The crisis of credibility faced by Western elites as they try and fail to patch over the bursting abscess that is the Epstein files release heralds something much more profound: potential systemic collapse.
I’ve been grappling with these issues for a bit, most recently last week in my post “The Mask of Unreality Slipping?”
The Disorienting Impact of Massive Document Dumps
Like many of you, I’ve been overwhelmed attempting to process the most recent Jeffrey Epstein document dump.
A personal cognitive crisis of credibility if you will.
I came across an explanation for why my normally trusty yellow waders weren’t keeping the filth off my feet from a somewhat unlikely source, the Pop Apologists podcast.
The show, hosted by sisters Lauren and Chanler, is not normally the sort of content I engage with.
But their discussion of the psychic trauma engendered by the latest Epstein files pointed me to a Threads account with an interesting insight.
FWIW, this is the first time I’ve seen any content of interest on Threads.
From Daphne Delvaux, Esq.,Trial Attorney aka The Mama Attorney:
I’ll paste some other key parts of Delvaux’s argument as straight text since the Threads embeds are so cumbersome:
Courts understand that when the brain is flooded with horror, your system gets hijacked by the primal brain. You go into hypervigilance, rage, obsession, and collapse. We have a name for this: reptile theory.
Reptile theory is a trial strategy built on this premise: if you can bypass the cognitive brain and activate the primitive survival brain (the oldest/reptile part of the brain), you can control outcomes without ever persuading on facts or law. This strategy is not allowed at trial.…The onus is placed entirely on the reader to make sense of chaos. There are random redactions that force the brain into constant guesswork. You have to deduce, infer, fill in blanks. This keeps the mind spinning, searching, looping.
You may have assumed they are sloppy. They are not. This is a known strategy.
The most ruthless corporate defense lawyers fight cases this exact way. Disorganized document drops, and endless data with no roadmap. Both high-volume but also evasive. It’s at the same time too much information, but also omits the most crucial information.
The strategy has two predictable outcomes.
1) You become consumed. You deep dive. You push to get more information. You stop sleeping. It takes over your life. Your focus narrows until there is nothing else. Gradually, they frack all of your life force. They keep you locked in an endless energy loop in their sick mind games. You become one of their victims.
2) You disengage completely. You decide it’s too much. Too confusing. Too overwhelming. You walk away. It implodes from your exhaustion.
Either way, they win.
While Delvaux may be correct that POTUS Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi is employing a known trial lawyer strategy — one that aligns perfectly with Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” tactic for overwhelming the corporate media.
Psyoper Delude Thyself
Unfortunately for Bondi and Team Trump, the POTUS infamously gets most of his information from cable news.
Thus when Bondi floods the media zone and glitches the MSM, she is further disorienting her boss.
And, as Michael Tomasky pointed out at The New Republic, the more tightly bubbles are sealed shut, the bigger they get, and the bigger they get, the louder they burst:
On a personal level, Donald Trump is becoming more and more unhinged. He rambles, he stumbles, he fumbles. We don’t know whether he actually pooped himself in that one much-discussed episode in the Oval Office. But the fact that it has been discussed as something that might have happened is bad enough. And even if he retains full control of those evacuations, it’s the ones coming out of his brain and mouth that remain more concerning.…Politically, the bubble in which he lives is becoming further and further removed from reality. His penchant for self-aggrandization, always prodigious, has lately reached the point of insane self-parody.…He has come to believe that the American people actually want what Immigration and Customs Enforcement is doing where it’s been unleashed. They do not. He has created for himself a world in which he never hears a negative word about himself. This is not a plea for him and his people to wake up—they won’t, and I’m well past hoping they will. It is rather an observation that this too is one more Trumpian assault on democracy. He thinks himself answerable only to those who adore him and think he can do no wrong—in other words, to people who require of him no answers at all. The rest of the country—that is, the majority of the country—doesn’t exist.…He is of course preparing to steal the midterms. Pundits and talking heads on cable news should dispense with even wondering whether he will. Of course he will try. And if he can’t pull it off, he and the GOP will challenge every result they possibly can in ways that you and I can’t even imagine.
So here we are. Mentally deteriorating, unpopular, incompetent, corrupt, out of touch; and yet, in—for now—unshakably firm control of power, completely beyond any democratic accountability. And when that accountability moment comes in November, he will blatantly do whatever he can to erase and reverse it. So this year is going to be far worse than last, at least for a while.…But he can’t shut out reality forever. No one can. And the longer he manages to do so, the more thunderous and unequivocal will be the comeuppance. The Trump bubble will burst, and it’ll be like the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments, crashing down on Pharoah’s head.
Hopeful words from Tomasky, who ends by advising “patience and rage” which is so useless as to nearly ruin the whole thing, but let’s keep moving.
Reps. Massie and Khanna Don’t Stop
The bipartisan co-sponsors of the Jeffrey Epstein Transparency Act that triggered all these Epstein document dumps are calling BS on the DOJ’s redactions and naming names. Per The Guardian:
The Democratic congressman Ro Khanna said on Tuesday that he and his Republican colleague Thomas Massie had forced the justice department to disclose the “hidden” names of six wealthy men they say are “likely incriminated” by their inclusion in the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files.
In a post on X at lunchtime, Khanna, of California, named the six as Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, Nicola Caputo, Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem and Leslie Wexner.
Wexner is the billionaire founder of Victoria’s Secret. His extensive ties to Epstein – the late convicted sex offender and disgraced financier – were exposed in a lengthy New York Times investigation in November.
Bin Sulayem is a billionaire businessman and real estate developer from Dubai – and brother of Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the head of FIA, the body that governs the world’s motorsport championships, including the prestigious Formula One series. Email exchanges between Bin Sulayem and Epstein have been previously reported.
The other four men named remain mysterious, for now.
Khanna and Massie refusing to play along with the DOJ’s half-measures are just one of many problems the flood the zone strategy is running into.
Flooding the Zone Doesn’t Work on Info Swarmers
One problem with Bannon’s flood the zone with shit tactic is that only the corporate media is frozen in place by the explosions of filth, the swarms of social media feed on it like dung beetles. Per Politico:
…we are witnessing this through the prism of an entirely new phenomenon — an internationally crowdsourced scandal, unfolding in real time across your social media feed. In many cases, citizen journalists have been nearly as capable as professional journalists and investigators at finding insightful documents within the millions of DOJ files and bringing them to the fore.
Parlor games: Washington being what it is, the universal access to raw investigative data has given rise to another new fad. People are also scouring the Epstein files for references to their bosses, their corporate rivals, their political enemies — even their own families. Gossip about some of the highest-profile revelations had been swirling in D.C. circles for days in advance, uncovered by the associates of those involved. Plenty of people are hunting not for criminal behavior, but for the intrigue.
“We are all searching the files: for colleagues, competitors, clients,” one well-connected PR operative tells POLITICO’s Daniel Lippman. “It’s shocking to see what some of the most powerful people in the world say to each other in private — and it’s also shocking how many folks we know are mentioned in some capacity, even completely innocuously.”
Politico then points to an important find in the Epstein files by The Miami Herald’s Julie Brown (who isn’t representative of the MSM, she’s a throwback to the Watergate era of reporting) about Trump and Epstein.
Politico concludes that Brown’s piece “ultimately seems to corroborate Trump’s longstanding insistence that he had fallen out with Epstein long before any police inquiry, and cut all ties. It’s important to note that the figures who have so far been damaged by this latest tranche of documents are those who chose to maintain links with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, like Peter Mandelson, Britain’s now-former ambassador to Washington.”
Which brings us to our next section, how are the Europeans reacting to the latest document dump splashing across the Atlantic and getting all over them?
European Leaders Frozen in Place
The redoubtable Simplicius addresses the European failure to respond to the current crisis of confidence and goes on to explain why they can’t.
Interested readers should also see Yves’ piece on “The European Veal Pen” to better understand their impotence.
After summing up the various troubles of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour government caused by the latest Epstein release and Starmer’s refusal to resign, Simplicius gets to his point:
Whether Starmer actually survives or not is immaterial: the fact remains that Europe is in a deep crisis of credibility, no longer retaining even a picayune’s worth of moral authority over the rest of the world. But the whacky thing is that these Western governments have no real solutions to their problems because the issues are so utterly structural and fundamental in nature, that merely the simple act of admitting to their root causes would signify the total collapse of everything the Western globalist order has built up over the last decades.…European countries are trapped in this zugzwang of inextricable problems that can only be “patched” over because, as stated earlier, truly fixing them at the first-principle level would require peering into uncomfortable closets where the elites have stashed their secrets.…Another example is the current censorship firestorm (Link mine, not Simplicius’, Nat): instead of addressing the actual issues that terrify these elites, bringing them out into the open and having a real honest dialogue about them at the societal level, the elites prefer the short-term “hotfix” of stamping out any dissent or discussion of ‘sensitive topics’ with increasingly crude and heavy-handed tactics. They believe this will make the issues go away, but instead it engenders vast social resentment, discontent, and distrust of all the organs of power, from media to government and everything in between. But of course, if these topics were allowed to be honestly and sensibly discussed in the ‘public square’, it would unravel the entire house of cards, making it a real no-win situation for the controllers in charge.…European elites have no way out of their sunk-cost fallacy trap: to turn back would be to admit to sins so monstrous they have squandered the livelihood of the entire European civilization; for these criminals, there is no other way but forward. Double down and hope your opponents happen to break before you do.
The Status Quo Doesn’t Have to Outlast Reality, It Just Has to Outlast Us
That last sentence brings to mind Aurelian’s summary of the fate of the late 2010s gilets jaunes movement in France:
…the reality was that the GJ were numerous enough and determined enough that they could actually have shaken the government to its foundations if they had been sufficiently organised. On at least one occasion in December 2018, there were enough of them in central Paris to have laid siege to the Elysée Palace, and indeed there was a helicopter on standby to take Macron to safety. But the GJ were from the sticks, and few of them had much idea of the geography of Paris, so they wandered around trying to find where Macron lived. As it was, the government realised that it only had to hang on and make a few token concessions, and eventually the protests would stop, which they did.
If the rulers of the West are unwilling or unable to change in response to their crisis of credibility and the people are too disorganized to force them, where does that leave us?
Stuck in the Spodocene?
I came across this translation of Hakan Illatikdi’s “The Spodocene: inhabiting the ruins of progress” (Italian original) at GeoPolitiQ and found it just too on the nose:
In thermodynamics, a system does not necessarily collapse when its energy is exhausted. First, it goes through a more disturbing phase: the point preceding the change of state. It is the moment when matter is formally the same, but no longer behaves as before. The temperature rises, pressure builds up, molecules agitate without finding a new stable form. Nothing seems to have changed, and yet everything is about to change.
Our era is exactly there.
The Spodocene is not yet the next state. It is the antechamber. The system continues to function, but it does so erratically, inefficiently and increasingly violently against itself. The energy that circulates no longer produces order, but friction. The mechanisms that once guaranteed stability — markets, institutions, narratives of progress — continue to operate, but have lost their ability to structure the whole. The result is not immediate collapse, but prolonged instability: a social, political and subjective warming that heralds an inevitable transition.
The change of state is neither a moral decision nor a voluntary act. It occurs when a critical threshold is reached. The most common mistake is to confuse this phase with a correctable anomaly. The most costly mistake is to try to force the old form when the conditions that made it possible no longer exist.
This is what defines our present. The elites continue to act as if it were enough to regulate the temperature, redistribute pressures or adjust variables to recover the previous balance. But that balance is no longer available. The system is not disordered: it is saturated. It does not need corrections, but transformation.…We are still in the moment before. The world has not changed state, but it can no longer return to its previous one. This interval — unstable, uncomfortable, fraught with tension — is the only real space for dispute. The Spodocene is not the end of history: it is the moment when history returns to being open, not because of the promise of progress, but because of the exhaustion of all the illusions that sustained it.
The synchronicities were piling up in my inbox yesterday morning as I worked on this piece because I had no sooner plugged in the above, than the latest from Nefarious Russians arrived in my email.
Is This What the Late Stage Soviet Experience Was Like?
Evgenia, born in the former USSR just as it collapsed writes ““>The Disappearance of BarbariansHow the Soviet Union psyoped itself out of existence.”
Now, though, having become an American and living through the decline of the American Empire in its very centre — New York — I do wonder if this is how it felt to be in Moscow during late Perestroika. A big part of America’s intelligentsia seems to be more and more disillusioned with the American myth, in American Exceptionalism. Meanwhile, the other part of America is doubling down on it and joining quasi-fascist “old guard” forces that are promising to keep the myth strong as ever…
As I’ve been writing and saying for a while, this American unraveling feels vaguely familiar. I was born during the unraveling of another mythic empire and grew up in its postmortem, a world that was like Fellini’s (and Petronius’s) Satyricon — a proto-Christian world where there was no faith and where basic instincts and base pursuits reigned in society, or what was left of it.…The Soviet elite actually believed American propaganda about the Soviet Union. And this elite themselves demonized the Soviet Union into extinction. The Voice of America and Radio Free Liberty were, in the end, very successful in carrying out their mission: to destabilize and topple the Soviet Union from within, despite all the censorship and Iron Curtain protections the Soviet Union put up in defense. In fact, this attempt to wall itself off from the West contributed to its demise, since no one could really experience the West as it was and relied on an idealized picture of the West they had in their heads — a picture drawn, in large part by American propaganda and Hollywood.
Unfortunately for Western intelligentsia, there is no great power ideological rival to admire and emulate the way the Soviets admired the West, leaving us stuck in the Spodocene.
I’m aware that some readers will be screaming “What about China?” to themselves, but I’ll have to save that for another time. Suffice it to say few in the West are even seriously attempting to understand China, much less admiring or emulating Earth’s longest-running civilization as it rises again.
But we can at least read how we are viewed by Chinese-born English-language author Yiyun Li:
I cried every morning on the way to nursery school, but few four-year-olds would know how to articulate their terror and misery. There were other adults at the school, but none of them seemed to find the teacher’s practice unacceptable (and perhaps the parents, had they known, would not have done either). All of them must have benefited from the teacher’s regime – we were obedient, easily manageable.
Living in today’s America reminds me of that nursery school. The reigning tyranny; the men who brutalise the innocent – like the boy with the hammer – because they can; the people who, like my mother, say this can’t be true, life can’t be that terrible; if bad things happen, you are the problem; do not provoke; keep up the hope; things will be better – by the midterms, in four years, some day.
But let’s close with two realities that may insist on breaking through Trump’s info-bubble and bring and end to the Spodocene or what I’ve been calling the “Interregnum of Unreality.”
I am referring to war and economics.
Scylla and/or Charybdis?
First up, The Wall Street Journal has elected to inform its readers about what Julien Garran is calling “The Biggest Capital Misallocation in History.”
From the WSJ’s piece “Big Tech’s AI Push Is Costing a Lot More Than the Moon Landing”, I’ll let the following picture serve as several thousand words:
pic.twitter.com/vLf9gQc4hY
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) February 10, 2026
As for war, I’ll quote William Schryver’s latest (and refer interested readers to Yves’ piece from Monday):
…contrary to the perceptions of most Americans and others around the world, making war against Iran in its own backyard here in 2026 is all but certain to produce disastrous results for both the US and Israel — and has pronounced potential to spark a regional war, spiral out of control, and ultimately draw in Russia, China, and North Korea.
In any case, it must be understood that, in firmly rejecting US/Israel demands, Iran is effectively dictating terms — and this strongly confirms what many of us have argued since last summer: Iran was the clear winner of the 12-Day War. Israel knows it, the US knows it, and Iran knows it.
If the reports above are more or less accurate, then it is undeniably evident that Washington is angling for an exit from this march to madness.
But, given that the Iranians are now dictating the terms of that exit and will not agree to a reprise of the orchestrated Operation Midnight Hammer, and its fictitious B-2 bunker-busting strike, and given the massive concentration of American military power in the region, and given the huge investment in menacing bravado Trump has already made in this ill-conceived adventure, war may now be unavoidable.
As Dean Wormer warned the Freshman from Animal House, “fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life,” I hope someone is warning Donald Trump that a market crash and a losing war on Iran is no way to go through a second term.
But we all know he won’t hear the warning over the din of cable news.
