While it is absolutely true what you’re saying about the miraculous post-retirement regenerative power of vestigial Republican spines, strangely enough Massie’s on the right side of Epstein and has been all along.

Is it abnormal for Thomas Massie to speak up?

Not on Epstein. I don’t know anything about Massie’s other voting history, but on Epstein the orange chancre has threatened him directly more than once, and he has never backed down. Without Massie and the other Rs who crossed the aisle, EFTA would not have passed.

Dude. Piefed.world is also a .world account, or hadn’t you noticed?

Also, seems like you have stopped trying to defend the indefensible, which is a plus. But go ahead, quote another fascist-lite to me in defense of your position.

Says the month old account full of brief low-effort posts insisting that any resistance will fail. You know, like the one I just called you out on.

It’s not my comprehension at fault here, kid. It’s your agenda. I don’t want fascism to succeed in my country. You want people to feel too discouraged to even think about resisting. And I’m here to put a cold boot in that wherever I see it.

Don’t need no old quote for that. And George Bernard Shaw was a questionable source to start with.

Shaw was a poseur and a puritan; he was similarly a bourgeois and an antibourgeois writer, working for Hearst and posterity; his didacticism is entertaining and his pranks are purposeful; he supports socialism and is tempted by fascism.

—Leonard Feinberg, The Satirist (2006)

As I said, try harder.

It’s not going to fail.

Your own future-looking statement; 100% predictive.

*“The power of accurate observation . . .”

Your comeback, lol.

“‘Accurate observation’ is only applicable to the present and past. Try harder when borrowing false intellectual authentication from old quotes.”

~ Me, just now

You’re in the wrong thread. I am talking about the Epstein files coverup, as are most of the other fine people here.

You clearly want to talk about something, anything else.

Try harder, because you’re way off topic. You can refer to the post title if you’re confused about where you are.

Speaking for myself, I intend to show up as if success is the only possibility, and I suggest the same to any American.

It’s far too early to guess the outcome one way or another, and anyone who claims otherwise is a fool, whether they belong to a thinktank or a sports bar.

But assuming failure is a lazy, shitty place from which to encourage people, including myself, to do their best to stop it.

Constitutionally, elections are governed by the states. He can’t just stop elections. The federal executive literally has zero power over them, and that is by design.

The country’s election system is highly decentralized. While the U.S. Constitution does set parameters for the election of federal officials, state law, not federal, regulates most aspects of elections in the U.S., including primary elections, the eligibility of voters (beyond the basic constitutional definition), the method of choosing presidential electors, as well as the running of state and local elections. All elections—federal, state, and local—are administered by the individual states, with many aspects of the system’s operations delegated to the county or local level.

But what he could do, and what I think he was or is planning on doing, is to try to create conditions to dissuade states from holding elections, like inciting disorder with ICE, as he tried in Minnesota, to then use as an excuse to invoke martial law. A state could then decide, based on its own constitution, what to do in that situation, including postponing to some future date “to be determined” later.

Fortunately, public outrage is now such that I think there will be such a voter turnout that some of what he tried in 2020 – calling state election officials and ordering them to “find him votes” like he did Raffensperger in Georgia – is dead in the water.

Or to put it another way, if we keep protesting and showing up like we did in January, I don’t think anyone at the state or local level is going to have the courage to “find” him jack shit, because they know they’ll be facing a mob if they do.

Excellent post. Thank you for taking the time.

I can only add that if we keep on showing up to resist, to make our peaceful non-consent loud and obvious like we did on the last Friday in January, the less support any of this planned and possible election fuckery will have. The people who desperately want to get or keep power do not want to actually have to take on the public hate of the entire country, like ICE has. But it’s up to us.

Thanks for reassuring us there’s no point to electing Democrats to stop the GOP agenda or politicians.

Funny how you don’t blame the GOP for the GOP agenda. You can take that same “look anywhere else but at the guilty” deflection horseshit to someone else.

Lol, no. He wasn’t even president when Epstein was alive, and what got Epstein busted was happening at the STATE level.

I’m very sure

That’s just you, and you’re confidently incorrect.

State investigators do NOT run their major strategic decisions by the federal.

Do you . . . do you really think that county attorneys or even state AGs are supposed to run their major strategic decisions past the US president? Oh, yeah. To quote The Big Lebowski, they’ll get right on that, lol.

And if they weren’t that’s even more of a failure.

No, that’s the structure working the way it’s supposed to work. It’s your personal agenda that is the failure here.

I don’t know what fantasy country you’re talking about where all this should have happened, but it’s not the US.

No one writing in good faith works as hard as you are trying to deflect blame from those actually guilty. Blocking you now, because frankly I never want to read another word you have to say.

I did indeed misunderstand you. And as someone who is 100% on the side of the survivors, because there is history here – a specific user repeatedly pointing to an out-of-office president for what he could not legally have done anyway, instead of ever lifting a finger to accuse those actually doing the coverup even now, today – I see that I massively overreacted to your own statement.

I usually reply with more attention, but honestly I just got tired of it and snapped. My apologies. Your calm explanation is appreciated. Thank you.

leaking documents to stop him would violate norms.

You have to have direct access to documents to leak them. Not only is a president separated from access to the products of a criminal investigation by the separation of powers at the federal level, in Epstein’s case he was also separated by the division between federal and state. And in Biden’s case, he was separated from that kind of meddling by his own respect for the constitution, which forbids it unequivocally.

Also, investigators who are genuinely working to bring justice do not use their investigations as political footballs, they use them to bring justice to the accused.

You should really just make up your mind: do you want pedos busted, or protected? Because what you are suggesting, “leaking documents” to stop the president, does not help honest investigators get pedos into jail. It stops them cold when defense lawyers bring that sort of prosecutorial misconduct to the judge.

But hey, keep pointing your finger at everyone but those actually guilty. That should work really well to keep billionaire pedos out of prison. After all, it has so far.

No, he really doesn’t. What he has is a willful and profound ignorance of the separations of US government, our constitution, and how until now, no president took it upon himself to throw out the constitutional divisions of government and try to run all three branches, including the judicial, which includes criminal investigation and prosecution at the federal level. Federal, not state.

Biden literally had nothing to do with any of it, except being president at the time.

Why are you so insistent on blaming Biden, the president of the country, for not interfering in state level investigations?

Why are you so intent on looking away from those who were and are actually guilty of stalling investigations and using their positions to protect pedophiles?

Why are you both working so hard to point fingers anywhere except at those who actually worked to cover these crimes and keep them covered, and still are?

You know, it almost seems like you aren’t really interested nearly as much in bringing the real perps to justice as you are in playing a game of squirrel to take the blame off of those who are STILL in power and STILL working to cover and defend these crimes.

So why didn’t all these investigations lead to any indictments in four years?

You’re so intent on it all being Biden’s personal fault that you are completely ignoring those who are actually guilty. Who needs “sugarcoating” when the truth alone suffices? It had nothing to do with Biden. There’s more than enough guilt to go around.

Did you even look up Pam Bondi, or Alexander Acosta? I gave you their names. What about Marie Villefana or Barry Krischer? Do you know who they are? They were the ones who were actually stalling investigations, in part by keeping them open to freeze all the evidence, duh. You act like you have no idea how any of this works – except Biden, and he’s absolutely the only person involved!

There’s nothing like the stink of willful ignorance to start a day. It’s not a president’s job to start, stop, or run criminal investigations. The US Constitution is very clear on this, even if you are not. The executive and judicial are two entirely different branches of government, and presidents until now did NOT interfere in that process. If needed they called on the DoJ to do it, and went through the courts, because running the judicial is not a president’s job.

Except Biden! Biden alone is guilty! Biden does everything and nothing, everywhere and at all times, and never! He’s like Schroedinger’s Satan to you, lol.

That’s kinda sorta what the chief of police in Palm Beach, Michael Reiter, did when he realized he was getting stonewalled by the county.

First, as was his job, Reiter took the case to the Palm Beach County State Attorney, Barry Krischer, who agreed Epstein would be a great case to prosecute – then suddenly got cold feet and refused to proceed. When Reiter asked Krischer to remove himself from the case and Krischer didn’t, Reiter went over his head and took it to the FBI. That’s when Alexander Acosta (Krischer’s counterpart at the federal level) stepped in to shut it down.

I don’t think people really understand what Reiter was risking to do that, and also later to help the victims with their own cases. Reiter has, of course, since retired.

I’m not a big fan of cops in general but Reiter and the two or three detectives he kept working on this, in spite of the overwhelming political pushback and even the moles in his own office, are absolute heroes.

The investigations were open throughout Biden’s term: legally Biden could not release them. Trump closed them himself, probably thinking he could keep them hidden anyway, until some congresspeople with spine crossed the aisle to make sure he couldn’t.

So if you wanna get pissed off at someone, remember that Epstein remained a repeat, habitual sexual offender against children after his sentence ended. He never stopped offending. He also never stopped visiting his Florida home in Palm Beach.

Guess who was Florida AG from 2011 to 2019 and COULD have done something about him, whose actual job it was to do something about him, but did not? Pam Bondi. Where is your ire for her?

Or for Alexander Acosta, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida that worked hand in hand with Alan Dershowitz and the rest of Epstein’s attorney’s to boil all his crimes down into one offense and give immunity to his unnamed co-conspirators? How has he not made it onto your shit list?

These are not secrets. These people are not hidden. Their roles in keeping Epstein out of jail are well known, and there are others too. But you blame Biden? The ONE guy who legally could not release the files without closing all the related investigations?

I will never understand people who claim to be righteously angry at the exact individuals who had nothing to do with what they’re angry about. If it’s worth expending the energy of rage on, it’s worth learning the bare facts of who is actually responsible.

EDITED to add: The survivors are now blaming Pam Bondi BY NAME as someone who is continuing to keep the truth from coming out, a high-level individual in government with both access and power who is actively working to keep this evidence from coming forward. Right now. Today.

Or to put it another way, they’re not blaming a guy who isn’t even president anymore; they’re blaming the primary person suppressing the truth TODAY, who has set her entire agency with fulfilling the same task.

Which begs the obvious question: Why aren’t YOU doing the same?

Yeah, that’s the point. MAGA loyalists are mediocre lawyers at best, and without exception they end up costing the regime far more than they win.

For example, when the actual Virginia AG quit rather than prosecute James Comey and Letitia James as political retribution, the replacement was so bad that the situation ended up getting both cases thrown out and the replacement MAGA loyalist too. It was a total fail for the regime.

So more power to these guys, I say. I can’t think of a better way for these prosecutors to shoot the regime in the foot than to walk out and take their expertise with them. The replacement hacks in general do not win, and just the walkout alone will likely stymie anything else the regime wants to do with it, like investigate Renee Good’s wife.

How can you possibly claim it was “defeated” when the whole thing was individual women (and the occasional man) rising up and saying, “This happened to me too” and simply refusing to remain silent?

On the contrary, for everyone who lent their own voice to it, as well as for those who used it as the reason and means by which to effect whatever changes they personally could, it was a resounding success.

You seem to have #MeToo, a grassroots ad hoc worldwide movement without structure or leadership, confused with the US government and/or justice system. Think that over for a hot minute, lol.

Yeah, yeah, no shit. But read further down in the article and you get this:

If there were law-enforcement agencies particularly ill-suited to anonymity, it would be Customs and Border Protection and the Border Patrol. From 2005 to 2024, nearly 5,000 CBP and Border Patrol officers were arrested, according to the journalist Garrett Graff, who testified about his findings to an accountability commission set up by the governor of Illinois. Information on the multitude of corruption-related charges faced by agents can be found on the CBP’s own website. “The crime rate of CBP agents and offices was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States,” Graff writes. Statistically speaking, “worst of the worst” seems to describe CBP and the Border Patrol as law-enforcement agencies better than it does the people they’re rounding up. (emphases mine)

To me, that’s the real story, right up there with and equivalent to what they’re doing at work.

The regime HAS to hire sociopaths to inspire fear and terror on the streets because no one else will do it, and even then some are starting to crash out. Applicants are already well aware there is neither honor nor glory in what they’re signing up for (that’s for the rubes) but it turns out that being called out to your own face daily, by entire crowds that never stop, in the worst language people can find, and finding yourself universally hated by everyone but your peers sucks the joy out of it too. You can’t even do it without getting swarmed and filmed now, much less as secretly as you’d like: it’s hard to savor that brutality when all those citizens are filming you from fifteen different angles.

So I’m not at all surprised to see stories coming out of individual ICE agents working under the influence, drunk driving, passed out in their vehicle covered in puke, or involved in theft and sexual assault, because they are FAILING. And not only are they failing, they are HATED. They’re not heroes, they’re not winning, they’re not even meeting their quotas. It’s inevitable that when all that mutual pseudo-military back-slapping bro-cheering togetherness ends and they end up in their hotel rooms alone some will be leaning hard into their preferred maladaptive coping behaviors, and that even the most effective of those will now be failing them.

Or to put it another way, these are brutal fucks who are hired because they get joy out of thuggery: take that away like the public has, surrounding them with cameras and calling them names and pointing out their exceptional incompetence in everything they touch, they’re just going to bust out in other ways.

In fact, I’d lay money on what we’ve actually seen of individual ICE sociopathy being the least of it, and that the reality and scale of ICE off-hours criminality is a hell of a lot worse than that. I’d also bet that at least part of that very large DHS budget has is dedicated to keeping as much evidence of ICE personal crime out of public sight as possible, by any means.

Not pics but a smoking fart. From January 29:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_6kGluvINg

There’s a small but audible fart around :33, and what some maintain is a squelchy sound around :44, but pay attention to the faces and positions of the people behind him, esp Ms. Green Jacket and Bobby Brainworm, and then the sudden immediacy with which the reporters are herded out. “Thank you! Thank you everyone! Thank you!” But keep your eyes on the two behind him: Bobby’s making some remark to her about it and she appears to want to use her folder to fan the air but is stopping herself until the reporters are out.

Also, enjoy the comments, lol.