Epstein: The Latest in a Long Line of Meaningless Diversions
The Epstein Hysteria Deflects Attention from the Greatest Political Con Job of the Past 45 years: The Transfer of Trillions from the Middle Class and Poor to the Rich
By
David Gottfried
Shortly after the 1960 Presidential election, Theodore H White’s book, “The Making of the President: 1960,” was published to wide acclaim. I don’t think journalism has ever recovered from what it set in motion.
Prior to 1960, the news was a series of catastrophic conflicts: World War One, the Great Depression and World War Two. The people who worked in the News, consequently, were not a gaggle of giggling bimbos, of both sexes, who regularly examined themselves in the mirror and concentrated on keeping a saccharine, sickening, insincere smile pasted on their faces to pretend they were all about good cheer. In those days, newsmen solemnly reported on war and peace, dollars and cents and had no time to note the circumference of the first lady’s bouffant hairdo.
But Theodore White found the Kennedys scrumptiously entertaining, and it was a gas to go to receptions and rub shoulders with Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Sammy Davis Jr. Soon, comedians produced records in which they gave us their imitations of Jack, Jackie and Bobby, and in a little while the press regaled us with detailed discussions on the fashions and alleged fearlessness of the Kennedys.
When Media Outlets Decided that War and Peace and the Economy were Boring and that it was more fun --- and so much more profitable -- to make Sexy Scandals the Mainstay of the Evening News
After JFK’s demise, the press was chagrined that President Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, were not pretty, were not Hollywood, and were brilliant but gruff people of the Texas Hill Country, where dust and heat and drought and searing poverty were as constant as Brie and Chablis were In Martha’s Vineyard or Harvard Yard.
And the press, hooked on the glitter of the Kennedy years as ardently as a 14-year-old girl may have been hooked on the glitter on David Bowie’s eyes, wanted lights, camera and sparkles from their politicians. Whereas Walter Cronkite might have devoted 90 percent of his broadcasts to hard news, and 10 percent to galivanting Princess Margaret or Elizabeth Taylor etc., the contemporary cable news networks sound like yentas in a Bensonhurst Bagel Coffee Klatch, and when Lady Di died, they talked about her bulimia and her wounded ego and gastrointestinal tract for upwards of 7 hours every day. (In “Fiddler on the Roof,” Tevya sings that he wishes he could sit in the synagogue and pray, seven hours every day. Now, Tevya’s grandniece, in Long Island, just wants to gossip -- about Lady Di, or Monica Lewinsky or Bill’s allegedly curved penis and Jeffrey Epstein -- seven hours every day.)
Consequently, although Americans devour more news than ever before, they are exceedingly uninformed and misinformed.
What the Mainstream News Media Missed as It Tried to Mimic the National Enquirer
Why we were completely blindsided by 2016.
Because we are so uninformed, 2016 hit us before we knew what was coming. In 2016, America was stunned that Bernie Sanders did so well in the primaries and that Trump won the election. Why ? It’s because the talking heads and verbose venal slobs of the literati were comfortably oblivious to the transfer of wealth, from poor and middle-class people to the rich, ever since Ronald Reagan ascended to power. They never noticed poor white men and have labeled them, ala Hillary Clinton, “deplorables.” Indeed, I have spoken to fashionable academic prigs, pouting princes and princesses of pretension and presumption, who have told me that my life is defined by white privilege and nothing but white privilege (That allegation is certainly false, but I won’t cite the myriad ways in which I have been an outcast lest I’ll sound as miserably maudlin as they do.)
The press, which was so adroit at discussing the dimensions and severity of Diana’s bulimia and the drug addictions of gorgeous Hollywood morons, was blind to America’s deteriorating public health, increasing obesity, diabetes, the declining life expectancy of poorer Americans and the millions of people getting addicted to Oxycontin thanks to the fraud of the Sachler family (The Sachlers paid doctors to write bullshit articles claiming that Oxycontin was less addictive than other opioids, and they used various financial devices to immunize themselves from liability.)
But, of course, the biggest negligence of the media consisted of its failure to report on the economy. From 1980 until 2016, they did not give a damn about the most important demographic and economic change in America since, perhaps, the migration of blacks from the South to the North: The negation of the leveling in incomes and wealth achieved since 1933.
Very simply, from 1933 until 1980, the enormous chasm between the super-rich and the poor had been mitigated and reduced. In 1980, The Robber Barons were still amazingly rich, but America’s capitalist royalty lost a few of the diamonds in its tiara of tyranny. Under Ronald Reagan – and through the reign of corporate Democratic cowards like Clinton who decided to nix regulations on derivatives, give unjustified tax breaks to big media, and repeal Glass Steagle – America began its long trek back to the 19th century.
The Media’s Malfeasance in Its Erroneous Reporting on the Great Recession of 2008
Also, the media were comatose in covering the great recession of 2008 and 2009. Actually, comatose is the wrong word. They weren’t unconscious; they actively lied about the causes of the great recession.
You may recall that the proximate cause of the great recession was a cratering in the subprime real estate market; there were far too many defaults on loans given to poorer home buyers. The tawdry and tacky media disseminated a lie that, at first blush, seemed completely plausible: From ABC and CBS to small newspapers all over the country, conservatives said that the recession was caused because banks and the government had been too liberal in approving loans, to buy homes, for people who were just too poor to buy homes.
Instead of conducting investigative journalism, the media simply parroted the talking points of the Republican party. It took a while for the truth to come out, but eventually the dirt was discussed in papers such as the NY Times (And 99 percent of the American people knows not a whit of what is inside the NY Times and is, consequently, wholly incapable of arriving at a political conclusion which merits any respect):
Financial finaglers extraordinaire, from Goldman Sachs, delivered a one two punch that made themselves very rich and America very poor: First, they bought credit default swaps, or the equivalent of put options, on Real Estate Investment Trusts (Essentially, they cast bets that these trusts would plummet in value because poorer people would default on their mortgages). Second, their agents, who dealt with poorer, subprime borrowers, quickly revised mortgage contracts, imposed impossible penalties that dramatically accentuated the risk of default, and huge numbers of subprime borrowers did in fact default. After the Real Estate Investment Trusts tanked, real estate as a whole tanked and the cratering of Real Estate soon enveloped the entire economy.
But none of the common dumb dolts know this. They are too busy being absorbed in stupid, silly tales about Paris Hilton and Jay Lo and a host of names that every so often intrude on my consciousness. (I am really bored by, and usually oblivious to, most reports about celebrity sex lives, their occasional trips to Mars, etc.) Very simply, every third item in the news seems to be the progeny of the number one fag hag reporter of the 70’s, Rona Barrett:
youtube.com/watch?v=JhbkVfWxNzE
The Epstein Scandal and Obsession is emblematic of the trivialization of news coverage. The media instructs us to focus our attention on the lifestyles of the rich and rapacious instead of figuring out how to screw the rich and rapacious.
The news is one, massive deflection machine, directing our gaze away from what is important.
Is the United States Congress a Dayroom in a Mental Hospital ?
When I survey the present political “discourse” with respect to Jeffrey Epstein, I get the impression that the United States Congress and the Media is sort of like a dayroom in a psychiatric hospital flooded with babbling, imbecilic psychotics:
The Marjorie Taylor Greenes, sitting in front of the TV set, imagine that they are as sleek and sexy and sardonic as Elizabeth Taylor in ABC’s 4:30 movie. House Speaker Michael Johnson, with understated but distinctly gay airs about him, is a reprise of Howard Sprague, Jack Dodson’s wimpy town clerk on “Andy of Mayberry.” And at least three dozen congressmen from the lobotomized Deep South are doing their best John Wayne, spiced up with the extra-terrestrial, Q anonish lunacy of “Bewitched,” “Dark Shadows” and “Chiller Theatre.”
Among other things, Trumpers, and now many people far removed from the Trumpian psychosis, are obsessed about a list. The list is poorly defined, but that doesn’t matter; they are sure the names on the list are the embodiment of unalloyed evil. Their stupidity reminds me of a nurse, who gave me intravenous gamma globulin every two weeks, who was a member of the tea party.
My tea party nurse always had a new story to scream about. One day, she was fuming because she had just found out that various moderate republicans were in fact communists. I asked her to explain. She said she did not understand why men like the Republican Speaker of the House were communists, but she would vouch for his guilt because her supervisor, in her little gang of Trumpian mental midgets, had figured it all out and had “absolute proof’ that the Republican Speaker would ban private enterprise, private property and the bible. I suppose many of the Trump nuts operate in much the same way: They are unthinking attack dogs. Tell them something is bad, and they will sink their teeth into the villainous flesh.
Actually, none of this is new: When republicans nominated Barry Goldwater for President, at the 1964 convention in San Francisco, some delegates, hopping mad about the 1964 Civil Rights, walked up to black delegates, at random, and put their cigarettes out on the suit jackets of those black delegates. (David Brinkley, one of NBC’s most famous Newscasters in the post war era, attested to seeing this – Republicans say the media is biased in favor of the left. If they are, maybe it’s because they had a front row view of right-wing violence and injustice.)
Although America is having a nervous breakdown about the Epstein lists, no one has bothered to define or even begin to say what the list is supposed to refer to.
What exactly is the Jeffrey Epstein List that these imbeciles rant about
1) Were the lists prepared by Epstein
OR
Were the lists prepared by Epstein’s Critics
2) Are they lists of every debit and credit entered with respect to every account Epstein had in various and sundry accounts in the US. If so, are you going to get your jollies looking at a debit of 173.14 for an electric bill in a small apartment in a red-light district in LA in 1972.
3) Are they client lists. Are they lists of people who were clients of Epstein or lists of organizations of which Epstein was a client.
4) Are they lists of every transaction with respect to every movie he was ever involved in. A demand for so much information is often outlawed, in pretrial discovery, as a “fishing expedition” or an untrammeled, unfocused inquisition into every nook and cranny of an individual’s life.
5) Do the lists start at the day Epstein crawled out of his Mom's womb till the day he died or are they lists of “everything” between 1975 and 1985, 1985 to 1995 or everything before 2015.
6) What crimes do the lists pertain to other than those crimes for which Epstein and Maxwell have already been prosecuted. And if there are no other crimes involved, then why should the “lists” be publicized.
The Political Discourse periodically wastes tons of time getting its panties in a snag by fretting, ad nauseum, about some new earth-shattering scandal.
Sample some of the scandals peddled by the right:
A) Hillary Clinton’s e mails
B) Obama’s birth certificate
C) Michelle Obama is really Michael Obama
D) AOC is a Palestinian terrorist
E) The Slaughter of 20 Plus innocents at Sandy Hook, Connecticut was a fabrication designed to boost support for gun control
F) Large numbers of men are having sex change operations so they can go into women’s bathrooms and have sex with women. (Many straight men get off on lesbian sex. I never knew that many straight guys wanted to become lesbians.)
While we are having tantrums about Jeffrey Epstein’s lists, attention is being deflected away from the myriad ways Trump is screwing America.
Consider the ways in which just one area of American life has been savaged by Trump while we all focus, like fools, on Jeffrey Epstein:
How American Jurisprudence has been debased in just the opening months of Trump’s Second Term:
The Supreme Court has Endorsed Trump’s Illegal Subversion of Federal Agencies
Ever since 1935, and the case of Humphrey’s Executor v United States, the Courts were very clear about something: Federal Agencies should execute the laws of the United States and should not be undermined by Presidents who imagined they were kings.
More specifically, since 1935, the Law held: A President could not remove a commissioner unless he was guilty of inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. Now, Trump wants to remove people simply because they believe in enforcing environmental laws or labor laws. For some sick reason, the United States Supreme Court has embraced Trump’s illegal efforts and has turned its back on 90 years of legal precedents.
The Supreme Court has Allowed Trump to
Violate the Constitution by Unilaterally Abridging Congressional Power
Recently Trump fired over 1000 employees of the Department of Education. The termination of these key employees effectively shut down much of the department of education. However, the department of education was established by congress and Trump does not have the power to shut down the department. The United States Supreme Court, predictably, gave Trump what he wanted, i.e., it let Trump fire employees even though their termination meant the closure of part of the Department of Education, even though the Law provides that the Department of Education can only be closed when Congress votes to close it down.
The Supreme Court has gotten into the habit of rendering more and more decisions without any explanation – not even a single sentence – as to why it ruled for Plaintiff or Defendant.
When the Supreme Court renders orders without any explanation at all, we have crossed a Rubicon of sorts. The absence of an explanation implies that no explanation is necessary. The absence of an explanation tells us that orders are produced at the whim of a king as kings don’t have to provide explanations. The absence of an explanation tells us that judicial decisions are not based on law or reason or justice; they are entirely the product of wanton, regal privilege.
The Supreme Court has given DOGE the power to access social security records.
Doge, an organization that is a creature of Elon Musk -- who is creature who when particularly inspired about something cannot restrain himself from raising his arm in a Nazi salute -- was not created by Law and now it has untrammeled authority to dig up dirt about anyone and anything it might consider a political opponent.
Indeed, Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, upon surveying recent changes in the Law, said, “Boy, is there now an incentive to just do whatever you want. It really ties the hands of the judiciary to keep the executive in line.” (The New York Times, June 27, 2025)
But should we really be surprised about this. Do you remember the Supreme Court’s decision of Jule 1, 2024. The Court essentially said that an illegal act is legal when committed by the President.
David, as usual, your essay reads like Hunter S. Thompson and Gore Vidal had a love child and raised it on espresso, rage, and a subscription to the Financial Times. It’s brilliant, blistering, and MOSTLY accurate, which is saying something given how much history you gallop through.
Numero 1, your takedown of how journalism mutated post 1960 is dead on. Theodore H. White did glamorize the Kennedy campaign in The Making of the President, and while it wasn’t a total betrayal of substance, it certainly helped kick open the door to infotainment as news. But I wouldn’t hang the whole collapse of journalism on Teddy alone. He wasn’t the disease; more like patient zero.
Ur also correct that the post war press used to approach their work with solemnity think Murrow, Cronkite, even Brinkley. Today we have a surplus of smirking avatars and “personal brands” reading tweets as if they were dispatches from the front. And yes, the Lady Di bulimia beat ran longer than the Gulf War.
On the 2008 financial collapse: You absolutely nailed the essence. Though, a minor correction while Goldman Sachs and their ilk did bet against the housing market and manipulate subprime instruments, the narrative that poor borrowers “caused” the crash was a deflection engineered by financial elites, not just conservative media. And not all media repeated it uncritically if u recall ProPublica, This American Life, and later Michael Lewis (The Big Short) did dig deep. But as you rightly pointed out, most Americans never read past the clickbait, and nuance died somewhere between Britney’s breakdown and Brangelina’s breakup and whats the latest makeup trend...
Now to your insight about wealth inequality reversing course post 1980 spot on. The New Deal through the Great Society era narrowed the gap. Reaganism, turbocharged by Clinton’s capitulation to corporate power, blew it back open. The repeal of Glass Steagall in 1999 and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 were bipartisan sins with catastrophic results. No argument there.
Ur critique of Supreme Court overreach, especially the erosion of agency independence and unchecked executive power, is deeply troubling n unfortunately, not hyperbole. Though DOGE (I assume you mean some sort of Musk-adjacent dystopian tech organ) doesn’t yet have official legal standing as an entity with Social Security access. But I get your satirical edge, and it’s not far from where we could be heading.
And yes, the Court’s increasing use of the “shadow docket” unexplained rulings with sweeping implications is a terrifying abdication of judicial responsibility. The Trump immunity ruling was real, and deeply corrosive to the idea of a government of laws, not men.
Also ur Epstein list questions are the most lucid breakdown of that dumpster fire of a conspiracy I’ve read. If only anyone frothing about it could articulate even half those questions. But as we all know facts are an endangered species.
The deeper point, which u drive home beautifully, is that media distraction serves power. We are transfixed by scandal, titillation, and tribal feuds while structural rot spreads under our feet. Rome burned, and we livestreamed it.
So keep sounding the alarm amigo. Just maybe take a breath once in a while so we don’t all stroke out reading it.
It was an interesting read but to ur friends point it was way long. The average person doesn't have time to digest all of it n there was a lot here to take in.
P.S. I’d pay good money to see you debate Marjorie Taylor Greene. Lmao