I’m leading with this because it seems like it’s all anybody wants to talk about this week, and while I might not want to admit it, part of my job is to come up with content that makes you people want to click on it.
I say that, and I’m a little tired of the Jeffrey Epstein thing. Because as I wrote last week, the Epstein thing is unresolvable — at least, in any way We The People want it resolved.
I’m going to say that Epstein is not ultimately going to destroy Donald Trump’s second presidential term, and it’s not going to cost the GOP the House in the midterms next year. The fact that we’re having this big knock-down, drag-out over this subject now, and not six months or a year from now, is actually pretty helpful.
Especially since, as I said, it’s unresolvable.
Anyway, I have a couple of things on the subject I thought might be worth passing along.
1. Mike Flynn Weighs In
I had a piece at RVIVR on Wednesday on this (go and read it here; RVIVR needs your clicks, too, and it’s definitely worthy of them), which I’ll pull from a little, but Gen. Mike Flynn, who was all set to be the National Security Advisor in the Trump first term before the crooked Deep State took him out on an utterly spurious process-crime charge, had an interesting take on the Epstein mess…
.@realDonaldTrump I hesitated to write this however, with the utmost respect and deference to you for all you’ve withstood (few know it better than me what the “deep state” can do when they want to turn on a person). The EPSTEIN AFFAIR is NOT about who killed him or if he…
— General Mike Flynn (@GenFlynn) July 16, 2025
Flynn is right about this.
There is a perceptible rot affecting our cultural, political and economic elite. We can all see it. The Epstein affair is really only one example of the exploitation of ordinary Americans by the rotten elite, and the inability to impose accountability from this scandal is corrosive.
You can’t talk your way past it.
But the problem, clearly, I think, is that there isn’t sufficient evidence in the file to effectively prosecute anyone as an Epstein client. I’m convinced that isn’t an accident; it was seen to by some of the same people who foisted the Russia hoax on the country in my view.
What I’d also say is that if the Epstein case isn’t actionable, then Trump had better make himself an instrument of vengeance against the corrupt elite in some other way. Especially if that can take the form of accountability for the rich and powerful who can be credibly accused of sexual misbehavior with children.
After all, I don’t think anybody believes Epstein’s was the only pedophile ring out there, or that none exist now that he’s dead.
And of course there was that Alan Dershowitz Wall Street Journal op-ed which was interesting; Dershowitz noted that he was Epstein’s lawyer and knew as much as anybody about what went on but couldn’t talk about most of it, denied that Epstein was anybody’s intelligence asset (come on, Alan), and then said something exceptionally interesting.
He said that any Epstein list that could be released wouldn’t have any new names on it.
You can interpret that a number of ways, but maybe the proper interpretation is to say that Alan Dershowitz just confirmed to us that the Bill Gates/Tom Hanks/Bill Clinton/Chelsea Handler/George Stephanopoulos/Oprah gang, who were all confirmed to be Epstein pals and associates, are the ones whose affiliation with him needs to be given a public examination.
The idea has been floated to turn this thing over to a special prosecutor now that the Epstein scandal blob has effectively eaten Attorney General Pam Bondi, and arguably FBI Director Kash Patel and his top deputy Dan Bongino, if not Trump himself (I’m not saying it has done that, but others have). I keep hearing how this is a terrible idea. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 201: What Happened to the Jeffrey Epstein List?)
OK, fine. Here’s another one.
Let Congress do it.
If Dershowitz is correct, then let’s get the House to set up a special committee not just on Epstein but on related scandals involving sex trafficking and other untoward activity (NXIVM, some of the Hollywood pedo rings, and even John Podesta’s weird emails). Get some top investigators, some really good lawyers, and a big stack of subpoenas together and start bringing people to Capitol Hill to find out exactly what the scope of all this is.
I’m interested in Bill Gates’s testimony at such proceedings. Will Gates take the 5th? If he does, we’ll at least have some gauge as to where he is. If not, then I would like to hear him say what the purpose of his trips to Little St. James Island was — Business? Pleasure? Helping the climate by riding on someone else’s private jet for a change?
What did Bill Gates see there? If we’ve all been led astray on the question of Jeffrey Epstein, then perhaps he can describe the Parcheesi tournaments for the rich and famous that were actually going on while we rubes were swallowing QAnon fantasies about jailbait sex orgies.
And if he lies to Congress and gets caught doing it, well… maybe Bill Gates can suffer the same fate Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro did.
They took Al Capone down on tax evasion charges, you know. It wasn’t bootlegging or murder that did him in.
If by some chance Congress actually does a half-decent job on an Epstein probe, and let’s remember that this doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t, just be about the Epstein scandal, then it’ll give the public an opportunity to reward the current House leadership for getting us the transparency we need on this issue.
While giving Trump the opportunity to wash his hands of it, like he clearly wants.
Of course, if the House botches this opportunity, which I’ll concede is at least an even-money proposition, then… are you really that much worse off than to let the Epstein blob go unaddressed?
Especially when the problem here is that the public believes the moral rot among our garbage elite is the real issue here, and one reason to put the irascible Trump back in office is that he’s the only instrument of reform available.
Scalps must be taken. Trump clearly wants to take them on the autopen scandal and the Russia hoax, rather than the Epstein scandal. Let him do those, and let Congress do this.
2. The Dumbest Scheme You’ve Ever Heard Of, and Why It Offends so Thoroughly
I know I’m spending this week airing all of Louisiana’s dirty laundry, particularly after Thursday’s column on the communists at the East Baton Rouge Library system who fired probably the only straight white male Republican librarian they had because he wouldn’t use the word “him” to describe a very delusional woman. So perhaps a slight apology for going so local of late.
But this, I think, you’ll find relevant even if you’re in Maine or Wyoming.
On Tuesday, five people were picked up around the state, including two conventioneers at the Louisiana Association of Police Chiefs’ annual meeting at a swanky hotel in Baton Rouge. Four of the five were local law enforcement folks — the current police chiefs in Forest Hill (population: 604) and Oakdale (population: 6,437), the former police chief in Glenmora (population: 1,046), a ward marshal in Oakdale, and a guy by the name of Chandrakant Patel who is not in law enforcement but rather has a Subway sandwich place in Oakdale.
These are all places in the west-central part of Louisiana where there is no crime — or population, for that matter — to speak of.
So what were the arrests for?
U-visas.
Right. You don’t know what that is. Why would you?
You can get a U-visa if you’re an illegal alien and you are the victim of, or a witness to, a crime. They’d give you one so that you’re in the country and can testify at the trial.
And Chandrakant Patel, honest legal immigrant grinding away at the American dream one steak-n-cheese sub at a time, decided a faster way to his promised McMansion was to collect sweaty wads of cash from illegal aliens that he would use to bribe small-town cops into filing police reports of armed robberies involving the names of said illegal aliens.
With that paper trail, they’d file for the U-visas.
Yeah, that’s a brilliant scheme. Right up until the point that the people the FBI pays check out the crime statistics and wonder what the hell is happening that stick-up men are rolling through the sleepy piney woods of west-central Louisiana and exclusively robbing illegal aliens there.
Either that’s a rash of hate crimes, which would make them disposed to investigate, or it’s a scam, which would make them disposed to investigate.
In other words, there’s an exceptional likelihood of getting caught. Especially doing this at scale in little villages like this.
Reportedly, Patel attempted to bribe a sheriff’s deputy in Alexandria, which is a city of around 100,000 people, and that was when the sky really fell on him.
I said this Thursday when I did a post at The Hayride about this stupid skullduggery…
This is such a crappy, Third World scheme that it’s just embarrassing.
I’m assuming Chandrakant Patel is a citizen. It would feel better if his name was Bob Smith or Claude Broussard. Typically if you have a Patel who owns a Subway, especially in a place like Oakdale, he’s a first or second generation legal immigrant.
So you bring legal immigrants in, and they promptly concoct crooked schemes to profit off scamming the system in favor of illegal immigrants.
Who will then latch on to Medicaid and food stamps and Section 8 housing and other welfare programs that are bankrupting the country, all the while depressing the wages of unskilled or low-skilled Americans.
This is the kind of rancid, lawless corruption you get in an India or Mexico. It’s literally why those are lousy countries people want to get away from.
Talk to people who’ve been to India, and one thing you get back again and again from them is the ubiquitous dishonesty of practically everyone there. Scam artists are everywhere, and if you’re a tourist they’ll literally mob you trying to sell you things or practice some scheme or other to get your money. It’s one reason there isn’t a lot of demand among Americans to travel there.
And India is one of the poorest places on earth because everything is so corrupt and the culture is so dysfunctional. People from India will tell you one of the reasons they wanted to get out of there so much was their disgust with that culture. Venezuelans will tell you that as well, and so will Nigerians, Indonesians, Filipinos and lots of others where it’s all the same thing.
It seems we’ve imported some of that culture here. Mix it with Louisiana culture, which sadly has it that if you’re a public official then by all means you should wet your beak at the trough, because who cares about some illegal who wants to buy himself a U-visa with a little white lie from the local-yokel cops, and you get this week’s shabby spectacle.
It’s the kind of scheme that makes you want to half-seriously advocate a public hanging for all of these idiots, just as a demonstration of how disgusting you find the whole thing.
It also makes you want to stop the Chandrakant Patels from being able to come here. Not because they’re Indian, or any race in particular; that isn’t the issue. The issue is that the culture of the entire Third World is poisonous and grotesque and corrupt, and ultimately unsuccessful. And we have enough trouble trying to preserve, much less reform, our own culture.
We did a great podcast segment this week with John Daniel Davidson from The Federalist, and Davidson has written eloquently about the damage done by importing inferior cultures into ours. This greasy scheme operating out of that Subway shop in Oakdale is a perfect illustration of why.
3. Hats Off to Abandoned Films, Part 1
I’m not sure how it happened, but I managed to run across a YouTube creator called Abandoned Films, and I’m hooked. I think you might well be, too, once you start watching these things.
What they’ve done is to start with the old Dos Equis beer commercials featuring The Most Interesting Man in the World, that we all got such a kick out of, and take it in a bunch of different directions — including some which are shockingly politically incorrect and nearly all of which are laugh-yourself-into-a-potential-stroke funny.
For example, here’s the Most French Man in the World…
And the Most Tremendous Man in the World, which of course had to be Trump…
4. Hats Off To Abandoned Films, Part 2
I couldn’t just leave it with those two. Here’s the Gayest Man in the World…
And the Most Canadian Man in the World…
And of course, just to be as politically incorrect as possible, The Most Asian Man in the World…
Before they started doing the Dos Equis commercial takeoffs, they were making old movie trailers for modern movies; for example, here was one for The Matrix…
The AI stuff is just plain wild, isn’t it?
5. Blockbusters Is Coming. It’s Almost Here.
I’ve been pounding away at the third Mike Holman novel, and this weekend the first episode is going to drop here at The American Spectator. The book’s title is Blockbusters, and it’s about a subject on which I’ve written a bit in this space.
Namely, fixing the culture.
The book is about an effort, led by our intrepid hero, to reform and revive the culture of the West, starting with a disruption of showbiz. It’s got some Get Shorty in it, some Wall Street and some Secret of My Success.
But it also gets into the revolutionary effect AI and the cord-cutting phenomenon are going to have on mass media, and while writing this book, I’ve been doing a ton of research and conceptualization about what that might look like. The book is about what it would look like in beneficent hands, unlike what the social media revolution became in the hands of… not so beneficent people.
Anyway, check it out. I’m guessing you folks will get a kick out of it. Definitely stick around to the third episode, because the ICE riot scene might just be the highlight of my writing career.
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