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Hair Plugs And Diet Pills: Trump's Personal Decay Is Nation's Avatar

Hair Plugs And Diet Pills: Trump's Personal Decay Is Nation's Avatar

In one of his earliest insane acts in public office, two weeks after his first inauguration, President Trump dispatched his former NYPD bodyguard to “raid” the office of his Upper East Side doctor and seize his medical records. The doctor had made the fatal mistake of revealing he’d prescribed hair growth drugs to the newly installed Leader of the Free World. Poor Dr. Harold Bornstein told reporters he felt "raped, frightened and sad" when Trump goon Keith Schiller and another "large man" came to his office to rifle the files and collect the records.

Despite that mobsterish incident, much reliable public reporting exists that Trump has resorted to hair plugs, baldness surgery and diet pills over the years to maintain his signature look. One former producer on The Apprentice, Noel Casler, has even insisted that Trump regularly snorted Adderall to stay focused.

But the rest of his self-care regimen is more murky. Did a doctor ever step forward to explain what really happened to his earlobe after the shooting in Butler? Did the public even see those medical records? Why, no!

After weeks of speculation about the Presidential cankles, the White House announced that he had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a fairly common condition that can also lead to amputation and death.

All we know for sure is that a steady diet of red meat and a little golf have apparently been sufficient to fuel production of the liters of bile required for hourly acts of vengeance.

For the last three days, social media was a-sizzle with macabre speculation about President Trump’s death. Granted it was a slow end-of-summer news weekend and people had a lot of time for wistful musing. He hadn’t looked well recently, his signature word salad was getting way more pronounced and there’s that weird bruise on his paw. Plus, the last Cabinet meeting played out like a creepy living eulogy session. Then he disappeared, without a word of explanation or reassurance in mainstream media.

The information vacuum became a vortex of speculation. Melania was (unreliably, but who knows) reported to have shown up unannounced in the maternity ward at Walter Reed. An unverifiable video went viral of a shadowy figure flinging something brown (a diaper? a McDonald’s bag?) out a third floor window of the White House. A Democrat I know in Washington spent the weekend querying ChatGPT about the prospects for an obese 79 year old with increasingly paraphasic, disorganized speech and with a noticeable weaving gait. Chat kept coming up with the same diagnosis: Transient ischemic attacks (little strokes).

Trump might be doing just fine. But like Biden, he is obviously experiencing some form of decline and his people are scurrying to cover it up. The ridiculous proof of life emissions the White House released over the weekend – old golf pictures and extended maniacal Truth Social rants – did little to reassure.

The old golf pictures presented as new were actually the most alarming sign that something was amiss. The Truth Social rants, not so much. (Clearly, he doesn’t write his own social media pronouncements – in my opinion, an official Trump rant channeler has been at work since covfefe. The tell is consistently correct spelling and perfect grammar, including semicolons and commas. We eagerly await that person’s unmasking.)

Whatever is going on with his health, we might not know about it for a generation or ever. Trump has overturned decades of tradition around transparency when it comes to Presidential health. But given that we are living at a time when the right’s brain trust openly advocates for a return to dictatorship or monarchy, it is worthwhile to remember how the medieval Europeans viewed the king’s body. Essentially it was doubled. The King was his physical body and the body politic. The physical body would decline and die, but the body politic was the eternal part of the man, hence “The King is Dead; Long Live the King.”

Trump can’t live forever. But his physical decline tracks with America’s.

The profound unhealthiness of the Trump moment is all around us: the MAGA social media grifters making bank on quack supplements; its women injected with plastic and hobbled in stilettos like footbound Chinese aristocrats, the reverence for pollution and worship of fossil fuel extraction, for "beautiful coal,” and more cracker plants to produce more tons of nurdles just as the rest of the nations on earth are trying to reduce plastic.

And most unforgivable – the deliberate destruction of our national medical research and public health systems to own the libs, save a few tax dollars for billionaires, and commence the great eugenics project openly cherished by the right wing fringe.

The MAGA movement has undeniable aspects of body horror, a subgenre of horror that involves grotesque degeneration, mutation, or transformation of the human body. The fear body horror evokes is rooted in violations of bodily integrity and the loss of control over one's own physical form, due to mutations, parasitism, infections, and augmentations or modifications. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is considered a principal originator of body horror films like Shivers and Rabid, his remake of The Fly. Think also of extremely unwanted pregnancies involving alien or Satanic gestations such as in Rosemary’s Baby or Alien.

The doddering old man’s body is metaphor for the ghastly corrupting effect he has had on our country: a decade-long descent of our public discourse into profane spectacle, the jettisoning of common decency and empathy in favor of rudeness and cruelty, the daily rituals of public humiliation, open racism and sexism, and the craven terror of the disfigured Republican Party.

How much longer can the health of the body politic withstand the weaving fat man at the podium, the most divisive leader in modern American history, crooning about internal enemies over and over in that saccharine hiss so mesmerizing to so many: “They hate our country. They hate our country. They hate our country”?

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Ghislaine Blames Victim (And More From Her Pardon-Pushing Prison Script)

Ghislaine Blames Victim (And More From Her Pardon-Pushing Prison Script)

When I was helping produce a three part series about Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, our team put in many hours discussing how and why she became the woman dozens of witnesses accused of heinous acts including underage solicitation, grooming, and trafficking. What kind of woman would serve up teen “nubiles” to a man who supposedly needed new girls on the daily? Why would she participate in an industrial scale sex trafficking operation? Was she pathologically inclined to assault? Was she groomed herself from childhood into the perfect tool for powerful men?

We hunted down and pored over clues to her psyche. We spoke with dozens of people who knew her in New York and in the U.K. where she grew up the tenth child in a wealthy family. We studied her father, media baron Robert Maxwell, a cruel, damaged oaf and one of the most mysterious figures in Cold War intrigue, associated with Israeli, and probably American, and maybe even Russian intelligence. What we didn’t do – what no one then could do - was hear from the woman herself.

Now she has spoken. In the released transcripts and audio from two days in a closed room with a Trump lawyer at a Tallahassee courthouse, she participated in a brazen feint at “transparency” for the Epstein conspiracy diehards threatening the MAGA coalition. It’s a fascinating charade and some enterprising theater director could turn the transcript verbatim into an excellent off-Broadway play.

Todd Blanche (one of the Epsteingate plumbers we covered here) threw softballs, and often answered Maxwell’s questions for her, while she suffered memory lapses, trashed victims, and demonstrably lied about her role and relationship with Epstein. (To be fair, Blanche did seem a little shocked that she couldn’t remember the reason for an $18 million payment from the sex trafficker.)

Blanche arranged the meeting after the Wall Street Journal published Trump’s “shared secrets” birthday note. That item is one of many artifacts – mostly photographic – confirming that the two men were close friends for years. The White House reportedly believed the item came from Maxwell’s side.

What else might be stashed in Pandora’s box?

While working on the documentary, we thought Maxwell would eventually trade evidence against untold numbers of powerful men ensnared in Epstein’s surveilled pleasure palace. Alan Dershowitz calls her “the key” to the case.

Anyone who reads the transcript and is familiar with the Maxwell story knows that there are many questions Blanche didn’t ask. But the transcript is filled with Easter eggs nonetheless.

Maxwell said a friend introduced her to Epstein as a potential husband in April 1991. If that’s true, is it just coincidence that it’s the same month Les Wexner mysteriously gave Epstein power of attorney over his entire fortune – a sum that enabled Epstein to catapult into the realm of blackmailable influential rich men. That same month, Epstein got his first private jet. According to flight logs, Maxwell would make 50 flights during the first year he owned it, often to Columbus, Ohio, where Wexner lived.

When Blanche asked her whether she had ever had any contact with an individual from Mossad, Maxwell replied: “Well not deliberately.”

“Pardon me?” Blanche replied, then moved on.

He was similarly blasé when she said Epstein hosted Ehud Barak, the former prime minister and head of military intelligence. Blanche breezed on to a question about Epstein’s use of testosterone instead.

Blanche worked to deliver backup for the MAGA obsession du jour, baiting his hook with the names of various Democrats – Andrew and Chris Cuomo, Bill Gates, Bobby Kennedy – trawling for evidence to build the elusive “client list” of progressive libertines. But Maxwell stood firm. “I never, ever saw any man doing something inappropriate with a woman of any age. I never saw inappropriate habits.”

Kind of depends on your definition of “inappropriate” of course: in court testimony, numerous women described Maxwell participating in the “massages” – stripping, pulling out sex toys, etc. To Blanche, she added a caveat: “Now, somebody's inappropriate and mine may be different.”

Inquiring minds might ask a follow-up to that. Blanche replied only: “Yep.”

In Maxwell’s memory, the bathrobe is the great leitmotif. “I don’t believe I ever saw him in a bathrobe,” Maxwell replied to a question about whether Dershowitz ever received a massage.

Maxwell used the exposure to settle scores and portray herself as a victim, a rebrand that, if successful, should win a Clio. She blamed her first public accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, 16 when she was recruited to service Epstein, for turning Jeff from a regular guy who just liked a daily massage or two, into an insatiable sex monster who always “wanted new,” causing Maxwell to trawl the spas of Palm Beach or the Caribbean for “masseuses” (she never called the victims women or girls). Roberts, Maxwell said, was trained “to be what every man wants in all its manners, fellatio and everything else.”

The transcript ends exactly where it likely began as the stunt was conceived in Washington – the birthday book. Blanche’s final question is the one eating his boss alive: “Do you know -- do you remember being told or knowing where the book is now?” Maxwell said she assumed the Southern District of New York feds had leaked it.

Maxwell knew exactly why she was there: She produced the money quote for Trump right away: “In the time that I was with him he was a gentleman in all respects.” The line made Fox News headlines and allowed MAGA propagandists to crow that Trump was ever honorable.

A week later Ghislaine was moved to finer prison digs, a way station perhaps to a pardon. And so the myth of the orange archangel sent from above to rescue children from pedophile elites lives another day.

AUTHOR NOTE: Readers interested in more about Ghislaine Maxwell, watch my recent Substack Live Sex Lies and Money with director Barbara Shearer and a long talk with Sidney Blumenthal at his Court of History podcast.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Pete Hegseth

Gender Regression: Trump Weenies And Their Woman-Hating Women

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a CNN clip in which a pastor from his nominally Christian sect said that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, the 19th Amendment should be “repealed,” and women should “submit” to their husbands. Hegseth’s getting better at cosplaying a powerful man. The flopsweat of Pete’s early days – wandering with lawyers and aides through Senate offices spluttering away the roofie rape charges – is mostly gone. But his eyes are ever aglow with the terror of his imposter syndrome. In his profound insecurity and his utterly unearned global power, Hegseth is a mascot for all Trumpy and MAGA men.

With Hegseth to his right and Attorney General Pam Bondi to his left, Trump announced that National Guard troops are taking charge of “crime prevention” in the nation’s capital. This was an obvious attempt at distracting from the President’s weaponization of the U.S. government for an Epstein cover-up. And that case, as we all know, is about the status of American women.

The elections in 2016 and 2024 signaled the end of a period when women could assume that we were living in an era of steady progress welcomed by many –but not all –Americans. The Dobbs decision set women back medically, but we overlook the knock-on effects politically and culturally. Since Trump’s first election, surveys have found that decreasing numbers of teen boys believe that women and girls deserve equal pay.

On Election Night last year, Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi who had dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, tweeted: “Your Body My Choice. Forever.” To slam home the point, the administration arranged for the accused sex trafficker, rapist, “manosphere influencer” brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate to be flown out of Romania, where they were awaiting criminal charges, and into Florida on a private jet.

The achievements of Second Wave feminism, a movement that profoundly challenged eons of patriarchy with the help of the birth control pill, seem to have culminated in the empowerment of a claque of extreme right-wing women serving arguably the rapiest White House in modern history.

These often blonde, conspicuous cross-wearing women – Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, political strategist Susie Wiles, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Agriculture Secretary and longtime hard-right conservative think tank figure Brooke Rollins, lawyer and media star Jeanine Pirro, profane right wing influencer Laura Loomer, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, media personality and lawyer Megyn Kelly and of course, mendacity phenom Karoline Leavitt, who stands steely-eyed before the entire world lying to vastly more experienced men and women – are the current de facto standard bearers for empowered American women.

Trump’s appointed eight women to his cabinet -- not a record but significant compared to the two in his first term. All are adept at the psychological and political jiu jitsu of serving a regime led by a convicted sex abuser, with a vice president who has seriously suggested that maybe single women shouldn’t vote. The disenfranchisement of women is just the beginning. Men’s rights cultists, religious leaders, and pandering legislatures fantasize about putting the “lock” back in wedlock, ending no fault divorce.

“Pastor” Doug Wilson is only one of the crackpot Men of God affiliated with Vance and Hegseth who openly proclaim that marital rape is impossible. (The “I do” in the vows constituted full and eternal consent, ladies. “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,” Wilson has written in one of his books. “ A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts…True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.”)

The foundational premise of this regressive worldview is that men, not women, are capable of living lives of adventure, mission, and public purpose. It’s an archaic notion originating from the movement’s murkiest id of a brain trust including, on the secular side, the odious Bronze Age Pervert, on the supposedly Christian side, Wilson and his ilk. These men share the view that women’s “natural” qualities design them for domestic, indoor, mothering forms of labor, and are innately incapable of seeking worldly challenge, living with purpose, or practicing self-reliance.

Supporting this creed, the working women of Trumpworld must be simultaneously empowered and hobbled. They would have you believe that although they have babysitters and cooks, and leave the kids with their husbands while they work long hours and rack up frequent flier miles, they are in full agreement with the notion that mothering, bread baking, and serving male carnal needs constitute all of a woman’s primary purpose in life. (In a recent Wall Street Journal article about these women, some claim that “faith” distinguishes them from career women of the left, who they believe “are unhappy.”)

These women and their regime are quantifiably setting women back on too many fronts to list here, and the cognitive dissonance between their real lives and the ideology they serve is mind-boggling. One need only look at before and after photos of every woman over the age of 40 in Trump’s orbit to know that they remake themselves physically to conform to his “smaller bikinis, higher heels” archaic caricature of femininity. Like the nativists descended from immigrants (Stephen Miller, et al) who yank up the ladder behind them, the rock-ribbed ladies of Trumpworld rode feminism to the top of the power structure, only to latch themselves to a project to revert those gains.

The bargain these women make with the sexual assaulter in chief is this: pretend that he and his men are actually protectors of women in exchange for personal gain and access to power. During the last weeks of his 2024 campaign, Trump was explicit on this, in a menacing way. He declared he would be a protector of women “whether the women like it or not.” Of course, the real protection that Americans need is protection against the misogynist MAGAs and the manosphere influencers and loony church men like Pastors Doug Wilson and Joel Webber.

The sole upside of the current assault on our rights is that it must energize a new generation of young women whose upbringing and expectations are profoundly at odds with the regressive aims of this minority. Anyone born after 1970 was raised in a world molded by grandmothers who made epochal change. The societal reset that clicked in half a century ago cannot be so easily erased. In the months and (hopefully not too many) years to come, they will re-learn an old lesson: In the oldest conflict in human history—the war between the sexes—women can never leave the front lines unattended.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.

The Epstein Coverup: Lawyers Descend Into Sewer To Protect Trump

The Epstein Coverup: Lawyers Descend Into Sewer To Protect Trump

“Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.” So announced MAGA stalwart Marjorie Taylor Greene recently in response to the Trump administration’s “nothing to see here” Epstein files pivot.

We agree with MTG. We know you’re ravenous.

Here at the Freakshow, we don’t have the FBI vault’s stash of Epstein filet mignon. But we’ve been serving up some well-done steak nibbles – a Jeffrey-Donald bromance history and reasons why it’s not improbable to think Melania Trump, née Knauss, could have met Epstein before she met Trump.

We have some more meat this week: a close look at the claque of dirtbag lawyers buzzing around Epstein, Trump, and Ghislaine Maxwell. Ruthless lawyers abusing the American legal system for purposes of political manipulation and private gain are a hallmark of Trump’s career. So, of course, he could find men to engineer the probably illegal move of Ghislaine Maxwell – the woman who holds “the key” to the Epstein story, per no less a source than implicated Epstein pal Alan Dershowitz – to a luxury minimum security prison.

Remember that the Trump White House reportedly thinks the “birthday book” that the Wall Street Journal got its hands on came from Maxwell’s side. We may never know for sure, but if she has stashed her “keys” with anyone, now, when Trump’s feet are to the fire and she wants a pardon, would be the time to rattle them at him.

Enter the cleanup crew. The plumbers of Epsteingate.

Start with Timothy C. Parlatore, the lawyer who handled Trump’s classified documents case in Florida. Just two months after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and seized a hoard of purloined documents, Parlatore hired Epstein’s lifelong attorney, Darren Indyke, into his firm.

Parlatore never had to win the documents case. The feds and Jack Smith had Trump dead to rights, but a Trump-appointed lackey of a federal judge slow-walked and then killed the case in time for last year’s election.

Parlatore next sailed to DC on his client’s coattails, savagely defending Pete Hegseth during his nomination fight and threatening the California Republican who accused him of roofie rape in a police report with legal action if she spoke out during the hearings.

He is now at the Pentagon, one of Defense Secretary Hegseth’s top advisors. Such a relationship in the Before Times was considered a conflict of interest since he is also Hegseth’s personal attorney. Now, of course, conflicts are the way we do bidness.

If a man is the company he keeps, then Parlatore, and by extension, clients Hegseth and Trump, are all tainted by Parlatore’s formal association with Epstein’s personal Better Call Saul, the Long Island-born and raised Darren Indyke. Parlatore’s law firm website launders Indyke’s history from the get-go: “For more than 20 years, Mr. Indyke served as general counsel to family offices, serial entrepreneurs, investors, and other ultra-high-net-worth clientele.”

Nice try. The “family office” Indyke worked in was Jeffrey Epstein’s, in a building on East 66th Street where Epstein routinely housed foreign and underage models (including “sex slave” Nadia Marcinka, at age 15), girlfriends, models, employees, and even French pedo and fellow “model agency” mogul Jean Luc Brunel.

The work was lucrative, even with a dead client. Indyke and Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, are the two executors of Epstein’s fortune. As such, they reportedly stood to reap $145 million last year in tax refunds from what was left of the estate. Some Epstein victims sued Indyke and Kahn claiming the two men helped Epstein build “the complex financial infrastructure” that enabled Epstein to sexually abuse hundreds for decades. The case was quietly dismissed in April of this year.

Another taxpayer-funded Trump personal lawyer on the case is Todd Blanche. Blanche tried and lost the Stormy Daniels hush money case. He is now Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice, empowered to do double duty for his formerly personal client by, against all procedural norms, personally and without a transcriber or video camera present, meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, someone Trump might like to pardon for – ahem – personal reasons. (AUTHOR NOTE: After we posted this, CNN reported that the administration is considering releasing a transcript - redacted to “protect victims” of the conversation between Blanche and Maxwell. )

Before we move on, let’s absorb the lawless depravity here: According to the New York Times, Maxwell was ineligible under Bureau of Prison regulations to be moved. Inmates designated as sex offenders are generally supposed to be held in high-security prisons, like the facility in Tallahassee where Blanche met with Maxwell, and not in minimum-security facilities, like her new digs in Texas.

Last but not least, let’s have a look at Maxwell’s current lawyer David Oskar Markus, whose chief mentor in law and in life was none other than Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and OJ lawyer who flew frequently on Epstein’s jet, and who litigiously denied allegations from victim Virginia Giuffre that he participated in Epstein’s smorgasbord of nubile sex.

Markus has been defending not just Maxwell but Epsteinians in general for years: besides Dersh, he wrote a Miami Herald op-ed arguing that Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who cut Epstein’s infamous 2008 sweetheart deal, was getting “unfairly criticized.”

As Maxwell’s lawyer, Markus sat in on the meetings between his client and Todd Blanche. He has insisted she deserves clemency because the Alex Acosta Palm Beach Epstein plea deal gave immunity to all Epstein’s co-conspirators.

It is possible the lawyers will have gone a bridge too far with Epstein. Maxwell’s own lawyer and some rightwing media are testing a rebrand of Maxwell as a victim. Anyone wondering why this will fail needs only glance at the harrowing testimony at her trial.

Meanwhile, Trump, his saurian eye always keen to danger, tried a new tack, claiming he “never had the privilege” of going to Epstein’s island. And he accused Epstein – for the first time ever – of “stealing our people” from the Mar-a-Lago spa, including, apparently, former locker room attendant, the late Virginia Giuffre.

One can easily imagine the faces of the cabal of lawyers as they listened to this clip of the president, digging himself into the briar patch.

A third of Republican voters disapprove of how Trump is handling the case, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. A Washington Post survey of over 1,000 Americans found a significant majority, including a large minority of Republicans, are actually paying attention and growing ever more uneasy about the legal sleight of hand and Trump’s dodges. These polls show Americans aren’t buying what Trump’s trying to sell – which is perhaps why he’s pivoted to threatening to arrest former President Obama and menacing Russia with nuclear subs on social media.

NIna Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow. Please consider subscribing here.

A 'Model' Immigrant: Did Melania Know Epstein Before She Met Trump?

A 'Model' Immigrant: Did Melania Know Epstein Before She Met Trump?

New York journalist Michael Wolff has five years' worth of interviews with Jeffrey Epstein, up until shortly before his death, in his possession. He is now releasing his bombshells with the regularity of a metronome. This week’s drop: he was quoted in a now retracted Daily Beast story saying that Epstein took credit for introducing Melania and Donald.

If true, the official story of their meetup is false. If not, it’s interesting that Number One litigation terrorist Trump has not gone after Wolff, whose unflagging courage in reporting on the President’s past and present sets him in a league of his own. Yesterday, when the Daily Beast asked the White House for comment on Wolff’s reporting, all they got was the predictably surly Steven Cheung insult-laden ad hominem denial. The Beast took the story down, after Melania’s attorney sent a letter “challenging the headline and framing of the article.”

I spent a good deal of time researching Melania for my book on the Trump family women, The Trump Women: Part of the Deal. Anyone who has tried to learn what Melania Knauss was up to in the years between leaving Slovenia around 1990 and washing up in New York City a few years before she says she met Trump in 1998, finds a lacuna, a blank slate on which there is almost no record. Mary Jordan, a Washington Post reporter and author who wrote a 2019 Melania biography, noted in her preface that she had an easier time reporting on national security spooks than on Melania.

I made some headway: I interviewed denizens of the New York fashion world who suggested, at the very least, that she was never a “supermodel.” I went to Slovenia, found a few sources who talked, and much fear, including in a powerful businessman who told me he was backing out of talking to me about Melania’s father’s legal problems after he was visited in his office by thuggish men in business suits.

In my reporting on Melania, I never ran across an Epstein connection. But it was 2018, and he wasn’t on my radar. I did discover a discrepancy in the official story of how Trump and Melania met. Melania says she met Trump in 1998 at a Victoria's Secret party. But fashion photographer, Jarl Alé de Basseville (who shot her in the nude scenes for a French men’s magazine that the New York Post published during the 2016 campaign) told me he and his team recalled her telling them in 1996 – two years before the official story – that Trump was her boyfriend.

Melania, of course, denies this.

The truth is that Melania was an Eastern European beauty who came of age in a formerly Iron Curtained-off country, Tito’s Yugoslavia. Like her predecessor, Ivana Trump, she grew up looking longingly over at the luxuries of the West, from plentiful Coca-Cola and Swiss chocolate to Italian jeans to Mercedes cars. As soon as the Berlin Wall fell, two things happened to women like her: one, they saw an escape hatch in commodifying their beauty, and two, they were ripe for exploitation by men like Epstein, whose business model involved trafficking Eastern European women – and girls.

One person who talked to me at length about this – and about Melania – was the man who claims to have brought Melania to New York: Paolo Zampolli, a jolly Italian businessman and sometimes model agent. Zampolli’s Milanese family had become wealthy making toys, including the Italian version of the Easy-Bake Oven (marketed in Italy as Dolce Forno). At the time I met him, he was a U.N. ambassador representing the Caribbean island of Dominica and a welcome guest at Trump’s first White House.

Here’s the story he told me, as I wrote in my book:

In the 1990s, beauties from the former Soviet Union were flooding the New York market. Books and articles have been written about this era and the rampant exploitation of these women.
Zampolli told me that there were so many gorgeous photogenic women looking for work that the value fell and pretty soon they were doing other things, things that maybe weren’t supposed to be captured on camera. He doesn’t deny this was true—although he has never included Melania in this category.
“At the time, once a month, I would have some guy calling me, putting pressure on me, saying his girlfriend should’ve been a model. And most of them, they were from Eastern European countries, because they had a visa problem. And you know, the girls would be beautiful. But they’re not model material, you understand. It’s a very different thing, is to be model material, or to be a girl you take out, or do other things. Okay. And in the nineties, New York was overflowing with these—those things—you might say. But this is not what happened in model agencies. Because in model agencies, we wanted to make money left and right.”
To accommodate the influx and see whether he could make money off it, Zampolli opened a division for the nonprofessionals.
“They’re not models, they can get little jobs, but they have to understand, they’re not models, they’re not fashion models.”
His People division was roughly equivalent to what other agencies called a Showroom division—basically lower-tier models who were contracted to designer showrooms. But Zampolli girls were also sometimes employed by what he called “party promoters”— tall, glamorous human decorations.
“But these are not models. They are beautiful girls with a stunning body that fits the clothes and their face is okay, but nobody gives a shit about the face because you just need somebody to wear the clothes.” He called them “clothes hangers.”
Sometimes he would send a dozen of his showroom girls to an “event,” Paolo recalled. That didn’t mean he expected them to stay out all night, he said. He chalked those incidents up to the “party promoters.” Zampolli described the party promoters as like Uber drivers with second jobs stocking nightclubs with lissome babes. “Remember this was before Uber. I had drivers driving them around in SUVs.”

Zampolli now holds a Trump appointment as “special envoy to Italy.” Melania is America’s mostly absent First Lady. And Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost haunts them all, but chained in a vault of 100,000 pages of FBI files that, we now know, a thousand agents were detailed to flag for mentions of Trump. We don’t know what’s in them, and the not knowing threatens to crack the MAGA coalition.

One thing is certain: Epstein was a capo in the global community of men who profited off the commodification and exploitation of Eastern European women. Much reporting exists indicating he was one of the most prolific movers of women out of Eastern Europe through New York. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that, through his involvement with that community, Epstein met Melania Knauss before she met Donald.

NIna Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.



Jeffrey Epstein

'Best Friends': A Two-Decade Timeline Of Trump And Epstein

The story of the long, tight relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein involves shared accusations from multiple women and frolics at social events, rides on each other's planes, and many salacious blind items in tabloids. The President wants this history to disappear. According to Sen. Dick Durbin, Pam Bondi ordered a thousand FBI agents to scour 100,000 pages of Epstein evidence and “flag” mentions of Trump.

We don’t know – and now may never know – what the agents flagged. But those dusty old public records barely scratch the surface. Back in the day, the British tabs* were also catching glimpses of Trump while tracking Prince Andrew’s escapades with Epstein.

Because Trump and Epstein were tight. How tight? More than half of all the photos of Epstein in the Getty Archive between 1987 and 2004 seem to be with Trump or at Mar-a-Lago. People thought they were best friends. They are linked by women, or groups of women, some of whom have accused Trump and Epstein of sexual abuse.

In April 2000, for example, the Mail on Sunday quoted a neighbor of Epstein’s: “I often see Donald Trump and there are loads of models coming and going, mostly at night.”

In late 1997, according to one report in the Daily Mirror, Trump dated and even housed a young woman introduced to him by Ghislaine Maxwell, who later went on to tell NBC that she’d been raped by and trafficked by Epstein for several years prior. Around the same time, Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell flew on Trump’s plane from London to Florida, where Randy Andy was consorting with a Boca Raton “sexologist” and spotted at what the Mirror called “a club frequented by gays.”

Now Bondi is racing down to a Florida prison to meet personally with Epstein’s convicted procuress. The U.S. House is adjourning early to avoid further discussion of the Trump-Epstein connection. The President of the United States is calling people who believed him when he said he would reveal all of the Epstein story “fools.”

To borrow a phrase from one of the great Republican Masters of Disaster, there are many Unknown Unknowns in the Trump-Epstein story. This week’s Freakshow is a compilation of the Known Knowns of the 20-year friendship between Donald and Jeffrey.

1987

Trump and Epstein strike up a friendship around 1987, based on Trump’s own reckoning, having said in 2003, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years.” Jack O’Donnell, president of Trump’s Atlantic City Trump Plaza Hotel from 1987-91, has said he saw Trump and Epstein together so “frequently” he told The Independent that he thought Epstein was Trump’s “best friend.” O’Donnell also described an incident where Trump brought Epstein and a 19-year-old girl to the casino gaming floor.

May 17, 1989

Trump shows up on Robert Maxwell’s yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, at a party in New York harbor. Ghislaine Maxwell is among the guests. Epstein is not listed in the society column about the event, but by 1989, he had become close with Robert Maxwell in London, where investigative journalists have claimed he helped the media mogul and sometime spy hide money he was pilfering from his company..

1990s

Throughout the ‘90s, Trump was a master modelizer. He hosted contests and parties in private suites at the Plaza, which he owned at the time, at which “young women and girls were introduced to older, richer men,” per a fashion photographer source, who said the girls were as young as 15. The girls were lured to New York for competitions and pageants, some of which Trump sponsored and judged. It’s not known whether Epstein was present at these events. But per testimony at Maxwell’s trial, at some point in that period, Epstein took a pseudonymous “Jane” to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago when she was 14 years old.

December 1992

Epstein introduces Sports Illustrated model Stacey Williams to Trump at a Christmas party. “It became very clear then that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” Williams has since said. Three months later, Epstein took Williams to Trump Tower, where she says Trump groped her while laughing with Epstein, an activity she has said she thought was “a twisted game” between the men.

January 1993

Between 1993 and 1997, Trump flew on Epstein’s plane eight times, according to flight logs, usually between New York and Palm Beach, and sometimes with his family members

On January 23, 1993, Trump and Epstein were the only guests at a “Calendar girls competition” at Mar-a-Lago arranged by pageant promoter George Houraney. Houraney’s then-girlfriend and business partner, Jill Harth, says Trump assaulted her that evening, forcibly kissing and fondling her in Ivanka’s bedroom and even restraining her from leaving as she protested. Harth has also said Trump later crawled into the bed of a 22-year-old contestant uninvited.

December 1993

Epstein attended Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples and is seen there clad in white pants and a bow tie, in photos recently uncovered by CNN.

1994

At some point between June and September 1994, a pseudonymous woman calling herself

“Katie Johnson” in court documents has alleged that Trump and Epstein repeatedly abused and raped her over the course of four months when she was 13 years old. Trump has denied this. In 2016, before the election, Johnson was for a time represented by lawyer Lisa Bloom, who arranged an interview with Johnson, which Johnson cancelled at the last minute after her car was vandalized. Bloom has said that she found “Johnson” credible, but her whereabouts today are unknown.

1995

Epstein and Maxwell were photographed at Mar-a-Lago with Epstein's assistant Gwendolyn Beck. (The precise date of the image is not known.)

Also in 1995, Epstein accuser Maria Farmer, at the time a young New York artist whose work Epstein was supporting, says Epstein summoned her to his offices late at night, where Donald Trump soon arrived. According to her account in the New York Times: “Ms. Farmer said she recalled feeling scared as Mr. Trump stared at her bare legs. Then Mr. Epstein entered the room, and she recalled him saying to Mr. Trump: “No, no. She’s not here for you.”

The two men left the room, and Ms. Farmer said she could hear Mr. Trump commenting that he thought Ms. Farmer was 16 years old.”

According to Michael Wolff, who has released some of his five years of interviews with Epstein, Trump and Epstein competed to date the hottest models, and sometimes shared or traded girls between them, engaging in what Wolff described as a kind of rich man’s cruel sport.

January 5, 1997

Trump flew on Epstein’s plane from Palm Beach to Newark with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, brother Mark Epstein, the Glenn Dubin family, and Epstein’s chef. (Dubin and the chef would later be identified in the depositions of victims and others as witnesses to trafficking). A month and a half later, Trump and Epstein were photographed together at the Pro Am tennis Tournament at Mar-a-Lago.

April 8-9, 1997

Trump and Epstein were photographed together at a Victoria’s Secret Angels event at Club Duvet on 21st Street in NYC. The photo is unposed, and Epstein’s signature smirk is visible right beside Trump’s profile.

April 29, 1997

Ghislaine Maxwell attends a “Gucci Envy” party to celebrate the design house’s new perfume, hosted by Trump at his Trump Tower penthouse. Maxwell is in attendance, and the party-goers include what appear to be several very young, quite possibly underage models.

November 23, 1997

The Daily Mirror reported Trump was dating a 20-year-old British model, Anouska De Georgiou, who Ghislaine Maxwell had introduced to him at a party in New York. In 2019, De Georgiou accused Epstein of raping her at age 19, in a NBC Dateline episode.. According to the Mirror, “after their meeting, Trump flew Madam Maxwell and the model south to the sunshine state, where they enjoyed a happy weekend together. When they returned to New York, Anouska was installed in one of Donald’s many apartments there.”

October 1998

According to a report in the Miami Herald, Epstein associate Jean Luc Brunel’s model agency sent a busload of paid models, some underage, to a Mar-a-Lago party, at which former model Zoe Brock says she was given a spiked drink.

1999

In a video unearthed by CNN, Trump and Epstein are together, laughing and talking, at a Victoria’s Secret party (Victoria’s Secret was owned by Epstein’s main benefactor, Les Wexner).

April 1999

Epstein and Maxwell invite Trump to a party with Prince Andrew, according to Craig Unger in his book, American Kompromat.

Early 2000s

In his book, Unger details the ways that Trump, Epstein, and Epstein’s sometime associate in the trafficking world, Jean Luc Brunel, relied on each other as they each set up model “agencies” that served as trafficking nodes.

In 1995, Jean-Luc Brunel moved to the US and founded MC2 Model Management, with financing from Epstein; the younger models were allegedly part of Epstein’s trafficking operation. “In addition to whatever legitimate careers Brunel may have fostered, as a ‘model scout’ he also allegedly hired ‘scouters’ to identify, procure, and transport underage girls, many fifteen years of age and under, hire them to give ‘massages,’ and train them to give sexual pleasure,” Unger wrote.

Unger quotes a sworn deposition from 2010 by MC2 bookkeeper Maritza Vasquez, who claims directives about contracts for these “scouts” came “from the office of Jeffrey Epstein.”

February 12, 2000

Trump, Melania, Epstein, and Maxwell are photographed together at Mar-a-Lago during an evening reception for the Pro-Am tennis tournament. Prince Andrew and Epstein associate Gwendolyn Beck were also at the event. Two days later, Trump announces that he is withdrawing from the presidential race in an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show.

Late summer 2000

Ghislaine Maxwell recruits locker room attendant Virginia Giuffre at the Mar-a-Lago spa.

September 18, 2000

Trump, Melania, and Ghislaine Maxwell are photographed together in the front row at the Anand Jon fashion show in New York. Maxwell and Trump are photographed sitting together front row.

October 2000

Trump is photographed at Heidi Klum’s “Hookers and Pimps” Halloween party with his arm around Ghislaine Maxwell’s waist.

December 2000

Melania appears in British men’s magazine FHM. The photo spread includes a poem titled “Melania’s lingerie poem” that, in syntax and language, is similar to the “bawdy” Epstein birthday message that Trump currently says is part of the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”.

January 2003

Trump’s “secret” card is included in Maxwell’s bound book for Epstein’s 50th birthday.

March 2003

Vicky Ward’s Vanity Fair profile of Epstein mentions Trump as among the “businessmen who dine with [Epstein] in his home.”

April 2003

A New York magazine piece on New York dinner parties names Trump as among the guests at Epstein’s East Side townhouse, along with Ghislaine Maxwell and Les Wexner.

2006

Trump says on Howard Stern's radaio show that the sexual age limit should be above 12.

October 2007

Epstein’s membership account is closed at Mar-a-Lago, per club records; Trump has denied that Epstein ever was a member, but author James Patterson says he spoke to the woman who ran the spa, who said Epstein used to come in and behave inappropriately with girls there.

NIna Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.

Trump's Trophy: A Message From An Unhappy Old Man

Trump's Trophy: A Message From An Unhappy Old Man

On hallowed military ground, Stars and Stripes whipping in the upstate New York breeze, an old man in a red hat toddled on stage and shared some wisdom.

"He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife," El Presidente said, referring, non sequitur, to the late New York real estate developer Bill Levitt. "But that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work."

Trump emitted this ramble to a West Point student body that is about 21 percent female. Would “trophy wife” be on their list of career goals yet? Maybe! God only knows what they think their job prospects are in a military currently presided over by an accused roofie rapist, who is on record speaking against women in the military, and an administration that sacked top female military leaders as its first order of trolling-the-libs business.

The West Point trophy wife riff was a tangent off another tangent – about the U.S. military’s job being not to “host drag shows,” but to “dominate any foe, anytime, anyplace.”

There is a certain logic to Trump’s tangents sometimes. Trophy wife. Goals. For both MAGA genders. The transactional relationship ascendant. Everyone has a price. Sugardaddies.com. Young beauty attached to the arm of a rich, powerful old man, pampered in exchange for being value-added in business and politics, submitting occasionally to the desiccated paw.

The freaky gym rat who goes by “Bronze Age Pervert” (eventually outed as poor little rich kid and Ivy league PhD Costin Almariu) blames all Western Hemisphere’s problems on the ascendance of supposedly feminine attributes – encapsulated in what he calls an “obese Mammy” HR overlord policing language – in his bestselling book, Bronze Age Mindset, which calls for the return of Agamemnon, Hercules worship, and widespread slavery.

BAP’s world view, widely shared in Trumpland, assumes that women do not need, want, or naturally exercise agency. It presumes that women are constitutionally, genetically, mentally, physically, in every way, not as capable as men of self-reliance or living with a purpose or a mission beyond childcare. Such creatures, given power and influence, clearly must drag down the rest of society, including the he-men they try to police out of their God-given right to authority.

BAP and his male fans like to refer to the current supposedly egalitarian enforcement system, also labeled by them as “wokeness,” as “the longhouse.” Here is how “L0m3z” (another former online anon, outed as California creative writing instructor turned neo-fascist literature publisher Jonathan Keeperman) defined the term in an article published in the trad-Cath, anti-democratic “First Things” magazine:

More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. ….

As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

Those tiny gains — two percent here, ten percent there …. unacceptable! Think of all the worthy white males with dreams deferred.

BAP and his fans must know that American society is more unequal than ever, and that white men still, by orders of magnitude, run everything from America’s major companies to all of Silicon Valley to the global financial sector to federal and state governments.

But still, women, learn your place.

We are living in a time of Orwellian erasure of women, as Anna Funder recently wrote in Time. Artificial Intelligence is literally hunting for and eradicating government web pages and documents with the word “women.”

This is nothing new. George Orwell himself – and his biographers – managed well to erase the contributions and influence of his accomplished wife, according to a new book, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Funder. (Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines has a more extensive list of modernist writers who used their disappeared wives for literary material.)

At the heart of the anti-feminist effort to convert younger women into trophy wives and nothing other than trophy wives is the notion that a viable route to success – or perhaps the only viable route, in MAGA men’s perception – is to serve rich, powerful men who need assurance that women are playthings with no agency. This model has been held up by Trump and Melania since he first screamed, “Where’s my supermodel?” as she picked her way onstage and said… literally nothing the whole time.

Melania is clearly the trophy Trump was rather wistfully thinking of when he blurted that it sometimes doesn’t work out. The East Wing is supposedly unstaffed for the first time in modern history. She served a political purpose for sure – the “supermodel” on the arm, value-added.

The late Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley said that Melania Trump was “the most exquisitely moisturized” person he’d ever met. “Melania is very moisturized, groomed, lacquered to perfection. She can stand on those 4-inch heels…“

And that’s it.

The top echelon of the MAGA right is packed with women who – like Melania – are openly engaged in transactional relationships. And now, younger MAGA women have lined themselves up with this model. Steve Bannon’s "War Room" White House correspondent Natalie Winters, who is 23 years old, proclaims she is looking forward to leaving her career so she can get down to the work of finding a husband “to be submissive to.”

If they’re not serving the regime in Washington, young women like Winters, who came of age with this look and lifestyle ascendant, are LARPing on social media as never-been-happier Betty Crocker 1950s tradwife influencers. But, in the case of influencers in particular, the joke is kind of on their guys: Follow the money home and see who really wears the pants.

The greatest difference between Gen Z and the Boomer-Gen X-Millennial cohorts is that while younger women may have been taught the lessons of feminism as children – girl power! – the real world in their living memory has not upheld that promise. Younger women don’t remember the very real restrictions that second-wave feminists eradicated, so feminism seems impotent and useless against new challenges. Submission seems like a viable choice.

A lot of this is camp, theater, and shock jock-ing, a new version of the “female chauvinist pigs” Ariel Levy chronicled in her book in the aughts. But in a time of performative erasure of women’s records of achievement, of purposeful diminishment of women’s cultural relevance, and of state power directed at women’s bodily autonomy, surrender really might seem preferable to struggle.

The White House is busy purging transcripts of Trump’s public verbal rambles from its websites, so you must catch him when you can. At West Point, Trump blurted out the unhappy old man’s truth about the trophy-ization of women.

Hopefully, both male and female cadets were listening.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow

Trump and MBS Saudi

One Thousand And One Nights Of Trump Grift

For generations, American foreign policy in the Middle East has been crafted with willful ignorance by people who see the region through the lens of Israel and oil. From the CIA coup in Iran in the 1950s to Cheney and Rumsfeld’s Iraq war folly – arguably the event that destabilized the entire planet by creating tens of millions of refugees, leading to rising fascism in Europe and the U.S – our history in the region is one of murder, mayhem, fecklessness and greed. Major and deadly decisions are routinely made without any appreciation of the history or understanding of the many, heterogeneous communities that live there. Ay-rabs, Eye-rack. In the 1990s, a purge of the “Arabists” in the State Department was even underway. It took 9/11 for the DOD and State to bring back a few Arabic speakers.

However, in the last few weeks, it’s started to become clear that the U.S. is taking a strange new tack.

During Trump One, the grift was mostly on in Ukraine and Russia. Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Rudy Giuliani reeking of duty-free cologne in first-class seats out of Eastern European airports, hauling suitcases of oligarchy pelf. Now, Trump Two has located far greater pots of gold. The Mother of all Piles, the trillions of dollars controlled by a tiny clan of Gulf oil potentates – wealth, which, it must be said, our gas addiction created.

Ever since Mohammed bin Salman, the millennial de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, had his henchmen chop off a Washington Post writer’s fingers and then murder him within earshot of Turkish audio surveillance, it has been clear that the men who control trillion-dollar sovereign wealth funds can do whatever the hell they want to any man, woman, child, or beast on planet Earth.

This week, Trump is being feted by that very finger chopper. He is very much in his element, sipping Diet Cokes under “tank size chandeliers” and parking himself on gilded chairs to talk business with the leaders of the three major Gulf oil fiefdoms. In Trump Twos’s pay-to-play, even Israel is out in the cold. Miriam Adelson’s $100 million campaign donation, reportedly handed over to make sure Trump would not object to Israel seizing the West Bank? Sorry, chump change! Trump blew past Jerusalem on his way to sword dances with the sheiks -- causing intense but veiled terror among the Israeli leaders accustomed to carte blanche in the halls of American power.

In the last few weeks, Don Junior has been on a business tour around Europe, and Eric has also preened around the Middle East. The boys are riding on the U.S. Presidency, raking in tens of millions for the family business with hotel projects and condos in Dubai, Jeddah, and Qatar, where one project’s motto is “Challenge Everything Stop at Nothing.” The bros are not the first presidential relatives to cash in on Dad’s position, but they are the first to openly rake in money that directly benefits the Man in the White House.

Besides the projects, they are road-testing Dad’s meme coin and the family crypto bank, World Liberty Financial. WLF, created just weeks before the election, is an untraceable intake valve for influence buying. And WLF is now humming away, having reportedly sucked in $2 billion from the emirs of Abu Dhabi and the crypto firm Binance, which has been linked to money laundering for terrorism and sex traffickers. Few MAGAs understand what WLF does, and neither do most elected officials, who have been asleep at the wheel while the now even less regulated crypto industry runs amok.

The speed with which the Trump family is enriching itself in Trump Two is dizzying. At this point, metaphors, like satire, are increasingly out of reach for your poor Freakshow scribe. A swarming of termites, hogs at the trough, Coney Island hot dog eating contest? “Virtually every detail of Mr. Witkoff’s announcement, made during a conference panel with Mr. Trump’s second-eldest son, contained a conflict of interest,” wrote the New York Times reporter dispatched to cover Zach Witkoff’s and Eric Trump’s press conference in Dubai. “There’s nothing like it,” said Douglas Brinkley, historian and author of books about U.S. presidents, of the Trump Two family financial windfalls.

And that was before the Qatari royal family offered Trump a Boeing 747-8 refitted as a flying palace, a gift that, according to the President, only a “stupid” person would turn down. In the Middle East, gifting is a common form of corruption known as baksheesh. Most U.S. ethics experts consider it illegal.

The gilded plane, though, seems to have woke the gag reflex of some leading MAGAs: Ben Shapiro, Loomer, and a few Republican Senators are making disgusted noises, and the commentariat from

Jennifer Rubin to Rick Wilson predicts that this gift could be the grift that breaks the camel’s back. But will it?

Could it be that a nearly half-billion dollar offering from an Arab potentate is what it takes to cure the so-far incurable Obama Derangement Syndrome, the racist Brown people are coming to get my stuff mind-virus behind the MAGA fever that turns Trump into a hallucination of white Jesus? There seems to be something about the plane, more than the crypto grift and Trump sons raking it in under their dad’s name, that might even get some action from a third branch of government in Washington.

But, so far, no hint of outrage ruffles the alabaster brow of the nation’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Pam Bondi. In Trumpworld, there’s no PR stain that a blonde with a conspicuous crucifix can’t wash away.

Pam was a Tallahassee nobody when she first tangled with Trump, taking a $25,000 donation that she personally solicited in 2013 and then backing off a Trump University civil fraud case her office had filed.

Bondi went on to bigger fry. Besides representing Trump in his first impeachment, and eventually parroting the election Big Lie repeatedly in the media, she signed on as a lobbyist for Qatar with the Trump-connected Ballard firm, pulling down $115,000 a month. That job was public knowledge months ago, but it didn’t bother Republican Senators as they rubber stamped her along with one after another of the wackos, conspiracy theorists, and extremist flotsam and jetsam Trump nominated in nose-thumbing gestures to his civil society enemies. Now, though, it’s treated like big news. Hmmm…

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.

Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, And MAGA's Misogynist Mythology

Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, And MAGA's Misogynist Mythology

I never met Virginia Giuffre, but I knew a lot about her. The first time I read her name was in the summer of 2019, long after her years as one of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of teen girls and young women lured into Jeffrey Epstein’s world and passed around “like a plate of fruit,” as she put it, to powerful men. Her name was prominent in hundreds of pages of court documents from a defamation case Giuffre had filed against Epstein procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell, a wealthy British socialite, had publicly called Giuffre a liar for claiming that Epstein trafficked her around to powerful men, including Prince Andrew. Giuffre took her to court, and Maxwell eventually settled, but the record remained sealed until just a day or two before Epstein died.

The documents were filled with redactions – powerful men had been fighting the release of their names in court for years – but it was also filled with horrifying Easter eggs, like depositions from other teens lured into Epstein’s Palm Beach lair, household staff describing the endless parade of girls paid by Maxwell, some of them lost and terrified.

I sat up all night, glued to the stomach-turning pages, and wrote about the documents for Rolling Stone a few days later. In 2020, I worked as executive producer on a three-part series about Ghislaine Maxwell, still streaming on Peacock.

That’s all to say: I never met Virginia Giuffre, but I knew a lot about her. As does most of the informed public and the legion of Epstein conspiracy theorists. I know enough to recognize that the MAGA cult belief that Donald Trump was put on this Earth to vanquish “pedophile”* sex trafficker Epstein and his ilk ought to go down in history as one of the greatest branding psy ops in recorded history. Trump and Epstein were close pals, sleazeball, greasy, handsy Manhattan modelizer running buddies in the 1980s, a fact easily ascertained in pictures, and if you don’t want to believe your eyes, listen to recorded tapes of Jeffrey Epstein that Michael Wolff released last fall.

I might have liked to talk to Virginia someday, but now she’s dead, reportedly by suicide, after long battles with physical ailments and depression. Virginia, like many girls lured into the sex trade, had already endured a difficult childhood: she was from a poor family, abused by a family friend at age 11, and in and out of foster care. Maxwell, always cruising for fresh teen flesh for her sometime boyfriend Epstein, found Giuffre (then Virginia Roberts) at age 17, working as a “spa attendant” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

Maxwell and Epstein soon groomed Giuffre into a plaything under their control, a young woman without agency. And that is not good for any woman’s mental or physical health.

There is a cherished lie that many men – and some women – tell themselves that women like Virginia are naturally pliant and happy to service men for money as part of “the oldest profession.”

This myth of the happily pliant and transactional female is not just resurgent but increasingly enforced in the Trump years. We are now witnessing increasingly brazen applications of raw state power over female physical autonomy, reduced public authority for women including electoral disenfranchisement, forced marriage via legally limiting divorce options, public humiliation and threats of violence toward women in power, social and cultural marginalization and erasure of women, and the reduction of women’s roles from economic agency to isolated baby-maker in abject dependence on a man.

You hear it in public statements – utterly unthinkable just five years ago – that maybe women shouldn’t vote because husbands know best, that no fault divorce should be rescinded because it’s too easy for women to leave their household duties, and that women should not have jobs. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh and others have even started to attack their own prominent working women on the right as de facto feminists.

You see it in Mark Zuckerberg’s latest project, revealed in the Wall Street Journal - a sex-playing AI chatbot that can pretend to be a “Submissive Schoolgirl” pretending its interlocutor is a middle school principal. Zuck is so pissed he missed out on Snapchat, he whined to colleagues, he wants to get out ahead on the AI sex bot.

You see it in Elon Musk’s insane harem of an untold number of women paid to incubate IVF embryos selected for male chromosomes.

You see it in porn that suggests girls and women like to be choked – which we now empirically know causes violence against women in the real world.

The Silicon Valley authors of our virtual world have been setting this up for a long time. It’s all around us. Online, we swim in a miasma of sexism. Ask AI Google what women want. I did this recently, looking for the famous Freud quote. AI will tell you that what we women want is empathy, love, and affection from a man, and nothing more than a relationship. Ask it the same question about men, and it adds an entire section about what men want beyond a partner, all of which have to do with worldly accomplishments.

This is exactly the crap that Christian nationalist pastors like the utterly mad and yet influential Doug Wilson (one degree separated from open affiliation with Vice President JD Vance) preaches, besides arguing that marital rape is impossible by definition, that women are constitutionally incapable of having a “mission” or “purpose” in life beyond marriage and childbearing, while men require the chance at least to aspire to greatness through worldly accomplishments. (The sermon is here, titled “The Natural Use of a Woman”.)

This age-old mythology was born in the eons before contraception, modern medicine and rape laws, in the dark ages when women were denied even a glimmer of economic independence and died often in childbirth. It has survived the epochal changes that modern science and feminists have managed to achieve for women over the last several decades, and is now the framework on which the whole MAGA enterprise with respect to women lies.

The primary plank of the Trumpist anti feminist movement is the notion that a viable route – and perhaps the only viable route – to success as a woman is to have children and serve men who need assurance that we are nothing more than sexual playthings with no agency.

This is, of course, a lie – both that women could or should ever be reduced to that and that it’s any kind of path to real success. The sad childhood and adolescence, the slow physical decline, and now death by suicide of Virginia Giuffre – if it means anything, and it should – reminds us that the myth of the naturally pliant woman is evil and damaging. And it is absolutely at the core of MAGA politics with regard to women.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.


With Francis Gone, The Hard Right Is Coming For The Vatican

With Francis Gone, The Hard Right Is Coming For The Vatican

On Roman streets and the worldwide web, a half-joke was making the rounds yesterday: Catholic convert JD Vance, emissary of America’s empathy-challenged hard right, was the last visitor to Pope Francis before he died and somehow… did him in.

Here at the Freakshow, we disregard conspiracy theories like these until shown hard proof. But it is a fact that a cabal of powerful right-wing American Catholics is not at all sorry to see Francis pass away – on Easter Monday, no less. These men have been licking their chops for more than a decade for a chance to conclave and install a man more of their ilk, someone who might help persuade millions of Catholics that Jesus was really a social Darwinist.

“The ultra-conservative wing of the US Catholic Church – a group made up of cardinals, bishops, priests and wealthy individuals – has spent years preparing for this precise moment,” says British investigative journalist Gareth Gore, who last year published a book on the strange and secretive Opus Dei cult, including its growing power in the heart of Washington. (I covered it for New York Magazine).

Pope Francis was one of the more progressive church leaders in recent Catholic church history. He acknowledged the effects of manmade climate change and made small – but, to the far right, significant and alarming – statements about market capitalism and the poor. Those positions are clearly aligned with Jesus’ actual teachings, but ultra conservatives have abandoned them in favor of the prosperity gospel and drill baby drill.

Francis’s support of social justice made him anathema to hard-right American Catholics like Leonard Leo and billionaires like California real estate attorney Tim Busch. Busch’s Trinitas Cellars produces red wines named after the Virgin Mary. Many Opus Dei-affiliated and other hard-right Catholics in Washington (JD Vance and Leonard Leo among them) have boarded jets west to attend gatherings at Busch’s Napa Institute School of Business.

Last year, Busch hosted a conference on “woke capitalism,” and in the past, he’s invited speakers questioning the authenticity of the civil rights movement. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops cut ties with Busch’s Napa School in part because event agendas include praying the Patriotic Rosary, a devotion invoking divine “continuance on our cause and our people” using the words of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee – that specific cause, of course, being the perpetuation of slavery.

In addition to annoying rich MAGA extremists, Francis had asked church officials to live more modestly. “We pastors must not be men with a ‘princely mindset.’” he once said. This did not sit well with rightist clergy who live for cosplaying royalty. American Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke was among them. He insisted on continuing to wear trains of watered silk, scarlet gloves, and jeweled red hats – all while calling gay marriage Satanic and accusing Obama of being a totalitarian because of the ACA.

Some of the kookiest hard-right Catholic clergy are American or are operating in this country. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former pontifical vicar to the U.S. under the arch-conservative Pope Benedict XVI, wrote a wildly nutty letter in support of Trump in 2020, calling the election a battle between the forces of light and darkness. He also publicly called Pope Francis a “false prophet” and a “servant of Satan.”

Cardinal Burke, discussed above, defied the Pope and refused to give communion to divorced and remarried Catholics. He had considered serving as honorary president of a “gladiator school” for white religious nationalists that Steve Bannon was building in Europe. (He backed off when Bannon said he might make a documentary about pedophile priests.)

During his tenure, Francis demoted Opus Dei and expelled some of the more extreme bishops aligned with Christian nationalism and alt-right conspiracy theorists. Last year, the Pope excommunicated Vigano for “schism” citing his "refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff.” Francis had removed Burke from the Vatican’s highest court and then revoked his salary and Vatican quarters.

Gareth Gore has reported that a secret cabal long schemed to get rid of Pope Francis. They used some of the same opposition research tactics to investigate rising left-leaning leaders within the church that (Opus Dei-affiliated Catholic) Leonard Leo and his Judicial Crisis Network have applied in media and influence campaigns to stack the Supreme Court with far-right Catholics.

“While Francis was alive, the [right-wing Catholic billionaires and clergy] actively sought to discredit his papacy with smear campaigns, leaking unfounded accusations that the late Pope had covered up cases of sexual abuse – and then using the right-wing Catholic media to spread those rumours far and wide,” Gareth Gore told me. “At the same time, they were financing a campaign to influence the next Conclave, hiring former CIA and FBI agents to dig up kompromat on liberal cardinals who might follow him. Their aim was clear: to discredit Francis and his progressive agenda, and to ensure that the next Pope is a man aligned with their world view - someone who agrees with their ultra-conservative reading of the Bible. That plan is now cranking into action.”

These same men are busy today and in the weeks to come, plotting to ensure the Catholic Church gets back to the business of the Inquisition and witch burning.

Ok, I jest.

But the Catholic hard right and their allies in Washington are not too sad today. They have waited a while for this opportunity. When Gore interviewed Tim Busch for his book, the Californian was explicit about the far right outliving a progressive Pope. “I think something important is happening, something not so good,” Busch said. “I think he’s tightening the noose, but I don’t think he’s going to have enough time.”

But Gore also believes the rightists face an uphill struggle. “The ultra-conservatives, while wealthy and powerful, are a tiny proportion of the 1.4 billion Catholics around the world,” he told me. “The Conclave to elect the next Pope will be largely made up of cardinals appointed by Francis himself. While they may not necessarily share all of his views, they will see the positive impact that his progressive agenda has had on the Church, and will likely want to build on his legacy.”

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.



Why Trump's War Against Women Doesn't Really Disturb Bill Maher

Why Trump's War Against Women Doesn't Really Disturb Bill Maher

Last week, HBO comedian Bill Maher waxed effusive about Trump’s graciousness and charm at a White House dinner the president hosted for him, Kid Rock, and UFC head Dana White. On his Real Time show, Maher said: “You can hate me for it, but I’m not a liar. Trump was gracious and measured. And why isn’t that in other settings? I don’t know, and I can’t answer, and it’s not my place to answer. I’m just telling you what I saw, and I wasn’t high.”

I’m usually a Bill fan. I was on his show once, and I like that he brings together opposing views but also pushes back on lies and bullshit –unlike Joe Rogan, for example. Communicating with people whose politics differ from ours is good for a healthy democracy: D.C. dinner society once included people from most of the political spectrum – I wrote a book about it.

That Washington waned and then disappeared roughly around the time Newt Gingrich rolled into town on the coattails of the long game the right had been playing to foment public distrust and loathing toward the entire government. Now, while one side still plays by the old rules, the other mounts a fascist insurrection and hangs “Fuck Biden” flags on the lawn for school children to see.

But all the vileness Trump and the MAGA cult have unleashed in American political discourse pales compared with the damage done to women. The dreadful things happening to American women and girls in the abortion ban states are some of the most dramatic stories in the country today. Women are getting sepsis and losing their reproductive organs. Some are dying.

Every one of those individual horrors was caused by one man: The leader of the greatest misogynistic backlash in modern U.S. history is Donald Trump – yes, that gracious dinner companion.

This is the man who crafted a Supreme Court that has set women’s health back into the Stone Age. This convicted sexual abuser and famous public denigrator of females packs his cabinet with accused predators and sex pests. Accused rapist Russell Brand recently posed with White House officials Peter Navarro and RFK Jr. at some tropical hideaway. The Trump regime just invited into America – and granted safe haven, literally – to the rape-accused domestic abuse propagandists that are the Tate brothers.

More than any single man or woman in my lifetime, Trump ushered in the ongoing and vicious legal and cultural assault on women and girls. Banning abortion was only the beginning. The fanatic MAGA misogynists who engineered this situation want the Jezebels to suffer more. A lot more.

States are passing “fetal personhood” laws giving embryos more rights than the women carrying them and enabling hundreds of arrests already. States are considering and passing laws to make abortion data public. Many are considering and some are passing laws to imprison women and doctors over abortion. A few are even trying to institute the death penalty.

Feminist journalist Jessica Valenti publishes a phenomenal compendium of the maniacal proposals and new woman-hating laws, Abortion, Everyday. I consult it for my daily dose of rage. Here you will learn, for example, that state legislators in Texas want to start testing the water for birth control hormones because they might be harmful. These are the same legislators, of course, who seem to be opposed to federal clean water regulations).

Remember, this is not just a legal assault, it is cultural: Peter Thiel’s conservative women’s magazine Evie routinely spews nonsense about the dangers of hormonal birth control. Anti-abortion propaganda (in the form of a movie called “Baby Olivia” produced by anti-abortion fanatics) is now mandatory in North Dakota, Tennessee, and Idaho schools and is being considered in Florida, Kentucky, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

And the Trump administration recently yanked NIH funding for the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient behind a major longitudinal study that examined the effects of unwanted pregnancy on women’s lives. The research found that abortion does not harm women’s health and well-being, in contrast to points made by anti-choice fanatics, but being denied an abortion results in worse financial, health, and family outcomes for women.

We are living through a time of truly crazy cultural assault on women’s agency rights, in addition to the violations of our bodily autonomy. Trump’s first election made misogyny cool again. His second regime is cementing that success into law and culture. Ideas that once festered in the incel basement chatrooms are now common currency in the mainstream. Maybe divorce is too easy for women. Maybe women shouldn’t vote (since they overwhelmingly do not prefer Trump).

The House recently passed a law that potentially disenfranchises 80 percent of married women by requiring voter IDs to have birth names, not married names. And states have been considering laws to repeal no-fault divorce, which has repeatedly been shown to reduce domestic violence.

Bill Maher was charmed by Trump, a disgusting oaf and abuser, who spent a full decade pal-ing around with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein per Michael Wolff’s tapes, competing for sexual access to pretty women before falling out, not over Epstein’s predations, as the deluded QAnon cult believes, but a real estate deal.

There’s a good reason why Maher is charm-able. Predations against women don’t trouble him too much. Like many left-ish cads, he’s not too bothered by “the woman stuff.” In fact, as Sophie Gilbert writes in her essay on women and porn in The Atlantic today, liberal - libertine - men in entertainment always promoted the hard-core sexualization of women and girls that preceded this Trumpy-Tate bro era.

Last week I heard Clara Bingham read from her best-selling new oral history, The Movement, on women behind the so-called “second wave” of the fight for women’s equality in America between 1963 and 1973. The changes those women were able to effect are nothing short of epochal. In 1963, American women couldn’t open bank accounts or get credit cards without men, couldn't serve on juries, and were generally limited to work in nursing, teaching, or, until the wizened age of 32 or earlier if pregnant or married, flight attendants. Women earned 59 cents for every dollar men earned. Contraception was hard to get, limited to married women and secret terrifying back alley abortions were the norm.

The women in that generation who fought for equality were subject to endless public ridicule - from men on the left and the right. But, by 1973, everything had changed. The lives of those women’s daughters and granddaughters are unrecognizable. Their achievement was epochal, making women and girls first-class citizens for the first time in history.

That didn’t sit well with many men, who spent the following decades relentlessly denigrating these heroines and downplaying their success. Men like Bill Maher -- nominally left-center but well-known habitué of strip clubs and serial dater of young women -- belong to the great cohort of American men who, while not MAGA, are simply not as horrified as they should be by what Trump has inflicted on half the American population.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow.

Autocrat (And Felon) Trump Yearns To 'Disappear' American Citizens, Too

Autocrat (And Felon) Trump Yearns To 'Disappear' American Citizens, Too

Hello from Union Station on a cold spring day in DC. Blossoms are out. The Capitol dome rises a few hundred yards away. The “city of magnificent distances,” as a 19th-century Portuguese minister once called Washington, is as elegant as ever. But all is not well.

I started out covering politics in the nation’s heartland: Springfield, Illinois. I was schooled under that smaller Capitol dome, not far from where Lincoln once practiced law, in the varieties of democratic compromise and the inexorable pull of public corruption. Almost all the governors of the state of Illinois during my years there ultimately wore the prison stripes – including, most recently, the man with the great hair, Rod Blagojevich.

One of the first lessons I learned at Springfield was the old saw about how the ingredients of lawmaking, like sausage, are not pretty to look at. Still, things got done. Sometimes, the things seemed unfair and regressive. Sometimes they were good things, improving lives, maybe righting wrongs. Whichever way things went, the framework of the law was not perfect, but it felt solid. And the public lawbreakers with hands in the treasury till or holding out the bribe bag still had to watch their backs.

Now, on this cold spring day in Washington, less than a hundred days into MAGA’s second term, that framework feels very, very shaky indeed.

The governors of Illinois went to prison one after another because the justice system – in most cases, the dreaded feds – had eyes on them as they grifted and grafted. I’m pretty sure they all would have liked to say the law was “weaponized” against them. But juries of their peers found the facts at odds with that assessment – including in the corruption case against Blagojevich, AKA Blago, that Trump erased with a pardon a few months ago.

The pardon of felonious Blago, like almost everything felon Trump does, was, first of all, a thumbing of the nose at the people who uphold norms and the structure of the law. For a man who claims to love cops and offshore slave prisons for the (never even charged with a crime) “alien enemies” among us, and who can’t wait to invoke the Insurrection Act to sic the military on dissidents, he sure hates the law.

MAGA voters empowered this man to wreak his vengeance, and he is peculiarly fit for the task. He doesn’t seem to know how to read three sentences into a law book, but he’s probably put in as many hours in consultations with lawyers as he has doing anything (other than playing golf).

He has a knack for finding lawyers to manipulate the law as a delay-delay-delay defendant, and to weaponize it (yes, it was projection) as a plaintiff. Now, he’s been empowered to systematically break the system.

Of all the unlawful activities we’ve witnessed since the inauguration, the one that chills to the bone is the plucking of un-charged mostly Hispanic, Muslim, or otherwise non-white people off the streets or from inside their homes and “disappearing” them into the tropical dungeon of El Salvador or the for-profit Louisiana prison network, our own swamp gulag.

The Supreme Court just “stayed” a lower court order demanding that these extralegal kidnappings be reversed. As Liz Dye explains in Public Notice, while the ruling is not permanent, it is an ominous signal, a feint to procedural bullshit, suggesting that the justices are ready to bail on due process rather than set up a crisis situation where the fake businessman they basically “kinged” with unlimited immunity last year just ignores them.

The day after that order, Trump’s Olympic Gold medal level lie spewer of a spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed that her boss had been musing about a point in the perhaps near future when he might be able to deport not just “aliens” but American citizens.

So sure is Trump of his omnipotence over the rule of law that he has hung his Georgia felony charges mug shot as his official portrait in the Department of Justice. He put his personal attorney, Todd Blanche (who lost the Stormy Daniels hush money case), in charge as DOJ deputy, and appointed anti-abortion MAGA fanatic Ed Martin* in the critical post of U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Blanche already won some DOJ toady chest ribbons by dispatching armed marshals to the home of a (female) Justice Department attorney the Trump clan fired over her refusal to restore gun rights to the actor Mel Gibson, who lost that right after a 2011 domestic violence conviction. The marshals were called off only because attorney Liz Oyer heard they were on their way and accepted the order by email.

So much plotting, so much lawbreaking, in so little time.

For the last few weeks, Trump’s minions have been drawing up executive orders aiming to restrict law firms that have ever worked for political opponents, individual and organizational, NGOs, nonprofits, or have employed lawyers who worked on any of the criminal and civil cases against Trump. Since Trump has spent most of his life fighting lawyers with other lawyers, the list is long.

Trump only skated away from the various cases against him in the year before the election by manipulating the courts with incessant delays and Hail Mary legal arguments, one after another. Trump’s orders bar targeted firms from federal contracts, strip their lawyers of security clearances, and – outrageously – prevent them from entering federal courthouses. "It sends little chills down my spine," U.S. Judge Beryl Howell said, to hear the government argue that such orders are lawful if the president thinks the firm’s cases aren't in the nation's interest.

Howell and other federal judges have “temporarily restrained” most of Trump's executive orders against the firms that fought back. But incredibly, a number of the nation’s largest, richest, and most powerful firms - “Biglaw” in the industry parlance - took a knee and negotiated themselves out of danger for now - by offering millions of dollars of hours of “pro bono” legal work for Trump’s pet legal projects.

Now the legal community, rather than standing united against these diabolical and patently illegal orders, are cutting deals individually, basically prostituting their lawyers to service the vengeful oaf with countless hours of legal harassment. "They're just saying, 'Where do I sign? Where do I sign?'" Trump bragged after the first ones broke without a fight.

Every American lawyer has taken an oath to uphold the law, both state and federal. What about the Constitution? What about that oath?

The bitter old man counts on one principle above all others in his relationships with everyone, from his wife and children to his political friends and foes: everyone has a price. And here, he didn’t even have to pay them, just threaten their income. They couldn’t bear to lose a few clients while they fought for their rights in court. “They’re zillion-dollar law firms, and ‘money, money, money’ is all that motivates them,” Bernie Sanders said in an interview on CBS News Sunday Morning. “So they’re going to sell out their souls to be able to make money here in Washington.”

The sheepdogs are leaving the field.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.

I Dream of Greenland

Why Greenland Became The Ultimate Fascist Dreamscape

Ever since Don Jr. and his “Trump Force One” team of bobblehead doll righties landed at Nuuk Airport a day after the fourth anniversary of January 6, we’ve all been scratching our heads. It’s hard for normies like us to comprehend the deranged, anachronistic white supremacist lunacy behind the Greenland fantasy. Yes, there’s the newly melted Arctic and its soon-to-be-contested waterways, yes, there are rare earth minerals, and yes, it’s sparsely inhabited by indigenous people that Trump and MAGA seem to regard as lower races.

But going to the mat for it, with Trump browbeating and insulting the prime minister of Denmark? JD Vance flying over uninvited with his wife by his side? During my process of researching a long article for New York magazine about Donald Trump Jr., it became clear that the Greenland play is, on one level, a giant dog whistle to the white fascist extremist base.

Greenland has been – for decades – a neo-Nazi fantasy. Julius Evola, a mid-20th-century Italian philosopher and now “the internet’s favorite fascist,” proposed Greenland as “the primordial homeland of a highly civilized prehistoric white race … sufficiently civilized to be conceived as ‘divine’ by the ancients.” (Evola’s explanation for how these divines could morph into actual non-white indigenous inhabitants is that their divinity was perhaps diluted by, you guessed it, breeding with lower orders.)

The online intellectual fascist influencers followed and amplified by Vance, Junior, Musk, Marc Andreessen, and countless Trump administration minions (who we have covered in previous Freakshows) are deeply attached to this mythology.

An anon called Plethonist (who seems to have now deleted his X account after we started writing about fascist Xitter) writes in an online white supremacist-friendly rag called IM1776. The magazine is published by The Arts & Literature Foundation, an outfit that bills itself as the “leading publication of the New Right.” It is housed in the same building near Capitol Hill as other hard-right, well-funded conservative outfits, including the Conservative Partnership Institute and the extreme Zionist Christians United for Israel (CUFI), and ironically, was home to far-right Liberty Lobby (founded by notorious anti-Semite Willis Carto). Its editor-at-large writes and tweets under the pseudonym Benjamin Braddock, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.

Here is Plethonist in IM1776 waxing hysterically Rudyard Kipling about Greenland, a month before Trump started to publicly lay claim to it:

“Projects call us now. Recently, some have spoken of plans to purchase Greenland, either for the United States or for the creation of a new state entirely. In either case, this would mean the opening up of a new territory for Western men to enter, a frontier that would forge, in time, a new people, conditioned by the cold climate and the harsh terrain. A hard people then, and rich perhaps, from the resources they could exploit there, or through the domination of advanced technology in a land free from pinching regulation and a parasitic governing class. It is no longer so hard to believe that this will happen, after what we’ve seen. I hope it does, and I would like to offer one thing to the men who, now or in the future, make that island noisy with ambition and industry: Palingenesis.” (Palingenesis is an ultranationalist concept of racist rebirth.)

Don Jr.’s pal Jack “Jack P” Posobiec wasn’t on the trip to Greenland, but he was definitely in on the joke. Two days before Christmas and more than two weeks before Junior and his posse landed in Nuuk, he posted on Xitter a long letter to Greenlanders which reads in part:

“Dear Honored Residents of Greenland, Imagine a Greenland where the promise of your land's vast potential is not just a dream but a reality. A Greenland where your children can dream bigger, your economy can grow stronger, and your voice can resonate louder on the world stage. This vision can become your reality by joining the United States of America.”

Posobiec (who has called Democrats and progressives “unhumans” and named dictators as political role models) has been grifting off Trumpism since 2016. The longtime neo-Nazi collaborator is so highly regarded among Trump cabinet members that Treasury Secretary Bessent invited him to Ukraine. Hegseth reportedly wanted to bring him to Europe (but Posobiec, clearly a man in demand, declined the latter invitation).

On Xitter, extreme right Passage Press publisher Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman amused himself after Junior’s visit by proposing that sacked DEI federal employees could be sent to Greenland to mine rare earth minerals. (America’s Siberia, for now, appears to be ICE’s swamp gulag in Louisiana.).

Another Greenland dreamer is Dryden Brown, a Peter Thiel acolyte, who designs for building utopian cities for the tech elites in a project called Praxis and who was covered rather fawningly not long ago in the New York Times.

Brown was moved to advertise his own white nation fantasies the same day Junior landed in Greenland, in a giddy tweet that included a map (see below) of a new American empire encompassing all the white-led nations on the planet.

For a while after Junior’s expeditionary assault, MAGA tried to claim Greenlanders really want America to invade (which is a lie). Of course, what Greenlanders might actually want is of no real concern to men seeking a new homeland from which to “re-breed” Aryans.

In his Pulitzer-winning The End of the Myth, Yale historian Greg Grandin proposed that Trumpism, and the big beautiful border wall of the first MAGA regime specifically, signaled the end of the nation’s founding ethos. He proposed that only endless expansion had kept the violence at the heart of the American experiment at bay. Now, with the oil wars lost and the nation too broke to conquer farther frontiers, we were shut in together, with no steam valve for the hate.

A white nationalist beachhead in Greenland buys more time for us, perhaps.

The fantasy is one-half X-Box sword-wielding hero homunculus and one-half emulation of Hitler – the essence of tech-bro fascism, if you think about it. The bros read their Tolkien. Their thumbs were weaned on the controllers moving heroic medieval knights and sorcerers. For the Millennial fascists in Junior’s set, Greenland promises manly ardors and challenges where a new race might emerge from the chrysalis of the 21st-century American Everyman, waddling between SUV and front door with a Diet Coke in hand.

Donald Trump might be a vulgar marketer of money-laundering condos and cheesy merch – but when they squint, he’s the vessel by which the white philosopher-priests that inhabited Hyperborea might return.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER'S American Freakshow.


MAGA Heart Of Darkness III: Hitler's Ice Cream Meets Bronze Age Pervert

MAGA Heart Of Darkness III: Hitler's Ice Cream Meets Bronze Age Pervert

Welcome to the final installment of your Freakshow guide to the extremely online Nazi influencers of Trumpworld. It’s been a sickening tour, so take your anti-nausea meds one more time, and let’s get cracking...

First, an update on Canadian racist Geoff Martin, who we covered two weeks ago. Martin, who calls himself Captive Dreamer, includes Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and other high-profile Trumpies among his fans. But you will recall that Dreamer/Geoff’s day job was office drone at Canada’s largest Christian university, Western Trinity – an institution presided over by his own father.

After Geoff was outed, his father Todd Martin renounced his spawn’s views, albeit without naming him. In a video posted online, the senior Martin said, in part: “I reject white supremacy and any ideology that elevates one group of people over another. I denounce the use of derogatory and disparaging labels and language and any attempts to dehumanize another individual or group. I strongly oppose the use of social media as a means of spreading such harmful ideas.”

(FWIW, your Freakshow author reached out to the university’s media office inquiring about whether Geoff Martin is still employed. Their reply: “As a matter of policy and in compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act, we cannot disclose personal information about current or past employees. However, we can confirm that no individual by that name is employed by the university.”)

Dad’s renunciation didn’t sit well with Dreamer’s online fans. American racist influencer Mike Cernovich called Martin’s video “a degrading struggle session imposed on him.” As if the president of a university (“Christian,” no less) that advertises its “inclusivity” could maintain his position without denouncing the odious public views of his spawn.

Dreamer belongs to a pack of non-American influencers with advanced degrees who don’t all vote here but who have been drooling over the prospect of a fascist America for years. We’ll have one more quick look at two of them here before we bid them all good riddance (for our reading purposes at least – when it comes to the Trump administration, they don’t seem to be going anywhere).

The king of MAGA’s online fascists is a Romanian named Costin Vlad Almariu. Almariu, born in Bucharest in 1980, is a greasy hyper-misogynist racist, with a Yale PhD in political science, who posts a lot of photographs of oiled-up bodybuilders in Speedos. He argues that modernity has stripped (white) men - especially progressive men - of their manliness.

No “I like beer” Trumpworld frat boy’s shelf is without his best-selling 2018 manifesto, Bronze Age Mindset. The tome has been compared to a modern, non-German Mein Kampf. His ideas have even earned him an ism - BAPism, which stands for “Bronze Age Pervert” per Almariu’s Xitter handle. Bronze Age Mindset’s ironic tone and elevated vocabulary gild the savagery of his ideas (boiled down by him to “the desire to be worshipped as a god”).

Like last week’s Freak, Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie, Almariu believes anyone who isn’t white is naturally inferior, and that “Black Africans, in particular, are so divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries.”

BAPists also presume self-reliant women are the cause of all modern male problems. Almariu’s personal misogyny is bottomless. He loathes us, routinely referring to us as “grils” or with the obscene insult “roasties” or, if he paid one, “prosties.” On International Women’s Day last week, he tweeted a picture of a woman eating raw tuna, with the caption: “Highly repulsive. I will generally not see a gril again after she eats in front of me. I stopped seeing a favorite prostie after I made the mistake of having delivery sushis with her at my place.”

Almariu’s 186,000 followers include Trump Junior, Vance, and many mod Nazi fellow travelers like Charles Cornish-Dale, another offshore fascist who spews into the U.S. radicalization pipeline under the username Raw Egg Nationalist on Xitter. “Yes, disgusting’” Raw Egg responded to BAP. “Eating is a big test of compatibility. How a woman holds a knife, whether she takes time eating her food, small gestures like using napkin properly, etc.”

Delicate, napkin-noticing Brit Cornish-Dale is another MAGA favorite (followed by Musk, Vance, Trump Junior, and Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Andreessen). As recently as last fall, Trump Junior was retweeting Raw Egg’s bullshit about FEMA and DEI programs.

He has an Oxford PhD (his thesis was on the religious history of an English parish), and now edits and writes a hilariously homoerotic (given Cornish-Dale’s other sentiments) magazine called Man’s World, with covers that include AI-generated classical male nude sculpture with futuristic eye beams and an apparently erect member. A British anti-hate group that outed him reports that he lives at home with his mommy in England.

Devoted to the goal of “superlative male flourishing,” Cornish-Dale advocates “slonking” 36 raw eggs a day among other wackadoodle muscle-building cures. Tucker Carlson featured him in his ball-tanning documentary on men not long before Fox sacked him.

Cornish-Dale has promoted Mein Kampf, eugenics, and the great replacement conspiracy theory. In a recent issue of his magazine, he posted a recipe for Hitler’s ice cream - Panzerschokolade - a concoction of cocoa powder and speed that gave the brave frontline Nazi tank troops more energy! (see below)

Last week, Cornish-Dale posted an AI “portrait” of JD Vance, his pudgy face slimmed down and decked in mutton chops and 19th-century colonial uniform, leaning on a sword, with an Indian woman coiled at his feet.

Cornish-Dale, Almariu and Martin, all born or living abroad, are invested in the American fascist experiment and are engaged with, platformed, and retweeted by men with immense power over global affairs, national policy, and American people’s freedom of speech, assembly, and the pursuit of happiness. They radicalize American Trump racists suffering from the Obama Derangement Syndrome that has motivated MAGA since 2015.

For decades after 9/11, the U.S. government blew tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into anti-radicalization efforts aimed at Islamic extremists. Meanwhile, this clan formed and spewed scholarly Nazism and Euro-fascist crap into the American mainstream. They are empowered by and influencing an administration that claims to see anti-Semitism on every campus and is weaponizing that accusation to deport people, all while refusing to call a Nazi salute a Nazi salute.

These freaks remind us that whatever the appeasers (ADL, Bari Weiss) want to pretend, the sieg heil means exactly what it always has: jackboots, thugs, and mass murder.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.


Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.


Heart Of Darkness II: A Trump Appointee's Deleted Racist Tweets

Heart Of Darkness II: A Trump Appointee's Deleted Racist Tweets

This story was originally published in COURIER's American Freakshow newsletter

Racist pseudoscience and flirtation with fascism were always in the water around Trump. But the influential online eugenicists and neo-Nazis of 2025 are not your grandad’s German Nazis, nor are they David Duke or even Richard Spencer (tiki torches, khakis, and gaiters are so 2017).

The Trump 2.0 white pride influencers often have academic cred. Their erudite snark appeals to the self-regard of Silicon Valley oligarchs and their fanboys who think being in a computer lab when the sum of all human knowledge initiated the digital era makes them superior DNA-bearing geniuses.

Last week’s featured Freakshow freak Geoff Martin and many of his fellow online racist anons, like Texas race pseudoscientist Jordan Lasker (who Elon Musk has engaged with dozens of times), prefer to lurk behind pseudonyms.

But some out-and-proud white nationalist/race scientists don’t mind putting their real names to tweets about sterilizing “low IQ trash” – the white supremacist online pseudo-scientists’ current favorite insult. Trump’s acting Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is Darren Beattie, and his white nationalist affiliations were too much for Trump 1.0. The White House sent him packing, and he went on to found a right-wing media outfit called Revolver News.

But in the new Trump regime, publicly declared racist views that might once have gotten pretty much anyone fired are now job qualifications. Beattie, like the rest of the creeps* who make up the MAGA Heart of Darkness, has academic bonafides. He wrote his PhD thesis on Nazi Martin Heidegger.

A typical Beattie tweet would be one in 2023, when he went on a tear about online street fight videos online, apparently unaware that Trump was getting cozy with UFC cage match tycoon Dana White, king of fight videos.

Many of Beattie’s Tweets about sterilizing “low IQ trash” – always understood to be people of color and not MAGA-white rabble – are still online. But his deleted tweets reveal another, sicker layer of sentiment, more familiar to movie-going Americans perhaps in the character Leo DiCaprio played in Django. Pure, deplorable, antebellum and Jim Crow racism.

The January 6 insurrection provoked Beattie to a frothing frenzy of anti-Black rage that he vented on Twitter for hours and then deleted. He was clearly more upset about what he might consider uppity Blacks on TV than the White horde that had just smashed, grabbed, and defecated on the walls of the capital.

He spent the afternoon and evening of that day calling for Black public commentators during the televised violence to get back to their “proper place” in the under-class. Some examples of now deleted Beattie tweets on January 6th:

“Ibram Kendi needs to learn his place and take a knee to MAGA. Learn his proper role in our society.”

“Kay Cole James of Heritage Foundation needs to learn her natural place and take a KNEE to MAGA.”

Beattie even took swings at Trump loyalist Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina:

“Tim Scott needs to learn his place and take a KNEE to MAGA.” (Scott is still a Trump-supporting Republican Senator. Whether he’s “learned his place” is not for us to judge.)

By midnight, Beattie had completely lost it, demanding that pretty much every Black person in America get to the back of the bus, with this tweet:

CNN unearthed some other deleted Beattie bon mots this week. In one tweet that was removed for violating Twitter’s terms of service, on the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, Beattie’s Revolver News posted about the decision maybe permitting shooting at women who get abortions.

He has also accused his now-boss (in name only, apparently), Secretary of State Marco Rubio, of being “low IQ” and closeted, referencing a high school curfew violation at a park:

He followed that up with: “What happens in the Cabana stays in the Cabana #Rubio.”

When reporters asked Rubio about Beattie’s new position as his State Department’s “public diplomat” (before the latest round of personally insulting Tweets was revealed), Rubio kicked the can: “He went through the process that the transition office went through,” Rubio told a press briefing. “He’ll be acting in that capacity, and he’ll largely be focused – as that department will be – on not wanting this Department of State to be involved in censorship.”

In other words, Beattie is on board to make public racism great again.

Obviously, putting this man in this position is just a big troll. One can easily imagine Team Trump elves smirking as they added his name to their vetted list. Think Stephen “Goebbels” Miller or Donald Trump Jr., who hosted Beattie at least seven times on his Triggered podcast in the last two years, possibly a record for him for one single guest.

Junior used to close every rally speech in support of his father with the sign-off: “We will make liberals cry again!”So, haha, you, dear reader, are supposed to be crying as an out and proud racist serves as the face of American public diplomacy for the next year (although he will not be permanent – the regime doesn’t really need his services, just his presence as a billboard insult).

These people aren’t new among us, but Trump has empowered them. The mainstreaming of eugenics was already in full sway during the campaign last summer. The Atlantic ran an article headlined “The Far Right is Becoming Obsessed with Race and IQ: Race Science has returned.” Ali Breland pointed out that the eugenics clan (Klan?) uses a kind of code to know and amplify each other. They call their observations about racially-based inferiority “noticing.”

The pathology that infects these men is eloquently explained in Sven Lindquist’s “Exterminate All The Brutes.” The title comes from the supposed last words of Captain Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novel about Europeans in the Congo, Heart of Darkness. Lindquist traces how European racial superiority ideology has led to countless massacres and genocides throughout history, from the indigenous Americans to the people of the Congo to the Jews of Europe.

The offensiveness of this ideology is only exceeded in vileness by the passivity and toadying of the political and corporate leaders in America right now who are not objecting to the mainstreaming of the sickness.

STAY TUNED: In part three of our MAGA’s Heart of Darkness series, I’ll introduce the popular MAGA fanboy who has published a recipe for Hitler’s ice cream. Take your anti-nausea medicine.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.


MAGA Heart Of Darkness: Tracing JD Vance's Favorite Nazi Troll To Canada

MAGA Heart Of Darkness: Tracing JD Vance's Favorite Nazi Troll To Canada

The MAGA universe is a big tent of incels and NASCAR fans and frat boys with rich daddies who “like beer.” Dear Leader’s bleats and Jesse Watters's insult comedy fluffs them up – but they’re not all paying close attention.

Then, there are the others – men with convictions and post-graduate degrees, who read European fascist texts and applaud each other’s ravings about the revival of a race of white men whose virility and mental force has been diluted by mixing with the lower orders and attenuated by feminism.

Most Americans, and probably many MAGA voters, have never heard of them as they go about amusing each other, advocating for eugenics, and translating dead fascist writers (IYKYK).

But they are the plutonium pit of the MAGA bomb. Racism and domination of the naturally inferior sex is not a casual pastime for them, it’s their raison d’etre.

Some of the most powerful men in America are tuned in to them. They are the brain trust, the moral – if you want to twist that word – nerve center of the Trump 2.0 movement.

Donald Trump famously amplified one of them, a Canadian millennial who tweets under the name @CaptiveDreamer7, which is a reference to a memoir by a fascist Frenchman during World War II who joined the Waffen SS, during last fall’s debate with Kamala Harris.

Trump shouting “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” is a badge of honor that still makes this man who amplified that lie to the attention of the candidate’s debate briefers giddy with joy. He was still ecstatic during the Veep debate a month later, when moderators put the question about the lie to JD Vance, erupting into all-caps joy: “Springfield in the FIRST FUCKING QUESTION. MY FUCKING PRESIDENT!!”

Offline, @CaptiveDreamer7 is a low-brow Bartleby the Scrivener in a Canadian Christian university’s purchasing department. Online, like Clark Kent transmogrified to Superman, he spews white nationalist trash into the powerful American right-wing mainstream.

A pair of intrepid journalists at the Daily Dot outed him this week. Over here at the Freakshow, we’ve been following Geoff Martin, the man behind @CaptiveDreamer7, for some time in connection with a long project that required me and a researcher to dive into fascist Twitter. (FYI, yes, I crave a shower after just 15 minutes in their spew.)

Here’s a sample of what you will find in Dreamer’s disgusting oeuvre: In June 2024, Dreamer tweeted and has since deleted: “I believe in Hitler. In National Socialism, in Total N***** Death. They win [sic] about how I talk but that’s because I’m Aryan, I’m confident, and I’m not a fucking Mexican F***** like they are.”

With habits of self-expression like that, it’s no surprise Dreamer burned through dozens of Twitter accounts in the pre-Musk years. He was repeatedly booted off the site until Musk stepped in. Welcomed back on the platform, he promptly got on a Twitter space with fellow travelers and sighed: “Total Aryan victory. Total victory of the white man. We’re back. The white man is back. Total victory of the Anglo. Musk is not a Boer. He’s an Anglo like you and me. Total victory.”

Dreamer lives in a larger online network of fashy white nationalist social media anons who also sport PhDs or other post-grad credentials. Many have been outed against their will, like @CremieuxRecueil, a pseudonym linked to race-scientist academic Jordan Lasker. Along with America’s fashy brain trust, Dreamer has academic cred, having, according to his tweets, studied philology and philosophy. He has written that he was driven out of academia by “leftists” who forced him to read feminism. “The Thucydides to NS [National Socialism] pipeline” is what he’s called his journey.

His intellectualism flatters the Trumpy policy drones and maybe some of the “I like beer” crowd in D.C. “You have the comic trolls like [Nick] Fuentes, people recognize there is no seriousness to them,” says researcher Will Stancil, who has tangled with Dreamer on X/Twitter before. “They are treating it like a real intellectual movement, this ridiculous hallucinatory Nazi stuff, and these ideas are clearly driving policy at the White House level. If you are familiar with these ideas, you can see they are leaking out all over.”

So back to the Great White North: How does an intellectual millennial Canadian* go all Nazi?

One thing we do know is if you poke at just about anyone on the MAGA fringe, you will find a wackadoodle religious upbringing. The parents and grandparents of Martin (AKA Dreamer) were members of the Worldwide Church of God, whose founder, Herbert Armstrong, was a mid-century radio preacher. Armstrong taught that white Anglo-Saxons are among the ten lost tribes of Israel and are the real Jews (maybe, one of my Israeli sources who interacted with them told me, because the word “Brit” in Hebrew means covenant).

The notion that white humans are the true ”chosen people” of the Bible was/is also a tenet of the Ku Klux Klan.

Former members of the Armstrong sect have described harsh child-rearing methods Armstrong advocated, listed in this guidebook by Armstrong’s son. They include beating toddlers in order to fend off nascent criminal impulses and ensure respect for authority.

After Armstrong’s death, the sect reportedly modified its views and renamed itself Grace Communion Church. Martin’s father is now president of Canada’s largest Christian university, where young Geoff – thanks, Dad! – has a job in the purchasing department.

Dreamer/Martin’s avatar is a picture of pedophile David Koresh in a MAGA hat. The Daily Dot reports Dreamer/Martin has advocated for lowering the legal age of marriage for girls to 14. David Koresh had a harem of wives as young as ten. Dreamer/Martin is apparently married – he has tweeted praise of a wife who thinks his Nazi bookshelves are “cute.” He may have spawned: He has tweeted pictures of a chubby (white) baby’s hand reaching for books about Hitler, to the delight of his followers, with one snapshot getting more than 2,000 likes.

It is no exaggeration to say that this man’s repulsive ideas intrigue, excite, and – if I may resort to our Dear Leader’s vermin metaphor – infest the minds of many extremely powerful men in America right now.

Dreamer/Martin has positioned himself as a white nationalist intellectual who offers strategies to mainstream his and his friends’ brand of fascism. In one recorded Twitter space in 2022, Martin chatted with Nick Fuentes (the odious white nationalist who has actually dined with Trump) and others. Someone mentioned “TND,” which is a code for “total n***** death,” as racist listeners in the space would know. Martin inquires whether the movement can “appeal to a middle America and portray your message in a way that is palatable to them?”

Dreamer has 71,000 Xitter followers in his radicalization pipeline, including major Trump administration figures and MAGA stars like Vice President JD Vance, Chris Rufo, Marc Andreesen, Curtis Yarvin, DOD deputy press secretary Kingley Wilson, and acting Washington, D.C. federal prosecutor Ed Martin. Elon Musk engages with and amplifies him. Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (and out-and-proud eugenicist) Darren Beattie has featured Martin's tweets under his many different usernames in his Revolver News, a site promoted by both Trump and Donald Trump Jr. Beattie appears to have consciously followed Martin/Dreamer across various X/Twitter bans. Late rightwing Justice Antonin Scalia’s grandson and namesake, who now works at Peter Thiel’s data and surveillance defense giant Palantir, is also a Dreamer follower.

If there is a segment of MAGA world that still finds Nazis repulsive, maybe the outing of Geoff Martin as an influencer to Musk and Vance will wake them up. But when even the Holocaust-remembering ADL and major media organizations call Musk’s Nazi salute just a gesture, I’m not holding my breath.

* Martin claims U.S. citizenship through his mother.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from Courier's American Freakshow newsletter


'Give Us Your Rapists And Millionaires': MAGA Welcomes Andrew Tate

'Give Us Your Rapists And Millionaires': MAGA Welcomes Andrew Tate

This is reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow newsletter.

At dawn Bucharest time yesterday, two stars of the worldwide misogynist movement boarded a plane in Romania, arranged for them by Trump’s regime, and soon sailed through the air across the Atlantic to Florida. Just when you thought the regime couldn’t get more vomitous, accused rapists Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan were on their way to America, sprung by an adjudicated sexual assaulter who has extracted them from the Romanian justice system, with blithe insult to prosecutors in both Romania and the United Kingdom.

By evening, these incel-fluffing rapey freaks were likely to be ensconced in a Miami luxury highrise, sipping cocktails and live streaming themselves watching the sun set over the Everglades.

Tate and his brother were arrested near Bucharest in 2022 and charged with with rape, human trafficking, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. They have denied the allegations.

Tate’s grift relies on the tried and true “shock jock” calculus that provoking male insecurity about women is a sure fire way to get famous and maybe even rich. Major male podcasters (like American Dave Portnoy, a fellow “survivor” of sexual assault accusations) and television personalities Piers Morgan and Tucker Carlson have platformed him.

Online, his brand of rank misogyny and get-rich-quick male empowerment (for a time, he sold a pyramid scheme called Hustlers University) made him rich – Tate reportedly has 15 luxury cars in Romania. It also attracted a legion of teenage and young men around the world. His influence among middle school boys is such that academic papers have been published and online seminars presented to help educators worldwide deal with the Tate contagion of implied and actual violence against schoolgirls.

Tate’s resume includes not just domestic violence and rape propaganda but his own personal assaults on women: He was booted off the 2016 cast of the reality show Big Brother after a British tabloid published a video of him beating a woman with a belt. He claimed it was consensual. He also bragged that he broke a woman’s jaw in a bar fight: He said he “ended up in court” after he was charged with causing “bodily harm,” but “got away with it in the end.” He has been accused of violence against women repeatedly, including a standing case against him brought by four women in the UK, for which authorities were trying to extradite him from Romania.

At some point, he also had a career as an online pimp. He has stated that men should choose girlfriends under age 20 because they are less likely to have had sex and can more easily be “imprinted.”

In one interview, Morgan asked him whether he felt marketing naked girls on the internet was unethical. Tate replied that he kind of does now -- having converted to Islam -- but that at the time, he came to realize how “my girls” prevented suicides among unhappily married men.

His social media empire relies heavily on a global following of teen boys and incels that lap up his public misogyny. In 2017, as the #MeToo movement was in full swing, he tweeted that women should “bare [sic] some responsibility” for being sexually assaulted and, in general, blamed women for male violence. According to NBC, in 2022, Twitter “permanently banned his account.

But banning a rape celebrator from social media is so 2017!

Musk promptly let him back on, and as of today, his @Cobratate account has 10.7 million followers. On February 23, he posted a tweet with a video sprinkled with images of Trump doing his YMCA dance and Barron Trump gazing off into oblivion, as well as himself stalking hotel hallways, working out shirtless, and spewing his trademark rant about male empowerment including “You have to make a decision if you’re a winner or a loser, because if you’re a loser, you’re gonna hate the next four years!”

Today, the four British women who have accused him of rape and are still waiting for justice released a statement: “We are in disbelief and feel re-traumatised by the news that the Romanian authorities have given into pressure from the Trump administration to allow Andrew Tate to travel around Europe and to the US.” Their lawyers urged the UK government to intervene, saying it would be “a complete abdication of its responsibility to the victims if it stands by and lets this continue.”

One of their lawyers, Matthew Jury, called the release of the Tates “equal parts disgusting and dismaying” and said: “The UK authorities must take immediate steps to secure their extradition to the UK to face charges for the offences of human trafficking and rape they are alleged to have committed in this jurisdiction.”

Today, this far-right hero is being welcomed back to befoul our soil. He walks among us thanks to our MAGA friends, who installed the rapey-criminal Trump administration and whose predator’s ball would not be complete without a Tate or two.

Surely a coincidence, but the arrival of the Tate bros comes a day or two after Trump announced a Gold Card plan to sell American citizenships for $5 million each. And there is zero doubt who wants them here in this country.

According to the Financial Times a few weeks ago, Richard “Ric” Grenell, now Trump’s “Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions of the United States,” personally leaned on the Romanian government at the Munich Security Conference to let the Tates out. The Romanian government at the time denied the pressure. But apparently, at some point before dawn on Thursday, they felt a little differently.

Grenell has already performed exactly this kind of official mission to spring another rockhard testosterone-poisoned accused foreign criminal. In 2019, as Trump’s ambassador to Germany, according to this great scoop by my friends over at Spytalk published in 2020, Grenell managed to get a criminal kickboxer from Europe to the US.

The US had denied a visa three times to German-Moroccan UFC fighter Abu Azaittar whose criminal past includes a conviction for beating a businessman and dousing him with gasoline and stealing his car, an accusation of punching and breaking a girlfriend’s eardrum, and other escapades. Azaitar and his brother were gang members who had earned the street nickname “the brutal twins.”

Then Grenell got involved. Shortly before he washed up in America at Mike Tyson’s Nevada ranch, Azaitar posted an Instagram picture of himself in a tight red t-shirt with Grenell in a dark shirt and black parka, looking chummy under an arched doorway. “Amazing time with mr ambassador …. Thank you for opening to [sic] door for me.”

I’m in New York City today, thinking of strolling down to the Battery to see if the “Give us your poor” bronze plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty has been pried off and replaced with her new motto in this MAGA era: “Give Us Your Rapists and Millionaires.”

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible

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