Epstein Files | Ghislaine Maxwell

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Paine said:
Keep your eyes on the prize. Theo Von isn’t the problem, he's the symptom. The real answer isn’t scapegoating him, it’s confronting the broader media ecosystem and building a culture that meets people where they are, both digitally and materially.

Democrats need a strategy rooted in narrative and infrastructure not reactionary finger-pointing.

Bernie going on Theo Von’s podcast proves the point. He didn’t scold or moralize. He showed up, talked like a human being, and reached millions of people, many of whom have never felt spoken to by mainstream politics. And it worked. The clip of Bernie explaining class politics to Von’s audience went viral. People respected it. That’s a roadmap, not a fluke.

This is what liberals still refuse to understand. The way to counter right-wing influence in the Rogansphere isn’t to sneer at it, it’s to compete in it.

Instead, they blame the platform and the audience. They hand-wave away real alienation and insecurity among young working-class men as if it's just a pipeline to fascism, but it’s not. It’s a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. If the left doesn’t fill it with solidarity, community, and material hope, the right will fill it with resentment and fantasy.
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For me pointing to Rogan and Vonn isn’t blaming them personally it’s recognizing that America has devolved into a nation that values the opinions of carnival barkers.
 
I dont know who Theo Von is and don't want to know. I've yet to see any podcast that I can stomach....even those I mostly agree with. Its all pandering one way or the other it seems to me.
 
For my part, I'm highly uncomfortable in a world where perception seems so much more important than experience, training and statistics. It's not that perception isn't important but the data you get is so unreliable and easily swayed.
 
Paine said:
I think the problem isn’t that perception has replaced expertise, it’s that people lost trust in the institutions claiming expertise.

People often turn to figures like Rogan or Von not because they reject truth but because they reject gatekeepers who too often used truth selectively.

That’s the real crisis: who gets to interpret experience and represent reality.

After years of elite failure, folks are looking for truth-tellers outside the club. That’s not ideal, but it’s understandable. Rebuilding trust means showing results not just citing credentials.
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The problem is that they lost that trust, not because of outcomes, but because so many of these "truth- tellers" lied implicitly or explicitly about these outcomes. No small part of the problem is that many people have either had professional restraints about how they can respond to those misrepresentations or lack the platform to debate on a level playing field.
 
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If Dems have any sense (which probably not) they would have Dem adjacent social media hammering this relentlessly. The Epstein Files is where Trump has a real frailty with MAGA and Q — don’t allege anything. But demand, day after day, the truth. This is a very rare opportunity to undercut the MAGA/Q/MAHA support of Trump. Not top down — not via political leaders. Bottom up.

FFS. See the opportunity, let the MAGA and Q sharks do the work but feed them chum daily until they cannot do otherwise.
 
Paine said:
That’s fair, but part of the issue is that the “experts” often earned their platforms through elite gatekeeping, not public trust.

When they misled or filtered reality through institutional bias, they forfeited credibility. The rise of podcasts and alt media didn’t happen in a vacuum: it was a direct response to legacy voices failing to meet the moment.

None of this is ideal, but it’s understandable. When institutions are caught lying or spinning key issues, people are going to lose faith in them even when they’re actually telling the truth later. That’s the cost of broken trust.
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Could you give me some of these issues that they were "caught" spinning? What would be equivocation in politics might be demanded in science, for example. When science is filtered through political spokesmen, it's probably not going to be the scientists doing the spinning.

Not that scientists are flawless. They can be frauds. Take the ulcer thing. That was terrible science. So was the failure in the 19th century to accept the value of antisepsis. It's still not going to be the smart money bet when it comes to twisting facts and figures. If caught out, politicians ,pundits and spokesmen move on the the next speech, scientists to their next occupation.
 
Paine said:
Sure, and to clarify, I wasn’t just talking about scientific issues. The collapse in institutional trust is about more than bad science communication.

Take Iraq and WMDs. That wasn’t a scientific failure, it was a political and media failure, with experts and prestigious outlets echoing falsehoods that led to a disastrous war. No real accountability ever followed. Same goes for the 2008 financial crisis, where elite economists, bankers, and regulators missed or downplayed warning signs, then got bailed out while regular people suffered.

Even with COVID, yes, science evolved (as it should), but public messaging often came from political spokespeople, not scientists. And when they overpromised or shifted positions without transparency, trust eroded further.

This isn't to say podcasts or populist figures are always right, but they tap into a very real narrative: that legacy institutions like media, political leadership, and academia misled the public at key moments. People remember that. Even if these "truth tellers" aren’t always accurate, their rise reflects a vacuum left by those institutions.
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You do realize that almost every single one of those came out of the same Republican think tanks and rightwing media foundations that Democrats have been literally the only ones to challenge. Can you you tell me what's wrong with this picture when the lying bastards who caused the damage get the benefit? That's almost as bad as ignoring how bad for the economy the Republicans have been in virtually everyway for the last 75 years.
 
Paine said:
For those who haven’t watched him, Theo Von isn’t trying to be malicious. He comes across as pretty naive but genuine. He actually cares and is authentic in his own way. The challenge is that other actors in this space exploit that authenticity. They use people like him as conduits to mix in baseless or misleading claims alongside ones grounded in fact.

This blending makes it harder for audiences to separate truth from distortion. Authenticity becomes a tool, intentionally or not, to launder misinformation through trusted voices.
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Nah Theo is MAGA
 
You might want to look into the story behind an informant named Curveball and the whole project by Shrub's people to manipulate and lie to the media. It's true that Judith Miller at the New York times was an absolute shill for the war. It's also true that, especially in the Senate, Democrats got a serious case of gnat nuts once it became clear that the Republicans had the votes to pass the resolutions to go to war and proceeded to cover their ass. But to put equal blame or even close to is to show a total lack of understanding of the advance planning even before Bush was elected to find a way to go after Saddam.

You might also want to go after the rules a lot of the media were reporting under before you go too wild with your claims about liberal media being so supportive.
 
Bigs23 said:
For me pointing to Rogan and Vonn isn’t blaming them personally it’s recognizing that America has devolved into a nation that values the opinions of carnival barkers.
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Seriously? It’s unfiltered conversation. I mean, it could be disorienting if you are used to CNN or The View interpreting for you…
 
Paine said:
I get that many falsehoods came from Republican think tanks and right-wing media; that’s no surprise. But it’s also important to remember that a lot of Democrats and liberals supported the Iraq invasion, and much of the liberal media went along with it.

This credibility gap goes way back, as early as the 1970s with both Johnson and Nixon lying about Vietnam. That erosion of trust in government and institutions set the stage for the deep skepticism we see today.

The problem isn’t just who started the lies, but how the entire system, across both parties and media, enabled them to stick.

Democrats often fail to effectively counter misinformation or rebuild trust with people who’ve been fed falsehoods for decades.

If we don’t address that, those lies will keep winning, and the real damage continues. The economic harm from Republicans is clear, but ignoring how misinformation spreads only makes it easier for them to keep doing harm.

Democrats seem content to hitch their wagons to the institutions people have lost trust in. Is it any surprise that their image suffers when they do this?

It’s the same dynamic: even when Democrats say the right things, people don’t trust them because the institutions behind those messages are already discredited. This cycle keeps repeating, and until it’s addressed, real progress will stay out of reach.
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I just want facts to be recognized as facts. I don’t care who or where it comes from.

To me there is a bigger distortion of the truth coming from the right over the last however many years. It’s what I see not what I want to see.
 
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ColdBlueSteel said:
Seriously? It’s unfiltered conversation. I mean, it could be disorienting if you are used to CNN or The View interpreting for you…
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But does anybody actually know what they are talking about? I really only consume print sources and not a lot of those so I'm curious if there is any kind of vetting at all.
 
ColdBlueSteel said:
Seriously? It’s unfiltered conversation. I mean, it could be disorienting if you are used to CNN or The View interpreting for you…
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I want you to take a second and really think about the dumb shit you just posted.

The director of the FBI has no business appearing on a podcast to discuss partisan politics and spew propaganda.

It wouldn’t be right under a Democratic administration, and it isn’t right now.
 
Paine said:
A lot of older liberals seem to want the 1950s back: a time when (white) Americans could trust that the government and its institutional allies had their best interests at heart. The experts were in charge, and that was enough.

I want to trust institutions too. It would make my life a lot easier. But they’ve shown us over and over that they don’t have our backs. Trust has to be earned, not inherited.
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This take is fucking ludicrous and im middle aged.

What most "liberals" want is for people not to be brain dead fucking morons. That's literally all. Just be not abjectly stupid about everything.

I donr care for the elite or those who hide behind credentials, but im not going to deal with fucking tiktoked podcast crybabies to accomplish something politically.

If we have become this lazy and stupid as a country, we goddammed well deserve to fail and there won't be anything any of us can do about it.

Maybe, juuuuuuuuust maybe, the people who follow these influences need to pay attention to reality for once rather than wrapping themselves up in whatever bullshit is being fed to them on the daily.

And yes all media panders which is why people need far less of a diet of it, not more.
 
Paine said:
I get wanting people to pay attention to reality but it’s unfair to dismiss millions as lazy or stupid for losing trust in the very institutions that failed them repeatedly: Iraq, the housing crisis, the pandemic response. That trust wasn’t broken by podcasts or TikTok. It was broken by real failures at the top.

People left legacy media because it stopped earning their trust, not because it was too responsible. Criticizing them now doesn’t explain why they tuned out, it just misses the root causes.

I want to trust institutions too. It would make everything easier. But trust has to be earned not assumed. If we want better conversations and better outcomes, we need to fix the system that broke that trust instead of blaming those who are trying to navigate a broken media landscape.

You spent decades backing a political project that gutted public trust, empowered bad actors, and paved the way for the exact chaos you're now furious about. It's rich to blame podcasts and young people when the institutions you helped legitimize are the ones that failed.

People aren't turning to alternative media because they’re lazy or stupid, they’re doing it because the establishment, including the one you supported, broke its contract with the public. That frustration didn't come out of nowhere. You helped create it. Maybe sit with that before lecturing everyone else about intelligence or responsibility.
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How the fuck did I support anything for decades? Im 47 years old and some version of Tea Party/MAGA furor has dominated half my life politically. I was in the teeth of those things that you rail about breaking all this trust. Yet somehow despite my distrust I didn't turn to being an absolute idiot who ignores objective truth. I also do substantially more to help lift young people up than probably 95% of Americans. I mentor, I train, I guide...all for free. What I don't do is coddle.

You love to lecture for someone who hates it in return. Maybe you need to accept that a shit-ton of young folks aren't doing one good goddamned thing to try to help themselves and in the process are shitting all over those of us extending a helping hand.

And yes, what I've seen of alternative media is both lazy and stupid. I tried this Theo Von for like 30 seconds when someone posted him with Vance. Its literally unbearable.

Im sick to death of being told Im somehow the problem when my generation has never had one ounce of political power in this country and we've born the biggest weight of all of this shitshow. We lost everything we started with when the economy collapsed in 2008. We now have to take care of parents who didn't plan well enough for themselves or relied too much on those institutions you seem to think we love. And now, apparently the movement toward abject stupidity in our politics and social world is apparently also our fault.
 
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Paine said:
Keep your eyes on the prize. Theo Von isn’t the problem, he's the symptom. The real answer isn’t scapegoating him, it’s confronting the broader media ecosystem and building a culture that meets people where they are, both digitally and materially.

Democrats need a strategy rooted in narrative and infrastructure not reactionary finger-pointing.

Bernie going on Theo Von’s podcast proves the point. He didn’t scold or moralize. He showed up, talked like a human being, and reached millions of people, many of whom have never felt spoken to by mainstream politics. And it worked. The clip of Bernie explaining class politics to Von’s audience went viral. People respected it. That’s a roadmap, not a fluke.

This is what liberals still refuse to understand. The way to counter right-wing influence in the Rogansphere isn’t to sneer at it, it’s to compete in it.

Instead, they blame the platform and the audience. They hand-wave away real alienation and insecurity among young working-class men as if it's just a pipeline to fascism, but it’s not. It’s a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. If the left doesn’t fill it with solidarity, community, and material hope, the right will fill it with resentment and fantasy.
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Theo Von is still a total dipshit.
 
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