The disaster of credibility confronted by Western elites as they attempt to fail to patch over the bursting abscess that’s the Epstein recordsdata launch heralds one thing far more profound: potential systemic collapse.
I’ve been grappling with these points for a bit, most not too long ago final week in my put up “The Masks of Unreality Slipping?”
The Disorienting Affect of Huge Doc Dumps
Like a lot of you, I’ve been overwhelmed trying to course of the latest Jeffrey Epstein doc dump.
A private cognitive disaster of credibility if you’ll.
I got here throughout a proof for why my usually trusty yellow waders weren’t preserving the filth off my toes from a considerably unlikely supply, the Pop Apologists podcast.
The present, hosted by sisters Lauren and Chanler, shouldn’t be usually the kind of content material I have interaction with.
However their dialogue of the psychic trauma engendered by the most recent Epstein recordsdata pointed me to a Threads account with an fascinating perception.
FWIW, that is the primary time I’ve seen any content material of curiosity on Threads.
From Daphne Delvaux, Esq.,Trial Legal professional aka The Mama Legal professional:
I’ll paste another key elements of Delvaux’s argument as straight textual content because the Threads embeds are so cumbersome:
Courts perceive that when the mind is flooded with horror, your system will get hijacked by the primal mind. You go into hypervigilance, rage, obsession, and collapse. We now have a reputation for this: reptile idea.
Reptile idea is a trial technique constructed on this premise: when you can bypass the cognitive mind and activate the primitive survival mind (the oldest/reptile a part of the mind), you may management outcomes with out ever persuading on information or regulation. This technique shouldn’t be allowed at trial.
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The onus is positioned totally on the reader to make sense of chaos. There are random redactions that pressure the mind into fixed guesswork. It’s important to deduce, infer, fill in blanks. This retains the thoughts spinning, looking out, looping.You might have assumed they’re sloppy. They aren’t. It is a identified technique.
Probably the most ruthless company protection legal professionals battle circumstances this precise means. Disorganized doc drops, and limitless information with no roadmap. Each high-volume but in addition evasive. It’s on the identical time an excessive amount of data, but in addition omits probably the most essential data.
The technique has two predictable outcomes.
1) You develop into consumed. You deep dive. You push to get extra data. You cease sleeping. It takes over your life. Your focus narrows till there may be nothing else. Progressively, they frack all your life pressure. They hold you locked in an limitless power loop of their sick thoughts video games. You develop into certainly one of their victims.
2) You disengage fully. You determine it’s an excessive amount of. Too complicated. Too overwhelming. You stroll away. It implodes out of your exhaustion.
Both means, they win.
Whereas Delvaux could also be right that POTUS Trump’s Legal professional Basic Pam Bondi is using a identified trial lawyer technique — one which aligns completely with Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” tactic for overwhelming the company media.
Psyoper Delude Thyself
Sadly for Bondi and Group Trump, the POTUS infamously will get most of his data from cable information.
Thus when Bondi floods the media zone and glitches the MSM, she is additional disorienting her boss.
And, as Michael Tomasky identified at The New Republic, the extra tightly bubbles are sealed shut, the larger they get, and the larger they get, the louder they burst:
On a private stage, Donald Trump is changing into increasingly unhinged. He rambles, he stumbles, he fumbles. We don’t know whether or not he truly pooped himself in that one much-discussed episode within the Oval Workplace. However the truth that it has been mentioned as one thing which may have occurred is dangerous sufficient. And even when he retains full management of these evacuations, it’s those popping out of his mind and mouth that stay extra regarding.
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Politically, the bubble during which he lives is changing into additional and additional faraway from actuality. His penchant for self-aggrandization, all the time prodigious, has these days reached the purpose of insane self-parody.
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He has come to imagine that the American folks truly need what Immigration and Customs Enforcement is doing the place it’s been unleashed. They don’t. He has created for himself a world during which he by no means hears a unfavorable phrase about himself. This isn’t a plea for him and his folks to get up—they received’t, and I’m nicely previous hoping they may. It’s reasonably an remark that this too is yet another Trumpian assault on democracy. He thinks himself answerable solely to those that adore him and suppose he can do no unsuitable—in different phrases, to individuals who require of him no solutions in any respect. The remainder of the nation—that’s, nearly all of the nation—doesn’t exist.
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He’s after all making ready to steal the midterms. Pundits and speaking heads on cable information ought to dispense with even questioning whether or not he’ll. In fact he’ll strive. And if he can’t pull it off, he and the GOP will problem each consequence they presumably can in ways in which you and I can’t even think about.So right here we’re. Mentally deteriorating, unpopular, incompetent, corrupt, out of contact; and but, in—for now—unshakably agency management of energy, fully past any democratic accountability. And when that accountability second is available in November, he’ll blatantly do no matter he can to erase and reverse it. So this 12 months goes to be far worse than final, a minimum of for some time.
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However he can’t shut out actuality eternally. Nobody can. And the longer he manages to take action, the extra thunderous and unequivocal would be the comeuppance. The Trump bubble will burst, and it’ll be just like the Pink Sea in The Ten Commandments, crashing down on Pharoah’s head.
Hopeful phrases from Tomasky, who ends by advising “endurance and rage” which is so ineffective as to just about smash the entire thing, however let’s hold shifting.
Reps. Massie and Khanna Don’t Cease
The bipartisan co-sponsors of the Jeffrey Epstein Transparency Act that triggered all these Epstein doc dumps are calling BS on the DOJ’s redactions and naming names. Per The Guardian:
The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna mentioned on Tuesday that he and his Republican colleague Thomas Massie had pressured the justice division to reveal the “hidden” names of six rich males they are saying are “doubtless incriminated” by their inclusion within the so-called Jeffrey Epstein recordsdata.
In a put up on X at lunchtime, Khanna, of California, named the six as Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, Nicola Caputo, Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem and Leslie Wexner.
Wexner is the billionaire founding father of Victoria’s Secret. His intensive ties to Epstein – the late convicted intercourse offender and disgraced financier – had been uncovered in a prolonged New York Occasions investigation in November.
Bin Sulayem is a billionaire businessman and actual property developer from Dubai – and brother of Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the pinnacle of FIA, the physique that governs the world’s motorsport championships, together with the celebrated Method One collection. Electronic mail exchanges between Bin Sulayem and Epstein have been beforehand reported.
The opposite 4 males named stay mysterious, for now.
Khanna and Massie refusing to play together with the DOJ’s half-measures are simply certainly one of many issues the flood the zone technique is working into.
Flooding the Zone Doesn’t Work on Information Swarmers
One downside with Bannon’s flood the zone with shit tactic is that solely the company media is frozen in place by the explosions of filth, the swarms of social media feed on it like dung beetles. Per Politico:
…we’re witnessing this by means of the prism of a wholly new phenomenon — an internationally crowdsourced scandal, unfolding in actual time throughout your social media feed. In lots of circumstances, citizen journalists have been almost as succesful as skilled journalists and investigators at discovering insightful paperwork inside the hundreds of thousands of DOJ recordsdata and bringing them to the fore.
Parlor video games: Washington being what it’s, the common entry to uncooked investigative information has given rise to a different new fad. Individuals are additionally scouring the Epstein recordsdata for references to their bosses, their company rivals, their political enemies — even their very own households. Gossip about a number of the highest-profile revelations had been swirling in D.C. circles for days upfront, uncovered by the associates of these concerned. Loads of individuals are looking not for prison conduct, however for the intrigue.
“We’re all looking out the recordsdata: for colleagues, rivals, shoppers,” one well-connected PR operative tells POLITICO’s Daniel Lippman. “It’s stunning to see what a number of the strongest folks on the planet say to one another in non-public — and it’s additionally stunning what number of people we all know are talked about in some capability, even fully innocuously.”
Politico then factors to an necessary discover within the Epstein recordsdata by The Miami Herald’s Julie Brown (who isn’t consultant of the MSM, she’s a throwback to the Watergate period of reporting) about Trump and Epstein.
Politico concludes that Brown’s piece “finally appears to corroborate Trump’s longstanding insistence that he had fallen out with Epstein lengthy earlier than any police inquiry, and minimize all ties. It’s necessary to notice that the figures who’ve thus far been broken by this newest tranche of paperwork are those that selected to keep up hyperlinks with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, like Peter Mandelson, Britain’s now-former ambassador to Washington.”
Which brings us to our subsequent part, how are the Europeans reacting to the most recent doc dump splashing throughout the Atlantic and getting throughout them?
European Leaders Frozen in Place
The redoubtable Simplicius addresses the European failure to reply to the present disaster of confidence and goes on to elucidate why they will’t.
readers also needs to see Yves’ piece on “The European Veal Pen” to raised perceive their impotence.
After summing up the varied troubles of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour authorities brought on by the most recent Epstein launch and Starmer’s refusal to resign, Simplicius will get to his level:
Whether or not Starmer truly survives or not is immaterial: the actual fact stays that Europe is in a deep disaster of credibility, now not retaining even a picayune’s price of ethical authority over the remainder of the world. However the whacky factor is that these Western governments haven’t any actual options to their issues as a result of the problems are so completely structural and elementary in nature, that merely the easy act of admitting to their root causes would signify the overall collapse of every little thing the Western globalist order has constructed up during the last a long time.
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European international locations are trapped on this zugzwang of inextricable issues that may solely be “patched” over as a result of, as acknowledged earlier, really fixing them on the first-principle stage would require peering into uncomfortable closets the place the elites have stashed their secrets and techniques.
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One other instance is the present censorship firestorm (Hyperlink mine, not Simplicius’, Nat): as a substitute of addressing the precise points that terrify these elites, bringing them out into the open and having an actual trustworthy dialogue about them on the societal stage, the elites desire the short-term “hotfix” of stamping out any dissent or dialogue of ‘delicate subjects’ with more and more crude and heavy-handed techniques. They imagine it will make the problems go away, however as a substitute it engenders huge social resentment, discontent, and mistrust of all of the organs of energy, from media to authorities and every little thing in between. However after all, if these subjects had been allowed to be actually and sensibly mentioned within the ‘public sq.’, it could unravel all the home of playing cards, making it an actual no-win scenario for the controllers in cost.
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European elites haven’t any means out of their sunk-cost fallacy entice: to show again could be to confess to sins so monstrous they’ve squandered the livelihood of all the European civilization; for these criminals, there isn’t a different means however ahead. Double down and hope your opponents occur to interrupt earlier than you do.
The Standing Quo Doesn’t Should Outlast Actuality, It Simply Has to Outlast Us
That final sentence brings to thoughts Aurelian’s abstract of the destiny of the late 2010s gilets jaunes motion in France:
…the truth was that the GJ had been quite a few sufficient and decided sufficient that they may even have shaken the federal government to its foundations if they’d been sufficiently organised. On a minimum of one event in December 2018, there have been sufficient of them in central Paris to have laid siege to the Elysée Palace, and certainly there was a helicopter on standby to take Macron to security. However the GJ had been from the sticks, and few of them had a lot concept of the geography of Paris, in order that they wandered round looking for the place Macron lived. Because it was, the federal government realised that it solely needed to hold on and make a couple of token concessions, and ultimately the protests would cease, which they did.
If the rulers of the West are unwilling or unable to alter in response to their disaster of credibility and the individuals are too disorganized to pressure them, the place does that go away us?
Caught within the Spodocene?
I got here throughout this translation of Hakan Illatikdi’s “The Spodocene: inhabiting the ruins of progress” (Italian authentic) at GeoPolitiQ and located it simply too on the nostril:
In thermodynamics, a system doesn’t essentially collapse when its power is exhausted. First, it goes by means of a extra disturbing section: the purpose previous the change of state. It’s the second when matter is formally the identical, however now not behaves as earlier than. The temperature rises, stress builds up, molecules agitate with out discovering a brand new steady type. Nothing appears to have modified, and but every little thing is about to alter.
Our period is strictly there.
The Spodocene shouldn’t be but the subsequent state. It’s the antechamber. The system continues to operate, nevertheless it does so erratically, inefficiently and more and more violently towards itself. The power that circulates now not produces order, however friction. The mechanisms that when assured stability — markets, establishments, narratives of progress — proceed to function, however have misplaced their capability to construction the entire. The consequence shouldn’t be quick collapse, however extended instability: a social, political and subjective warming that heralds an inevitable transition.
The change of state is neither an ethical choice nor a voluntary act. It happens when a essential threshold is reached. The commonest mistake is to confuse this section with a correctable anomaly. The most expensive mistake is to attempt to pressure the previous type when the situations that made it potential now not exist.
That is what defines our current. The elites proceed to behave as if it had been sufficient to control the temperature, redistribute pressures or modify variables to get better the earlier steadiness. However that steadiness is now not accessible. The system shouldn’t be disordered: it’s saturated. It doesn’t want corrections, however transformation.
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We’re nonetheless within the second earlier than. The world has not modified state, however it may now not return to its earlier one. This interval — unstable, uncomfortable, fraught with pressure — is the one actual house for dispute. The Spodocene shouldn’t be the tip of historical past: it’s the second when historical past returns to being open, not due to the promise of progress, however due to the exhaustion of all of the illusions that sustained it.
The synchronicities had been piling up in my inbox yesterday morning as I labored on this piece as a result of I had no sooner plugged within the above, than the most recent from Nefarious Russians arrived in my electronic mail.
Is This What the Late Stage Soviet Expertise Was Like?
Evgenia, born within the former USSR simply because it collapsed writes ““>The Disappearance of BarbariansHow the Soviet Union psyoped itself out of existence.”
Now, although, having develop into an American and dwelling by means of the decline of the American Empire in its very centre — New York — I do surprise if that is the way it felt to be in Moscow throughout late Perestroika. An enormous a part of America’s intelligentsia appears to be increasingly disillusioned with the American delusion, in American Exceptionalism. In the meantime, the opposite a part of America is doubling down on it and becoming a member of quasi-fascist “previous guard” forces which might be promising to maintain the parable sturdy as ever…
As I’ve been writing and saying for some time, this American unraveling feels vaguely acquainted. I used to be born in the course of the unraveling of one other mythic empire and grew up in its postmortem, a world that was like Fellini’s (and Petronius’s) Satyricon — a proto-Christian world the place there was no religion and the place fundamental instincts and base pursuits reigned in society, or what was left of it.
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The Soviet elite truly believed American propaganda concerning the Soviet Union. And this elite themselves demonized the Soviet Union into extinction. The Voice of America and Radio Free Liberty had been, ultimately, very profitable in finishing up their mission: to destabilize and topple the Soviet Union from inside, regardless of all of the censorship and Iron Curtain protections the Soviet Union put up in protection. In actual fact, this try to wall itself off from the West contributed to its demise, since nobody might actually expertise the West because it was and relied on an idealized image of the West they’d of their heads — an image drawn, largely by American propaganda and Hollywood.
Sadly for Western intelligentsia, there isn’t a nice energy ideological rival to admire and emulate the way in which the Soviets admired the West, leaving us caught within the Spodocene.
I’m conscious that some readers will likely be screaming “What about China?” to themselves, however I’ll have to save lots of that for an additional time. Suffice it to say few within the West are even significantly trying to grasp China, a lot much less admiring or emulating Earth’s longest-running civilization because it rises once more.
However we will a minimum of learn how we’re seen by Chinese language-born English-language writer Yiyun Li:
I cried each morning on the way in which to nursery college, however few four-year-olds would know articulate their terror and distress. There have been different adults on the college, however none of them appeared to seek out the trainer’s follow unacceptable (and maybe the dad and mom, had they identified, wouldn’t have accomplished both). All of them will need to have benefited from the trainer’s regime – we had been obedient, simply manageable.
Dwelling in at the moment’s America jogs my memory of that nursery college. The reigning tyranny; the lads who brutalise the harmless – just like the boy with the hammer – as a result of they will; the individuals who, like my mom, say this could’t be true, life can’t be that horrible; if dangerous issues occur, you’re the downside; don’t provoke; sustain the hope; issues will likely be higher – by the midterms, in 4 years, some day.
However let’s shut with two realities which will insist on breaking by means of Trump’s info-bubble and convey and finish to the Spodocene or what I’ve been calling the “Interregnum of Unreality.”
I’m referring to battle and economics.
Scylla and/or Charybdis?
First up, The Wall Avenue Journal has elected to tell its readers about what Julien Garran is looking “The Greatest Capital Misallocation in Historical past.”
From the WSJ’s piece “Large Tech’s AI Push Is Costing a Lot Extra Than the Moon Touchdown”, I’ll let the next image function a number of thousand phrases:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) February 10, 2026
As for battle, I’ll quote William Schryver’s newest (and refer readers to Yves’ piece from Monday):
…opposite to the perceptions of most People and others world wide, making battle towards Iran in its personal yard right here in 2026 is all however sure to provide disastrous outcomes for each the US and Israel — and has pronounced potential to spark a regional battle, spiral uncontrolled, and finally attract Russia, China, and North Korea.
In any case, it should be understood that, in firmly rejecting US/Israel calls for, Iran is successfully dictating phrases — and this strongly confirms what many people have argued since final summer time: Iran was the clear winner of the 12-Day Conflict. Israel is aware of it, the US is aware of it, and Iran is aware of it.
If the reviews above are kind of correct, then it’s undeniably evident that Washington is angling for an exit from this march to insanity.
However, provided that the Iranians are actually dictating the phrases of that exit and won’t conform to a reprise of the orchestrated Operation Midnight Hammer, and its fictitious B-2 bunker-busting strike, and given the huge focus of American navy energy within the area, and given the massive funding in menacing bravado Trump has already made on this ill-conceived journey, battle could now be unavoidable.
As Dean Wormer warned the Freshman from Animal Home, “fats, drunk, and silly is not any strategy to undergo life,” I hope somebody is warning Donald Trump {that a} market crash and a dropping battle on Iran is not any strategy to undergo a second time period.
However everyone knows he received’t hear the warning over the din of cable information.
