Democracy, Freedom, and Survival

"The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits, in the classic formulation. Now, it's long been understood, very well, that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist, with whatever suffering and injustice it entails, as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others, or, alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival, let alone justice, require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, and by now that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication, and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely, to impose necessary illusions, to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and remove them from the public arena. The question, in brief, is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival."

 

------Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (video)

Martin Luther King - A Revolutionary, Not a Saint

"When I say poor people, I'm not only talking about black people."

-----Martin Luther King Jr. 

 

"The true enemy is war itself." 

-----Martin Luther King Jr.

 

For thirteen years he lived and worked with the knowledge that a violent death awaited him, that it might come at any moment from a knife thrust out of a crowd, a sudden gunshot, a bomb tearing him to pieces. His wife was plagued with nightmares about it.

Reminders were frequent: a shotgun blast through his front door, the bombing of his home, a dozen sticks of dynamite found smoldering on his porch, a razor-sharp Japanese letter-opener plunged into his chest by a crazy woman, and, of course, the regular late-night phone threats that began with, "Nigger . . . ."

Prayer and a deep Christian faith dissipated his paralyzing fear, giving him the strength to act. His eloquence, soaring idealism, and amazing composure under relentless pressure inspired millions to act with him, leading to the fall of Jim Crow, and contributing to the collapse of public support for the Vietnam War, the most criminal military intervention in U.S. history. 

Unfortunately, the public image of Dr. King handed down to us by our mind-managers bears only the faintest resemblance to the impassioned rebel he was in real life. These days Dr. King tends to be remembered as a reformist, African-American preacher who went to college to better himself, believed in God and his fellow man, and won a Nobel Prize for Peace, along with the admiration of both whites and blacks for his decency and non-violent reminders of the nation's essential goodness. Lost completely are his feverish intensity, tactical brilliance, and anguished incomprehension of a society permeated by racism, exploitation, and deceit.

From the very beginning King was a political radical whose aspirations went far beyond reform, a Christian revolutionary who dedicated himself to creating a culture of social justice that would give substance to the freedom and equality the U.S. political system merely talked about. He opposed in principle "systems of oppression" like colonialism, imperialism, and segregation, and denounced capitalism for being "predicated on exploitation." He saw racism not as a feudal anachronism of the Old South, but as a national problem implicating all Americans. He found all those isms incompatible with "the natural goodness of man and the natural power of human reason."

Though he had gone to school in the North and only with reluctance returned to the South, he was never naive about the informal apartheid that characterized life above the Mason-Dixon line. (No one had wanted to rent to him during his student years in Boston.) As a pastor, he regularly traveled to the North years before the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s, plugging into activist structures pushing back against racist exclusion and police brutality. 

One such visit was to Los Angeles in the wake of the police killing of Ron Stokes outside a Muslim mosque in 1962 (an event usually associated only with Malcolm X), where King supported locals calling for the ousting of openly racist Police Chief William Parker,* expressed zero tolerance for police brutality, and talked of the need to build black power, by which he meant blacks organizing themselves into a force for real democracy.

The year after the Stokes killing he visited Los Angeles multiple times to protest segregation, and did so again right before the Watts rebellion (1965), when he declared that Los Angeles schools were as segregated as those in Birmingham. In all, he made more than fifteen visits to the area prior to the black uprising, and followed up with another visit in the wake of that event, calling for a Civilian Complaint and Review Board to deal with police brutality, which proposal was angrily shot down by Mayor Sam Yorty, whose racial instincts weren't all that different from Bull Connor's.

King understood that blacks being manhandled by police was related to their being corralled into ghettos. Thus, he was deeply critical of California's Proposition 14, passed in 1964 (supported by 75% of whites), which he called the "vote for ghettos" initiative, since it re-affirmed the practice of deeded covenants mandating that homes remain exclusively in the hands of white owners. Such deeds were common in the North, and King criticized Northern liberals for their hypocrisy in applauding the end of official segregation in the South while perpetuating an informal apartheid in the North.

When the Watts powder keg inevitably exploded, King was devastated by the destruction (thirty-four people were killed) and shocked at the attitude of residents, who cheered on the destruction of "their" communities.

"Burn, baby, burn," they chanted, as store after store, building after building, was put to the torch and consumed by flames. In a sea of police roadblocks, broken plate glass, and strewn rubble, they cut the hoses of firemen battling the blaze and lobbed Molotov cocktails into the expanding inferno. 

Though it may have looked like they were destroying their communities, in fact the residents were fighting for the resources to maintain them, and were, in any case, ironically conforming to the logic of their degraded capitalist environment: Looters loaded up cars with as much merchandise as they could carry off, surrounded by signs celebrating instant acquisition on easy terms. 

According to Bayard Rustin, King was deeply affected by Watts, realizing more acutely than ever before the real depth of economic oppression, which overlapped with racism, but also went beyond it.  Having the right to sit at a lunch counter and order a hamburger, for example, meant little to those who lacked the money to pay for one.

With his usual amazing patience, King put himself to the task of explaining to those who thought that black grievances should have ended once civil rights legislation passed, that the urban uprisings in Harlem (1964), Watts (1965), and Newark and Detroit (1967), were caused by longstanding socially-sanctioned crimes committed against blacks, not by them. Building and housing codes were routinely violated to perpetuate slums, meager social allotments owed blacks were often slashed or denied them, and black civil rights didn't even rise to a theoretical concern for police who brutalized them. 

After seeing the devastation of Watts, King moved on to a fair housing campaign in Chicago with a renewed sense of urgency in 1966. He didn't call the slums there "neglected areas," nor did he describe its residents as "deprived" or "left behind," code words the professional servant class uses to imply that mass poverty is somehow incidental to capitalism, when, in fact, it is characteristic of the system, since profit-takers are encouraged to "externalize" costs (i.e., make the public absorb them), among which mass poverty is especially prominent. King called the wretched Chicago ghettos a system of "internal colonialism," comparing it to the exploitation of the Congo by Belgium. In charge of the system was Mayor Richard Daley and his corrupt regime, who loathed King for shining a public spotlight on their activities, at the same time finding it incomprehensible that he couldn't be bought off. 

Crazed mobs repeatedly turned out to scream racist obscenities and pelt Dr. King and his fellow marchers with bottles, rocks, cherry bombs, and lumps of coal. On a Sunday march a nun was struck in the head by a rock, and the crowd cheered when her wound began to bleed visibly. On a march through Marquette Park and Chicago Lawn Dr. King himself was felled by a fist-sized stone that slammed into his temple. A hurled knife missed him but struck another marcher. Stunned by the depravity, King confessed to reporters that he had "never seen - even in Mississippi and Alabama - mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I've seen in Chicago." 

Except for Operation Breadbasket, most people involved in the Chicago campaign ended up writing it off as a failure. Nevertheless, King was impressive, even convincing gang members to lay down their arms and peacefully march for change, but the massive resources needed to end slums in Chicago were being allocated to obliterate Vietnam, not deal with the tragic legacy of slavery at home. Meanwhile, King's sincerity and eloquence were as powerful as ever. On a trip to rural Mississippi he spoke so movingly that a five-year-old-girl started sobbing and repeating over and over, "I want to go with him."

After Watts and Chicago, King publicly stated the need for revolution: "I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values." 

More clearly than any other civil rights leader, King saw that racism abroad was related to racism at home, that freedom for American blacks was tied to self-determination for the Vietnamese people, then fighting to expel the United States from their country. He had already begun speaking out against the war starting in 1965, continuing to do so until his death, in spite of strong criticism from other leaders, a hostile press, and harassment by the FBI. When told he was alienating friends and supporters with his stance, King remained unmoved: "I am not a consensus leader." "I don't care who doesn't like what I say about it." "This madness must stop." 

He was especially gripped by the suffering of the children, but also protested that twice as many black soldiers as whites were dying as cannon fodder in an imperial war whose crimes rivaled those of the Nazis. Water and land were poisoned, harvests destroyed, and people tortured and murdered in staggering numbers, using funding that should have been allocated to ending poverty at home.

In his 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech, Dr. King called out the U.S. for being, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," and did not mince words about the form that violence was taking in Vietnam: 

"The peasants watched as we supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where thousands of homeless children roamed the streets like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do the peasants think as we test our latest weapons on them, as the Germans tested new medicine and tortures in Europe's concentration camps? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones? We have destroyed two of their most cherished institutions: the village and the family. We have inflicted twenty times as many casualties on them as have the Vietcong. We have destroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary political force - the Unified Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators!" 

A year later he was cut-down by a bullet full in the face at the age of 39, leaving behind an astonishing list of achievements, all attained against the pressure of barbaric segregation in the South, horrendously complex racism in the North, a prolonged vilification campaign waged against him by the FBI, considerable jealousy on the part of other civil rights leaders, a savage imperial war that devoured the resources needed for social transformation, and a vengeful Lyndon Johnson. 

In spite of such formidable obstacles, Dr. King reached more blacks, more Americans, and more citizens of the world, than any U.S. reform leader of the 20th century, and at a depth of understanding few leaders ever even entertain. Referring to King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech, John C. Bennett, then president of the Union Theological Seminary, said that "there is no one who can speak to the conscience of the American people as powerfully as Martin Luther King."

January 19 is the fortieth anniversary of the U.S. national holiday for Dr. King. This remembrance is a nice gesture, but if we are to truly honor him, we'll have to establish the culture of social justice he struggled to create, in order to reign in a lawless U.S. government carrying us to utter destruction.

 

*Chief Parker explained the 1965 Watts uprising this way: "One person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks." (italics added) Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge, - America In The King Years 1965-68, (Simon and Schuster, p. 399)

 

Notes: 

MLK visits to Los Angeles, Theoharis interview

Racist housing covenants, see (Branch, p. 637)

Watts rebellion, description of . . . (Conot pps. 40, 99, 219, 239, 362, 364)

MLK can't be bought . . . (Oates, p. 408)

Sobbing five-year-old girl wanting to go with MLK, (Oates, pps. 399-400)

MLK on Chicago mobs being most hate-filled he had ever seen, (Oates, p. 413)

MLK on the need for revolution .. . (Cone, p. 257)

MLK, "This madness must stop" . . .(Cone, p. 297)

MLK, "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" (Cone, p. 237)

"Beyond Vietnam" excerpt (Oates, p. 435)

John C. Bennett quote, (Cone, p. 294)

Sources: 

Jeanne Theoharis, MLK Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside The South, Counterpunch Radio, www.counterpunch.org

Conot, Robert E., Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness, (Bantam, 1967)

James R. Ralph Jr., Northern Protest - Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement," (Harvard, 1993)

David J. Garrow, Bearing The Cross, (William Morrow, 1986)

Stephen B. Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound - The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., (Harper & Row, 1982)

James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America - A Dream or a Nightmare, (Orbis, 1991)

Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge - America In The King Years 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster, 2006)

 

 

 

 

 

Who Is Nicolas Maduro?

Nicolas Maduro is my friend. I feel terribly for him. When he was told by Hugo Chavez, "You know, Nicolas, you have to take over after I'm dead," Nicolas Maduro started crying and saying, "Nobody can take over from you. Please don't put this mantle on me." He's an extremely humble man. He enters politics as a union leader of the bus drivers. He himself was a bus driver. Then he goes off and becomes a politician because Chavez found him in the union movement. Becomes a foreign minister. He is a reluctant politician. And I feel terribly for him as a person. There is nothing in his character that suggests this kind of treatment of him (is deserved). And I really want to say that, because I know that lots of people on the Left will turn their backs on Nicolas Maduro Moro and Cilia Flores and I refuse to do so."

 

-----Vijay Prashad, BreakThrough News,"Why The U.S. Will Never 'Rule' Venezuela," January 5, 2026

U.S. Bombs Venezuela, Kidnaps President Maduro

The United States bombed Caracas (and the provinces of Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira) and kidnapped President Maduro on Saturday, whisking him away to the U.S. where he faces literally Trumped-up drug and gun charges in the Southern District Court of New York. The resort to charging him with violating a 1934 U.S. gun law highlights the ludicrous nature of the entire fiasco: Why would a Venezuelan living in Caracas be accountable for obeying U.S. gun laws?

The drug trafficking charges are scarcely more plausible, which would be easily demonstrated if Maduro were to receive anything like a fair trial (inconceivable in a U.S. court). In any event, it's painfully obvious that the U.S. doesn't really care about drug trafficking, having recently released from prison Juan Orlando Hernandez, who ran a large scale drug operation as President of Honduras from 2014 to 2022.

In fact, the United States lacks all legal basis for its Venezuelan attack, having acted without a United Nations resolution, without Congressional authorization, and without the slightest military threat emanating from Caracas. The political shortcomings of a government, whether real or imaginary, do not constitute any kind of legal justification for foreign attack; if they did, a long list of countries would be more than entitled to bomb Washington and Tel Aviv, while kidnapping President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu.

President Trump immediately promised to "run" Venezuela. When asked who exactly would be in charge he indicated it would be Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and the U.S. military.  Though he suggested implausibly that Venezuelan Vice-President Delcy Rodriguez was being "cooperative" with the regime change operation, "defiant" is the more realistic characterization of her reaction. Already sworn in as Venezuela's interim president, she loudly declared that Maduro remains the country's only real president.*

Without even a hint of a popular uprising in favor of the invasion, and with only a handful of ground troops available as potential occupation forces, the U.S. president's unhinged declaration appears to be just the latest example of Trumpian fantasy masquerading as political reality.

Nevertheless, delusions acted upon have real consequences, none of which are likely to be pretty with Trump ranting about carrying out further operations in Venezuela and perhaps similar actions against Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, and Greenland.

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times had advance notice of the U.S, attack, which fact they kept secret, guaranteeing the deaths of dozens of Venezuelans when the invasion occurred. 

 

*Rodriguez subsequently issued a "cooperation" statement, obviously under duress, but which does not concede that the U.S. intervention is at all legitimate: "We invite the U.S. government to collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation oriented towards shared development within the framework of international law to strengthen lasting community coexistence." See interview with attorney Eva Golinger, Internal Coup? Was Maduro BETRAYED By His VP?, Breaking Points, January 5, 2026

 

 

Five Craziest Things About the Epstein Case, Part 2

On civil liberties and the hearing in which women testified against Epstein after his death

Michael Tracey Dec 31   ∙   Guest post

I'm often asked why I've bothered to devote so much time and energy to this interminable Jeffrey Epstein saga, and it's forced me to come up with a bit of a stock answer. One major reason, I tell my kindly inquisitors, is that the sprawling multi-decade fiasco has been disastrous for civil liberties. Which gets comprehensively ignored, despite the hyper-saturation levels of media coverage. No one in their right mind wants to be accused of "defending Epstein," even if what they're manifestly doing is not "defending Epstein," but pointing out that civil liberties have been worryingly abridged.

The vindictive moralistic frenzy that attaches to this issue means that by simply calling attention to objectionable government conduct, you can expect to be instantly spun as somehow condoning the personal proclivities of Jeffrey Epstein. And who wants to deal with that headache? Therefore: out of sight, out of mind. Which is a recurring pattern for how civil liberties invariably end up getting eroded. It's always a crowd-pleaser to direct punitive state action at the most reviled figures in society — the most notorious of which in previous eras have included "terrorists," "domestic extremists," "drug dealers," and the like. The more untamable the public animus against a particular category of wrongdoer, the more readily civil liberties can be chucked aside. So when it comes to "pedophiles" and "child sex-traffickers" — forget it. All bets are off. Perpetrators of quadruple homicide are less culturally anathema these days. Here's a neat trick for prosecutors and politicians: if you want to make the Constitution vanish, just say you're punishing "pedos."

However unpleasant we might find actual pedophilic criminality — though the definition of such seems to expand exponentially by the day — unchecked degradation of civil liberties affects the entire body politic, whether or not you give a hoot about Epstein. Some readers might be wondering what specific infringements I'm talking about, and their wonder isn't unreasonable, as so little airtime has ever been given to these affronts. So let's get specific.

After he died in federal custody, the government predictably moved to dismiss the charges pending against Epstein, because he was no longer alive. Thus rendering any criminal proceedings against him moot. Or so one might have thought. Turns out, the presiding judge in the Southern District of New York, Richard M. Berman, had another idea. Berman announced he was going to do something wildly aberrational — or as the New York Law Journal politely described it at the time, "unique, and perhaps unprecedented." That is, Berman proclaimed he would convene a hitherto unheard-of hearing, in which any self-identified "victim" was invited to show up and be granted an unfettered platform to say whatever the heck they wanted about Epstein. Who at this point had never been convicted of any federal crimes. And was also deceased. Thus eliminating his ability to refute unflattering claims made against him. Berman said the technical purpose of the hearing was to consider arguments around nolle prosequi — the nullification of Epstein's indictment upon his death — even though there was no serious legal question that charges against a decedent must be dismissed. Using this bogus pretext, Berman allowed his courtroom to transform into a complete free-for-all, with a parade of self-declared "victims" and lawyers filing in for what could only be described as a judicially-authorized "struggle session."

The hearing, on August 27, 2019, also predictably became a giant media frenzy. Journalists swarmed the courthouse and its surrounding environs, though virtually none evinced the slightest apprehension about the civil liberties implications of the spectacle they were about to behold. "Victim" after "victim" — some named, some permitted to stay comfortably anonymous (emphasis added)— gave tearful monologues recounting their purported victimization by Epstein, without the faintest notion that their claims would be subjected to even basic corroborative vetting, much less cross-examined. Instead, they could just rattle off whatever came to mind, with the implied imprimatur of the court. Epstein's erstwhile defense counsel was relegated to sitting quietly by, with their client having just been found dead under circumstances that are still murky.

Upgrade to paid

One anonymous "victim" presented at this hearing claimed that as a 15-year-old girl living in Texas, she was approached at the mall one day by an unidentified woman who spotted her carrying a violin case. The woman purportedly told her about a "very rich man who had a home close by," and that he would like to hear her play the violin. "After some hesitation," the anonymous "Jane Doe" recounted, she agreed to visit the man. This, she said, turned out to be the most catastrophic decision of her life, marking the death of her childhood and loss of her innocence. Eventually, she claimed, she was tricked into "forced copulation" with the man, who she now understands to have been Jeffrey Epstein.

There was just one slight problem: Epstein is never known to have had a "home" in Texas. The closest conceivable property would've been his ranch in New Mexico, which was located about 200 miles from the Texas border — certainly not "close by" to any shopping mall in Texas. Nothing about this person's anonymous story made a lick of sense, but it was all lapped up totally uncritically, as Judge Berman decided anyone who believed themselves a "victim" could saunter into the courthouse that day and tell any Epstein-related tale they cared to conjure.

From the bench, Berman affirmed that the individuals present were in fact bonafide "victims," and repeatedly referred to them as such, without requiring even minimal verification of the facts underlying their purported victimhood. Gone was any idea that assigning the label of "victim" should be accompanied by meddlesome, outmoded qualifiers such as "alleged victim," or "purported victim." Instead, "victimhood" was now an unchallengeable metaphysical status (emphasis added) that could be conferred on anyone who desired it. Abandoning the customary pretense of judicial neutrality, Berman even personally commended the "victims" for their "courage to come forward" — regardless of whether or not what they were "coming forward" to say was true. That was totally immaterial.

As to the mystery Texas victim, her statement was read aloud in court by the famed feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, who clearly relished the chance to get in on some hot Epstein action. But a few weeks after the hearing, the mystery compounded. Allred submitted a notice to Judge Berman on September 26, 2019 declaring that she no longer represented the "Jane Doe" whose statement she had dramatically read. No further explanation was given. Nor, apparently, was any explanation ever sought. I recently asked Allred for an update on this mysterious turn of events. What steps, if any, were taken to corroborate the accuser's claims? Has any evidence emerged in the past six years that would substantiate the notion that Epstein procured teenage girls from shopping malls in Texas? What were the grounds for Allred's sudden withdrawal of representation from this individual? Her answer: "No comment."

<blocked.gif>

This unexplained snafu did not stop the government from relying on Allred to furnish additional "victim" evidence as the investigatory process wore on. In the "Epstein Files" released by the Department of Justice earlier this month, Allred can be seen emailing her contact at the U.S. Attorney's office, on October 18, 2019, with the subject line: "Urgent [...] I have a new client who was a victim of Epstein. She is willing to fly to New York for the victim meeting on Oct. 23. May I call you at 5:45 P.M. to discuss ?" An assistant U.S. attorney, apparently on a first-name basis with "Gloria," replies: "We will make ourselves available to meet with your new client on 10/23."

<blocked.gif>

Given the expansive redactions that suffuse these latest "Epstein Files," it's difficult to discern whatever came of this "new client," and if she was deemed of any "urgent" value by the Southern District of New York, which by then was in fervent pursuit of Ghislaine Maxwell, and perhaps other potential "co-conspirators" of Epstein. Either way, interfacing with the FBI and US Attorney's Office could be profitably cited in any civil litigation Allred might subsequently bring.

Another chain of emails between August and October of 2020 shows Allred once again propositioning her federal contacts about "new potential victims of Epstein and some of Maxwell who are willing to speak to you and the FBI." No clients of Allred are known to have testified in the 2021 trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, or to have played any material role in that prosecution. However, an associate at Allred's law firm can be seen repeatedly inquiring if the Feds could please send her "documents" and "photographs" related to Allred's clients, which would certainly have been helpful for any forthcoming lawsuits.

One client of Allred's was eventually revealed to be Alicia Arden, who claims that in 1997, she met Epstein in a hotel room in Santa Monica, Calif., for what was ostensibly supposed to be some sort of private lingerie exhibition. Arden, then age 27, was an aspiring Victoria's Secret model. Epstein was then a money manager and confidant to billionaire Leslie Wexner, the owner of Victoria's Secret, and he'd often use this fortuitous position to attend various soirees filled with attractive young ladies, to whom he could present himself as a friendly conduit to the elite modeling industry. Over the course of their hotel room liaison, Arden claims Epstein "groped her buttocks," and she reported the offense to local police, who determined the complaint to merit no further action. The officer documenting Arden's complaint noted that she acknowledged "having reservations" about the meeting before her arrival, because "generally, meetings are not conducted in hotel rooms." Details of this decades-old encounter were tearfully recounted by Arden, with Allred by her side, as recently as August 6, 2025, and again on November 17, 2025, at press conferences convened by Allred in Los Angeles. None of the attending journalists asked what the allegation, even if true, would have to do with the "child sex-trafficking" theories that tend to dominate the public's conception of the Epstein matter, seeing as Arden was 27 years old at the time. Allred told me in a September 3, 2025, interview that at some point Arden did speak to federal law enforcement about Epstein, but evidently, nothing ever came of it. When I inquired if Arden had sought or received any of the profligate settlement monies that became available after Epstein's death — including for alleged adult "victims" — Allred would not say, citing client privacy concerns.

Other emails from the recent DOJ batch show unnamed officials forwarding around news of a "stunt" Allred had orchestrated, in which she placed a banner ad on the side of a school bus circling Buckingham Palace, exhorting random British pedestrians to send the FBI tips about Prince Andrew. Curiously, another email exchange from November 2024 features FBI agents discussing how Allred "made it difficult speaking with individuals she represented," as certain clients of hers had "refused" to provide the FBI with their contact information.

Returning to the fateful August 27, 2019, hearing held by Judge Berman, ahead of this confab, Bradley Edwards — one of the "victim" lawyers who's made an absolute fortune on his years-long entanglement with Epstein — sensed a priceless opportunity. In his widely unread 2020 memoir, Relentless Pursuit, he recalls that when Judge Berman announced the hearing, Edwards had a bold idea, so he got on the phone with a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Maurene Comey. Yes, that Maurene Comey.

Edwards says he "pleaded" with Comey: "Can you ask the government to pay for all who want to come?"

"The government has never done that before," Comey reportedly told him. "But we will ask."

Within an hour, Edwards got a phone call back, with amazing news: "Please tell your clients that the government has agreed to pay for the travel and hotels of all Epstein victims who wish to attend." (emphasis added)

So not only was Judge Berman holding this elaborate, essentially extra-judicial hearing, where self-described "victims" who had never been adjudicated as such could pile into court and blast off whatever damning commentary they wanted about a dead defendant — taxpayers were also going to subsidize the brouhaha. More details on the mechanics have begun to trickle out in the long-awaited "Epstein Files" production earlier this month. Emails show the superstar Epstein "victim" Virginia Roberts Giuffre — a proven serial fabulist who had to recant a succession of her most sensational claims — scrambling to arrange last-minute travel from Australia to New York, so she could take part in the hotly-anticipated August 27 hearing. Prosecutors were eager to assist in whatever way they could. Taking up the offer, Virginia writes that since it had been decided that U.S. taxpayers would underwrite her hotel, ground transportation, and airfare, "I would need to fly business." This was "needed," she claimed, due to "an ongoing medical condition." Perhaps what she was referencing was the universal "condition" of preferring spacious and comfortable First Class seating on a long-haul flight. The cost for a one-way ticket was $10,673.40 — and the government seemingly picked up the tab.

<blocked.gif>

Email from U.S. Attorney's Office

Also among those whom Judge Berman thanked that day for having "the courage to come forward" was Sarah Ransome. Taxpayers likewise were made to shell out $1,492.02 for Ransome's flight from Barcelona to New York.

<blocked.gif>

She declared that she was a "victim of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's international sex trafficking ring," and further announced that she was not merely a "victim" but a "survivor" — catalyzing a strange lexical shift, where it's now increasingly mandatory to use the term "survivor," seen as a more empowering designation than "victim" (emphasis added). It also seems to carry a certain sense of enhanced moral profundity, not unlike "Holocaust Survivor" — and certainly the Epstein affair has come to be regarded as of comparable historical magnitude. Ransome duly denounced Epstein as a "depraved and cowardly human" and added, "we all know he did not act alone."

In the more than six years since that hearing, no criminal proceeding has ever found Ransome to have been the victim of any "international sex trafficking ring." However, a variety of other interesting findings have been made. Such as that Ransome first entered Epstein's orbit as a 22-year-old fashionista who earned an income by having "dinner" with "gentlemen," for which she would be paid $1,500, and would sometimes have sex with these gentlemen if she found them attractive. She also claimed to possess sex tapes of Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Richard Branson, and Prince Andrew. "I have backed up the footage on several USB sticks and have securely sent them to various different locations throughout Europe," Ransome said. She later admitted this was all completely fabricated (emphasis added)— there were never any sex tapes. Her declared mission at the time was to ensure that neither "that evil bitch Hillary" nor "Paedophile Trump" would win the 2016 presidential election. Exactly who Ransome thought would be the alternative victor is unclear: perhaps she backed the Libertarian Party. Ransome also claimed that the CIA hacked her emails. "I have reached out to the Russians for help and they are coming to my aid," she wrote to New York Post journalist Maureen Callahan, adding that she had already "corresponded with the Moscow police" on the matter, and had resolved to "aid them in stopping Hillary or Trump getting through." (Callahan reported none of these emails contemporaneously; all were eventually unearthed through lawsuit discovery.)

So in other words, Ransome was a certified nutcase. This didn't stop her from getting a HarperCollins book deal, for a memoir touchingly entitled Silenced No More — nor was her nuttiness any impediment to being named as a plaintiff in some of the most consequential litigation against the Epstein estate, which ultimately led to the creation of the Epstein Victims' Compensation Program, from which Ransome undoubtedly received a generous (tax-free!) payout — likely in the millions. Perhaps her good fortune in this regard stemmed from the perceived credibility she was afforded by her participation in Judge Berman's wild August 2019 hearing. But as the years went by, things continued to unravel for Ransome, psychologically and otherwise. She turned on one of her high-powered lawyers, David Boies, declaring he had "betrayed" her for reasons she attempted to explain, but were increasingly indecipherable. She wrote in a 2023 affidavit: "I am infertile and have no children. I am damaged and broken because I was raped hundreds of times by Epstein while his enablers stood by and watched. My mother witnessed me die three times." She started rebuking Boies not just as a craven betrayer, but as "Deablous," a demon-like being. She sent rambling emails addressed to Joe Biden, Pope Francis, Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdogan, Mohammed bin Salman, among others, demanding to be granted a central diplomatic role in mediating the Ukraine war and Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She even did the unthinkable for any self-respecting "Epstein Survivor," and condemned Virginia Roberts Giuffre:

<blocked.gif>

<blocked.gif>

And so, a core function of Judge Berman's state-sanctioned struggle session was to give a veneer of credibility to the delusions of straight-up crazy people. Viral videos still routinely circulate of Ransome speaking to the media that day in August 2019, alleging that factory-style mass rape went on at Epstein's property in the US Virgin Islands, or as she called it, a veritable "conveyor belt of abuse." Of course, nothing was ever remotely proven to this effect. Another function of Judge Berman's hearing was to assist federal prosecutors in what had become their supreme prerogative: making sure someone, somewhere, got convicted of something in lieu of Epstein, who had embarrassingly perished on the government's watch. Bradley Edwards wrote that the "victims" he'd helped assemble were ushered directly from the courthouse into the quarters of US Attorney Geoffrey Berman (no relation to Judge Berman).

Among the most notable of these proved to be Anouska De Georgiou, who said in July 2025 that she fondly remembers the hearing as "probably the single most emotional moment of my entire life," as it felt like she had finally been inducted into a collective of "sisters in trauma." Serendipitously, De Georgiou was interviewed by the FBI "directly after" the hearing. By 2021, she was a marquee government witness in the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell — permitted by Judge Alison Nathan to testify under a fake name, "Kate," despite having already gone public under her real name, both at the August 2019 hearing and a subsequent NBC interview with Savannah Guthrie. New records produced by the DOJ finally elucidate a thorny issue that came up at trial, which is that in 2008, when she was 31 years old, De Georgiou was writing flirtatious emails to Jeffrey Epstein (while he was incarcerated in Florida!) offering to send him racy photos, and even to come visit. She continued to initiate similar communications in 2010 and 2011, always keen to pay Jeffrey a wholesome social visit. However, by 2019, she realized she was in fact a "survivor," and reaped $3.25 million (tax-free!) from the Epstein estate, not to mention whatever remuneration she also surely received from other settlement funds. By 2021, her survivorship had been upgraded to "child sex-trafficking" survivor, as she was called forth by the government to send Maxwell to prison. By 2025, she was delivering soaring oratorical performances at rallies and press conferences in front of the US Capitol, flanked by politicians enthralled with her bravery. She has also launched her own podcast.

After Maxwell was convicted, thanks in part to the pseudonymous testimony of De Georgiou, "survivors" gathered once more at the federal courthouse in Manhattan, this time to promulgate "Victim Impact Statements." That's the practice whereby judges can hold hearings after a defendant has been found guilty, and allow a bunch of people to say stuff that's supposed to influence the judge's sentencing decision. These statements are not scrutinized for factual accuracy, or subject to cross-examination, and can include evidence (or purported evidence) that was never admitted at trial. Among those permitted to make "Victim Impact Statements" against Ghislaine Maxwell at a June 28, 2022 hearing were Anouska De Georgiou, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Sarah Ransome, and Juliette Bryant, the latter of whom claims she was abducted by UFOs, and once witnessed Jeffrey Epstein morph into a reptilian humanoid creature. Bryant has also attempted to perform an astrology reading on me personally over DMs. The reading was harmless enough — even mildly amusing — but the idea that this woman could ever play a legally decisive role in anything is self-evidently absurd.

The very concept of "Victim Impact Statements" is already dubious enough. They used to be quite controversial. In Payne v. Tennessee (1991) Justice John Paul Stevens lamented that "Victim Impact Statements" enable prosecutors to introduce irrelevant and prejudicial evidence against defendants, and further, that the practice "encourages reliance on emotion" rather than what sentencing decisions should be properly based on, which is "reason." Ransome submitted a suite of disturbing photos in her "Victim Impact Statement," purporting to illustrate at least two of her apparent suicide attempts. No causal link between these apparent suicide attempts and the conduct of Ghislaine Maxwell was ever meaningfully established. De Georgiou wrote in her statement that "the many acts that were perpetrated on me by Epstein, including rape, strangulation and sexual assault, were never consensual, and would have never occurred, had it not been for the cunning and premeditated role Ghislaine Maxwell played." Curiously, these allegations of violent rape cunningly facilitated by Maxwell were wholly absent from the actual trial in which De Georgiou had testified, with its slightly stricter standards around the admissibility of evidence. Indeed, the judge in that trial was compelled to instruct jurors that De Georgiou had undergone no "illegal sexual activity." But during this more free-wheeling "Victim Impact" phase, the gloves were off, as were any evidentiary safeguards. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison, where she remains today.

At least Maxwell had been convicted of something when she was harangued with these "Victim Impact Statements" of questionable veracity. Not so for the August 2019 hearing held by Judge Berman, which amounted to a de facto "Victim Impact" session to cathartically malign a defendant, Epstein, who was never convicted, or even stood trial, and was also dead.

As a subsequent article in the Fordham Law Review opined: "When, as in Epstein's case, the defendant dies before a trial has even begun, the court must treat the accused as innocent for all legal or judicial purposes (emphasis added), regardless of popular sentiment or assumptions to the contrary." Judge Berman delivered a resounding blow to this most basic tenet of due process, thus undermining the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, not just for deceased alleged "pedophiles" such as Epstein, but for everyone who'd like to retain the pre-Pedo Panic principles of the Constitution.

Whenever I try to highlight any of this stuff, there's always an onslaught of trolls demanding that the FBI seize my hard-drives — with the idea being that I must be hiding my own sexual depravities. That could be my only conceivable motive for "defending Epstein," or more accurately, highlighting the ways in which Epstein mania has undermined core precepts of civil liberty. You can try to refute these sleazy imputations all you want, but anyone who'd sling them in the first place is never going to be persuaded. (For the record, I can confirm there's nothing of much interest on my hard-drive, perhaps other than the mountains of PDF files I've had to accumulate researching this case. If you'd like to make an appointment to view the hard-drive yourself sometime, let me know.) At this point, for me, the sicko name-calling barely even registers anymore. But the torrential downpour of slime gives some insight into why the media has almost uniformly declined to cover this story with any semblance of critical detachment or discernment. Most people, including journalists, have concluded that life is too short to be barraged day after day with ridiculous "pedo" smears. Even to refute such smears would be to bring more attention to them, and no one wants to be associated with "pedo"-related insinuations at all, regardless of context. Though it should be said: a handful of journalists have contacted me privately to say they now agree with, or at least tentatively appreciate, what I've been trying to get across about Epstein. Even if going public about it themselves is not worth the hassle. The problem with this mentality, however, is that while you might spare yourself short-term hardship, the long-term debasement of civil liberties will continue unabated. And those civil liberties could come in handy someday, if they're still around.

Does Noam Chomsky Need To Be Re-Assessed?

The usual circular firing-squad is forming on what passes for an American left, this time to decimate our all-too-limited ranks "re-assessing" Noam Chomsky as a "gatekeeper" for the U.S. empire he brilliantly critiqued for almost sixty years. That this fool's errand obviously benefits establishment elites desperately trying to shore-up their fading legitimacy by setting social justice groups at each other's throats appears to be escaping our attention.

Such a controversy speaks to the problem of our tendency to deify people we admire. Chomsky himself has always been critical of this propensity for hero-worship, because we can’t raise up heroes without diminishing ourselves in some important way. One suspects that a fair number of the unhinged accusations about Chomsky allegedly being a “sellout,” “fraud,” deceitful or gullible “gatekeeper” and the like, are not really assessments of Chomsky at all, but knee-jerk projections of him as (previously) a Saint and now a Devil. Clearly, Chomsky is neither, and what is called for is a rational assessment of his work, not a stimulus-response sequence of triggered reactions. Politics of the triggered by the triggered and for the triggered cannot possibly lead us to a better world.

There is also the problem of both his fans and his critics not really being very familiar with his work, which is no easy job, as he put out something on the order of 150 books. Anyone who has read and re-read a substantial portion of his political body of work (say half or more of it) should find it impossible to believe he is doing the establishment’s bidding. The establishment has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep Noam’s political ideas away from mass audiences. For years his political writings could most reliably be found in South End Press, a worker-owned and managed publishing house, and Inquiry magazine, a right-wing libertarian journal. Why did the establishment subject him to such a black-out if he was actually friendly to its agenda? It makes no sense.

Chomsky’s few appearances on U.S. corporate outlets were not characterized by him finding common ground with elite ideology. Quite the contrary. He offered his usual rational critique, but in doing so he may simply have convinced the corporate-captive audiences that he was a lunatic, since brief flashes of rationality amidst a flood of propaganda are unlikely to be perceived as such. As Chomsky himself said, “If they (elites) were BETTER propagandists they’d have me on more often.”

 

Useful follow-up to this commentary:

For a fair review of Chomsky's incredible permormance as a public intellectual, see "The Public Life of Noam Chomsky," Legalienate, November 28, 2024. 

For un-triggered analysis of the Epstein fiasco, see Michael Tracey, "The Idiocy of the Epstein Mythology," Legalienate, December 24, 2025

For critical but not dismissive commentary about Chomsky, see "Debating Chomsky on Lesser Evilism, BLM, Stolen Elections, and Responsibility For WWII," Legalienate, December 26, 2020

Also, "The Lesser-Evil Syndrome: Noam Chomsky's Fall Into Self-Contradiction," Legalienate, April 12, 2020

Hero-Worship and Impunity: The Jerry Sandusky Case

Note: This story was originally published at Legalienate in 2012. See postcript below for an update calling the premise of Sandusky's guilt into serious question.

ms

 

Just in case you thought sodomized children might be the obvious victims in the Jerry Sandusky case, an editorial published today from the San Jose Mercury News tries to set you straight: The real tragedy of the case is that, by failing to strike the correct moral posture, Joe Paterno missed his chance to be a hero.

Here's how the editors arrive at this conclusion:

"Being told that Sandusky was seen abusing a boy in a shower, Paterno told a superior -- not the authorities as required by law -- what he had heard. . . . And went on as if it hadn't happened.

"When the revelations finally became public years later, Paterno, then 85 . . . had not the instinct to realize what he had done, to swiftly resign and apologize profusely to the victims and the families and everyone he had let down, and then fade into a chastened but still perhaps dignified retirement.

" . . . Paterno's fate is a tragedy. He probably should have retired long before the Sandusky case fell into his lap. He now passes to eternity less as a legendary coach than as that guy from Penn State who let a pedophile keep abusing kids.

"To those who knew and revered him, it will forever feel as though he was the victim. But he had the power to make it different. He could have done the right thing all those years ago and spared future victims. Or he could at least have faced up to what happened and become a champion for victims of abuse. He could have been the hero.

"That's the take away from all this, after Friday's verdicts. And the real tragedy."

In the first place, Sandusky was not seen merely "abusing" a boy in the shower; he was seen sodomizing him, which is several orders of magnitude beyond mere "abuse."

Secondly, Paterno sacrificed whatever claim he had on a "dignified retirement" the moment he knew what was going on and failed to go to the police. And this would not have been a "heroic" act, merely a necessary one. It is frankly outrageous to suggest that doing anything other than this would have been appropriate, much less heroic, especially years after being informed of the crimes.

"To those who knew and revered him [Paterno], it will forever feel as though he was the victim."

Here it's difficult to escape the conclusion that the Mercury News' editors are helping foster the very climate of hero worship that gives people like Sandusky their opportunity to victimize children in the first place. The victims were the children; Paterno doesn't count. But he made himself count in a negative way by his failure to act. This is no one's responsibility but his own.

Obviously, Sandusky should never have been allowed to be a coach, but neither should Paterno. Sandusky is a predator, Paterno a moral imbecile. Young athletes deserve better than either of these two.

Parents are now wondering, appropriately enough, how deep the moral rot runs in organized sport, and exactly what risks are entailed in letting their children participate. We should not surrender to hysteria on this count, but we should adopt a critical attitude towards the "winning forgives everything" attitude so dominant in the sports world today. Athletes and coaches are athletes and coaches, not Gods, and we should demand moral behavior of them just as we do everyone else.

The presumed impunity with which Sandusky acted arises from a culture of hero-worship in which the adored figure is presumed to be incapable of wrong. This presumption makes it easy for men like Sandusky to believe that wrong simply doesn't exist, which is undoubtedly how he continues to maintain his innocence, even as he concedes that he took showers with his victims and engaged in affectionate "horseplay," as though that would have been permissible.

The Mercury News' editors engage in apologetics when they explain - as though it were relevant - that Paterno was of a generation that simply ignored sexual predation, hoping it would go away without the need for confrontation. To wit:

"In the olden days, reports of sexual abuse prompted many, whether priests or educators or even parents, to try to wish it away, hope they were wrong about what they thought they saw or heard or were told, and to grasp at the flimsiest of excuses to tell themselves they had done their part, done the best they could, fulfilled their responsibility. That is was not really that bad. That the kids would be fine.

"This was Paterno's downfall... When the revelations finally became public years later, Paterno, then 85, being of that earlier generation, had not the instinct to realize what he had done, to swiftly resign and apologize profusely to the victims and the families and everyone he had let down . . ."

As though letting a sexual predator run riot for years constituted a mere "let down" to the victims, one that could be swiftly erased with a perfectly useless apology.

The problem here is with the attitude of the Mercury News' editors. They still appear to believe that great coaches are Divine, and so they are prepared to downplay grotesque criminal behavior in the interest of continuing the delusion that success in sports is synonymous with Godlike perfection.

But it's not.

Source:

Bay Area News Group editorial: "The tragedy of Sandusky's case is that Joe Paterno could have been a hero," Marin Independent Journal, June 23, 2012

 

Postscript: The validity of the case against Sandusky has been seriously called into question on the grounds that it was part of a moral panic. See David Rosen's, "From Moral Outrage to Moral Panic: the Limits of Public Rage," Counterpunch, January 29, 2019, excerpted below:

"The trial, conviction and imprisonment of Jerry Sandusky is an illuminating example of how moral outrage can turn into a moral panic when a perfect target captures public attention.  He was a Penn State football coach who served for thirty years (1969-1999) as an assistant its legendary head-coach, Joe Paterno.  He also founded The Second Mile, a charity for at-risk youths.

"However, on November 4, 2011, a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report initially accusing him of sexually abusing eight young boys over a period of at least 15 years.  A month later, two additional boys came forward claiming they had been abused, raising the total of accusers to ten. He was charged with 48 counts of sexual abuse including “involuntary deviant sexual intercourse, indecent assault, unlawful contact with a minor, corruption of minors and endangering the welfare of children.”  But did he commit the acts he was convicted of perpetrating?

"Mark Pendergrast, a science writer and author of more than a dozen books, provides an invaluable case study into how questionable accusations and outrage could rapidly snowball into a moral panic.  In his recently-published book, The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment (Sunbury Press), he argues that Sandusky’s arrest, prosecution, trial and final imprisonment was a miscarriage of judgement and believes he should receive a new – and fair – trial.

"After careful coaching from aggressive law-enforcement officials, therapists discovered repressed memories and opportunistic civil-litigation attorneys, the alleged victims fundamentally changed their stories, their memories.  The author takes particular aim at those promoting recovered-memories theories, specifically many of the psycho-therapist who assisted the victims to recall long-suppressed memories of sexual abuse.  During the Sandusky scandal, this form of psychotherapy captured much media attention and became a short-lived self-help fad, with numerous scholarly/academic studies and popular books published about the topic.  Stories about recovered memories regularly appeared in the local media and spread to the New York Times and The Washington Post as well as CNN and NBC, ensuring that the Sandusky case became a national story."