Here is a transcript, edited for clarity:
Good morning. It is Friday morning, February 6th, 5:30 a.m. here in upstate New York. I wanna talk a little bit about the gaslighting that I’m seeing happening now, with regards the Epstein files, and Epstein in general, Epstein and Trump, all of it.
I feel like the United States public is at the point of realization where they’re like, maybe they’re 10, 11 years old, and they’re starting to realize that they’re a little bit too old to believe in Santa Claus anymore. That the whole story about Santa coming down the chimney and visiting every home on Earth in one night and knowing what presents to bring and all that stuff seems a little bit too far-fetched to be real. And meanwhile, all of the media—all of the movies, all of the songs—wants everybody to believe in Santa, wants Santa to be real. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus and so on. And that’s what I feel like is happening right now.
And let me explain what I mean. We’ve been gaslit for so long about Trump, about Epstein, about this elite group of people, who have so much wealth and so much power. And now the veil has been lifted, and we can see what really happens, what really went on.
And I think there’s two things at work here. First is that the staggering evil and depravity on display—the breadth of it, the depth of it, the horrific-ness of it—is frankly difficult for people to wrap their minds around. You’re like, “They didn’t do that. How could they do that? Nobody would do that.” Therefore it must not be true, right?
So they have that on their side. The fact that their actions are so abominable, so heinous, that any person with a soul would look at it and be like, “No, that can’t happen, that can’t be real.”
But these things are real. Epstein was real. And he was a depraved, sick person who trafficked girls and made his trafficked victims available to his wealthy—I don’t even want to say friends—his targets, basically: these men who thought that he was their friend. And meanwhile, he was videotaping it the whole time.
All of it is disgusting. The fact that these men would do this, would participate in this clearly illegal, clearly disgusting thing. The fact that Epstein would have organized it to begin with and then used it as blackmail. It’s all so seedy and nasty and awful. And then the people involved. I mean, there’s a lot of very wealthy, powerful, influential people involved, from, obviously, Donald Trump, who was intimately involved, I think, in the trafficking aspect of it, as far as I can tell, as well as the rape part of it, as far as I can tell, and I’m sure other things that are gonna come out down the line.
Elon Musk has lied about how much he knew Epstein and stuff like that, and he clearly was in there, at least meeting with the guy and emailing him and trying to get in on the parties. There was an email that had Musk trying to go to the island to take advantage of what was available there. And Ghislaine wrote him, “Yeah, we’re gonna shut down the island.” Because even these guys didn’t wanna hang out with Elon Musk.
You’ve got Peter Thiel, Bannon, Epstein working—Thiel and Epstein, apparently, according to the files, working with the Russians, with the FSB, with Russian intelligence, to fuck the 2016 election—in favor of Trump, obviously. To help Putin to knock down and topple the order of things, which in itself is purely evil.
Allegations against Leon Black—I know he’s not a guy people have heard of that much. He’s one of these wealthy venture whatever-the-fuck-it-is. What do these people do that’s useful for society anyway? They just ruin everything. The allegations about Leon Black are abhorrent, and I can’t imagine they’re not true. We’ve seen them over and over and over again. He’s been, I guess all we can say, he’s been “credibly accused.” Well, he’s been credibly accused by a bunch of different people. And he’s stood by Epstein’s side gleefully for years. So we can draw our own conclusions about Leon Black.
You got the British royal family. Prince Andrew was way up in there. And they’re starting to slowly…he’s not gonna have the titles anymore, and he’s not gonna have this anymore. Not enough, not enough. He really should be—at least have a trial about all of these things, so people know the truth.
So the depth and the scale of it all, I think, is mind blowing, you know? And we’ve been taught, in the United States especially, to believe that conspiracy theories are all lies, that they’re all bullshit, right? Starting with the Santa Claus conspiracy theory. Isn’t that a conspiracy theory? There’s this fat guy in a red suit. Children sit on his lap, he comes down the chimney. Society wants us to believe that. Well, that’s a conspiracy to lie, in a sense. It’s a benign one, but it’s still a conspiracy to lie. Anyway, we’ve been trained—and Kurt Andersen wrote a whole book about this called Fantasyland, that’s wonderful—we’ve been trained to look at these things with suspicion. And anytime we start to question the official narrative about anything, we’re trained to think, “No, no, I can’t do that. I can’t go there. I don’t want to be labeled a conspiracy theorist. I’m not Alex Jones. I’m not Glenn Beck. I don’t want to be one of these guys.”
You know, I haven’t written about things that I wanted to investigate more because it’s not worth it. You know, it’s just not worth the agony of it all. Sometimes when you are down that path, you get things wrong because you are known to be somebody that’s open to reporting about this stuff. Seymour Hersh, for example—I just watched the documentary about him, I think it was on Netflix, which was really good and interesting. And he’s done it. He did a lot of really great investigative reporting, and he got some things wrong. And that’s the nature of this, because the forces that are out there trying to muddy the waters and make us not know things—the cover-up forces are enormously powerful, enormously powerful.
Anyway, we’ve been taught, we’ve been trained, and shamed, in some cases, not to go there in our brains. What we have here with Epstein is not a “conspiracy theory.” It is a legitimate conspiracy. And talking about it out loud, even now, even in this video, even after reading all of this Epstein stuff and absorbing all this Epstein stuff for months and months—probably at the risk of my mental health, frankly—I still feel crazy talking about it out loud, because it seems nuts. It seems nuts.
“You know, there’s this guy that comes out of New York, and he doesn’t go to college, but he somehow manages to work his way into the the inner workings of all these different things. He’s in there with the bankers and he’s in there with the lawyers and he’s in there with the universities and he’s in there with the tech guys and he’s in there with the scientists and he’s in there with the arms dealers. He’s in there with all the hostile foreign intelligence services and all the friendly intelligence services. And he also, by the way, is a major, major child sex trafficker.”
That doesn’t sound like something that should happen. But it did. Why did it happen? We don’t know. And the forces are gonna try to prevent us from finding out. We may never find out. But it did happen. And a lot of people were involved. And the people that are involved in the United States, for the most part, suffered zero consequences. Zero. Maybe somebody’s wife won’t talk to them at the next Met Gala or something. Woo woo, who cares? There’s no prison time, there’s no charges, there’s no fines, there’s nothing. What’s gonna happen to Leon Black? Probably nothing.
So we’re faced with that.
And the files are coming out in dribs and drabs. They’re hard to search, the PDFs are annoying. It’s just—it’s not conducive to learning stuff. Like, every time one of these things drops, I have to stop what I’m doing and I go through. And I don’t go through meticulously, I just pick them at random and see what I can find. And I immediately, if I see something interesting, I screenshot it and I put it up on social media because somebody else might find it useful. And this is not healthy, you know?
The dribs and drabs release system is designed also to fuck with our brains. You know, it’s certainly hurting mine, because I can’t have any peace until this is all out and done. I mean, I could. I could ignore it, but that’s not what the purpose of this whole enterprise is, right? So I think that is also part of the gaslighting, you know, not just releasing the fucking thing in one piece in a way that makes sense. You know, here’s a file that’s all Leon Black. Here’s a file that’s all Ian Osborne. (That’s a name that nobody’s gonna talk about, but he’s in there a lot and I think probably is way more important than anyone realizes, but nobody’s gonna talk about that. We’re gonna focus on other people, most likely.)
So we have all of that. We’re all getting tired, we’re exhausting ourselves, trying to make sense of this. And the whole time there’s a very powerful voice in our head saying, “This sounds crazy. You sound bananas even talking about this as being something that’s happening in real life.”
But now we’ve also seen in Europe, across the pond, where the gaslighting about Epstein and certainly about Trump and Epstein isn’t nearly as pervasive, the Europeans are not treating it the way that we are. If somebody is mentioned in the Epstein files a bunch of times in a bad way, they resign. The guy from Slovakia, the foreign minister, whatever he is, resigned immediately. That’s a country that, you know, the president or prime minister, whatever the head of Slovakia is, is a Trumpy guy. Doesn’t matter. That guy resigned at once.
In Norway, you had a bunch of people. This guy, what’s his name? Thornebjorn Jaglund, who was the prime minister and other things, was very close with Epstein, apparently, based on the files. You know, he stepped down from whatever he’s doing now. The Crown Princess Mette, whatever her name is, is in there talking about Epstein. She’s issued statements.
In France, people have resigned. In the UK, Peter Mandelson, who they call the Prince of Darkness—appropriately, because he’s one of Epstein’s fucking friends. You know, he had to step down from certain jobs and now apparently there’s a criminal investigation into him. Which didn’t take long, know? Stuff came out and they opened a criminal investigation. That’s what you’re supposed to do with these things.
So we’re seeing the normal behavior in Europe. We’re seeing individual people behave with honor. We’re seeing governments actually open investigations. France opened an investigation. Norway, Slovakia. Lithuania is opening an investigation. Latvia is opening an investigation. Poland is opening an investigation. And that’s, I think, the big one. Tusk, who’s again kind of, you know, allied a little bit more with Trump than some of these other leaders, wants to know what happened. There were Polish girls, apparently, that were mentioned in these files that were taken from Krakow. And he says, we’re opening an investigation and we’re going to find out what the deal is with this. And he said openly that this appears to be—Epstein’s entire operation appears to be a KGB honeypot trap. And Epstein appears to be working for the Russians. This is a world leader in Poland saying this.
And let me tell you something. Unlike here in the United States, if people in Poland find out stuff about the Russians, they are not going to be afraid of them. They’re not going to kowtow. They’re not going to tiptoe around it. They’re going to come out with it. That’s just how it’s going to be over there.
So all of these European countries are behaving the way that normal countries are supposed to behave. You know, we’re like the little kids saying, “Well now, Santa Claus is maybe real.” And then we look over there and our 16 year old cousin is like, “What are you, high? No, it’s not real. Why would you even believe that? Why would you believe that?” And we’re opening up to the reality now. We’re seeing the reality in the picture and it’s starting to dawn on us. We’re also like Kimmie Schmidt at the beginning of The Unbreakable Kimmie Schmidt, which is a great show, where she’s in this underground bunker cult for years and then they rescue her and she comes out into the sunlight and everything that she’s known is wrong. And she has to kind of navigate what’s real, what’s not real, what’s true, what’s not true, what they told her, what they didn’t tell her, all that stuff. It’s a comedy, but it’s the same idea.
It’s like you have to basically stand back and question everything you know about reality and what you think you believe. I had that situation personally in my life when I had a break-up with my girlfriend in college. I think it was sophomore year. And I was so messed up after that that I really had to stop and tear down my belief system because I didn’t know what I believed anymore. I’m talking about politics now. I had to stop and re-examine and re-evaluate everything from scratch.
And I think that’s what the American people need to do now. And certainly here at PREVAIL, I am trying to help everybody do that. But I’m doing it at the same time. We’re all going through the same kind of process here of re-examining everything and starting at square one, with founding principles, and building on that.
I don’t think that there should be kings. I don’t think that there should be a cabal of rich billionaire oligarch assholes who run everything. I don’t think there should be billionaires. I think we should tax the fuck out of these people to pay for things that we need. I think that the allocation of wealth is disgusting. And I think that anybody that treats girls the way that these people treated them shouldn’t have any money at all, or any freedom at all—let alone the grotesque amounts of money that they have and the freedom that they enjoy. Even Epstein, when he got arrested, being able to come and go out of the prison, just thumbing his nose at it, is disgusting. Disgusting.
And of course we have Trump saying, “Well the files exonerate me. They prove I’m innocent,” or whatever he said. And you have Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, formerly Trump’s lawyer, saying, “We’re not gonna have any new investigations, we’ve looked through it, no new charges are gonna be filed based on the Epstein files information. There’s nothing there.” And then he said also, on TV, he said, “It’s not against the law to party with Epstein.” That’s what he said. This is the guy that’s supposed to be in charge of justice. In charge of justice! I really do want somebody to ask him that if, when he went to see Ghislaine Maxwell and interviewed her in the deposition that he did a couple months ago, if they hooked up. I seriously want somebody to ask him that, just to see how he’ll react and how he’ll respond. He is an awful, evil man. I mean, evil. At this point in time, at this point, after all that we know and all that we’ve done and all that we’ve lived through, to sit there and lie like that, when you have the power to actually do good…I don’t, I can’t even.
It’s hard for me to wrap my brain around why people would do this at all. It just doesn’t make sense. I can’t understand it. And as a novelist, I try to get into people’s heads that way and understand their motivations. And I try to have sympathy and empathy and all that and see things from other people’s points of view. I don’t understand their point of view here. I don’t get it. I don’t understand how anyone can behave this way. Unless they’re evil or crazy or both. Or just completely amoral.
I forget who was talking about amorality as opposed to immorality and that an amoral person—which is somebody that, as was once described of Epstein, has no moral compass—an amoral person is harder for normal people to understand than an immoral person. Because we understand the bad guy in the movie, who just wants to do evil. What’s harder to understand is the person who just has no scruples, just doesn’t care, just blows with the wind and has no compunction and sleeps well at night no matter what. I’m sure Todd Blanche sleeps fine at night. I’m sure Donald Trump does too. We like to say, “He’s gonna be shamed.” No, he’s not. He’s not gonna be shamed. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care.
So that’s where I’m at with this, and I feel like, looking at everything, we’re at a moment where it could be a moment of revelation here. It could be a “road to Damascus” moment for the American people. Will it be? I don’t know. I don’t know, because there’s still tremendously powerful forces that want this story, or the extent of the story, not to come out. Not to come out about Trump, obviously, but also about all the other people mentioned in there.
I mean, you look at the money that these people have, the money Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Bill Gates—the net worth if you total them is something like a trillion dollars! That’s a lot of money And who are we to fighting against that? Who are we?
That doesn’t mean that we’re gonna stop fighting or stop trying to arrive at the truth and understand what happened We’re gonna keep doing that until we know what it is that we’re dealing with here. And how we might be able to make it so that the people doing these evil deeds—I know that sounds sort of Biblical and Shakespearean, these evildoers, it’s a George W. Bush word, these evildoers. But how else to describe them? They are people who do evil, they are evildoers. Until the evildoers are brought to justice and experience consequences for what they did.
And that’s the part that burns me. I want to see consequences. We all want to see consequences. Not only because we want the justice to be served, but also because having consequences proves that this is all real. It proves that it’s real. It proves that the cult was just bullshit. It proves that no, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus.
Have a good weekend everybody. Check out The Five 8 tonight. We’re gonna be talking about the Epstein offshores. LB’s gonna take us through some of the offshore leaks shell game stuff, which is gonna be totally fascinating.
Have a good weekend and until next time: we shall prevail.
