Self-Deprecation, Humble-Bragging, and Persona

In Part 2, Matt and Chris return to Blindboy, now broadcasting from a solar-powered podcast and therefore morally unimpeachable. The darkness, however, remains. Having established in Part 1 that the global elite are a vampiric class of depraved blackmailers who traffic children and delight in cruelty, in Part 2, Blindboy offers us some welcome relief in the form of answering the question of what it looks like to be one of the good ones. You may be surprised to learn that it involves a missing dressing room, muddy socks, and a loyalty to small-time promoters that some might call heroic.

The episode also traces an ambitious historical arc: from street gangs in 1800s Limerick to the New York underworld, Meyer Lansky, Roy Cohn, CIA brothels and LSD interrogation programmes, and eventually to Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. The connecting thread is a continuous tradition of sexual blackmail passed from master to apprentice that has, apparently, been quietly guiding Western (criminal) civilisation for the better part of two centuries.

Matt and Chris sift through the historical material, examine the leaps required to keep the chain intact, and consider whether a conspiracy hypothesis that explains quite so much, quite so neatly, might deserve a small dose of skepticism. As you might anticipate, the episode features discussions of many of our old friends, including strategic disclaimers, moral grandstanding, and layered preemptive defences. Finally, get ready to learn who the real villain is, when the mask is finally removed.... spoiler: it's neoliberal capitalism. A revelation that some listeners may have suspected from the very beginning.

Links

• Blindboy: A Deep Dive into Jeffrey Epstein
• The Rest is Classified: Was Epstein a Russian Spy?
• Epstein Files Declassified: Mossad, Israel, and Ghislaine Maxwell
• Epstein Files Declassified: Was he a Spy?
• The Saville Inquiry Report on Bloody Sunday (2010)
• BBC Panorama reporting on the British Army’s Military Reaction Force (MRF)
• Popular Mechanics article on Operation Midnight Climax
• US Senate Church Committee report on MK-Ultra and CIA covert experimentation and the archived report
• NY Times: What Donald Trump Learned From Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand Man
• A less conspiratorial but more sympathetic perspective on Epstein's influence by Taylor Lorenz and Ryan Broderick
• An in-depth critical review of Whitney Webb's book (by an academic who might be a little conspiracy-prone themselves)
• Webb, W. A. (2022). One Nation Under Blackmail-Vol. 1: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, VOL. 1. Trine Day