The New M.A.D.

Throughout this latest Epstein fiasco, there's one theory that hasn't been discussed.

If you haven’t noticed, there’s an epic shitshow going on.

This Grand Tour of Manure, this Gardyloo of Poo, stars a boy named Jeff, a gal named Pam, and an old school New York hoofer who looks like he just lost the beat, if not his credibility and presidency.

And he just might lose all three, before the year is out. 2025 may have hit middle-age, sure. But it’s in crisis mode, and just bought itself a red Lamborghini.

There are other edge players involved. For instance, there’s a cop whose name sounds like a rapper from the slums of Noodly, and a nepo-hire from the Southern District of New York who recently helped another rapper beat a racketeering charge. It’s a Worldstar world, I suppose. We just livin’ in it, dawg.

But the reticle is currently locked on the absurd scene above, which would feel more at home in some Zucker Brothers farce. “Are we still talking about that creep?!” shouts President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. Who cares about a global blackmail ring that roped in politicians, scientists, billionaire businessman and financiers? Except for literally everyone with a functioning prefrontal cortex, that is.

The takes so far have ranged from from face-melting German speed metal hot to "Bridge over Troubled Water" Simon and Garfunkel depths of cope. But as far I can tell, they all correspond to one or more of the following theoretical templates:

1. Tradecraft 101: Key players in the Maxwell-Epstein blackmail ring who haven’t already been deleted have clammed up or gone to ground. The plan now is to present a false front based on some backroom deal, while quietly baiting the traps and building the case in the background. While the hew and cry of the moment is politically painful, a global sting operation will eventually settle all family business and heal all wounds. In the meantime, the Left will get rope-a-doped into caring (or pretending to care) about Jeffrey Epstein and related “conspiracy theories.”

2. The Fart of the Deal: Somewhere in the maelstrom of behind-the-scenes horse trading, the Trump administration obtained one or more secret concessions from the world’s power elites. In exchange, Epstein Island would be entombed in the same underground warehouse as the JFK assassins, the 9/11 planners, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Colonel’s secret blend of herbs and spices. We will never know the nature of this deal. I will say it’s interesting that Brennan and Comey might be coming up on charges in the same news cycle, suggesting perhaps a hostage swap. But for all we know, Epstein sold for the low, low price of OBBBA, or some hyper-complex combination of promises and side deals. Whatever was gained, Trump (being Trump) believed he could manage and survive the fallout. But this deal reeks to high heaven, and is already backfiring.

3. Trump is Isildur: Trump sweeps back into power with big plans to challenge the Fates and change the world. From USAID to tariffs to racking up SCOTUS victories on DEI and immigration, he has come to see himself as the embodiment of the indominable will. Cue hubris. “Hey, what’s that shiny ring over there? It looks so… precious.” The temptation to wear the One Blackmail Ring has conquered far greater men than Donald Trump, who would see it as the perfect accessory to his tariff dashboard. The appearance of the mysteriously unsigned, undated document is just a signal to an esoteric audience: We have chosen to spare you, for now. But we can always change our minds.

4. “National Security”: This is the flip side of the coin to the One Ring theory, Instead of a goldmine of useful kompromat, Our Heroes™ decide they’re sitting on a powder keg full of briefcase nukes and sentient anthrax. Yes, 90% of Congress has been bribed, threatened, or otherwise captured (one might even call it a puppet empire, if one is so inclined). But political capture is only the tip of the Reverse-Everest Iceberg. The cabal’s tendrils drill so deep into intel services, multinational corporations, and the global supply chain, a full exposure of the Epstein Op would be like amputating the head to save the foot. Even if a few of their middle managers could be brought to justice, the majority of their masters would skate free, and the collateral damage would destroy whatever was left of Western influence (not to mention, put them all out of a job).

5. The Irrefusable Offer: Because you can never have too many Godfather references, what we’re seeing is the end result of the horse head scene, cloned-stamped a couple hundred times all over Trump’s new administrative hires. The old guard has reminded the newbies just why they’re called the “Deep” State, and what it really means to rule from the shadows. Threats that were once implicit have been made unmistakably explicit and dire. All aspiring heroes think they will pass this test, right up until the moment of truth arrives. This time, the moment arrived in the dead of night, laid your children out on the floor, and threatened to rape them while they calmly dissected you. Like Pulp Fiction’s Jules Winnfield, “O Death, where is thy sting?” was only some bible quote you memorized so you could sound badass on Twitter. Now what, hero?

6. The Old Reliable:

   

I’m sure there are a few other formulations, including exotic cocktails that somehow combine all of the above. There are also a few small-bore explanations to consider. Maybe Kushner popped up on the radar sweep, or Don Jr. made a guest appearance on a very special episode of Gilligan’s Island? But these possibilities can also be folded neatly in the categories above.

A Dishonorable Mention goes to the now-official version: Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffery Epstein were just a couple of rich perverts, whose only motive was to get jiggy with legendary party animals like “Screamin’”Stephen Hawking, Glenn “Doobie” Dubin, and Bill “Manboobs” Gates.

Meanwhile, all the other, non-retarded theories sound feasible to me. I have yet to settle on any one in particular (though I’m leaning slightly toward Sauronic corruption). It seems many other commenters have already staked their claims with 100% confidence, owing to their vast reserves of intelligence, discernment, and psychic ability.

By contrast, I’m just a humble hacker with an artistic streak. But one of the purposes of this blog is to push the boundaries of reason, and think that which has not been thunk. In that spirit, I give you one more possible explanation, which I have not heard presented elsewhere:

7. Trump is a Boomer: Technology is magic to most boomers. It can literally do everything, and it has already done most things. This includes mysterious things that terrify and bewilder them.

How does Trump’s generation factor into the Epstein saga? I will try to illustrate it with a pair of short videos.

Here’s the first, in which a Chinese stereotype-made-manifest explains why his mom needs her internet keys taken away.

The second video is both less direct and more profound. Here we have a buxom blonde hawking the latest in AI slop factory warez, from what looks like a car that’s been stranded in rural Kentucky.

Ads like this are ubiquitous nowadays, featuring fake people with fake voices saying fake stuff about fake products. This particular ad gets shoved into frame every time I fire up YouTube. Even before the doll’s head begins to bobble and gyrate atop its well endowed but breathless, flatlined chest, the scent of unreality is overwhelming. As deepfakes go, this chick is barely a puddle. She doesn’t just tumble down the walls of the Uncanny Valley, but into a hole dug straight to China.

She can’t fool me, and she can’t fool you.

But I bet she could fool Donald Trump.

And not just Trump. We are currently living through the last verse of The Boomerdämmerung, for whom the final battle is one the rest of us are only just starting to fight. And they are losing it, bigtime. Most of them cannot even begin to imagine what the Internet is, let alone the vile new things that slither out of its darkest alleys. This isn’t meant as a dig against Boomers, who are often more maligned than they deserve. In this case, it would be like blaming a blind man for blowing a red light (although, we might reasonably ask why he saw himself fit to drive in the first place).

For this explanation to work, we’d have to take for granted that Trump isn’t a complete stooge or corrupted crime boss, and that he wants to take down the global blackmail ring. He doesn’t need to be a paragon; we’d be free to assume all kinds of motivations, linked to his great vanity and vengefulness. But whatever the reason, he wants to clean up Dodge City, and tack some scalps to his big, beautiful wall.

In this scene, Trump is bitching about the lack of forward movement on L’Affair Epstein. He went along with the whole “binders” scam, assured that it was just an early feint designed to turn some heads and twist some arms. But he’s getting impatient, and is enraged at the situation in the New York Southern District Office. “Why can’t we just raid ‘em?” he asks. “The sons of bitches raided me!”

It is in the midst of this rant that Trump is quietly led into a darkened room, where he is shown a thing on a screen.

The thing he is shown is a video of himself on Little St. James Island, doing unspeakable things to a goat. It bowls him over. He’s seen some convincing crap before. He’s seen Hollywood resurrect dinosaurs, and send Matt McConaughey to a wormhole near Saturn. He even saw that Tom Cruise thing on TikTok. But this video strikes him as next level, convincing beyond a shadow of a doubt. They even got the hair right!

Superficially, this sounds like a blend of options 4 and 5. But the people who brought him into the room aren’t threatening him. They are trying to explain the new battle we’re all fighting, to someone who’s just too old to understand. It’s like trying to explain anti-drone HPM emitters to a Viking.

Here you might object that Trump is a very special breed of Viking: a meme berserker who wields Tweets and clips as expertly as Thor wields Mjölnir. That’s true in many respects. But there are limits to what a mind’s eye can imagine, which are roughly defined by our memories and working knowledge of observed phenomena. And while Trump’s technical knowledge of real estate markets, branding, and negotiations might be vast, he’d be stumped if you asked him how modern video games were made.

Covfefe-Thanos dances the Orange Justice near the smoking ruins of Lindisfarne.

Rather than waste time trying to explain the tech, they deliver the bottom line: a release of the Epstein tapes will hasten an inevitable shift in consciousness, but with short term results so catastrophic that they might trigger World War Three. When Trump demands to know why, some Agent Smith-looking bastard pipes up.

“When you release the names and tapes, Mr. President, two things will happen.

“First, all of the blackmailed victims will deny it, and blame it on AI deepfakes. Due to our political environment, approximately 20% of the American people will accept this explanation without question. For them, literally everything that comes out of your mouth is a lie, and they are already psychologically primed for the deepfake revolution. They will be amplified and rewarded for their allegiance by Silicon Valley. Gates, Hoffman, Musk, Thiel, Altman, and a bunch of other nerds will go all-in on the deepfake theory, using it to cover their asses and pitch their frontier models. And the crooked press will gladly back their play…”

Trump cuts him off. “Yeah, but those people are a bunch of crazy wackos. And like you said, it’s only twenty percent. Who cares? I’ll blow them out of the water in the mid-terms.”

Agent Smith ignores him and moves on.

“Next, this fake recording of you, or something very much like it, will be leaked to the Washington Post. The people who refuse to believe you sodomized a farm animal will now be forcibly squeezed into the pro-deepfake side of the argument. The country and its Western allies will be split between those who think the Epstein clients were framed, those who think you’re a goat-aficionado, those who believe none of it is fake, and those who believe ALL of it is fake.

“The most dominant of these groups will be the latter, Mr. President. They will literally not believe their own ears and eyes, no matter what you show them. And the size of this group will rapidly expand, as the tech companies blast every screen on Earth with proof that nothing whatsoever can be trusted as real.”

The agent then tries to explain the e/acc movement, the Singularity cult, Baudrillardian simulation, the Basilisk, and other concepts that soar completely over Trump’s epic hairdo. But, thanks to his animal instincts, he gets the basic gist (“So you’re saying it’s like the Matrix?”). Once the Deepfake genie is let out of the bottle, all Hell breaks loose. Trust collapses, markets crash, the streets boil over, and, eventually, the real shooting starts. The world has been irrevocably Alex Jones-pilled. It will become impossible to convince anyone that any recorded event is real.

The chaos from the trust meltdown will seep into every institution and industry, but law and order will be hardest hit. It’s explained that leftwing defense attorneys and DAs will have a Field Day with this new evidentiary standard, as well as supporters of illegal immigration and child abuse. If a murder is captured on security footage, or a cartel war breaks out on the Texas border, or Hilary Clinton devours a live baby in the dungeon under her Chappaqua mansion, plausible deniability will become absolute deniability. “They” can do anything with computers these days, after all.

According to this model, Operation Epstein was a far greater success than anyone imagined, because it shipped with the ultimate Dead Man’s Switch. In case of emergency, all they need to do is burn down all trust in consensual reality. That’s been hanging on by a thread for decades anyway. You could even call it a mercy killing, since the connection between true reality and its screen-based mediated version has always been a carefully constructed illusion, weaponized for mind control.

Walter Cronkite was lying to you, Don. In fact, based on their horrendous track record, you should be suspicious of any guy named Walt.

He tells Trump that trust in screens is doomed, no matter what. There’s some good news in that, since it will defang most propaganda. Some would say this broad shift in consciousness is long overdue.

“But if you pull that trigger too fast, Mr. President, the world will be plunged into chaos. The beneficiaries, engineers and targets of Operation Epstein will have nothing to lose by playing this card, since their only other alternatives are prison or death. They don’t care about the country, or the world. They’d burn down truth itself to escape their just desserts.”

Anyway, this is how the scenario would be sold. As a Boomer raised in the Cold War, Trump’s strategic Tao is the stalemate of M.A.D, of which he sees the Deepfake War as yet another instantiation. He can stockpile as many incriminating videos as he wants, but releasing them won’t even convince the people who might have otherwise believed, sight unseen. It will be dismissed as “fake news”, hoisting him on his own rhetorical petard. Meanwhile, Trump believes his enemies are in exactly the same pickle, since releasing a Trump deepfake would simultaneously force his hand. He might even be tempted to start cooking up deepfakes of his own, for all the good that would do him. Nobody wins.

In other words, Trump buried the Epstein case because, if he allowed it to take its natural course, it would trigger a form of magical warfare that he’s never been trained to fight. Sad!

Is this what I believe happened? Not necessarily. As mentioned, I’m leaning towards Isildur at Mount Doom. Mostly because that would be the stupidest thing to do, and I am the kind of American who never underestimates his government’s stupidity. But I would still be amazed if similar conversations haven’t taken place in Trump City, and even in Bidenville and Obamabad before that. You don’t need to be a philosophy professor or cybersecurity expert to see the epistemic threat of Nothing’s Real.

More importantly, does Agent Smith’s version give us an accurate picture of how the Deepfake War will play out?

It’s lot more complicated than that, in my opinion. A lot funnier, too.

Like I said, the threat of deepfakery in its current form is mostly a generational filter, and the Boomers aren’t going to squeeze through that mesh. But Generations X and Y are still tossups, and this current phase isn’t the end of the war. It’s barely the beginning.

The next phase of AI will function less like a Great Filter, and more like pruning the rotted branches of a tree. For those who get pruned, it will be a long way down. They will tumble past centuries of error and malignance, past the Enlightenment and the Middle Ages and Rome, plummeting all the way to Old Babylon and the pit beneath. If that pit has a bottom, I wouldn’t want to see it.

But for those who make the grade, great laughter and merriment awaits. That kind of party atmosphere is to be expected after any war. Once we have grieved our losses and buried our dead, a grand time will be had by all, as we go back to living our human lives as God intended.

Oh, did you think would be another hot take on Current Politics Thing? You must be new around here. Consider this a prelude for an article to be published soon, on a topic I have danced around in the past. My working title is “How Deepfakes Saved the World.”

Here’s a little preview:

Stay tuned.

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