Filthy Rich – The Jeffrey Epstein Story

By comparison to the history-making events of 2020, the sordid saga of shadowy, uber-rich hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein, whose sex-trafficking trial temporarily dominated the news cycle last year, now seems foggily distant and even insignificant. His suspicious suicide while in custody spawned conspiracy theories and internet memes, and then – just as suspiciously – any highly-anticipated exposés of the rich and powerful who might have cavorted with underage girls on Epstein’s infamous “Orgy Island” disappeared into a black hole, and the news media went back to hating President Trump.

Now Netflix has premiered a four-part documentary series titled Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, which raised expectations again that the mystery man and his web of powerful acquaintances would be dragged into the cleansing light of day. Based on the 2016 book Filthy Rich: The Billionaire’s Sex Scandal – The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein by bestselling novelist James Patterson (journalists John Connolly and Tim Malloy are credited as authors as well), the series instead just drags viewers through the repellent Epstein’s mucky lifestyle but unfortunately offers no new revelations or insights into the man or any of his hedonistic friends in high places.

I was primarily curious to see how the documentary would handle former President Bill Clinton’s role in the controversy, partly because Epstein buddy Clinton is conspicuously absent from the series trailer (see below), and partly because author Patterson, who appears in the documentary himself, has at least a professional relationship with Clinton; they have collaborated on two thriller novels. Hillary’s infamously predatory husband is indeed presented in the documentary as being a friend of Epstein and as having flown on his private jet over two dozen times, but all this was all common knowledge before the Netflix series.

A former Epstein employee does claim in the film that he saw Clinton on his boss’ private island, and one of Epstein’s girls affirms that Bill was there but “I never saw him doing anything improper.” Clinton spokesperson Angel Urena has issued a blanket denial of any insinuation that Bill ever participated in Epstein’s pedophiliac shenanigans or even visited any of Epstein’s residences: “This was a lie the first time it was told, and it isn’t true today, no matter how many times it’s repeated.” Hillary unsurprisingly is neither seen nor heard from in the series. That’s as far as the series delves into the Epstein-Clinton connection.

Filthy Rich spends more time covering disgraced British Prince Andrew’s involvement, including showing footage of his epic fail of a BBC interview in which he claimed that he couldn’t possibly be the “profusely sweating” man described by one of Epstein’s girls because he was suffering from a medical condition at that time that didn’t allow him to sweat. He also claimed that he had no recollection of that same girl, whom he was photographed hugging on Epstein’s island. An employee at the island also asserts in the documentary that in 2004 he saw the Prince getting frisky in a pool there with the same girl, who was topless. This new salacious detail, however, is little more than an extra nail in the coffin of Andrew’s public life.

Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

Before there was Brett Kavanaugh, there was Clarence Thomas. Many who watched or participated in the grotesque circus that was the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings no doubt were unaware of, or had forgotten, the ugly spectacle that was Thomas’ confirmation hearings in 1991. As a black conservative, Thomas drew (and continues to draw) the vicious wrath of racist Democrats who reserve a special enmity for minorities that dare stray from the leftist plantation. Then as now, the Democrats waged their politics of personal destruction, and then as now a good man with impeccable legal credentials was demonized by an uncorroborated allegation of sexual harassment shored up by the full force of the leftist smear machine.

A riveting new documentary revisits the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy as part of a look at the Supreme Court Justice’s amazing life journey. Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, produced by Michael Pack of Manifold Productions, aired earlier this week on PBS, of all places, and is still available here for free through June 2. Don’t miss it. The producers interviewed Thomas and his wife Virginia for over 30 hours about his life, the law, and his legacy. As the movie’s website states,

the documentary proceeds chronologically, combining Justice Thomas’ first person account with a rich array of historical archive material, period and original music, personal photos, and evocative recreations. Unscripted and without narration, the documentary takes the viewer through this complex and often painful life, dealing with race, faith, power, jurisprudence, and personal resilience.

In his rich, sonorous voice, Thomas, the second black American to serve on the Court and, at 28 years, the longest-serving Justice, tells his life story beginning with his birth in tiny Pin Point, Georgia in 1948. Descended from West African slaves and born into rock-bottom poverty, Thomas later was raised by his grandparents in Savannah. His stern grandfather, “the greatest man I have ever known,” believed firmly in hard work and even more firmly in the education he never had, the lack of which he blamed for his inability to rise above his station in life. He impressed upon his grandchildren the importance of committing themselves to school. He told Thomas and his brother that they would go every day, even when sick, and even if they were dead he would take their bodies to school for three more days “to make sure we weren’t faking.”

'Mrs. America': Phyllis Schlafly and the Battle to Stop the ERA

In November of 1983 I attended a highly-anticipated debate at San Francisco State University called “Two Views on Women” between Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative icon who had famously spearheaded the scuttling of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s, and Dierdre English, a Mother Jones editor and feminist who stood in complete opposition to everything Schlafly stood for. I was a Democrat at the time, and thus went into the debate rather mindlessly expecting to side with English. I was not in the minority; most of the two thousand or so attendees that evening were rooting for English, as might be expected considering the venue.

But even as a Democrat, I was put off by the fact that throughout the debate, English resorted to sarcasm and personal attacks instead of reasoned argument, while the unflappable Schlafly not only never took the bait, she also skillfully defended the traditional roles of mother and housewife with arguments English either wouldn’t or couldn’t refute (in retrospect, this contrast should have clued me in to a stark difference between the left and the right in general, but regrettably, my political epiphany wouldn’t happen for many more years). I remember feeling so frustrated with English’s tactics that at one point I hissed out loud, “She’s blowing it” – which earned me a nasty look from the female student and English-supporter in front of me.

This scenario similarly played out over and over again in Schlafly’s skirmishes with feminist proponents of the ERA in the previous decade. The National Review recently decried a “shoddy attack” against Schlafly, who died in 2016, in the Washington Post by NeverTrump blowhard Max Boot, who identified her as a key factor in “the origins of our current madness,” claiming she “pioneered the kind of incendiary, irrational rhetoric” that ultimately led to the ascendance of Donald Trump. But if you’ve ever seen Schlafly in the media, or watched any videos of her many TV appearances, you know that, far from employing incendiary, irrational rhetoric, she could be forceful but was unfailingly cool, calm, collected, reasoned, articulate, and never sank to ad hominem – or more precisely, ad feminam – attacks, in contrast to the kind of incendiary, irrational rhetoric regularly used by her radical opponents like Diedre English.

This comes up because the FX network and Hulu streaming service have combined in the recent release of a nine-episode series about the battle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment called Mrs. America. The show is an ensemble piece which devotes more time to the bevy of feminist characters than one might expect, considering the title and the fact that Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett is the centerpiece as Schlafly, who is depicted as an anti-heroine. Reviewers have missed no opportunity to praise Blanchett’s “complex” characterization and to demonize the real-life Schlafly. The Loud and Clear review describes Mrs. America as “the story of Second Wave Feminism in America [told] from the side of the villain.” Slant Magazine states that “Schlafly resembles Trump in her truth-flexing fearmongering,” and in another sideswipe at President Trump, a reviewer at RogerEbert.com claims that “few, if any, of her arguments are based in fact. This leads the ‘libbers’ [in the show] to write her off as a quack, dismissive of the massive power of her lies, conspiracy theories, and nightmare scenarios. (Sound familiar?).”

A World Without God

With few exceptions, the overwhelmingly secular filmmakers in Hollywood don’t present Christianity in a favorable, or even a balanced, light. Characters who are overtly Christian are almost always caricatures if not the bad guys: fanatical fundamentalists, over-the-top hypocrites, sexually perverse, outright evil, or a combination thereof. The British leftist propaganda network, the BBC, is typically just as bigoted in this respect as Hollywood, which makes its series The Frankenstein Chronicles all the more stunning as a pro-life, cautionary tale of a world without God.

The Frankenstein Chronicles is a two-season BBC series (six episodes in each) from 2015-17, available on Netflix. It stars Sean Bean, who is well-known from dozens of films and TV shows such as The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and the James Bond film Goldeneye (Bean reportedly was once considered for the role of Bond). Set in 1820’s London, the series follows Bean, looking even more grizzled than usual here, as war veteran and river detective John Marlott. He is tasked with investigating a monstrous crime: the body of a young girl has been recovered from the Thames, and Marlott learns that her corpse actually consists of the parts of eight different children, stitched together into a single body. Someone is kidnapping and murdering street urchins, then performing unholy experiments on them. But for what purpose?

The show reflects a real-life, early 19^th-century surge of interest in anatomy thanks to an increase in the importance of surgery. At this time, only the corpses of executed murderers could legally be used for dissection. But the rise of medical science and a reduction in executions meant that an underground trade in grave robbing began to flourish. The trade was conducted by so-called “resurrectionists,” who robbed graves to sell corpses for medical study. An Anatomy Act was proposed which would ensure that anyone practicing anatomy had to obtain a license from the Home Secretary. It gave physicians, surgeons, and students legal access to corpses unclaimed after death – in particular, those who had died in hospitals, prisons, and workhouses – which would end the work of the despised resurrectionists but meant that the bodies of society’s downtrodden would be denied dignity and become fodder for medical experiments.

Marlott is a working-class stiff whose soul has been ravaged by the drowning death of his young daughter and his wife’s subsequent suicide – and if you’re familiar with Sean Bean’s work, you know that there is literally no actor alive whose face more convincingly conveys a world-weariness and torturous guilt. Troubled by dreams and hallucinations in which he sees, but cannot reunite with, his deceased family, and disturbed by the prospect that children are being victimized by “a monster with a human face,” Marlott begins to obsess over the case, which leads him deeper and deeper into a tangled political web, and dangerously close to the darkest evil.

Trump and Churchill

I’m a firm subscriber to the “Great Man” theory of history, which posits that the course of history largely (but not entirely) has been determined, for better or worse, by the decisive impact of individuals of unique vision and indomitable will. What would the world look like had Alexander the Great, for example, never been born? Or Jesus Christ? Or George Washington? Or Adolph Hitler, for that matter? Fortunately for the world, Hitler’s impact was checked by the timely emergence of another towering figure who validates the Great Man theory: Winston Churchill.

Now conservative author and speaker Nick Adams has written a book linking Churchill to President Donald Trump as men who share certain qualities that Adams believes confirms their stature as history’s two greatest defenders of Western civilization.

If you’ve ever seen my friend Nick Adams speak in person or in the news media, you know that one would be hard-pressed to find a more enthusiastic cheerleader for America – especially considering that he’s from Australia (he describes himself as an American trapped in an Australian body). A legal immigrant, Nick is genuinely so grateful and excited to be an American that he founded FLAG, the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating Americans about the values and principles that make our nation exceptional. Toward this end, FLAG promotes civics education to K-12 students across the country.

Nick has also written a number of books extolling and defending American virtues, including Green Card Warrior: My Quest for Legal Immigration in an Illegals' System, Class Dismissed: Why College Isn’t the Answer, and Retaking America: Crushing Political Correctness. His latest book, available May 19, is Trump and Churchill: Defenders of Western Civilization – “part historical, part rallying cry, part sociological analysis,” as he puts it. In it, Nick examines the former British Prime Minister and America’s 45^th President through a combination of ten qualities crucial to their greatness, each of which is assigned its own short chapter: genius, patriotism, prescience, instinct, defiance, pugnacity, and ebullience, among others. He asserts that the mix of these qualities enabled Churchill and Trump to rise above adversity, controversy, and overwhelming opposition both without and within their own governments to become the saviors of Western civilization and its values at moments in history when the West was challenged by perilous threats, and he predicts that Trump will surpass even Churchill in terms of his historical significance for our way of life.

If You Protest Against Leftist Tyranny, You’re Racist

Over the last week, thousands of frustrated Americans gathered at state capitols in Michigan, Ohio, California, Minnesota, and other states to protest stay-at-home orders from totalitarian progressive leaders such as Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who argue that the lockdowns are crucial to containing the coronavirus. But with literally tens of millions of Americans losing their jobs and their businesses, and the economy collapsing with the worst possibly to come, Americans are legitimately complaining that the draconian cure is shaping up to be worse than the disease.

Speaker of the House and nepotism-enthusiast Nancy Pelosi decried the protesters, of course: “What they're doing is really unfortunate,” she condescended. “What we have to do is, is, is shelter in place.” That’s easy for her to say. While Pelosi (who as of last year has a net worth of over $120 million) “shelters in place” in her San Francisco mansion that features a $24,000 refrigerator stocked with gourmet ice cream, her constituents are losing their livelihoods and life savings. Her nephew-by-marriage Gov. Gavin Newsom, California’s answer to Justin Trudeau, said he will not be swayed by public protests in deciding when he will reopen the state: “We are going to do the right thing: not judge by politics, not judge by protests, but by science.” Of course, what the left means by “science” is “science that conforms to our political agenda,” because progressives reject any scientific conclusions that present them with inconvenient truths.

President Trump has encouraged the demonstrations, calling last Friday for the citizens of Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia, specifically, to be “liberated.” This kind of language didn’t sit well with the totalitarian left; race-mongering MSNBC propagandist Joy Reid, for example, called it “faux-Confederate.”

Saturday on MSNBC’s AM Joy, host Reid discussed the nationwide protests with fellow Victimhood Propagandist, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who also compared the protesters to the Confederacy and claimed hyperbolically that President Trump is “literally willing to sacrifice the lives of Americans for personal gain.”

Reid asked Ellison, “When you hear Donald Trump talking in this sort of faux-Confederate language about these lockdown orders – which are meant to save lives – and you see people with these insta-protests, paid for by activists for the super-rich, egging on this kind of activity that could get violent, what does that say to you?”

The Left is Panicking That the Pandemic Will Encourage Homeschooling

One of the more significant social and political consequences of the coronavirus pandemic is the fact that countless American parents of public school-enrolled children suddenly find themselves faced with the daunting prospect of having to homeschool those kids for an indefinite period of time. When normalcy returns, most of those families, who for various reasons are unable or unwilling to continue homeschooling, will simply fall back into their old groove and schooling will resume as before. But many parents may find themselves enlightened and excited about homeschooling’s benefits and how it actually operates, as opposed to common misconceptions, which are usually pejorative. This is a possibility that the secular leftist elites in education will not tolerate.

Decades ago progressive activists realized that revolution was best brought about not through overt attacks on the Establishment, but through subversion from within its structures – in particular, the field of education. After all, children are the future, and thus the surest and most direct way to mold the future is to mold impressionable young minds who are a captive audience for progressive, social justice indoctrination. This is why domestic terrorists like Barack Obama’s ghostwriter Bill Ayres and his (literal) partner-in-crime Bernardine Dohrn abandoned bombmaking for the Weather Underground and became respected, credentialed educators working primarily with children (Ayres earned two master’s degrees in Early Childhood Education and a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction; the law professor Dorhn is one of the founders of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law).

The secular left is terrified of losing control of America’s children to homeschoolers, who tend to be (but are not always) conservative and often religious. The secular left also resents the notion of parental control; after all, as former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry put it bluntly in a network promo several years ago, “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” Harris-Perry too was a college educator. In light of developments due to the pandemic, the left is gearing up to clamp down on any increased interest in homeschooling.

One example of the left’s offensive against homeschoolers: the Daily Caller reports that in June, Harvard Law School will be hosting an invite-only “homeschooling summit” to discuss the “problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling, in a legal environment of minimal or not oversight.” The event, which will host speakers from education and child welfare policy backgrounds as well as academics, policy advocates, and legislators, is sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, in cooperation with the Academy on Violence and Abuse, the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, the Institute for Human Services, the New York Foundling, the William & Mary Bill of Rights Institute, and the Zero Abuse Project. Note how many of those organizations focus on child abuse. That’s because homeschooling parents are often demonized as abusers of their own children in order to justify government intrusion – oops, I mean “oversight” – into private homes. 

The Coronavirus Confirms Who Our Friends – And Enemies – Are

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – although right now it just seems like the worst of times, with the world stricken either by the Chinese coronavirus itself (that’s right, I called it Chinese) or by the media-fanned panic about it. But a silver lining of any crisis, perceived or real, is that it swiftly reveals who one’s friends really are – whom you can trust when the chips are down – and that is a vital lesson for Americans to take to heart.

Conversely, of course, a crisis also exposes who one’s enemies are, and that may be an even more valuable lesson to digest. Whom has the coronavirus pandemic shown to be the enemies of the American people? Let us run down the list.

China is not your friend. More specifically, the Communist Chinese regime – not the Chinese people as a whole – is not your friend. This should come as no surprise to most Americans, but as Bill Gertz notes in his recent book Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy, in past decades American governments, both Democrat and Republican, have suffered from a willful blindness about that country stemming from the false assumption that “if the United States simply conducted business with China, the Communist regime in Beijing would eventually evolve into a free market, democratic system,” and then we would be partners. Unfortunately, the plain fact is that China is driven not only to position itself as the world’s preeminent superpower, but to destroy America in the process.

The coronavirus originated in China (and may even have been weaponized in a lab; the leftist media treats this possibility as a conspiracy theory, of course) and the regime did its utmost to suppress any information about it even as countless numbers of Chinese travelers spread it abroad. For that reason, the culpability for the many thousands of coronavirus deaths worldwide, as well as the devastating economic impact, can be laid directly on the regime’s doorstep. China officially continues to deny responsibility and has even attempted to shift blame to the United States, because the left’s automatic, go-to strategy is to accuse others of that of which you are guilty.

Our willful blindness has been reinforced by the establishment news media’s obsession with Russia since 2016, which has provided recent cover for China’s dangerous ambition. Which brings us to…

The leftist news media is not your friend. American patriots have long known that the Democrat-controlled news media is the enemy of the people, never more so than during the age of Trump. Indeed, he occupies the Oval Office in large part because he relishes exposing so many so-called journalists as the leftist activists they are, and goading them into confirming their bias every day.

News propagandists at every network have disseminated Chinese disinformation about the coronavirus, whipped up hysteria about it, ignored positive developments, and steered blame toward Trump. Chuck Todd (pictured above, with Joe Biden), to name one media hack, shamefully declared that the President has “blood on his hands.” Citizens who care about the truth and about making America great again must choose from two options: tune them out or call them out. Either way, never forget that they have no interest at heart but Democrat power. And that leads us to…

Progressive Destruction: The Pandemic is the Perfect Time to Abolish the Family

Amid lockdowns and “shelter-in-place” orders and social distancing from strangers and even friends, the coronavirus pandemic has been a time, for many of us, of reaffirming the centrality of family in our lives. For utopians of the radical left, though, the pandemic is an opportunity to deconstruct flawed, traditional familial bonds and remake the world along the lines of new-and-improved, collectivist possibilities. As author Sophie Lewis (pictured above) puts it bluntly in a recent opinion piece at Open Democracy: “We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it.”

The author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis’ academic work “focuses on eugenic, bioconservative and imperial feminism, queer and trans social reproduction, Black feminist family abolitionism, hydrofeminism, postgenomics, and Marxist-feminist accounts of care,” which seems like a lot to fit on a business card.

Writing in her article titled, “The coronavirus crisis shows it's time to abolish the family,” Lewis addresses what she calls “the unspoken and mostly unquestioned crux of the prescribed response to the pandemic: private homes.” She criticizes the assumption that we should all “stay at home” to contain the spread of the virus, arguing that 1) not everybody has a home, and 2) private property is already a “fundamentally unsafe space.”

“How can a zone defined by the power asymmetries of housework (reproductive labor being so gendered), of renting and mortgage debt, land and deed ownership, of patriarchal parenting and (often) the institution of marriage, benefit health?” she asks. “Such standard homes are where, after all, everyone secretly knows the majority of earthly violence goes down… A quarantine is, in effect, an abuser’s dream – a situation that hands near-infinite power to those with the upper hand over a home.”

Lewis approvingly quotes feminist Madeline Lane-McKinley, who had this to say in a tweet about the shelter-in-place imperative: “Households are capitalism’s pressure cookers. This crisis will see a surge in housework – cleaning, cooking, caretaking, but also child abuse, molestation, intimate partner rape, psychological torture, and more.”

‘Caliphate’ - The Series Every Western Feminist Needs to See

As an act of #Resistance! to the misogynistic dystopia America would surely be plunged into by the election of Donald Trump, the leftist media hyped the 2017 Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women are subjugated and dehumanized under a totalitarian patriarchy. “Relevant!” and “Timely!” were the marketing buzzwords used to sell the show to liberal females as an allegory of the horrors they would experience under a Mike Pence-led theocracy. The Handmaid’s Tale became a cultural touchstone for unfulfilled Western feminists whose lives were suddenly given meaning by costuming themselves as handmaids from the show and milling about in protest of their oppression – for example, outside the chambers where Brett Kavanaugh was smeared as a rapist during his Supreme Court confirmation.

The internet series and the original 1985 novel were both set in America, of course, because everyone who has been processed through our Progressive propaganda – er, education system knows that the United States is the historic epicenter of religious intolerance and sexual oppression. Precisely because of this indoctrination, the same feminists who were so inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale are either oblivious to, or intentionally silent about, the real-world suffering of girls and women who are oppressed under an actual totalitarian theocracy outside the West – territories ruled beneath the iron fist of sharia law.

Forget The Handmaid’s Tale – a new Netflix series called Caliphate (Kaliphat in the original) debuted last month which every feminist in the Western world needs to see, not because it will confirm their cultural self-loathing but because it may just open a few eyes to the misogynistic oppression That Must Not Be Named. Produced in Sweden (yes, the same feminist-run Sweden that has all but officially become a Muslim state; how did this show get made?), Caliphate’s storyline centers on Parvin, a Syrian woman desperate to get herself and her baby out of a marriage to a member of the Islamic State. Her only hope for rescue is to spy on her husband and his fellow jihadists, and surreptitiously pass along details of their terrorist plot against a Swedish target to an intelligence agent there named Fatima. Fatima is trying to pull off a balancing act between trusting Parvin, who could just be peddling misinformation, and battling her skeptical superiors, who seem suspiciously resistant to pursuing the lead.