Ryan: Jeffrey Epstein and the authenticity mirage

October 14, 2019

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Kevin is an award-winning writer who focuses on long-form literary nonfiction and investigative reporting.

First thing that morning, millionaire socialite and prolific pedophile Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself in a Manhattan jail cell. With a State-issued bedsheet would you believe? Supposedly no thicker than off-brand toilet paper.

Ever since Epstein had been arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, people had been waiting for something unbelievable to happen. How light would his slap on the wrist be this time around? Or maybe not. This was the post-MeToo world, after all.

Then, when his bail was denied — Epstein's first bout of misfortune in decades, possibly ever — we all wondered if he'd actually face justice this time. And what did that mean for all his high-powered friends? Political and otherwise. Surely they had a problem with all his secrets. Supposedly he had incriminating video footage of important people, for blackmail, and here was his chance to share it with the world.

For weeks, the joke was "Wanna bet that he gets suicided?" Now he was dead. Via suicide. Which looked a lot like "suicide." It was hard to tell what was news and what were memes anymore.

When the guards at the Metropolitan Correctional Center noticed Epstein all droopy, they slammed into his cell and yelled and yelled and yelled, "Breathe, Epstein, Breathe."

Alas, he was blue and stumpy and by then probably stiff.

An odd way to begin a Saturday, any Saturday, but especially the first weekend of the Iowa State Fair, as you're gnawing on a fried Oreo, chomp gnash chomp and you get the news that Hell just welcomed yet another prodigious monster.

Plus, most suicides happen on Monday's or Wednesday's, and usually after midnight.

Saturday bright and early was a strange one. But I suppose even the weekend sucks when you're a celebrity millionaire stuck in high-security prison for prolific sex trafficking and molestation that was international in scope. And all you can do is think about all the high-powered people you pose a threat to, or your connections to an embarrassing amount of celebrities, including at least one member of the British royal family.

The coward. He'd stayed alive despite himself for six-and-a-half decades, raping and extorting and bullying and eluding, why couldn't he just wait until the next figurative commercial break?

Ideally, he'd have waited till trail. So that all the people he'd tormented could stare him in his dead, sharky eyes and lob words like spit in the direction of his miasma.

And why in the middle of an already-bizarre election? Now it was Hamlet on an Iowa Saturday. A silly wacky mix-up. So lifelike because the irony is gross. Because the slip-ups are so perfectly timed.

Daddy Epstein drank the poison meant for who knows who.

And now Epstein's whimpering pouty ghost cast a shadow on the American public. Wasn't it enough that he'd existed at all? And it was annoying, the way none of it made sense.

Why hadn't he been on suicide watch? Wasn't he a celebrity? Was this the first time in his life he didn't get lavish treatment? His first time really alone, and he couldn't handle it?

Didn't sociopaths tend to aviod suicide, for narcistic reasons?

And was it true that the security cameras — all of them?! — went off for thirty minutes, the same half-hour that all the guards took a nap? A nap?

And why did he kill himself before the trial? Didn't people usually wait until after they were convicted, when there was no hope that they'd be free ever again?

And worst of all he was sulking on our weekend.

It was about disgust. We were repulsed. Like when you see a brown recluse spider and your skin gets itchy for a few minutes and you suspect that something awful has occurred.

All day in Iowa, at all the various rallies and speeches and events, none of the Democratic candidates mentioned Epstein. We all know they had heard the news. But who could smile after biting into a lump of charcoal? And these people were all about smiling and not at all about charcoal.

So they were playing dumb or acting smooth or just confused and annoyed like the rest of us. Whatever the case, excellent decision, to zip their lips. But it still felt odd.

Because I suspect that if the BBC ran an article about Joe Biden telling reporters, "We need justice for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, who is similar to Donald Trump. What he did was cowardice. When I'm President I will handle this situation as such..." or if Kamala Harris tweeted "#EpsteinWasMurdered!" and if any of that boosted Biden's or Harris' favorability online and in polls and with the media, then game on for all the other candidates.

We get it, they signed up for a year-long debate tournament and crazy shit keeps happening and at every moment they have to be ready with some brilliant answer.

But it still felt grimy. Like they were closer to Epstein's world than to ours.

The world of politics is gross. You can read Plato's "Republic" in a library all day, but politics is still disgusting. Politicians are the plungers of humanity, chugging toilet water and shit for a living, a thrill. They make a game of our lives and our country. Those rubber leeches cling to dark pipes and keep climbing through the sewers and the gutters like maniacs. Some of them are gifted enough at navigating excrement and latching onto pvc pipes that they make it to the finest waste treatment facility in the land. And right there in piles of you-know-what, they duke it out until the best plunger wins.

"Hooray-glorg-SLURP," bellows the champion at the wobbling podium, ribboned by tufts of thin white tissue.

*
The personal is political insofar as politics as a whole belongs to humanity. In service to we the people. And humanity must always precede politics, which is just the lengthy — at times begrudging — set of rules that we do our best to adhere to, even as the global population nears 8 billion. Because roughly 107 billion people lived and died before us.

Yet we are really not much closer to the great realities than the ancients were. But we are closer to something.

And it's not Jeffrey Epstein. The opposite. Or something far, far away from him and his cruel, depraved empire of mud and paper. He is the dark ghost behind us, the skid mark leading to the fatal crash.

He typifies what we have learned and now regret knowing. Yet, he represents the undefined lower reaches of the American psyche. If Taylor Swift is the Magic Kingdom at DisneyWorld, Epstein is a speakeasy stripclub in downtown Tampa, full of backroom syringes and deadly venereal diseases.

Same city, but two horrifically different environments. Which is more American?

Easy. Disney. Hope. Wonder. Beauty arrayed into the sky despite all the dark winds that howl through mankind. Because, for the most part, America is everything in between.

So drive and drive, through the wild-eyed curves and humps of the country.

You will witness the capillary strings of fog in the morning, the soliloquy chatter of tiny red birds waiting for a storm to pass. Broken ground in the summer, and the last sheaf of daylight like a dark low jack of the ocean, and the whine of a grasshopper that sees our world the way we see the universe.

You will meet grocery-baggers and lawyers and people of so many other professions. Most things about them will be different than you. At the surface. But what you'll find are people with the same depthless stirring as you.

New installments of this series come out every Monday and Thursday morning. Check out my Twitter or email me at kryan@mercurystudios.com

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Globalize the Intifada? Why Mamdani’s plan spells DOOM for America

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

If New Yorkers hand City Hall to Zohran Mamdani, they’re not voting for change. They’re opening the door to an alliance of socialism, Islamism, and chaos.

It only took 25 years for New York City to go from the resilient, flag-waving pride following the 9/11 attacks to a political fever dream. To quote Michael Malice, “I'm old enough to remember when New Yorkers endured 9/11 instead of voting for it.”

Malice is talking about Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist assemblyman from Queens now eyeing the mayor’s office. Mamdani, a 33-year-old state representative emerging from relative political obscurity, is now receiving substantial funding for his mayoral campaign from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

CAIR has a long and concerning history, including being born out of the Muslim Brotherhood and named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding case. Why would the group have dropped $100,000 into a PAC backing Mamdani’s campaign?

Mamdani blends political Islam with Marxist economics — two ideologies that have left tens of millions dead in the 20th century alone.

Perhaps CAIR has a vested interest in Mamdani’s call to “globalize the intifada.” That’s not a call for peaceful protest. Intifada refers to historic uprisings of Muslims against what they call the “Israeli occupation of Palestine.” Suicide bombings and street violence are part of the playbook. So when Mamdani says he wants to “globalize” that, who exactly is the enemy in this global scenario? Because it sure sounds like he's saying America is the new Israel, and anyone who supports Western democracy is the new Zionist.

Mamdani tried to clean up his language by citing the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which once used “intifada” in an Arabic-language article to describe the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. So now he’s comparing Palestinians to Jewish victims of the Nazis? If that doesn’t twist your stomach into knots, you’re not paying attention.

If you’re “globalizing” an intifada, and positioning Israel — and now America — as the Nazis, that’s not a cry for human rights. That’s a call for chaos and violence.

Rising Islamism

But hey, this is New York. Faculty members at Columbia University — where Mamdani’s own father once worked — signed a letter defending students who supported Hamas after October 7. They also contributed to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. And his father? He blamed Ronald Reagan and the religious right for inspiring Islamic terrorism, as if the roots of 9/11 grew in Washington, not the caves of Tora Bora.

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

This isn’t about Islam as a faith. We should distinguish between Islam and Islamism. Islam is a religion followed peacefully by millions. Islamism is something entirely different — an ideology that seeks to merge mosque and state, impose Sharia law, and destroy secular liberal democracies from within. Islamism isn’t about prayer and fasting. It’s about power.

Criticizing Islamism is not Islamophobia. It is not an attack on peaceful Muslims. In fact, Muslims are often its first victims.

Islamism is misogynistic, theocratic, violent, and supremacist. It’s hostile to free speech, religious pluralism, gay rights, secularism — even to moderate Muslims. Yet somehow, the progressive left — the same left that claims to fight for feminism, LGBTQ rights, and free expression — finds itself defending candidates like Mamdani. You can’t make this stuff up.

Blending the worst ideologies

And if that weren’t enough, Mamdani also identifies as a Democratic Socialist. He blends political Islam with Marxist economics — two ideologies that have left tens of millions dead in the 20th century alone. But don’t worry, New York. I’m sure this time socialism will totally work. Just like it always didn’t.

If you’re a business owner, a parent, a person who’s saved anything, or just someone who values sanity: Get out. I’m serious. If Mamdani becomes mayor, as seems likely, then New York City will become a case study in what happens when you marry ideological extremism with political power. And it won’t be pretty.

This is about more than one mayoral race. It’s about the future of Western liberalism. It’s about drawing a bright line between faith and fanaticism, between healthy pluralism and authoritarian dogma.

Call out radicalism

We must call out political Islam the same way we call out white nationalism or any other supremacist ideology. When someone chants “globalize the intifada,” that should send a chill down your spine — whether you’re Jewish, Christian, Muslim, atheist, or anything in between.

The left may try to shame you into silence with words like “Islamophobia,” but the record is worn out. The grooves are shallow. The American people see what’s happening. And we’re not buying it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Could China OWN our National Parks?

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The left’s idea of stewardship involves bulldozing bison and barring access. Lee’s vision puts conservation back in the hands of the people.

The media wants you to believe that Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is trying to bulldoze Yellowstone and turn national parks into strip malls — that he’s calling for a reckless fire sale of America’s natural beauty to line developers’ pockets. That narrative is dishonest. It’s fearmongering, and, by the way, it’s wrong.

Here’s what’s really happening.

Private stewardship works. It’s local. It’s accountable. It’s incentivized.

The federal government currently owns 640 million acres of land — nearly 28% of all land in the United States. To put that into perspective, that’s more territory than France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom combined.

Most of this land is west of the Mississippi River. That’s not a coincidence. In the American West, federal ownership isn’t just a bureaucratic technicality — it’s a stranglehold. States are suffocated. Locals are treated as tenants. Opportunities are choked off.

Meanwhile, people living east of the Mississippi — in places like Kentucky, Georgia, or Pennsylvania — might not even realize how little land their own states truly control. But the same policies that are plaguing the West could come for them next.

Lee isn’t proposing to auction off Yellowstone or pave over Yosemite. He’s talking about 3 million acres — that’s less than half of 1% of the federal estate. And this land isn’t your family’s favorite hiking trail. It’s remote, hard to access, and often mismanaged.

Failed management

Why was it mismanaged in the first place? Because the federal government is a terrible landlord.

Consider Yellowstone again. It’s home to the last remaining herd of genetically pure American bison — animals that haven’t been crossbred with cattle. Ranchers, myself included, would love the chance to help restore these majestic creatures on private land. But the federal government won’t allow it.

So what do they do when the herd gets too big?

They kill them. Bulldoze them into mass graves. That’s not conservation. That’s bureaucratic malpractice.

And don’t even get me started on bald eagles — majestic symbols of American freedom and a federally protected endangered species, now regularly slaughtered by wind turbines. I have pictures of piles of dead bald eagles. Where’s the outrage?

Biden’s federal land-grab

Some argue that states can’t afford to manage this land themselves. But if the states can’t afford it, how can Washington? We’re $35 trillion in debt. Entitlements are strained, infrastructure is crumbling, and the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and National Park Service are billions of dollars behind in basic maintenance. Roads, firebreaks, and trails are falling apart.

The Biden administration quietly embraced something called the “30 by 30” initiative, a plan to lock up 30% of all U.S. land and water under federal “conservation” by 2030. The real goal is 50% by 2050.

That entails half of the country being taken away from you, controlled not by the people who live there but by technocrats in D.C.

You think that won’t affect your ability to hunt, fish, graze cattle, or cut timber? Think again. It won’t be conservatives who stop you from building a cabin, raising cattle, or teaching your grandkids how to shoot a rifle. It’ll be the same radical environmentalists who treat land as sacred — unless it’s your truck, your deer stand, or your back yard.

Land as collateral

Moreover, the U.S. Treasury is considering putting federally owned land on the national balance sheet, listing your parks, forests, and hunting grounds as collateral.

What happens if America defaults on its debt?

David McNew / Stringer | Getty Images

Do you think our creditors won’t come calling? Imagine explaining to your kids that the lake you used to fish in is now under foreign ownership, that the forest you hunted in belongs to China.

This is not hypothetical. This is the logical conclusion of treating land like a piggy bank.

The American way

There’s a better way — and it’s the American way.

Let the people who live near the land steward it. Let ranchers, farmers, sportsmen, and local conservationists do what they’ve done for generations.

Did you know that 75% of America’s wetlands are on private land? Or that the most successful wildlife recoveries — whitetail deer, ducks, wild turkeys — didn’t come from Washington but from partnerships between private landowners and groups like Ducks Unlimited?

Private stewardship works. It’s local. It’s accountable. It’s incentivized. When you break it, you fix it. When you profit from the land, you protect it.

This is not about selling out. It’s about buying in — to freedom, to responsibility, to the principle of constitutional self-governance.

So when you hear the pundits cry foul over 3 million acres of federal land, remember: We don’t need Washington to protect our land. We need Washington to get out of the way.

Because this isn’t just about land. It’s about liberty. And once liberty is lost, it doesn’t come back easily.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

EXPOSED: Why the left’s trans agenda just CRASHED at SCOTUS

Anna Moneymaker / Staff | Getty Images

You never know what you’re going to get with the U.S. Supreme Court these days.

For all of the Left’s insane panic over having six supposedly conservative justices on the court, the decisions have been much more of a mixed bag. But thank God – sincerely – there was a seismic win for common sense at the Supreme Court on Wednesday. It’s a win for American children, parents, and for truth itself.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s state ban on irreversible transgender procedures for minors.

The mostly conservative justices stood tall in this case, while Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson predictably dissented. This isn’t just Tennessee’s victory – 20 other red states that have similar bans can now breathe easier, knowing they can protect vulnerable children from these sick, experimental, life-altering procedures.

Anna Moneymaker / Staff | Getty Images

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, saying Tennessee’s law does not violate the Equal Protection Clause. It’s rooted in a very simple truth that common sense Americans get: kids cannot consent to permanent damage. The science backs this up – Norway, Finland, and the UK have all sounded alarms about the lack of evidence for so-called “gender-affirming care.” The Trump administration’s recent HHS report shredded the activist claims that these treatments help kids’ mental health. Nothing about this is “healthcare.” It is absolute harm.

The Left, the ACLU, and the Biden DOJ screamed “discrimination” and tried to twist the Constitution to force this radical ideology on our kids.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court saw through it this time. In her concurring opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett nailed it: gender identity is not some fixed, immutable trait like race or sex. Detransitioners are speaking out, regretting the surgeries and hormones they were rushed into as teens. WPATH – the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the supposed experts on this, knew that kids cannot fully grasp this decision, and their own leaked documents prove that they knew it. But they pushed operations and treatments on kids anyway.

This decision is about protecting the innocent from a dangerous ideology that denies biology and reality. Tennessee’s Attorney General calls this a “landmark victory in defense of America’s children.” He’s right. This time at least, the Supreme Court refused to let judicial activism steal our kids’ futures. Now every state needs to follow Tennessee’s lead on this, and maybe the tide will continue to turn.

Insider alert: Glenn’s audience EXPOSES the riots’ dark truth

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Glenn asked for YOUR take on the Los Angeles anti-ICE riots, and YOU responded with a thunderous verdict. Your answers to our recent Glennbeck.com poll cut through the establishment’s haze, revealing a profound skepticism of their narrative.

The results are undeniable: 98% of you believe taxpayer-funded NGOs are bankrolling these riots, a bold rejection of the claim that these are grassroots protests. Meanwhile, 99% dismiss the mainstream media’s coverage as woefully inadequate—can the official story survive such resounding doubt? And 99% of you view the involvement of socialist and Islamist groups as a growing threat to national security, signaling alarm at what Glenn calls a coordinated “Color Revolution” lurking beneath the surface.

You also stand firmly with decisive action: 99% support President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to quell the chaos. These numbers defy the elite’s tired excuses and reflect a demand for truth and accountability. Are your tax dollars being weaponized to destabilize America? You’ve answered with conviction.

Your voice sends a powerful message to those who dismiss the unrest as mere “protests.” You spoke, and Glenn listened. Keep shaping the conversation at Glennbeck.com.

Want to make your voice heard? Check out more polls HERE.