Epstein's "Friends" Have One Thing In Common

Crippingly uncool

Feb 10, 2026

As the fallout from the latest Epstein files release continues, including revelations about ex-Ambassador ex-Lord Peter Mandelson which have now put an actual Prime Minister on the hot seat, discourse so far has ignored a central question: why were credentialed neolibs the most susceptible to this gadfly pervert? It’s simple: these people all grew up cripplingly uncool. Model UN types who went to Brown and climbed the ranks at McKinsey hoping for social affirmation from their idea of a popular party bro — suave, connected, mysterious. Nerd sycophants who knew they’d be eaten alive at the University of Alabama. (Has anyone spotted any SEC grads in the files? Any at all?) That’s how you get Larry Summers desperately seeking relationship advice from the guy he knows who’s good with (very) young ladies. Basically, Epstein provided these powerful, successful nerds what they always craved when they were excluded in high school… with high schoolers, no less.

The Woke Post Deserved to Die

New York Post:

The Washington Post’s newsroom layoffs last week brought a flood of media hate for Jeff Bezos, but they should have inspired a moment of reckoning for the woke left who went so crazy on Bezos’ dime while giving readers none of the content they wanted to read.
When he bought the newspaper, the Amazon billionaire was hailed as the savior of a grand old institution that had fallen on hard times.
He offered not just a lifeline, but a huge amount of investment to expand the role and reach of the paper, which had been lapped by newer competitors in covering the nation’s capital.
Instead of seeing this opportunity as a kick in the pants, motivating better coverage of the things that interest Washington readers, the Post leaned hard into woke, race-focused, pro-transgender, anti-Trump coverage.
Bezos gave them a chance to reset.
Instead, they became the “Democracy dies in darkness” newspaper on every last page.
No section was safe from the absurdity: Consider, for example, 2021’s ridiculous deep-dive feature story on the racist implications of birdwatching.
Because some birds are named after people who owned slaves, you see.
So it’s racist.
Washington, the name of both the city and the paper, is problematic, the Woke Post told us.
So are the many local monuments and statues built to honor America’s greatest historic figures — the very thing that brings tourists our way.
Perhaps jealous of The New York Times’ 1619 project, The Post pursued its own TEMU version for years.
Its staffers covered such deeply important questions as whether it was sexist to dislike the all-female “Ghostbusters” reboot, or racist to like Dungeons & Dragons.
They employed online hit-job artist Taylor Lorenz and a host of woke scold writers across all subjects.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in the sections that had nothing at all to do with politics — particularly the sports pages.
The Post’s sports section was once legendary, with names like Shirley Povich, Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, Sally Jenkins and Tom Boswell drawing readers with their lively coverage.
Yet the very paper that sold millions of copies on the back of Kornheiser’s cocky “bandwagon” columns boosting the ’90s-era Washington Redskins became a chiding, lecturing nag in the hands of a younger generation.
The death of George Floyd meant just one thing for them: Here’s our way to get rid of our local football team’s “racist” name.
Instead of covering the franchises locals love as sports, they covered them as politics.
So when the NHL’s Alexander Ovechkin was riding toward his historic goal performance for the Capitals, the big question for the Post was: Is it problematic to root for a Russian, given the war in Ukraine?
The crowds cheering him on certainly didn’t feel that way, but the city’s biggest paper clearly did.
Maybe that’s why the crowds stopped subscribing.
There’s a reason the sports staff’s most glowing coverage was reserved for trans athletes and for Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe.
It’s because the woke left’s highest aim is to inject divisive politics into everything — especially into the few remaining things that unite us.
In the run-up to the Super Bowl, the Post was doing its normal schtick: ignoring the storylines people care about to instead cover things that non-sports fans think you should care about.
Such as Excel-spreadsheeting competitions. Really.
It isn’t always true that going woke makes you go broke.
But one area in which that chestnut does apply is the case of a newspaper that’s supposed to appeal to a wide audience in a major city, and instead only speaks to those who want constant lectures on the new thing that’s racist, sexist or problematic.
You don’t lose $100 million in a single year by giving people the stories they want or need to read.
Media critics tried to blame the Post’s losses on Bezos and his decision to spike a 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris.
But that’s ignoring the truth.
As acid-tongued social critic David Burge puts it, the aim of the woke left is to “target a respected institution, kill & clean it,” and “wear it as a skin suit, while demanding respect.”
The woke left tried to do that to DC’s biggest newspaper.
And not even one of the world’s biggest billionaires was willing to keep lighting cash on fire to support this amount of crazy.
There are markets for everything. The founder of Amazon, of all people, knows that.
But there’s no great market for the wokeness The Washington Post was selling.
For that news, America should be thankful.

Prediction Markets Thrive, But Are They a Safe Bet?

The Spectator:

On a cold January night in New York City, Chris Hayes walked off the set of CBS’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert only to face a pressing ethical dilemma. As he left the Ed Sullivan Theater and walked on to Broadway, he got a text from a friend who covers technology for NPR with a screenshot of a Yes/No market that had been spun up on the prediction market Kalshi, based on what Hayes might say on the evening’s broadcast. What would he say about Donald Trump? Would he talk about affordability, Russia, China, Greenland or other topics? It was just a $22,000 market in volume, a minor amount. But what struck Hayes as truly bizarre about the market was this: it was a prediction market about something that had already happened.
Late-night show broadcasts, despite advertising and even title claims indicating otherwise, aren’t live. They are taped in the afternoon, and in the case of Colbert, in front of hundreds of tourists who stand in line to attend. “The crazy thing was that this wasn’t a future event,” Hayes later told his social media followers. “This had happened. We had recorded it. I, Stephen Colbert, the production staff and all the people in the building know what I said or didn’t say.”
Things got even stranger as broadcast time approached. Increased activity on Kalshi led the prediction market to be featured on its homepage, blowing the volume up to more than a million dollars, all on a conversation that had already taken place.
“What possible social utility, what possible utility whatsoever can be gained from a $900,000 betting market on a thing that’s happened? And obviously, I’m not going to go in and place a bet or tip my friends off to it,” Hayes said. “That would be unethical. But a lot of people would. And for a lot of the bets that are on Kalshi, it just seems like these are essentially opportunities for people with inside information to monetize their inside information.”
Hayes may be a ramrod of integrity, but others not so much, as we see with the concerning prediction-market plays in politics and the national security space. The ability to bet on everything – even though these are, technically speaking, contracts – also leads to the emergence of ridiculous whales. One Nostradamus of the net responded to the ebullient nature of Zohran Mamdani’s November election win by placing a $15,000 longshot Polymarket bet at 3 a.m. on the New York City mayor becoming the 2028 Democratic nominee. Upon waking, they apparently realized the foreign-born Mamdani is ineligible, and sold for an immediate $10,000 loss. But why does Polymarket allow people to trade on an impossibility?
The paid backers of these prediction markets – which include prominent Democrats such as Sean Patrick Maloney, president and CEO of the Coalition for Prediction Markets – repeatedly espouse them as a social good. “I know from my time in Congress that noise does not equal knowledge. And when truth gets buried, power shifts further away from everyday people to those who profit from confusion,” says Maloney in a walk-and-talk ad for his trade group. “But what if you could have better insight into what the future holds? Prediction markets, exchanges where people trade on the outcome of future events, existed for centuries.” So have soothsayers and psychics, but they are rarely the richest in the neighborhood. Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren is having none of it, saying Maloney’s leadership of the group – which includes Kalshi, Crypto.com and Robinhood – “stinks like the swamp.” She may find a bipartisan friend in Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who has already introduced bans on stock trading by members of Congress and may soon look to these markets as a logical next step. But with Donald Trump’s family all in on the crypto-backed economy and the light touch of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, this may be an instance when the swamp wins out, at least temporarily.
In the long term, the established players in this space are more skeptical. Top experts at the major sports gambling sites are doubtful about the future of prediction markets. More regulation seems likely once there is a change in administration or the Supreme Court makes a ruling on the prediction markets. According to Eilers & Krejcik’s Gaming Online Gambling Outlook for 2026, prediction markets could reach $1 trillion in annual volume this year, with sports bets by far the most popular, valued at $435 billion. The more prediction markets look like an underhanded way to get around state restrictions on sports gambling, the more likely it is that government will respond. The report warns: “The rapid expansion of sports trading via prediction markets increases the likelihood that Congress revisits the permissibility of sports prediction markets and, under certain conditions, the regulatory treatment of sports betting itself.”
People at the Super Bowl this month were not able to live-bet on the game legally – California doesn’t allow sports gambling. But it does allow prediction markets, although the NFL banned adverts for these companies during the game. But that won’t diminish the amount of betting: the American Gaming Association estimated Super Bowl wagers in legal sportsbooks would hit $1.76 billion this year, not including prediction markets or less than legal methods.
More gamblers means more betting on everything including individual players’ performances. As a result, betting scandals take on a more personal quality.
After a turnover-filled performance against Auburn in February, Tennessee Coach Rick Barnes said the quiet part out loud: “I mean at the end of the game, some of the passes that we throw, I don’t know what to say other than sometimes I wonder if my guys are betting on games. I shouldn’t say that, but… erase that. I’m just wondering what’s happening.” With 39 college basketball players currently accused of point shaving, you don’t have to wonder. The biggest prediction-market play right now might be a bet on whether they survive. The more people lose, the more they will ask whether these markets are fair. Chris Hayes has already answered that $900,000 question.

✍️ Feature

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🪶 Quote

“I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.”

— Christopher Hitchens

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