• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    He started donating as soon as Trump appointed JD Vance as his VP. Vance is a protege of Peter Thiel, a Musk partner and Silicon Valley confidant.

    Nobody is going to release “the Epstein file” (whatever the fuck that’s supposed to be) because Epstein was doing all sorts of shady shit on behalf of national security services in order to build compromat on people in conflict with those agencies. You didn’t need Trump to make any kind of promise for that (not that he’s particularly trustworthy anyway). What you needed was a guy on the inside, slavishly loyal to the Silicon Valley techbro community. And JD Vance is that guy.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Hardly red-string. This is bog standard business news. JD Vance is part of the Thiel political incubator project, intended to finance both right-wing media projects and partisan electoral bureaucrats. He’s running the same playbook as Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers employed a decade ago. A playbook they got from the O&G and Tobacco lobbies ten years before that.

        If you’re looking to go down a rabbit hole on Epstein specifically, I might point you towards TrueAnon podcast. They did live coverage of the Gislaine Maxwell (ep 29/30) even getting into her trial. And they have a ton of material on the Koches (Ep 94/95), Elon Musk (The Lamest Show on Earth eps 1-3), and Peter Thiel (Palantir ep 105 and Survival Of The Grimmest ep 244).

        TrashFuture does a ton on the Silicon Valley political networks as well.

      • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Theil paid for his running for Senate and got him his jobs… Theil so happens to be a billionaire from PayPal, hmmm who else is a billionaire from PayPal .

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          3 months ago

          Theil also bankrolled Hulk Hogans sextape lawsuit against Gawker, because nearly a decade earlier, Nick Denton (founder of Gawker) de-closeted him online.

          Hmm who else was ripping off his shirt at the RNC.

          (N.B. Nick Denton is an asshole here, but the moral of the story is don’t fuck with Theil because he holds a grudge).

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        I recently read (well, listened to) this book on the subject and it turned me on to the whole genre of non-fiction true-crime. I found it on Libby after hearing an author interview on NPR.

    • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Not everything is some national security plot. Its completely possible that he ran that kind of service purely for private interests. For instance, Ralph Nader had people trying to do that to him hired by automotive companies.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Not everything is some national security plot.

        This was explicitly a national security plot. Epstein had known associations within national intelligence, both historically and at the time of his arrest.

        • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          So does twitter and whatever. This is a guy who hung out with rich people including prince andrew. Any contact could have been purely procedural. Whether there’s a real plot in there still hasn’t been proven.