[Special] J. Burden reads you an Article about Epstein

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of things scheduled, but nothing that meets this deadline. And the interview was supposed to come out today Thomas and I talking about the West Memphis three with a first hand source. Uh didn't work out. The guy, as the kids say, crashed out, quit kind of lost. It won't get into that perhaps best left unsaid. So I needed something to do, and I figured we'd bring back an old staple, the Jay Burtons Show article reading streams or podcasts.

I guess because this isn't going out live. This article and I'm going to read for you is actually cited in a piece that I have written coming out tomorrow with my friends at Juneto or huntil I'm not entirely sure. An outlet on substack started by some friends with mine, and I might add, actually, by the way, in addition to their substack, which is quite good, they also have

a really fascinating intel tab. This is not the point of the stream It's just something that I was showing me where effectively you can find all sorts of interesting things like a campaign finance tracker, networking map, can wright wing talent network. Not for jobs, of course, but just track different people and their institutional affiliations. Even if you're not a conservative per se, there's a lot you can glean from there. Right, It's fascinating information, and the network's

growing rapidly. They didn't pay me to say that. I just think it's kind of neat. So if you're interested, check that out. In addition to my article which cites this piece, the one that we're going to be going over, it's a part of that argument, not the whole thing, but this article written in New York Magazine by Brooks what's his last name or first name rather, by Dan Brooks, going over the recent DJ release of the Epstein files. Right.

And the reason I'm reading this is partially because, look, I got a slot I need to fill, but also because it's a really interesting argument. You see it come up again and again from these sort of professional managerial types. Right. Brooks may not be smart enough to express it well, but he is smart enough to pick up on a trend to pick up on the direction the winds are blowing, so also somewhat interestingly, initially this article was titled Pizzagate

Wasn't real right? They changed it. I thought that name was a lot better the new one. Jeffrey Epstein loved sex trafficking pizza did. The newly released documents lend support to the old Pizzagate conspiracy way worse title. The first one was great. The latest tranch of documents released by the Department of Justice related to its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein contains four hundred and eighty two occurrences of the

word pizza, which seems like a lot. By comparison, the word Hamburger appears only one hundred and ninety tens, while the phrase sex with children appears twenty times, including in some kind of tract sent to the FBI with the impenetrable title sex Collectors, Halet, Tony Blair, Cullen, Gordon Brown, British Intelligence I six MI five Dunblane Pedophiles, nWo Illuminati Freemasons, as well as in this photograph Epstein's brother Mark provided

the Agency in twenty twenty. For those this is a photo of a flip phone from Mark Epstein, which says five twenty nine are five twenty four excuse me, you have a good family. Do they know if you had sex with children you will die? And then a link. These two artifacts represent two ends of the evidentiary spectrum. A seemingly explicit indication that somebody was abusing kids and getting blackmailed and threatened for it, and a dispatch from

the most fevered corner of the conspiracy minded Internet. You would think the conspiracists would be thrilled by the blackmail stuff, but for the time being, they have focused their attention on the pizza. I'm just going to go through this intro and then once we get into actual meat of it, get my analysis. Admittedly, some of the pizza related material seems pretty weird. An April twenty eighteen message from a redacted sender says, let's go for pizza and grape soda again.

No one can understand go kN oh cryptic. Some of it is scrutable. Go no k and o appears to be a rendering of go no, an English derivative of the Yiddish express gay vase ge. I'm sorry, I don't understand the Star Wars language, which is roughly equivalent to go figure. The claim that no one else can understand, on the other hand, is a creepy element that echoes Donald Trump's allusion to the Wonderful Secrets and his infamous letter on the occasion of Epstein's fiftieth birthday. This combination

is the essence of the latest cash some question. Some questions yield to research. Others are stubborn but tantalize, inviting readers to fill in the blanks with what they could not possibly know. Pizza and grape soda blombe to the latter category and appears frequently in Epstein's emails and texts. In a twenty eighteen exchange with his zerologist Harry Fish, who erroneously appears in Epstein's context as Harry phish Fish, the two seem to discuss refilling Epstein's prescription for a

rectile dysfunction medication. Phish later texts, after you use them, wash your hands, and lets go get pizza and grape soda. This proposal seems odd. There are many things you can do after your viagra kicks in, and getting a slice with your doctor is not near the top of the list. In another context, it might just be funny. But the confluence of pizza and grape soda with Epstein, a man increasingly known for exactly one thing, and boner pills is

enough to drive a reasonable person to conjecture. Remember when only unreasonable people thought like this? The idea that pizza could be a code word for illicit sexual activities was laughable in twenty sixteen, when the so called pizza Gate conspiracy captured the imagination of what charitably might be called

the internet's most enthusiastic use users. The theory, which emerged after wiki Leak's publicly released the personal emails of Hillary for America campaign chair John Podesta, hinged on the belief that references to pizza were code for children used for sex. From that bedrock assumption, Pizzagate theorist concluded that the Clintons and other powerful Democrats were satanic pedophiles operating an abuse in cannibalism, ring from various restaurants in the Washington, DC area.

Why else with the staff of presidential campaign talk about ordering a pizza. Even the theory's most ardent believers lost confidence. However, after a man named Edgar Madison Welch brought a rifle to one of the restaurants, Comet Pizza, and demanded to see the children being held in its basement. Comet Pizza had no basement, and Welsh eventually surrendered to police. In January twenty twenty five, he was shot and killed during an unrelated traffic stop in North Carolina. I prefer not

to comment on this turn of events. Okay, so several things here. One, I'm not like Pizzagate guy, but this is a really interesting timeline because he's partially and he also does some false equivalency here, so he is correct. Pizza Gate happened months like roughly three or four months before QAnon, which is probably what you're thinking of when you hear the term pizzagate, and it came from, as

he said, the John Podesta emails. Now, the first part, you know, the idea that this restaurant and others were being used for child sex trafficking, is part of kind of the og, the first strain of pizza Gate. But all the other stuff, the Democrats, the the crazy stuff about Hillary Clinton, that's QAnon. And I have long contended that QAnon is a massive op. Right, just look at the kind of similarities to what the the Communists were doing to the white Russians, right, the propaganda they were

doing during Russian Civil War. Well, sure, some of it was throw down your arms and surrender, but a large portion of it was effectively, everything is fine, the Communists

are being destroyed. You don't have to do anything. QAnon obviously has a very similar character to it, right, the idea that there is the shadowy force in the US government, that patriots are in control, that so many of these hated figures for the followers of q have been arrested, tried, and executed in Guantanamo Bank, This is a really interesting

equivalence one you see often. Now he mentions it. The framing on this is slightly changed because for a long time, almost a decade, Pizzagate, the widely debunked conspiracy theory, was sort of the the the prime example for the regime of why conspiracy theories are dangerous, because it resulted in this mass shooting. Now he mentions it, of course that welch, this guy brought a rifle into comment pizza. So I'm

not going to get into this. Like I said, the point of this is not to be a pizza Gate video. What it is to go over the reaction to it. Right, this is sort of an inciting incident, but it's worth saying nonetheless, So a couple things. One, it's not a mass shooting. He didn't shoot anyone. He fired one bullet and that bullet went through the door of the maintenance closet. He was attempting to rescue children from into the four hundred thousand dollars server rack in a pizza place, destroying

the hard drive. Just things that normal pizza places have. If you're curious, if you want to watch security cam footage of the attack, you can't because every single one of them was turned around on that day, which is weird. Now Brooks is actually correct, I don't have a smoking gun. You know, this is the sort of question that defies researchers. But it's interesting certainly. Obviously the fact that he was shot and killed. You know, he seemed to be sort

of an unstable individual. I don't necessarily want to comment on that, but it's a weird thing to have happened. And also, of course, the Podesta emails are just as if not more incriminating. My friend Daryl Cooper Martyer made did an excellent series digging into the Podesta emails highly recommend checking that out. There's a lot there, I'll put it. I'll put it that way, go into his art collection

his associations. Point is the idea that this is simply some sort of conflagration of like QAnon and like Retardo conspiracy theory is it's like, well, sure that exists, but that's not all of it. And it is very convenient QAnon exists because it forms a great straw man. You don't actually have to address real meaningful criticism inconsistencies. You can just say, well, those people believe JFK is going to resurrect from the grave and appear it in Rockefeller Plaza,

they're transparently stupid. Anyway, back to the article, because we have we have a lot to go. At the time, the assumption that pizza was code for sex with children seemed obviously arbitrary and extravagant, a violation of the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the right one. This heuristic octims razor, which, by the way, progressives are very

tactical in their invocation of Oham's razor. One may may think of systematic racism or either glass ceiling or the patriarchy as sort of wonderful examples of this where the most simple explanation is completely and totally inappropriate. Back to the narrative, This heuristic Ocome's is often a handy way to differentiate ideas and people we should take seriously from ones we can safely dismiss. People who are frustrated that they've misplaced the keys tend to be more credible than

those who think their keys have been stolen. Except with the Epstein pizza thing that somebody stole my keys contingent seems to have been suddenly and disastrously vindicated. As of February twelfth, a Reddit post titled pizza code words littered in Epstein files has gotten twelve thousand upduts and eighteen thousand comments, many of which center on the idea that the Pizzagate conspiracy has been proved basically correct, even if

it got some of the specific th wrong. One commenter wrote, I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with the original conspiracy to take attention away from the places where it was actually happening. And William of Oakham rotates in his grave like rotisserie chicken, so several things there, right, Look, I have no great lover of Reddit for any number of reasons. But okay, surely you know, as open minded progressives as liberal defenders. Fourth Doxy, we should at least

hear this out. Are we going to hear this argument out? Dear listener, I think you know the answer. One must keep a level head. Even though these recent Epstein materials do make the financi here seem strangely interested in pizza and unusually committed to having it delivered to other people. Several emails, such as May twenty fourth, twenty seventeen, send Pizza to Bobby, appear to be an automated calendar reminder.

The Bobby in question here is comedian Bobby Slayton, the subject of pizza reminders on consecutive days in twenty seventeen. Another message to an unnamed recipient goes into detail about how this pizza should be procured. Artures opens at four pm. Be there when they open and order the pizza then

delivered to three oh one. The message reads. The numeral three oh one refers to Epstein's townhouse at three oh one sixty six Street, where Slayton appears to have been staying at the time, These instructions seem too specific and

mundane to be about anything but the actual pizza. Similarly, this message, which acts a redacted recipient to pick up pizza from Patsy's on West seventy fourth Street and then, in a change that should annoy anyone who has ever worked as an assistant for the first Avenue and one one hundred and eighteenth Street locations said looks too detailed

to be coated. To read it as a cipher, you would have to assume that Patsi's does not refer to one of the better pies in the city, but rather to a specific type of illicit activity available at two locations where actual Patsy's Pizzeri's happened to be. Okay, sure, these specific instances, it's probably correct, but there's a lot more there, right, you have in these files Epstein's assistant referring to a sixty thousand dollars pizza room in his

renovated apartment. That's kind of weird. I mean, look, man, like, you know, I like a deep dish pie as much as the next guy, and I get it. Sixty thousand dollars is a lot less of a thing for Epstein than it is for me. But uh, I don't know, man, that seems a little bit odd. You have other references to, you know, renting a pizza. I don't know how one would do that. And look like my conclusion is not

particularly I am mister pizzagate. I believe it. But this article, as we will get into, is clearly a disingenuous reading. The point of this article is not the title. The point of this article is not to examine the claims made. The point of this article is to effectively refocus the angst of the progressive reading this away from this uncomfortable truth, this uncomfortable thought that maybe the chuds were onto something and onto their real target, which, let's be honest, is

those chuts. Yet Otkham's razor has comparatively little to tell us about grape soda. Fish and Epstein refer to pizza and grape soda so often and so often together, seemingly never just grape soda and rarely just pizza, that the whole thing starts to look like a shibbalthe I'm gonna

leave that there. On March thirty first, twenty eighteen, Fish texts pizza, grape soda, naf said, a little more than half an hour later, Epstein replies, go no, the same expression and expression with which he answered the no one else can understand message, also about pizza and grape soda. There the exchange ends, leaving the reader to guess what

happened next. The mystery deepens when you notice Fish often follows references to pizza and grape soda with emoji depicting an African American, at least four times that I noticed. On May twenty fourth, Fish texted Epstein to suggest they try the pop tarts at Greenberg's Bakery, meaning William Greenberg Desserts. Epstein textbacks June fourth, and Fish responds, first we get a slice of pizza with grape soda, then the pop tart.

Epstein responds, wow, Fish sends the black judge emoji. This is another exchange that seems potentially too weird to really be about pizza and grape soda. Grape drinks are stereotypically associated with African Americans, huh, A bit of niche racism that, in combination with the status of cheese, pizza, and soda

as essentially juvenile foods, invites all manners of conjecture. The amateur detective might conclude that pizza and grape soda means black prostitutes, or one Italian prostitute and one black prostitute, or one black child and one Satanic cabal dressed like Super Mario. You couldn't know, but you can speculate endlessly. Then the next day, thick fish text couldn't wait, followed by an actual photograph of an actual slice of pizza and actual grape soda cuts through, and suddenly the whole

conversation looks like what it first appears to be. Two older Jewish men with problematic running joke about their mutual infection for particular combinations of foods. Go figure, and again, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Right, there are millions of documents, between two and a half and three and a half million, depending on who you ask. There's

endless fodder for narrative creation. Just put a pin in any one of his claims, because very clearly, as we get to the back half of this, it will become clear that this is all motivated reason. It's that actually concerned with this question. He simply found convenient examples that support what he already thinks But then there's this to

thrust the reader right back into paranoia. Two Jeffrey. Jeffrey's email from redacted, Good afternoon, Would it be possible for Bryce and I to go over to Red Hook and have a quick pizza meal? Warmest regards? The sender's name has been redacted in the identity of Bryce is unclear, but a former New Zealand Army chief named Bryce Gordon co managed Epstein's New Mexico rams and was interviewed by

the FBI in two thousand and seven. Red Hook is an unincorporated town in the US Virgin Islands, the least populated such place, according to a twenty twenty census, consisting mostly of marinas. There is, as it turns out, a pizza restaurant there, But why would someone needs Epstein's permission to have a quick pizza meal to which the financier was not invited. It's enough to drive a sensible person

to speculation among online conspiracists. Among online conspiracists, speculation had already won the day again, and the people who bought Petz, bought into pizzagate are declaring that they were right all along. This is exactly the section of this article that got me to do this strength this next one. It is one of the while the sentences ever written in an article, especially in allegedly a respectable And I don't know why I'm surprised by this. I shouldn't be. I still am,

deep down. I think I have some sort of a battered sense of shame and standards that I really should disregard. Anyway, this is the section the people who bought into Pizzagate are declaring they were right all along. They weren't. If Epstein and his friends did use pizza as a code word for sex, that wouldn't mean that the original Pizzagate conspiracy theory was correct, even if it was the case that pizza was a sexual code word in the Podesta emails.

So basically we see here the shifting of the goalposts that the conspiracy isn't correct unless it matches up with the predictions of another conspiracy. Look like, I do not believe in Kewanon. I do not have the maximal take on Epstein, But this is a horrible argument. He's basically saying, even if you're right, well you're not right. I mean, that's effectively a more concise way to say exactly what he said it's absurd, and we get some slight chin

stroking next to you to bulk out this argument. But there's really not much to it. Don't worry. This carries on from here. A person who stumbles on the correct answer through incorrect reasoning is still mistaken. Socrates explains this principle in Plato's Mino Dialogue, in which a servant boy correctly guesses the area of a two foot by two foot square four feet, then reveals his ignorance by declaring the area of a four by four foot square is

eight feet. Socrates argues the boy was wrong when he got the right answer. He thought you calculated the area of a square by doubling the length of one size. Anyway, Socrates was put to death by popular vote. That's democracy

in action. The potential for thousands or even millions of Pizzagate conspiracists to feel vindicated and therefore empowered by the preminence of Pizza in the latest bash of Epstein's files is scary in a similar democratic fashion, evoking the opposite fear from of the excuse me, evoking the opposite fear from the fear of elites. The heart of the Epstein conspiracy a terror of ordinary people. That is the point

of this article. This author, his audience is way more afraid of the chudgs of you, of the people who may or may not have been right about their conspiracy theories quote unquote, than they are of, you know, the actual collection of blackmailers, inside traders, actual traders, and the sexual abusers at the center of this that is comparatively less of a scary or disconcerting thing to them. The Epstein story is unkillable because it is a vampire story. Huh.

A parable about the power and privilege that wealthy people wield in the twenty first century. Show me a guy who believes Epstein traffic children to Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, and I'll show you a guy who thinks rich people run the world. He's not wrong about that second part, but he's probably wrong about the details as well as a host of other stuff, including but not limited to vaccines and Jews and lasers that control the weather. I'm

not touching that, and his righteous wrongness. He's become one of the most terrifying forces in the twentieth century America. And that's the thing right that you have to be right. You not only have the goalpost shifted to simply being factually correct, but you have to be factually correct in a way that this progressive type believes is appropriate. Look like, this isn't a real argument. This is a dismissal. It's basically, you're racist, and so I don't have to listen to you,

even if you're right. This is an essay arguing for people to just stick their head in the ground. And this is ultimately why my takeaway from the last several years politics is as bad as things are. It's worse for them, right, It's worse for the elite.

the central claim, they held on to their specifics. You know, they stood astride you know, the great train of progress and yelled stop. But they lost. So I think that this is you know, and there's more analysis after that. But I think that this is a moment for optimism because of that when millions of people like him find

one another, it can cause Hughes problems. I submit that the fear of such people is fundamental The experience of being an educated liberal in Trump's United States listen closely more frightening than the syndicate of pedophilic celebrities, finance seers

and their urologists, because it operates in greater numbers. So in this latest batch of Epstein files we find weirdness, double terror, the sensation that some of the most powerful people in the world really did commit acts of imaginable cruelty and perversion, and the feeling that the craziest people in the world about to get a lot more influential

as a result. There are two conspiracies out there, the mysterious conspiracy of elites that was the life of Jeffrey Epstein and the dwell documented conspiracy of morons that is American democracy. It is possible that we are ruled by both. Well. Shoot, I honestly thought that you guys seeing that article the same that I was, well, that's embarrassing, so I guess you've been staring at my face. I'll put the link down in the description if you guys want to go

through it. But yeah, there's a lot in that article. Right. The terror, right, the real fear that they have lost or are losing, is something you see really throughout liberal and progressive thought. In my mind, this is why after

Obama too, the left got really nasty. I think that, deep down, if I could psychologize them for a bit, there was this fear, this fear that not only was this great messianic figure of Obama, the reincarnation of Martin Luther King, the man who would heal the indelible sin of America, not only did that not work out, not only did healthcare get more expensive, not only did the wars not and not only did gay marriage not do

all the things it was claimed to do. But the chudges were still there, these these this conspiracy of morons, these you know, these racists who you know prot along about Jewish space lasers and the like. They didn't go away, and so the focus shifted, of course, shifted to punishing them. These figures became sort of a recasting of the Soviet records for those who aren't familiar. And I don't know

if this is true. It may be apocryphal, but it stands for this point, when the Soviets were encountering issues, they couldn't meet quotas, things were moving inefficiently, machines broke. Well, if the state owns all of those things and it's not going well as a reflection on the state, the state cannot be criticized, And so where do they externalize

that blame? Well, externalized didn't on the wreckers. The reason we didn't make enough pig iron, the reason that this tank is late, Well, it's not because of any problem with the proletariat, not with any problem with the state. It's the wreckers, right, this sort of shadowy force. They are the reason. And in much the same way the progressives turned to these evil conspiracy theorists, these racists as the explanation for why there's sort of heaven on Earth

not materialized. We saw a huge reversion to this in the aftermath of Donald Trump's first win. I mean, look the whole modern discourse on I say modern, it's been a decade on conspiracy theories is basically that it is cope or why Hillary Rodham Clinton didn't win, right, the most prepared, the most perfect quote unquote candidate in history, Why did she lose to this orange O. Well, it's

the Russians, it's conspiracy theorists, that's queue it on. It's it's uncensored social media, it's anything but me, anything but the state. And I think you're seeing the exact same thing. And fundamentally, it seems as if these progressive types are much more afraid of that than they are of Jeffrey Epstein.

Now also, and this is much more the point of my article in juneto, which is how I will pronounce it until someone tells me how to, is why does the progressive who fundamentally casts himself as a rebel right? There's a reason they're always, you know, comparing themselves to Harry Potter or to to Star Wars right, the underdog fighting against an evil, oppressive system. Why do they feel the sudden urge to run to the defense of that same system?

against the system? Well no, we all understand that isn't true. Fundamentally, these people have the same politics as JP, Morgan, Chase and Raytheon and them. I five, right, they're not rebels. But I think a large part of this on ease is that it is that feeling of disquiet. It is that feeling that that core central myth to who you are, what justifies your existence, how you conceptualize yourself politically qua religiously. It's like, oh, shoot, I'm not I am the institution.

We understand that, right, Brooks the others I mentioned Nick Lowles as well. If you guys heard me talking to Dan the other day, I did. I have found that article. Someone was able to find it for me very quickly. So I appreciate your guys help with that. These guys are not rebels. They love to cast themselves as activists. They love to cast themselves as those who speak truth to power. Of course, right, it's not true. It's not

true at all. Obviously, they receive lots of money from the government, as I've said, the same politics as you know, Fortune ten companies in every government in the West. But this puts them in an awkward situation. Of course, I'm going to cut that out. I just completely lost my train of thought. Anyway, this places them in a very precarious situation. On twofold, one, they're moral legitimacy internally, right, This sort of narrative they tell themselves is on fundamentally

unstable ground, which is huge. We referred earlier right to the self confidence required to rule, and that self confidence requires this kind of externally externalization of plain Well, if you're sort of stuck in this situation of realizing one this central myth I told myself is not correct, and two my greatest fear really stated that the Chuds have been justified, that they have been granted moral legitimacy. It's a very interesting thing. It's sort of an inadvertent admission,

you know, those two things kind of bundled together. So yeah, I get much more into this in my article for June too. You should check it out. It's pretty good. There's a lot more in it than when I went over here. I pull from another source in that by the infamous Nick Lols who and that's you know, that is nice, right in addition to hearing about all these guys, when you read their defenders, right, when you read those who seek tokind of miscast and recharacterize these tragic events.

Lulls was, of course reacting to the Grooming gang scandal, but there are obvious and clear parallels between the two. This is one of the great things about having a you know, certain religious belief is that it's like, okay, well, you know, as a servant of power, right, as a client ally of the regime, sure, you know, he may well escape punishment. He seems to be quite wealthy and

have a pretty easy job. But uh, you know that dude's getting just Kentucky Kentucky fried now, So you know, anyway, I know this is a little bit shorter and a little bit different than normal. As I said earlier, it wasn't my plan. It's just sort of something I had to pull out of my back pocket. But I appreciate you guys. Appreciate you guys. That is an impressive illusion of three words. I appreciate you guys a lot. Thank you so much for the support. Regularly skeed old episodes

will resume tomorrow. We'll get back to kind of the normal swing of things. Sorry, I know it's not a full length episode, but you got thirty five minutes of me talking, which is basically, if you only listen to my audio track like a month of the Jay Burden Show, as long as Carl Doll's not all, we don't count us. But anyway, guys, I appreciate it. I'll be back tomorrow. To everyone at home, keep your head up. Good night,