Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Wednesday, December 24, 2025 15:54
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Tuesday, December 23, 2025 3:18 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

So shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

Believe me, says 6ixStringJoker, the Nazi who claims he is not a Nazi.

JD Vance pretends almost no Americans are antisemitic

The Times of Israel reports:

US Vice President JD Vance claimed in an interview on Sunday that almost no Americans are antisemitic and that concerns about antisemitic voices are raised as a way to avoid discussing “a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy” on Israel.

In the interview with the publication Unherd, Vance also downplayed concerns about Nick Fuentes, the popular far-right antisemitic podcaster, and said that Christianity is “very much at the heart” of America’s common culture.

The interview was the latest in a series of comments Vance has made dismissing or declining to condemn an increasing embrace of antisemitism among parts of the US right.

In a speech on Sunday to the conservative Turning Point USA’s annual convention, whose opening days were roiled by a debate over excluding antisemites, Vance said the movement should be open to everyone as long as they “love America,” coming down firmly against “purity tests” and adding that he “didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform.”

More, including videos, at
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/12/22/jd-vance-pretends-almost-n
o-americans-are-antisemitic/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, December 23, 2025 3:45 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

MAGA Is Breaking Up Over an “Are Nazis Cool?” Debate. It’s a Sign of Things to Come.

Trump’s GOP is held together by a cult of personality. But what happens when that personality flickers?

By Jill Filipovic | Dec 23, 2025 1:09 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/maga-heritage-foundation-m
ike-pence-donald-trump.html

In something of a Christmas miracle, the MAGA coalition may finally be starting to break down.

The Heritage Foundation, which published the Project 2025 blueprint for this Trump term, just saw more than a dozen staff members defect for former Vice President Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom think tank; turncoats include the former leaders of Heritage’s data, economics, and legal teams. Among prominent MAGA leaders—mostly elected officials, people who want to be elected officials, and podcasters—there is a growing divide over what one might assume should be an easily answered question: Should they welcome Nazis, avowed white supremacists, and unrepentant racists hurling slurs into the movement?

This is apparently quite the conundrum. It’s also telling that the cleavage is coming now. After all, the movement Donald Trump built has long welcomed bigots and racists; Trump himself dined with white supremacist Nick Fuentes and enthusiastic antisemite Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago, although he later claimed to not know who Fuentes was. The people who have gotten into bed with the president, whether they’re D.C. think tank staffers or Jan. 6 hooligans, realized who they were cozying up with.

That some are starting to object and defect suggests that two things are happening at once. The first is that MAGA bigotry has gotten significantly broader, expanding beyond the groups the broader right believes are acceptable to malign (women, Black people, immigrants, Muslims) and coming for groups of which prominent MAGA leaders are a part (Jews, Indians, anyone whose ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower). The second is that Trump himself is fading: He’s elderly and showing the typical signs of fatigue and cognitive decline. This is creating something of a vacuum in leadership. Vice President J.D. Vance is the clear MAGA heir apparent (or at least believes himself to be). But he won’t take the throne unchallenged. Some of these contenders want to sit in the Oval Office, and there can be only one butt in the chair behind the Resolute Desk. Others want a different kind of Republican Party: Some strive to turn away from Trumpian populism and toward a tax-cutting pro-business agenda; others aim for a return to the politics of conservative Christianity, with a refocus on restricting abortion and LGBTQ+ rights; a few really may object to MAGA’s blood-and-soil nationalist turn. But the coalition is currently fracturing for one reason: The leader is weak, and a successor is being chosen.

The growing objections to MAGA racism can feel pretty rich coming from people who seemed just fine with many kinds of racism up until now. But it’s also true that MAGA racism has, like the famous “First they came for” poem, proved itself insatiable. Vance has been among the leading voices for the idea that there is a category of “heritage Americans,” a very-online term for people whose family ancestry supposedly gives them more of a claim to legitimate Americanness than anyone else: naturalized citizens, children of immigrants, someone whose grandparents immigrated after World War II. If your ancestors came over anytime after 1789, you are not a “Grade A” American, as one chart puts it. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” Vance has said—marking those who chose to become American as having a less legitimate right to Americanness than those who fought to break up the country.

This turn has alarmed many conservatives who, like most Americans, are not purely descended from Pilgrims. The elevation of unapologetically antisemitic rhetoric and the growing hatred of Jews among Gen Z conservatives seem to have also spooked some MAGA loyalists. A recent Manhattan Institute focus group of Gen Z conservatives found them praising Adolf Hitler as a “great leader” and understanding “where he was coming from as far as wanting to improve the national state of Germany.” One young man who also said that Jews are a “force for evil” explained: “I’m very pro–strong executive, –strong leader, –strongman. I support national sovereignty, and Hitler was a nationalist. He was like, ‘We have to take Germany back for Germans.’ And I feel like we should do that in America.” A leaked chat among Young Republican leaders showed them joking about the Holocaust, calling Black people monkeys, and saying, “I love Hitler.” Young voters generally hold more antisemitic views than older ones, and young conservatives are, on average, the most antisemitic of all. This may be because young people are getting much of their political news from outrage-amplifying social media, as well as from “influencers” with popular podcasts, TikTok accounts, and YouTube and Discord channels, and many right-wing influencers have seen that racism, sexism, and antisemitism drive traffic—which in turn drives fans to be even more bigoted and reactionary. Candace Owens recently went on an extended antisemitic tirade, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Fuentes have also entertained antisemitic conspiracy theories or flat-out blamed the Jews for various problems. And the Trump administration is putting people with long records of antisemitism into top positions.

This seems to be an inflection point even for some notorious bigots and people who didn’t mind when the president called Somalis “garbage” and compared immigrants with insects. Laura Loomer is one of the country’s most notorious Muslim-haters (she has called Islam a “cancer” and argued that Muslims should not be allowed to hold political office) and acted as if getting banned from Twitter for hate speech was as bad as being sent to the gulags. But now she is suddenly in favor of gatekeeping, enforcing basic standards, and “moral clarity.” Former presidential contender and current candidate for governor of Ohio Vivek Ramaswamy, who during his 2024 campaign claimed that “our diversity is not our strength,” compared prominent Black progressives with the Ku Klux Klan and asserted that he had never seen or met “the boogeyman white supremacist” in America—“Maybe I’ll meet a unicorn sooner,” he added, “and maybe those exist too”—also seems to have changed his tune. “If you believe that Hitler was pretty fucking cool, you have no place in the future of the conservative movement,” Ramaswamy recently said. “If you call Usha Vance, the second lady of the United States of America, a ‘j—t,’ you have no place in the future of the conservative movement.”

J.D. Vance, whose Indian American wife Usha has been called racial slurs by right-wing racists, said that people who target her specifically can “eat shit” but that otherwise the GOP should be a big tent. “When I say that I’m going to fight alongside of you, I mean all of you—each and every one,” the vice president said at Turning Point USA’s recent AmericaFest. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests.”

As the Nazis vs. Say-No-to-Nazis fissures broke open at the Turning Point event, conservatives on all sides of the debate laid claim to the legacy of their martyred leader Charlie Kirk. Some argued that he was a free-speech fanatic who would have welcomed everyone to TPUSA events even if they were wearing a T-shirt bearing a pro-Holocaust meme (“Let ’Em Cook”). Others agreed with Loomer’s take, that “people want to pretend like [Kirk’s] events were a free for all so they have an excuse to not call out the GOP’s Nazi problem.” Vance positioned himself on Team “Let ’Em Cook.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, seems to be with him: He caused major outcry after he defended Carlson having a very friendly interview with Holocaust denier Fuentes, in which Fuentes complained about the domination of “organized Jewry” and Carlson noted his belief that “Christian Zionists” have been “seized by this brain virus.”

The former Heritage staffers who have decamped for the new organization seem to be on Team Moral Clarity—or perhaps a team for which they don’t have to play ball with Nazis or the kinds of people who would attend a Turning Point USA convention. (That the organization they flocked to belongs to Pence—remember him? The guy the Jan. 6 rioters wanted to lynch on the White House lawn?—only adds to the sense that this cleavage runs deep.) In a not-so-long-ago iteration of the Republican Party, those who spoke and acted like Loomer, Owens, and even Kirk were the riffraff—part of the base, sure, but inconvenient and merely dog-whistled at to encourage loyalty. Now, though, they’re leading the pack, and not only when it comes to MAGA’s young pups.

It’s worth noting that in all of this, Trump is largely absent. Perhaps those closest to him see what average Americans do not: that his abilities, and with them his power, is waning. He turned the party into a cult of personality, in which the only ideology was to line up behind Donald Trump. The GOP rule “Whatever Trump wants, Trump gets” was so clear that the party stopped writing out policy platforms, instead issuing a one-page fealty pledge to its unquestioned leader. No one has the audacity to try to unseat him, or even to say that he won’t be in charge forever. MAGA stalwarts still wear their Trump 2028 hats, make Trump-as-Jesus fan art, share the triumphant photo of him raising his fist after surviving an assassin’s bullet, and believe that his 2024 win was a political resurrection divinely ordained to save America. Maybe Trumpism will never die. But clearly those around him can smell decay.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 24, 2025 7:31 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Winds of Change have changed direction. Hey, remember April?

When President Donald Trump marked his 100th day in office at the end of that month, he was on a seemingly unstoppable roll. After taking four years out of office to prepare, he and his team returned to power with a blitz of more than 140 executive orders. He bent the Republican-controlled Congress to his will and dismantled much of the federal bureaucracy. He brought powerful institutions, including prestigious universities and law firms, to heel, demanding that his ring be kissed and his wallet fattened. He upended the nation’s economic and diplomatic relations with the world. He hijacked Americans’ attention—he was everywhere!—while openly musing about tearing up the Constitution and serving a third term. Moreover, Democrats were in disarray—truly—and their party’s future seemed in doubt. Trump stared out from the cover of this very magazine with the accompanying quote “I run the country and the world.” Honestly, it was hard to argue with him.

But as 2025 draws to a close, Trump seems a whole lot smaller. His party has been battered in recent elections. His poll numbers on even his signature issues—the economy, immigration—have tumbled. He’s seemingly lost touch with what got him elected, instead focusing on projects both petty and self-aggrandizing. As Americans worry about affordability, Trump and his family have profited wildly from his time in office. Republicans have begun to openly and repeatedly defy him. Democrats have started to outmaneuver him. Today, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal once more erupted with embarrassing revelations and unanswered questions. And every now and then, Trump seems to have a hard time even staying awake.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trump-is-suddenly-looking-a-lot
-smaller/ar-AA1SViia

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 24, 2025 7:37 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

There’s a 92 Percent Chance Trump Is Making It Up

By Marie-Rose Sheinerman | December 20, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2025/12/trump-strikes-ca
ribbean-military-number-venezuela/685348/

President Donald Trump likes to use a big number to anchor his point, especially when he wanders off on a tangent. Often it seems that a specific figure is on the tip of his tongue.

At this year’s ceremonial turkey pardon, Trump praised a farmer from Wayne County, North Carolina, for raising two “record-setting” birds, but then pivoted to his own electoral margin of victory: “I won that county by 92 percent.” (In fact, he won it by 16 percentage points.) At a McDonald’s corporate event last month, Trump claimed that the United States controls 92 percent of the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico (the Gulf of America, as he calls it). It’s really about 46 percent. Trump won the veterans’ vote, he said on Veterans Day, with “about 92 percent or something,” and in July, he said he won farmers—well, “by 92 percent.” (More accurate estimates of the portion of the electorate he won would be 65 percent of veterans and 78 percent of voters in farming counties, according to exit polls and election data.)

His fixation on the number between 91 and 93 has been a feature for a while. In April, Trump claimed that egg prices had fallen by 92 percent. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics said 12.7 percent.) And at a rally shortly before last November’s election, while railing against journalists and the media, he allowed that “not all of them” are “sick people.” Just “about 92 percent.” That one, admittedly, is difficult to fact-check.

I came upon this curious pattern in the course of tracking down the basis for a far more serious claim the president has made repeatedly as part of his justification for the U.S. military buildup near Venezuela. More than two dozen strikes on small boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 100 people since September. The strikes have formed the core of the administration’s ongoing campaign to treat President Nicolás Maduro as a “narco-terrorist,” which many view as a veneer for wanting to see the Venezuelan strongman ousted from power and work with a new government to secure access to the country’s oil and rare earth minerals.

“The drugs coming in through the sea are down to—they’re down by 92 percent,” Trump told Politico on December 8. At a roundtable later the same day, he went with “92 or 94 percent.” Three days later: “Drug traffic by sea is down 92 percent,” Trump said in the Oval Office. A day after that brought a new estimate: “We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water,” he told reporters.

More often than not, the president links the 92 (or more) percent claim to another: “Every one of those boats you see get shot down, you just saved 25,000 American lives.” In December alone, he has cited that figure—25,000 American lives saved per boat strike—on at least six different occasions.

I asked the Coast Guard—the lead federal agency for maritime drug interdiction—for any underlying data or information to support both of those figures. The Coast Guard referred me to the Pentagon. The Pentagon referred me to the White House. The Department of Homeland Security referred me to the Pentagon and the White House, which repeated Trump’s remarks without elaboration.

“President Trump is right. It is widely known that one small dose of these drugs is deadly, fentanyl is the number one killer of adults between the ages of 18 and 45, and any boat bringing this poison to our shores has the potential to kill 25,000 Americans or more,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement. “Rather than try to poke holes in these facts, The Atlantic should join President Trump in elevating the voices of families who have lost loved ones to the scourge of narcoterrorism.”

The president’s claims, however, are so porous that I hardly found anywhere to poke. Although Trump and other officials have repeatedly said that the goal of the strikes is to combat the trafficking of illicit fentanyl—the synthetic opioid chiefly responsible for an epidemic of fatal overdoses over the past decade—the drug does not come from South America. It enters America primarily across the border with Mexico and is produced using precursor chemicals from China. Venezuela, however, is primarily a transit country for cocaine bound for Europe.

In a briefing with lawmakers early last month, top officials acknowledged that they believed it was cocaine, not fentanyl, on the boats. A former senior Coast Guard official told me that in his more than three decades in the service, he has not been aware of a single instance of an intercepted load in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific containing fentanyl. In sum, the boats being struck aren’t carrying the drug that is the leading cause of overdose deaths in the U.S.—and what drugs they may be carrying aren’t coming to America. So it is hard to see how each strike saves 25,000 American lives.

Bill Baumgartner, a retired Coast Guard rear admiral who directed the agency’s operations in the Caribbean, told me that number “is just complete and pure fantasy.” The only way to arrive at that total of saved lives is if you would have rounded up 25,000 people and forced them to consume lethal doses of cocaine—a claim “just as stupid as saying that there’s a box of ammunition; if you confiscate a box of ammunition, you have saved 100 lives because there were 100 bullets there,” Baumgartner said.

It is even unclear how many of the destroyed vessels were actually carrying narcotics. The administration has not specified or released evidence of the types or quantities of drugs on them. When identifying boats ferrying drugs, “the intelligence isn’t foolproof,” and destroying a vessel with a strike—unlike boarding it during an interdiction—leaves no room to correct faulty intelligence, Baumgartner said. In the 13 months leading up to early October, 21 percent of the boats interdicted off the coast of Venezuela turned out not to be carrying any contraband, according to data shared by Coast Guard Acting Commandant Admiral Kevin Lunday in a letter to Senator Rand Paul, a Republican.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in the 12-month period ending in April, there were about 73,690 total drug overdose deaths in the United States (although that number is likely to increase when final data are tallied). If it were the case that each strike since September has saved 25,000 American lives, and given that 28 boats have been destroyed to date, the operation would have saved 700,000 lives—more than nine times the total U.S. drug overdose deaths in a year. “That makes no sense,” Adam Isacson, an expert on drug trafficking in Latin America at WOLA, an NGO based in Washington, D.C., told me.

The majority of overdose fatalities stem from opioids, not stimulants such as cocaine. In 2023, the most recent year for which such data are available, the CDC tracked 29,449 cocaine-linked deaths. (About 1.2 grams of cocaine can constitute a fatal dose. That amount is 600 times greater than the 2 milligrams of fentanyl that can cause a deadly overdose.) But notably, nearly 70 percent of cocaine- and other stimulant-related deaths that year also involved fentanyl.

As for the basis for the president’s claim of a 92 percent decline in maritime drug traffic: “We’ve only seen that in Trump’s remarks. No sourcing, no other data,” according to Isacson. (The White House did not specifically respond to my inquiry about it.) But the numbers the government does release give ample reason to doubt the statistic. Last month, the Coast Guard touted a record-setting year of drug interdiction; the agency seized more than 510,000 pounds of cocaine, primarily in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, compared with the 167,000 pounds it seized on average in prior years. This month, as part of its ongoing maritime-law-enforcement operations separate from the strikes, the Coast Guard seized 20,000 pounds of cocaine in a single interdiction. But global cocaine supply and demand continue to reach new heights, according to a June report from the United Nations. And counternarcotics-enforcement veterans told me that even if drug traffic by sea has seen a sharp drop, that does not signal an overall decline in cocaine traffic, because traffickers adapt and reroute shipments.

Perhaps the president has divined these numbers through a mathematically rigorous process beyond the reaches of my imagination. After all, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told Vanity Fair that her boss is a “statistical savant.” More likely, his affinity for 92 percent and extravagantly large round numbers is what in a game of poker might be called a tell. In 2019, Bloomberg noticed 10,000 cropping up whenever Trump made big claims, in topics such as the stock market and ISIS fighters. It was the number Trump cited for known or suspected gang members whom ICE removed in 2018 (though the agency put that number at 5,872). And it’s the number of points he said the Dow Jones would have been up in 2019 had the Federal Reserve not raised interest rates the previous year.

Not every time the president cites a 92 percent is off base. His August boast of a “92 percent” approval rating for the Department of Veterans Affairs, for instance, was actually slightly less than the 92.8 percent of veterans who reported trusting the VA for their health care in the agency’s survey that month. That was up from—wait for it—92 percent under the Biden administration the previous year. But more often than not, the number seems to serve as a clue that the commander in chief might be reaching for a number he can easily remember, caring little whether it is accurate.

At three different rallies in the fall of 2024 leading up to Election Day, Trump bragged about his nearly decade-long campaign to denigrate the press. “The fake news back there—they were at 92 percent approval rating when we started this journey in 2015. And now they’re less than Congress,” he said on November 2. “I’m very proud of that.” In fact, the year the president descended his golden escalator and upended the country’s political life, Americans’ trust in the media was not at 92 percent. It stood at a then-historic low of 40 percent. In the years since, it has dropped to a new historic low of 28 percent. Congress’s approval, for the record, stands at 15 percent.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 24, 2025 7:45 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump is doing all he can to prove he is crazy:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The Failing New York Times, and their lies and purposeful misrepresentations, is a serious threat to the National Security of our Nation. Their Radical Left, Unhinged Behavior, writing FAKE Articles and Opinions in a never ending way, must be dealt with and stopped. THEY ARE A TRUE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! Thank you for you attention to this matter. PRESIDENT DJT
12/23/25, 12:32 AM

Trump, 79, Declares Absurd National Security Threat in Late-Night Meltdown

It is unclear what prompted the president’s latest deranged rant.

By Ewan Palmer | Updated Dec. 23 2025 3:02PM EST

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-79-declares-absurd-national-securi
ty-threat-in-late-night-meltdown/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 24, 2025 10:36 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Judges who ruled against Trump say that subsequent threats have changed their lives

NBC reports:

In his almost 45 years as a federal judge, John Coughenour has seen it all, including high-profile criminal trials that put his own safety at risk.

But this year, the 84-year-old senior district judge did something he hadn’t considered for a long time: He retrieved a gun he had stored at the federal courthouse in Seattle years ago and brought it back to his home in case he needed it to defend himself.

Coughenour is one of dozens of federal judges who have found themselves at the center of a political maelstrom as they have ruled against President Donald Trump or spoken up in defense of the judiciary. With Trump administration officials vilifying judges who rule against the government, a wave of violent threats and harassment has often followed.

More at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judges-ruled-trump-say-
harassment-threats-changed-lives-rcna248445

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, December 24, 2025 1:10 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

So shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Believe me, says 6ixStringJoker, the Nazi who claims he is not a Nazi.

Shut the fuck up, idiot.

Last time everybody checked, it's YOUR fucking party that is out there shitting all over Jews literally every day.

You're the bad guys. You're fucking toast.

It's hilarious to watch, actually.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, December 24, 2025 3:54 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Shut the fuck up, idiot.

Last time everybody checked, it's YOUR fucking party that is out there shitting all over Jews literally every day.

You're the bad guys. You're fucking toast.

It's hilarious to watch, actually.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

So This Is Why Trump Didn’t Want to Release the Epstein Files

The latest batch includes many new references to Trump—and enough ammunition for Congress to keep pressing.

By Sarah Fitzpatrick | December 24, 2025, 2:49 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/trump-epstein-files-justi
ce-department-redactions/685455/

Nearly two years ago, Donald Trump kicked off the presidential-campaign season with a declaration: “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island,” he posted on Truth Social in January 2024. Reports to the contrary, he insisted, were the fault of AI—and of his political rivals: “This is what the Democrats do to their Republican Opponent, who is leading them, by a lot, in the Polls.”

But this week, the documents released by Trump’s own Justice Department—including flight logs and emails—told a different story. Federal prosecutors determined in January 2020 that Trump had been a passenger on the notorious private jet owned by Jeffrey Epstein—who would later be charged with sex trafficking—far more often than they had realized.

Many of the flights on what came to be known as the Lolita Express took place “during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case,” a federal prosecutor in New York told colleagues. Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was subsequently convicted and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the sex-trafficking operation, including using the plane for “transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts.”

There are many other mentions of Trump. The president’s name appears more than 100 times in files released yesterday as part of the DOJ’s compliance with legislation requiring it to disclose everything it has on the Epstein case. Trump fought Congress’s demand for transparency for months before abruptly pivoting and endorsing the bill once he realized he had lost. Although many references to Trump are clearly from news reports or from seemingly unverified tips to the FBI, one conclusion from the files is that Trump’s relationship with Epstein, a former friend, was of interest to federal law enforcement for years.

A White House official told me that Trump was never contacted by law enforcement regarding his interactions with Epstein during the time period for which Epstein and Maxwell were charged. The president has denied wrongdoing, though his characterizations of his relationship with Epstein—including about his presence on the plane—have shifted over time. Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, declined to answer questions about the discrepancy between the president’s prior statements and the material released by the DOJ but said in a statement, “The truth remains: Donald Trump did nothing wrong.”

Read: The Epstein files only get worse

Trump has also insisted that he knew nothing of Epstein’s criminal activity—though his critics have questioned how that could be true given their close relationship and history of chasing women together. Members of Congress from both parties have said they will continue to probe the issue in the upcoming year. Representatives I spoke with told me their takeaway from reading the files is that top officials in the Trump administration have not been honest about what was in them, and that they intend to press Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel for more information.

“Although the files are overly redacted, they’ve already demonstrated that the narrative painted by Patel in hearings, Bondi in press statements, and Trump himself on social media wasn’t accurate,” Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who co-authored the Epstein legislation, told me. “A complete disclosure consistent with the law will show there are more men implicated in the files in possession of the government.”

Representatives and staff on the House Oversight Committee told me they were drafting subpoenas in response to the documents released yesterday, seeking more information related to law enforcement’s identification of 10 alleged “co-conspirators” shortly after Epstein’s arrest in July 2019. The case that prosecutors were building related to those unnamed co-conspirators appears to have been substantial. One document released yesterday is a November 2020 overview presented to the deputy attorney general from an acting U.S. attorney titled “Anticipated Charges and Investigative Steps.” But what, if any, next steps were taken remains a mystery: The rest of the page is redacted.

Oversight Committee members are also drafting a contempt resolution to penalize Bondi for not ensuring that the DOJ fully complied with the law. The resolution, spearheaded by Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, will give Bondi 30 days to fully release all of the remaining Epstein materials, then fine her $10,000 each day that she doesn’t release them after that. They told me they expected to introduce the resolution when Congress returns in January. They are also moving ahead on articles of impeachment for Bondi, and said they were optimistic that they could get them passed in the House.

Khanna told me that there was an emerging “coalition of the right and left to fight for justice.” That alliance, he added, “has proven to be the kryptonite that marks the beginning of the end of the Trump era.”

Read: ‘They’re delusional if they think this is going to go away’

The files released yesterday—and Trump’s prominence in them—appear to have changed the calculation for senior Democratic Party leaders as they prepare for the midterm elections. Party leadership had previously sought to convince junior members not to focus on Epstein. But this week Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said he will push for the Senate to hold the DOJ accountable for not fully complying with the legislation, citing a missed 30-day deadline for all files to be released and excessive redactions in those that have been.

“The Department of Justice needs to shed more light on who was on the list, how they were involved, and why they chose not to prosecute. Protecting possible co-conspirators is not the transparency the American people and Congress are demanding,” Schumer said in a statement.

The Justice Department has acknowledged there are still many more files to be released—and the known backlog grew longer today when the DOJ announced that the FBI and New York prosecutors had uncovered “over a million more documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case” and that the process of reviewing them could take “a few more weeks.” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had earlier said on Meet the Press that the delay was due to the need for additional redactions in order “to protect victims.” Behind the scenes, his office has requested additional “emergency” help from U.S. attorneys’ offices to continue reviewing and redacting Epstein-related material over the Christmas and New Year holidays, CNN reported.

The DOJ did not respond to my questions, but on X, the department’s public-affairs office has sought to downplay mentions of Trump in the files, saying that yesterday’s documents “contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”

When asked if the president still has confidence in his attorney general’s handling of the release of the Epstein files, Jackson said, “The president’s entire Cabinet, including AG Bondi, has done a great job implementing the president’s agenda.”

Survivors of Epstein’s abuses reacted with both excitement and anger as they reviewed the new files, lighting up group chats. Some were working retail jobs on one of the busiest days of the year; others were caring for children home from school. Lisa Phillips told me that there were still too many unanswered questions, but that the months of work she and other Epstein survivors had put into lobbying Congress were finally delivering results. “This is the first news that has made me feel like we are making headway,” she told me.

Sigrid McCawley, an attorney who represents several of Epstein’s victims, said it would take time to know the true impact of the “avalanche” of new documents released yesterday. But she told me that one thing is clear: “These brave survivors were absolutely correct that the government was withholding critical information from the public.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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