Brilliant, Daniel! I have not thought much about Lacanian theory these past few decades, but this certainly seems right on target. You might also bring in Kristeva’s concept of “the abject.”
The image that keeps coming to my mind lately is Saddam Hussein coming out of that hole, all dirty and disheveled, and then his subsequent trial—in a cage!— and hanging. Much about his rise to power, and his spectacular fall, is worthy of consideration.
Needless to say, I am hoping that DJT meets a similar fate as Saddam.
I recommend Zainab Salbi’s excellent memoir, Between Two Worlds, for a look at how malignant power and predatory sex works, and feels, from a young woman’s perspective. Salbi, as you may recall, used her fury as fuel to found Women for Women International, which works to help women through trauma, including in conflict & post-conflict situations.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I just ordered it on Amazon, hard copy was cheapest, but I think I may have snagged the last of those, at $9.40. Downside is the wait for delivery, but they also had instant gratification via KIndle.
Yeah, spot-on. I think this line hits the nail on the head: "He ties together disparate and even contradictory threads—evangelical Christianity and casino vulgarity, blue-collar resentment and billionaire indulgence, victimhood and messianism—under one unifying construct."
Halfway into his first term, once it became apparent that the GOP had no principles beyond greed and a lust for power, they went from being a political party to a cult built around a collective id of the most shameful and vile aspects of American culture: racism, violence, and greed, currently personified in DJT. That trope of "everything they say is a projection" rings truer every day, it went from being a clever observation to painfully obvious. Not at all my area of expertise, but I figured Jung would have described this phenomenon at some point, as it's a recurring pattern throughout history.
Aside from the clear repugnance of trump and his enablers, I'm more dismayed at how vile and shitty 38% of Americans are. I mean, I know plenty of these people, and over the past decade they went from having a few character faults and moral flaws (which we all have) into making these features their entire political identity. It's called shame, and they need to actually process it so that we can all get past this insanity.
This was a really good essay, very thought-provoking.
The problem for DT is that he and his cronies weaponised the Epstein thing against his enemies, but it's a similar mistake that it would be for Putin to nuke Ukraine: that would also destroy Russia.
That makes it distinct from other allegations against DT, because he can call them fake. But much harder to suddenly call something fake when you yourself have been saying it's real for years.
Musk sensed that this would be the one thing that could really harm DT and went for it. I don't have that much hope that the blow will be fatal, because the cult doesn't really have anything to fall back on, they have to go with their main man no matter what by this point. But, we'll see... I have the 🍿 ready.
The Epstein files are a considerable thorn for Trump. Perhaps a major ‘distraction’ is in the works? The promised full release of the JFK files? Roswell bombshells? Heightened conflict with Iran?
What an excellent read! Daniel, yes, you've put your finger on this so well - the vital charge—the libidinal electricity—that pulses through the situation: the secret, the guilt, the transgression of others we delight in and permission, while disavowing, the master signifier that may (i think not likely) collapse - and all the while such collapse gives certain of us great pleasure while giving others much anxiety. In that sense we are all caught up in this insanity. That's the tragedy as we should be getting on with so much more (How Soon is Now). I've been reading about 19th century American Lit these last months and came across D.H. Lawrence’s reading of The Scarlet Letter in Studies in Classic American Literature and I share this as I wonder if this psychic structure you so well read through Lacan and Freud goes deeper into the American psyche., the American past. Here is the set up of the story -- In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale are lovers who commit adultery. Dimmesdale is a respected Puritan minister and Hester is a married woman whose husband is presumed dead. Their affair results in Hester bearing a child, Pearl, whom Dimmesdale secretly fathers. They are bound together by their shared sin and the secrecy surrounding it, which deeply affects their lives and the lives of those around them.
Lawrence sees Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale not as tragic sinners, but as participants in a vivid, even ecstatic drama of life. He writes (roughly paraphrasing): “They liked it. It made them feel warm. They had something to hide, and they enjoyed hiding it.” For Lawrence, the affair is not simply a fall from grace; it is an ascent into intensity. The sin vivifies them. This is the key thing: what the Puritan world calls “sin,” Lawrence calls life.
This pleasure—jouissance is exactly the right word, Lacanian though it is—is what Lawrence is tracking. He’s attentive to how the illicitness of the act charges it with meaning, how the very fact that it must be hidden, whispered, repressed, gives it force. The energy doesn’t lie in the act itself, but in its resonance, its aftermath, its echo in the soul and in the society that condemns it. Lawrence is not moralizing, he's vitalizing: he reads for life-forces.
He’s interested in how repression creates intensity. How sin (so-called) becomes the condition for heightened consciousness. Dimmesdale becomes a living wound—a man whose suffering makes him real—while Hester, marked by the scarlet letter, becomes radiant with a strange, independent beauty. They are more alive because of what they carry. Not despite it.
Lawrence, in his usual volcanic, anti-repressive stance, sees the Puritanical effort to crush desire as precisely what makes desire flame. He’s not applauding adultery—he’s identifying how passion erupts in cultures of strict order. And The Scarlet Letter becomes, in his hands, not a moral tale but a mystical-erotic one: a story about how living secretly and intensely because of sin might be preferable to living cleanly and dully without it. Also been reading Melville's The Confidence Man : His Masquerade s a novel that explores themes of deception, identity, and the nature of trust, set aboard a Mississippi River steamboat on April Fool's Day. The ambiguous central character, the "confidence man," adopts various disguises and preys on the passengers, testing their gullibility and prompting them to confront their own vulnerabilities.
Lawrence sees America as a culture structured by disavowal. We do not admit it is us who sin—it is always the others. This is exactly what The Confidence-Man dramatizes: everyone believes themselves to be good, charitable, Christian—and everyone is being conned. But the con isn’t just from outside; it’s inherent in the system. The lie is structural. Thanks for this Daniel! Superb!
This is such a great comment! I haven't read "The Scarlet Letter" since I was in 11th grade, and have been lately thinking of re-reading it, as I suspected it would turn out to be a much more gripping book than I remember it as. I think we should all be reading and re-reading the best works of 19th/early 20th century classic fiction - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, George Elliot, Hardy, etc. as there is very little available today that matches them in depth and psychological insight. It irks me that many of the best of these are hard to find in the library, as they have been culled to make room for more popular fiction.
A disturbing question - as a grandparent and unrepentant English major, I am struggling with the prospect of a post-literate society, wondering what could possibly replace literature as food for the imagination.
I hear you. I got my masters in English literature from Boston University. In spite of it’s non-utilitarian value in our society, it has proved an invaluable asset to me in my journey. I’m incredibly disappointed and disheartened by the fact that our universities have been so enchanted by STEM education that they now largely teach mostly for careerism and have abandoned any notions of teaching the whole person in preparation for the complexities of life in this postmodern age .
Yes - a real sign of the times, this over-glorification of STEM and dismissal of the humanities, as if our all-too-human predicament were technological in origin and to be solved by technology. Education is becoming like freeze-dried soup.
Thanks Lee. I am so with you. So rich is this period in American Lit. Lawrence’s genius is in understanding that the American soul, especially as dramatized by writers like Hawthorne and Melville, isn’t simply split—it’s charged by its splitness. The Puritan exterior and the buried desire beneath it are not in simple conflict. They’re co-constitutive. The mask produces the desire; the repression creates the energy. To paraphrase Lacan through Lawrence: the Puritan says, “I do not sin,” and in that very disavowal, becomes erotically entangled with sin—precisely by needing it to be elsewhere.
So when Lawrence says, almost mockingly, that Hester and Dimmesdale "liked it," or that American literature is full of people pretending to be good while secretly loving their badness, he’s diagnosing a central American contradiction: the belief in virtue as external appearance, while internally experiencing the ecstatic suffering of forbidden life.
Daniel, as usual you’re raising some excellent questions. However, you say you doubt the connection to the intelligence agencies. Wasn’t there some connection to these agencies established with the Acosta “sweetheart deal”? This merits far more serious research and investigation. Much has been memory holed. Also I think you’re coming dangerously close to being obliquely dismissive of Epstein’s behavior in citing common practice from an early century. There was also child labor back in the day. We are supposed to be wiser and more intelligent about such matters now obviously.
In fairness, it’s not correct to say there's no other value that Maga supporters are interested in. Reinventing the US economy and deglobalization are clearly top priorities and these are things that many Americans support. Finally, you made a great point about the cruelty perpetrated on children in the administration’s approach to deportation. Alligator Alcatraz is a horrific gulag and will be seen as a shameful chapter in our history.
I am a fan of a lot of your work and I believe we have much in common our points of view philosophically from what I can see. So I will take the time to try to express my disappointment with this article. First of all, this article struck me as dangerously whitewashing of the Epstein issue. Why does it appear to me, you are writing about Epstein and actually don't know much about the issue? It is no small thing that the right wing has had to take on the so call "conspiracy" work that the left has totally disowned and used to cancel people. If you want to go into actual psychology of what's going on in America today, I would suggest not once again judging the right by what appears to us lefties as tacky aesthetics and lame played out archetypes (all the while pretending to do this in the face of deep thinking psychoanalysis like this article). It appears you are using this pivotal important moment in politics to create another obvious article where we lefties can easily throw a bunch of obvious judgements on the right. The truth is, their party, which clearly you don't much understand the passions of, you even admit you can't imagine how they could have been duped by Trump, is doing something politically that the left has totally failed to do for the longest time. GO AGAINST their own president with actual power! Politics in this country is corrupt from many angles and sides. And finally somebody, in this case the right, is actually gaining momentum to reveal some of the lies and corruption we have been forced to stomach for decades. Why take this time when the republicans are finally doing something right, facing the gaslighting, and the hypocrisy within their party to criticize them in this predictable way? Why not take this time to say why in the hell has the left not been leading the torch on government corruption? What are we psychologically fetishizing so that we can pretend we don't look like a bunch of duped rule followers now? What are we denying, disowning, repressing? ya know- but hey at least we have good taste and would never fetishize our president like the right, no we would just judge others for it huh, and do nothing and get nothing done. The left is a very weak party for a reason, which is also why Trump won and is president. I would love an article bringing us together under this obvious gaslight instead of more judging and pushing away of their aesthetics. I'm pretty bored by this ongoing battle between the parties. Which of course, the corrupt elites, thrive on!
Daniel, this would be great if you'd only get over your preoccupation with Trump. You add to the problem and serve the agenda of distraction. The Epstein thing is much deeper, goes way beyond the blow dried hustler. Besides, he was a democrat when he hung out with the sleazy CIA Mossad creep.
i find her to confirm what i've been picking up for years. the far right takeover of the US, which includes the democratic party, has been using sexual blackmail schemes for a long time. since the Nazi days. Trump was set up to be controlled president for a long time. Roy Cohn was an Epstein predecessor... I don't think he is a crux, just the latest puppet. https://kirbysommers.substack.com/p/unraveling-the-epstein-files-will
Years ago Daniel I decided that I would not let DT "live in my head". I get it. It's so easy for that to happen and some of my friends have succumbed. But life goes on in all its fullness and richness. It's a shame to let this guy rob us of what we still have in this mysterious and wonderful world including the Awakening that's clearly now underway. Good luck!
Sorry but I have to agree that making everything about Trump leaves a lot of other important issues out that need to be addressed. Balance and perspective.
From The Guardian today: "Donald Trump has lashed out against his own supporters, calling them gullible “weaklings” for questioning the transparency of a secretive government inquiry into the late high-profile socialite and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The US president is struggling to contain a political crisis within his usually loyal Make America Great Again (Maga) base over suspicion that the administration is hiding details of Epstein’s crimes to protect the rich elite Epstein associated with, which included Trump. In a lengthy post on his social media website, Truth Social, Trump accused his voters on Wednesday of falling for what he called a “radical left” hoax by the opposition to discredit him."
I read both essays here and found myself honestly wondering about much of what you yourself indicated was speculative material. A part of me wanted to reject a lot of specifics as overwrought, but I continued to read, and to make associations from my rather different than your experience and knowledge base. I suppose I ought to say that I've always found the writings of some psychoanalysts uneven and unnecessarily dense as well. Might be one reason that systems theories appealed more to my way of identifying useful concepts, which is pretty pragmatic and down to earth when it comes to therapeutic notions.
But at the same time I could sense that your quest for understanding is sincere and pretty fearless, too, even if at times your tentative conclusions sound paranoid. I have heard the old joke about even paranoids having real enemies, btw. And I have no doubt that wealthy psychopaths have, do and perhaps always will indulge their proclivities without much fear of detection. It seems they value violation--of rules, norms, young bodies and minds--above much else. Which makes sense as they have withered 'hearts' and lack compassion and anything approaching true regard of others. So they gravitate toward sensation as well as anything that speaks to their sense of being special. To me, this seems enough insight to understand them, and the idea of occult networks kind of excessive, though they may well exist. Are you asking whether or not 'demonic forces' outside of the dark triad exist? (They certainly do within it.) Maybe we can't answer this question credibly. Maybe we don't need to. And maybe that's my point, Daniel my brother.
This is fascinating and astute analysis, though it doesn't, of course, square all circles. Why would the diabolically clever and wicked MAGA influencers promote a conspiracy of ultimate abject evil that would implicate Dear Leader himself far more than, say, Joe Biden, and thereby undo fealty to their redemptive retribution agent? Surely, the Q-Anon masterminds, inter alia , knew all along that Trump was a pedophile. Why perpetuate a conspiracy using a godhead so ripe for desacralization?
I predict that this will end very badly -- for the Democrats. Trump will prevail and the Dems will still be flummoxed as to how to capitalize on both the scandal of 47's grotesque history of sex crimes and pedophilia AND MAGA's internecine warfare and blindingly glaring self-contradictions.
With all of this - it's hard to tell these days what is merely a distraction from something worse (like this Epstein scandal has now overshadowed the Big Terrible bill and even taking attention away from ICE), or is this a real crisis pointing to a larger battle like you said. Also to add - for as much as I'd like to believe MAGA will crumble around this, it seems also likely to me that they can be fed more lies about it and eventually move on and still follow Dear Leader. He can tell them Biden destroyed the files or some BS. We'll see.... Jessica Wildflower wrote a great piece pointing towards Musk 2028: https://www.the-sentinel-intelligence.net/elon-musk-for-president-2028/?ref=the-sentinel-intelligence-newsletter
Yes it will continue but this is a serious hollowing out of the already very thin basis of legtimacy for the MAGA movement. This was one area where they claimed to have principles. That is utterly busted now - now anyone must admit the entire structure is built on total lies and garbage.
Hi Daniel - 2 things: Epstein’s early teaching job was obtained from Bill Barr’s father. This is why Barr hid information about Epstein in Trump’s first term. And - Freud’s theories are more than suspect, and Jeffrey Masson paid dearly for uncovering why this is so. Are you familiar with Masson’s research into how Freud altered his data and conclusions?
Brilliant, Daniel! I have not thought much about Lacanian theory these past few decades, but this certainly seems right on target. You might also bring in Kristeva’s concept of “the abject.”
The image that keeps coming to my mind lately is Saddam Hussein coming out of that hole, all dirty and disheveled, and then his subsequent trial—in a cage!— and hanging. Much about his rise to power, and his spectacular fall, is worthy of consideration.
Needless to say, I am hoping that DJT meets a similar fate as Saddam.
I recommend Zainab Salbi’s excellent memoir, Between Two Worlds, for a look at how malignant power and predatory sex works, and feels, from a young woman’s perspective. Salbi, as you may recall, used her fury as fuel to found Women for Women International, which works to help women through trauma, including in conflict & post-conflict situations.
More on Zainab and Women for Women here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6MfGkxXInY
Her current project, more environmentally focused: https://daughtersforearth.org/about-us/
Thanks for the book recommendation. I just ordered it on Amazon, hard copy was cheapest, but I think I may have snagged the last of those, at $9.40. Downside is the wait for delivery, but they also had instant gratification via KIndle.
Yeah, spot-on. I think this line hits the nail on the head: "He ties together disparate and even contradictory threads—evangelical Christianity and casino vulgarity, blue-collar resentment and billionaire indulgence, victimhood and messianism—under one unifying construct."
Halfway into his first term, once it became apparent that the GOP had no principles beyond greed and a lust for power, they went from being a political party to a cult built around a collective id of the most shameful and vile aspects of American culture: racism, violence, and greed, currently personified in DJT. That trope of "everything they say is a projection" rings truer every day, it went from being a clever observation to painfully obvious. Not at all my area of expertise, but I figured Jung would have described this phenomenon at some point, as it's a recurring pattern throughout history.
Aside from the clear repugnance of trump and his enablers, I'm more dismayed at how vile and shitty 38% of Americans are. I mean, I know plenty of these people, and over the past decade they went from having a few character faults and moral flaws (which we all have) into making these features their entire political identity. It's called shame, and they need to actually process it so that we can all get past this insanity.
This was a really good essay, very thought-provoking.
The problem for DT is that he and his cronies weaponised the Epstein thing against his enemies, but it's a similar mistake that it would be for Putin to nuke Ukraine: that would also destroy Russia.
That makes it distinct from other allegations against DT, because he can call them fake. But much harder to suddenly call something fake when you yourself have been saying it's real for years.
Musk sensed that this would be the one thing that could really harm DT and went for it. I don't have that much hope that the blow will be fatal, because the cult doesn't really have anything to fall back on, they have to go with their main man no matter what by this point. But, we'll see... I have the 🍿 ready.
The Epstein files are a considerable thorn for Trump. Perhaps a major ‘distraction’ is in the works? The promised full release of the JFK files? Roswell bombshells? Heightened conflict with Iran?
https://kirbysommers.substack.com/p/unraveling-the-epstein-files-will
What an excellent read! Daniel, yes, you've put your finger on this so well - the vital charge—the libidinal electricity—that pulses through the situation: the secret, the guilt, the transgression of others we delight in and permission, while disavowing, the master signifier that may (i think not likely) collapse - and all the while such collapse gives certain of us great pleasure while giving others much anxiety. In that sense we are all caught up in this insanity. That's the tragedy as we should be getting on with so much more (How Soon is Now). I've been reading about 19th century American Lit these last months and came across D.H. Lawrence’s reading of The Scarlet Letter in Studies in Classic American Literature and I share this as I wonder if this psychic structure you so well read through Lacan and Freud goes deeper into the American psyche., the American past. Here is the set up of the story -- In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale are lovers who commit adultery. Dimmesdale is a respected Puritan minister and Hester is a married woman whose husband is presumed dead. Their affair results in Hester bearing a child, Pearl, whom Dimmesdale secretly fathers. They are bound together by their shared sin and the secrecy surrounding it, which deeply affects their lives and the lives of those around them.
Lawrence sees Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale not as tragic sinners, but as participants in a vivid, even ecstatic drama of life. He writes (roughly paraphrasing): “They liked it. It made them feel warm. They had something to hide, and they enjoyed hiding it.” For Lawrence, the affair is not simply a fall from grace; it is an ascent into intensity. The sin vivifies them. This is the key thing: what the Puritan world calls “sin,” Lawrence calls life.
This pleasure—jouissance is exactly the right word, Lacanian though it is—is what Lawrence is tracking. He’s attentive to how the illicitness of the act charges it with meaning, how the very fact that it must be hidden, whispered, repressed, gives it force. The energy doesn’t lie in the act itself, but in its resonance, its aftermath, its echo in the soul and in the society that condemns it. Lawrence is not moralizing, he's vitalizing: he reads for life-forces.
He’s interested in how repression creates intensity. How sin (so-called) becomes the condition for heightened consciousness. Dimmesdale becomes a living wound—a man whose suffering makes him real—while Hester, marked by the scarlet letter, becomes radiant with a strange, independent beauty. They are more alive because of what they carry. Not despite it.
Lawrence, in his usual volcanic, anti-repressive stance, sees the Puritanical effort to crush desire as precisely what makes desire flame. He’s not applauding adultery—he’s identifying how passion erupts in cultures of strict order. And The Scarlet Letter becomes, in his hands, not a moral tale but a mystical-erotic one: a story about how living secretly and intensely because of sin might be preferable to living cleanly and dully without it. Also been reading Melville's The Confidence Man : His Masquerade s a novel that explores themes of deception, identity, and the nature of trust, set aboard a Mississippi River steamboat on April Fool's Day. The ambiguous central character, the "confidence man," adopts various disguises and preys on the passengers, testing their gullibility and prompting them to confront their own vulnerabilities.
Lawrence sees America as a culture structured by disavowal. We do not admit it is us who sin—it is always the others. This is exactly what The Confidence-Man dramatizes: everyone believes themselves to be good, charitable, Christian—and everyone is being conned. But the con isn’t just from outside; it’s inherent in the system. The lie is structural. Thanks for this Daniel! Superb!
This is such a great comment! I haven't read "The Scarlet Letter" since I was in 11th grade, and have been lately thinking of re-reading it, as I suspected it would turn out to be a much more gripping book than I remember it as. I think we should all be reading and re-reading the best works of 19th/early 20th century classic fiction - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, George Elliot, Hardy, etc. as there is very little available today that matches them in depth and psychological insight. It irks me that many of the best of these are hard to find in the library, as they have been culled to make room for more popular fiction.
Great comment about shelf space in libraries. And what is AI going to do with what’s left of the liberal arts in our universities?
A disturbing question - as a grandparent and unrepentant English major, I am struggling with the prospect of a post-literate society, wondering what could possibly replace literature as food for the imagination.
I hear you. I got my masters in English literature from Boston University. In spite of it’s non-utilitarian value in our society, it has proved an invaluable asset to me in my journey. I’m incredibly disappointed and disheartened by the fact that our universities have been so enchanted by STEM education that they now largely teach mostly for careerism and have abandoned any notions of teaching the whole person in preparation for the complexities of life in this postmodern age .
Yes - a real sign of the times, this over-glorification of STEM and dismissal of the humanities, as if our all-too-human predicament were technological in origin and to be solved by technology. Education is becoming like freeze-dried soup.
Thanks Lee. I am so with you. So rich is this period in American Lit. Lawrence’s genius is in understanding that the American soul, especially as dramatized by writers like Hawthorne and Melville, isn’t simply split—it’s charged by its splitness. The Puritan exterior and the buried desire beneath it are not in simple conflict. They’re co-constitutive. The mask produces the desire; the repression creates the energy. To paraphrase Lacan through Lawrence: the Puritan says, “I do not sin,” and in that very disavowal, becomes erotically entangled with sin—precisely by needing it to be elsewhere.
So when Lawrence says, almost mockingly, that Hester and Dimmesdale "liked it," or that American literature is full of people pretending to be good while secretly loving their badness, he’s diagnosing a central American contradiction: the belief in virtue as external appearance, while internally experiencing the ecstatic suffering of forbidden life.
Yes! And vital to understand I think. This is a nation of prurient Puritans.
Daniel, as usual you’re raising some excellent questions. However, you say you doubt the connection to the intelligence agencies. Wasn’t there some connection to these agencies established with the Acosta “sweetheart deal”? This merits far more serious research and investigation. Much has been memory holed. Also I think you’re coming dangerously close to being obliquely dismissive of Epstein’s behavior in citing common practice from an early century. There was also child labor back in the day. We are supposed to be wiser and more intelligent about such matters now obviously.
In fairness, it’s not correct to say there's no other value that Maga supporters are interested in. Reinventing the US economy and deglobalization are clearly top priorities and these are things that many Americans support. Finally, you made a great point about the cruelty perpetrated on children in the administration’s approach to deportation. Alligator Alcatraz is a horrific gulag and will be seen as a shameful chapter in our history.
I am a fan of a lot of your work and I believe we have much in common our points of view philosophically from what I can see. So I will take the time to try to express my disappointment with this article. First of all, this article struck me as dangerously whitewashing of the Epstein issue. Why does it appear to me, you are writing about Epstein and actually don't know much about the issue? It is no small thing that the right wing has had to take on the so call "conspiracy" work that the left has totally disowned and used to cancel people. If you want to go into actual psychology of what's going on in America today, I would suggest not once again judging the right by what appears to us lefties as tacky aesthetics and lame played out archetypes (all the while pretending to do this in the face of deep thinking psychoanalysis like this article). It appears you are using this pivotal important moment in politics to create another obvious article where we lefties can easily throw a bunch of obvious judgements on the right. The truth is, their party, which clearly you don't much understand the passions of, you even admit you can't imagine how they could have been duped by Trump, is doing something politically that the left has totally failed to do for the longest time. GO AGAINST their own president with actual power! Politics in this country is corrupt from many angles and sides. And finally somebody, in this case the right, is actually gaining momentum to reveal some of the lies and corruption we have been forced to stomach for decades. Why take this time when the republicans are finally doing something right, facing the gaslighting, and the hypocrisy within their party to criticize them in this predictable way? Why not take this time to say why in the hell has the left not been leading the torch on government corruption? What are we psychologically fetishizing so that we can pretend we don't look like a bunch of duped rule followers now? What are we denying, disowning, repressing? ya know- but hey at least we have good taste and would never fetishize our president like the right, no we would just judge others for it huh, and do nothing and get nothing done. The left is a very weak party for a reason, which is also why Trump won and is president. I would love an article bringing us together under this obvious gaslight instead of more judging and pushing away of their aesthetics. I'm pretty bored by this ongoing battle between the parties. Which of course, the corrupt elites, thrive on!
Daniel, this would be great if you'd only get over your preoccupation with Trump. You add to the problem and serve the agenda of distraction. The Epstein thing is much deeper, goes way beyond the blow dried hustler. Besides, he was a democrat when he hung out with the sleazy CIA Mossad creep.
I’m honestly not preoccupied with Trump… except as he is the crux of the right’s symbolic order. Where do you believe the Epstein thing goes?
i find her to confirm what i've been picking up for years. the far right takeover of the US, which includes the democratic party, has been using sexual blackmail schemes for a long time. since the Nazi days. Trump was set up to be controlled president for a long time. Roy Cohn was an Epstein predecessor... I don't think he is a crux, just the latest puppet. https://kirbysommers.substack.com/p/unraveling-the-epstein-files-will
Years ago Daniel I decided that I would not let DT "live in my head". I get it. It's so easy for that to happen and some of my friends have succumbed. But life goes on in all its fullness and richness. It's a shame to let this guy rob us of what we still have in this mysterious and wonderful world including the Awakening that's clearly now underway. Good luck!
Sorry but I have to agree that making everything about Trump leaves a lot of other important issues out that need to be addressed. Balance and perspective.
From The Guardian today: "Donald Trump has lashed out against his own supporters, calling them gullible “weaklings” for questioning the transparency of a secretive government inquiry into the late high-profile socialite and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The US president is struggling to contain a political crisis within his usually loyal Make America Great Again (Maga) base over suspicion that the administration is hiding details of Epstein’s crimes to protect the rich elite Epstein associated with, which included Trump. In a lengthy post on his social media website, Truth Social, Trump accused his voters on Wednesday of falling for what he called a “radical left” hoax by the opposition to discredit him."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/16/donald-trump-dismisses-inquiry-into-jeffrey-epstein-as-boring?
I read both essays here and found myself honestly wondering about much of what you yourself indicated was speculative material. A part of me wanted to reject a lot of specifics as overwrought, but I continued to read, and to make associations from my rather different than your experience and knowledge base. I suppose I ought to say that I've always found the writings of some psychoanalysts uneven and unnecessarily dense as well. Might be one reason that systems theories appealed more to my way of identifying useful concepts, which is pretty pragmatic and down to earth when it comes to therapeutic notions.
But at the same time I could sense that your quest for understanding is sincere and pretty fearless, too, even if at times your tentative conclusions sound paranoid. I have heard the old joke about even paranoids having real enemies, btw. And I have no doubt that wealthy psychopaths have, do and perhaps always will indulge their proclivities without much fear of detection. It seems they value violation--of rules, norms, young bodies and minds--above much else. Which makes sense as they have withered 'hearts' and lack compassion and anything approaching true regard of others. So they gravitate toward sensation as well as anything that speaks to their sense of being special. To me, this seems enough insight to understand them, and the idea of occult networks kind of excessive, though they may well exist. Are you asking whether or not 'demonic forces' outside of the dark triad exist? (They certainly do within it.) Maybe we can't answer this question credibly. Maybe we don't need to. And maybe that's my point, Daniel my brother.
This is fascinating and astute analysis, though it doesn't, of course, square all circles. Why would the diabolically clever and wicked MAGA influencers promote a conspiracy of ultimate abject evil that would implicate Dear Leader himself far more than, say, Joe Biden, and thereby undo fealty to their redemptive retribution agent? Surely, the Q-Anon masterminds, inter alia , knew all along that Trump was a pedophile. Why perpetuate a conspiracy using a godhead so ripe for desacralization?
They are short-term reptilian in their thinking, not strategic. The term “hoist with their own petard” comes to mind.
I predict that this will end very badly -- for the Democrats. Trump will prevail and the Dems will still be flummoxed as to how to capitalize on both the scandal of 47's grotesque history of sex crimes and pedophilia AND MAGA's internecine warfare and blindingly glaring self-contradictions.
With all of this - it's hard to tell these days what is merely a distraction from something worse (like this Epstein scandal has now overshadowed the Big Terrible bill and even taking attention away from ICE), or is this a real crisis pointing to a larger battle like you said. Also to add - for as much as I'd like to believe MAGA will crumble around this, it seems also likely to me that they can be fed more lies about it and eventually move on and still follow Dear Leader. He can tell them Biden destroyed the files or some BS. We'll see.... Jessica Wildflower wrote a great piece pointing towards Musk 2028: https://www.the-sentinel-intelligence.net/elon-musk-for-president-2028/?ref=the-sentinel-intelligence-newsletter
Yes it will continue but this is a serious hollowing out of the already very thin basis of legtimacy for the MAGA movement. This was one area where they claimed to have principles. That is utterly busted now - now anyone must admit the entire structure is built on total lies and garbage.
Hi Daniel - 2 things: Epstein’s early teaching job was obtained from Bill Barr’s father. This is why Barr hid information about Epstein in Trump’s first term. And - Freud’s theories are more than suspect, and Jeffrey Masson paid dearly for uncovering why this is so. Are you familiar with Masson’s research into how Freud altered his data and conclusions?