Anyone who writes a newsletter and hosts a broadcast in defense of Epstein's child sex trafficking ring probably should be under some kind of enhanced scrutiny.

Please keep in mind that the Epstein case was argued in open federal court, where he was found guilty and was sentenced. When he died, there were further criminal proceedings pending in two countries.

Hanania's habit of seeing everything in the binary of "woke" vs "not woke" leads him to some incredibly questionable places, as evidenced here. It's "woke" to believe that a convicted child sex trafficker resumed his crimes when released from prison, so Hanania is ideologically forced to take the opposite view that the kerfuffle is mostly hysterics. I honestly don't know why people read him, the quality of thinking and analysis is simply not there. There are much better conservative writers out there who are not currently apologizing for child rapists.

Michael Tracey, who influenced Hanania, has been on a wild crusade against all Epstein victims and has tried to discredit them.

He also avoids all intelligence connections. He never asks why Epstein got the job at Bear Stearns after leaving as a teacher at an expensive private school where William Barr's father was the headmaster.

He never publishes material like the officially released birthday book entry from Eliot Wolk, trader at Bear Stearns, who confirmed that Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, had an account at Bear Stearns and who teased Epstein about knowing teenage Ghislaine.

So it is now officially confirmed that Epstein knew Robert and Ghislaine much earlier than previously known. And that he knew Robert in the Iran Contra years where Robert was dealing with Adnan Khashoggi.

Tracey and Hanania are doing extremely poor journalistic work here by just focusing on the subset of Epstein victims that were over 18 and took money for the services.

Not reporting at all on the intelligence connections seems suspect as well.

"Especially since the MeToo era began, we’re too credulous about these things. So we have globs of money going to Epstein accusers and their lawyers, while nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system."

Feels like someone with an axe to grind over MeToo turning Jeffrey Epstein of all people (???) into a martyr figure for their pet issue. I don't know why someone would feel compelled to defend him when he's not even alive to thank you for it. The idea that vast amounts of evidence and accusations exist yet nothing bad happened whatsoever is so wildly implausible that I can't grasp the mindset that would lead to openly publishing this perspective on Epstein. We found out from the most recent disclosures that people reported Epstein's inappropriate behavior to the FBI as early as 1996 and it wasn't investigated. One need only look at the amount of detail on his Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#First_criminal... ) to get a sense of why accusations against him are at least treated as credible.

I totally get not finding this issue interesting or not caring about what he did to his victims, though I can't really empathize with that position, I understand it. But writing like Hanania's feels beyond the pale and unnecessary.