not messaging with pre-packaged, eight-second sound bites like in the past. But talking. In a way that is authentic. It has to be. You can fake who you are and what you know for a few minutes. But when you're on the mic for hours, the audience figures out who you are.
As it turns out, that's what the public is really after. In a world where supposedly our attention span was shrinking to something slightly above zero, the new media space is actually long form conversations. And there's practically no one who can honestly say they saw that coming.
So it was that Donald Trump jumped into that space with both expensive designer shoes. Because he's a Reality TV star. Has been playing The Donald character he invented since the early '80s. And has a lot of experience therefore with rambling, random, often incoherent conversations. And with him and the rest of his campaign going on any show that would have them, they probably won the 2024 election. Quite literally, comics with studio space changed the course of world history last year by welcoming Trump and his supporters to sit down and talk.
But all that might change for Trump's team. And if it does, it will probably be because of their massive bungling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. And "massive bungling" is being kind. Good luck finding anyone who doesn't think this is not just a continuation of the coverup, but also it's successful conclusion.
As a refresher, since Dante referred you to my post about this, let me do a little logrolling and refer you back to his outstanding, thorough post:
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Now I refer you to this opinion piece that seems entirely plausible to me:
Source - Crucially, Trump didn’t deny Epstein was a spook, and neither did Attorney General Pam Bondi to whom he passed the question. “I have no knowledge about that. We can get back to you about that,” she obfuscated.
What a ludicrous place the Epstein saga has now arrived at, a place in which – according to the official statement released late on Monday – we are now required by the FBI and the Department of Justice to believe Epstein did not traffic “over one thousand” young women to powerful men as part of an industrial-scale honey trap blackmail operation, but rather that he molested them himself, in private. …
Stating that there obviously seems to be a high-level, deep state cover-up taking place on all things Epstein-related can no longer be dismissed simply as a nut-job conspiracy theory, no matter how much those involved might like to. Why not? Well, because so many of the people now asking us to believe the unbelievable not so long ago themselves called bullshit. …
What seems certain is that Trump at a stroke has placed himself at odds with the podcast bros – and their massive audiences – that he and Vance went to such lengths to court ahead of the election. Hundreds of hours have been spent over the years by the likes of Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon, Lex Fridman and Theo Von discussing Epstein.
This, for example, is Rogan’s recent take on Epstein: “It was an intelligence operation. Whoever was running it – whether it was the Mossad or the CIA, or whether it was a combination of both – it was an intelligence operation. They were bringing in people and compromising them, and then when they compromised them, they would use whatever they had on them to influence their opinions and the way they expressed their opinions.”
It seems extraordinary that Trump’s usually so reliably excellent political instincts, particularly when it comes to his base, would be so off. What is really going on? Unless answers are swiftly forthcoming, there is no danger that discussion of Esptein will cease any time soon. It will be tremendously damaging for Trump.
I'll add another take. This one from Tim Dillon. In the most predictable development in this story, he had this hilarious rant I highly recommend:
Just gem after gem:
"We've got 10,000 hours of videos. But the only person who did anything wrong was Jeffrey Epstein."
"They really think you're stupid."
"We have a LOT of lists. The one list you want? That's the one we don't have."
A few paragraphs ago I mentioned how the public craves authenticity. How you get nothing but that in a three hour discussion. Well that goes for the hosts as well. These guys, the Rogans, Dillons, Fridmans and Vons aren't about to flip just to protect whoever is being protected in all this. There's no benefit for them. On the contrary, it would destroy the biggest commodity they have going, which is the trust of their audiences. It would cost them listeners, and therefore millions of dollars.
The point being, this story is not going away, no matter how much the White House tries to put their palms to the ceiling, shrug, and ask why anyone still wants to talk about it. The narrative is driven by stand up comics in $16 dollar t-shirts and half buzzed on Gummies. Not the old journos who used to play ball with whatever story you wanted spoon fed to the public.
Personally, I think we're all better for it. Let's hope the podcast bros keep this story going for as long as it takes for us to actually get answers.