Is there something about liberal elite networks, you should understand?
Half the country is up in arms about President Donald Trump’s inexplicable decision to mock his base, because many are appalled that Attorney General Pam Bondi seems to be orchestrating a coverup of a serial rapist of children. Bondi’s Justice Department released a memo last week: “The two-page document said the department found no evidence of an Epstein client list and that no additional files from the investigation would be made public.”
President Trump’s response to all this has been startling: He stated that “[O]nly really bad people […] want to keep something like this going.” According to NBC, he also called MAGA supporters of his who are upset at AG Bondi, “weaklings” who “bought into this bull—-t” —.
President Trump’s supporters, including Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and even Alex Jones, are furious, and calling for full release of the “Epstein files.” Polls show harm to his support: numbers that could threaten Republicans in the midterms.
Democrats are racing to capitalize on the fissures opening among Republicans, as Politico reports. President Trump’s appeal to his base is that he is “one of us”, and that he promises transparency. A situation that casts him as a rich guy with muddy motivations protecting another late rich guy’s friends — the dead man, the worst of the worst — could lose him the base, and cause MAHA voters – millions of them moms and dads of girls like the ones that Epstein abused — to flee.
Conservatives are baffled. My husband, a truly objective man (as well as an ardent President Trump supporter who also worked for numerous intelligence agencies for almost three decades), is puzzled, to the point of wondering if the President is acting uncharacteristically in response to some serious unnamed threat (or threats), perceived or actual.
Because I spent decades in the same elite liberal circles that sheltered Epstein, I am not puzzled. I think I understand the matrix of this situation.
It has, in my view, to do with “the network.”
I think that it is likely that multiple people who are critical to this administration’s success — my guess is, that these are mostly guys from the Silicon Valley community, who have been the ones to put the fuel of their billions and their technical and media support into President Trump’s campaign and administration’s engines — whether they are innocent or guilty, are in the Epstein files. (Remember why Mrs Gates broke up with Mr Gates?) And I think this nation’s most important scientists, innocent or guilty, are in the files. And my guess is that the funders have confronted President Trump.
Why do I think this? There are several clues.
One is the interview of the late Epstein’s former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, with Chris Cuomo. Remember, Dershowitz used to represent President Trump as well. Dershowitz confirmed that there is a redacted list of people accused of improper conduct, stressed that no one who is a public figure who is in office currently (you get it) is on the list, and called on AG Pam Bondi to ask the New York Courts, who have custody of this list, to release it.
If you read the hieroglyphics here correctly, what you should see (this is why it is useful to have been a political consultant; you can read the code, which often involves triangulation or “deniability”) that A/ President Trump is not on this list. B/ President Trump does not wish the horrific baggage of being the one to infuriate all the powerful people who are on this list, by releasing it himself via his AG. C/ They — the Trump administration — want it released by others, ie, the New York courts, so that they themselves don’t receive the appalling blowback.
I also believe that there are make-or-break tech bro Trump supporters on the list, because of a moving interview given by Eric Weinstein on July 14, 2025— interestingly, in the midst of the Bondi furor — to Steven Bartlett, on the “Diary of a CEO” podcast.
Weinstein was til 2022 managing director for the American venture capital firm Thiel Capital. Weinstein is a compelling intellectual, in addition having served at the very top of one of Silicon Valley’s key organizations. He created a physics-based “theory of everything” that he brought to a fellowship at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford, and he was trained in mathematics at Harvard University.
On the podcast, he stated that “[s]ex offender Jeffrey Epstein was a “product of one or more elements of the intelligence community.” Weinstein, who said he had met Epstein, described him as “certainly was not a financier in any standard sense. That was a cover story.”‘
“British entrepreneur Bartlett asks about Weinstein having met Epstein, and he says, “He wasn’t a financier the day I met him.” Weinstein goes on to describe Epstein as a “weird guy,” who “didn’t seem to know a lot about currency trading.”
Weinstein also describes Epstein as a “construct”‘.
This interview has been seen by 2.4 million people. It is riveting. I felt a deep sense of recognition when Weinstein was speaking. My sense is that Weinstein was speaking extremely carefully; that his goal, among others, was to establish that one could be enmeshed in documentation around the Epstein community and “lists”, without being a pedophile — indeed, one could be enmeshed in those documents simply for being a cutting-edge scientist; and that one intention of his was to put this situation on the record.
I know that Weinstein is correct; “the list/s” will have pedophiles on them, and they will have innocent men (and women) who are snapshotted forever in the vicinity of Epstein – even at his New Mexico ranch and yes, even on his island — simply because they had the misfortune to be some of the most important scientists and mathematicians — and technologists — of our time.
Weinstein argues that the Epstein “construct” was what the military calls “dual use” –that is, that Epstein had multiple missions running concurrently.
One mission, of course, was that of running a grotesque sexual honeypot, exploiting minors, for purposes of blackmail.
But another, Weinstein argues, is the management and direction of Western science itself. Weinstein notes that Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, the late publishing magnate/reputed intelligence asset Robert Maxwell, founded the scientific imprint Pergamon Press, the Oxford-based imprint that published medical books and journals, which was bought by Elsevier, which is the main scientific publishing imprint (and the advance guard scientifically for the COVID/vaccine narrative; indeed, Elsevier created a “resource hub” about COVID for “librarians, campuses and health professionals”, an oddly activist offering from what is supposed to be a neutral scientific platform).
Weinstein notes that Epstein funded a number of important scientists, and that he had an office at Harvard. Weinstein says in the podcast, with what looks like suppressed rage, that he wants to know why Epstein was aware of his, Weinstein’s, work, and why Epstein was embedded in the Harvard mathematics department.
Indeed, Harvard was an avid matchmaker for Epstein among the scientific and mathematics community. Harvard accepted about $9 million from Jeffery Epstein, and gave him an office in the institute that he helped to fund. Epstein visited Harvard more than 40 times.
Key Harvard academics were brought to him by connectors in the university, and encouraged to socialize with him. “Some [Harvard] professors beyond [mathematics professor Martin Nowak] appear to have enjoyed close ties with Epstein, the [Harvard] review found. The report says “a number” of faculty members visited Epstein at his homes in New York, Florida, New Mexico and the Virgin Islands. [Italics mine]. Some said they visited him in jail or took trips on his planes. The visits were done in a personal capacity, the report said, and do not appear to violate Harvard rules.”
So: systematically, consistently, major intellectuals, especially in the fields of computation, genetics, evolutionary biology, and consciousness, were being herded by gatekeepers into proximity to Epstein, who had been planted physically in their midst; and these academics were urged to accept his funding money and to meet with him and by implication, to befriend him or to accept his friendship, and even his invitations. I think this is the “Why?” that Weinstein is asking. We will return to the implications of this systematic engagement structure, later.
Eric Weinstein is correct. Jeffrey Epstein did fund cutting-edge scientists and mathematicians, especially in the fields of genetics and and evolutionary biology. He even convened them via another entity, into a community under his funding structure.
Weinstein’s larger claim — that the Maxwell/Epstein nexus or “construct” served not just to fund but to direct and manage and gate-keep and put a frame around and essentially set the direction of science — is a claim that makes sense, from what I know.
I know that Weinstein is right because I was unknowingly part of a network that overlapped with a part of this network. My agent for almost all of my career, since I was “discovered” by him and since he helped me to publish my first book, The Beauty Myth, a bestseller, at the age of 26, was the legendary literary agent John Brockman. Brockman became as famous as his famous stable of intellectuals, especially during the 2000s and 2010s, for promoting something he called “The Third Culture,” an intersection between the humanities, technology and the sciences.
Brockman’s roster of writers had no mass market novelists, no thriller writers, no cookbook writers, no popular historians. It was, in retrospect, a remarkably curated list. I was honored to join it. Brockman Inc primarily represented the very pinnacle of science and science-adjacent writers: evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, cognitive scientist Daniel Dennet, psychologist Daniel Kahneman. “Nimble Deal-Maker for the Stars of Science” reads a gushing New York Times profile of John Brockman.
Jeffrey Epstein funded the Edge Foundation, Brockman’s digital and irl salon. No one knew this. Or, at least, no one I knew, knew this.
This entity held gatherings of these intellectuals, and published a website and books in which they were asked critical questions (the website is still up). Edge.org’s website hosts commentary by the best of the best — the minds that are directing our culture and our science: theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann, cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, Gnostic Gospel scholar Elaine Pagels, theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, Google co-founder Larry Page.
Its motto is: “To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.”
Edge.org hosted “millionaire’s dinners”, which later became “billionaires’ dinners”; these brought the elite of the world of science together with the elites of Silicon Valley. Edge.org also published commentary by some of the most influential intellectuals in the world — men (mostly men) from both of those worlds, in dialogue. (Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein and Eric Weinstein both contributed to Edge.org, and in 2018 Eric Weinstein thanked Brockman in a tweet, for the opportunity to speak “as me”.)
I will just lift out the sections from Wikipedia that explain the basics of the Epstein link with Brockman Inc, as I do not wish to locate myself in the cross-hairs of any new reporting for this dangerous story:
“In an interview with Prince Andrew dated November 17, 2019, BBC reporter Emily Maitlis mentioned that both Andrew and John Brockman attended an intimate dinner at child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion to celebrate Epstein’s release from prison for charges which stemmed from at least one decade of child sex trafficking.[7]
Andrew’s presence at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion was corroborated by Brockman himself, in emails published in an October 2019 New Republic report. The story suggested that Brockman was the “intellectual enabler” of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who died in August 2019 while again awaiting trial on charges related to sex trafficking.[8]
Brockman’s famous literary dinners—held during the TED Conference—were, for a number of years after Epstein’s conviction, almost entirely funded by Epstein as documented in his annual tax filings.” This allowed Epstein to mingle with scientists, startup icons and tech billionaires [Italics mine].”
