The internet is awash in metric tonnes of shallow Epstein bullshit

Yesterday I took the train north from Dresden to Rostock to deal with some last-minute personal business:

As it turns out, it is very cold in Rostock – probably not cold enough to impress my midwestern American readers, but far too cold for my tender sensibilities. This is because a “sudden stratospheric warming event” has disrupted the polar vortex, pouring a lot of very rude Arctic air into the Baltic region where nobody wants it. This air appears primarily in the form of an unrelenting, soul-freezing wind from hell. Naturally, to enrich these Soviet meteorological conditions, transit workers had to go on a nationwide strike yesterday, so I spent hours penguin-walking from appointment to appointment across the insidious ice covering half of all city surfaces.

I did, however, manage to get this cheerful photo of the old lighthouse at Warnemünde:

Now I sit on the return train to Dresden, and the frozen fields again flash past my window, this time in the opposite direction.

The internet is intermittent, the overeager conductor will not stop making inane announcements and the cabin temperature is too low.

All of which is to say that I am grumpy and in the mood to rant. And given my limited resources at the moment, I will rant about the latest cultural virus to afflict social media, occasioned by last Friday’s three-million-page Epstein document dump.

What the last 48 hours have taught me is this: To win a lot of X impressions and therefore earn a lot of X money, all you have to do is wade into this vast documentary ocean, screenshot three or four emails that may or may not contain anything notable, and attach these images to a post making literally any hysterical claim you want. Don’t worry – the sources you’re providing and the claims you’re making need not be all that closely related. With a little luck, you’ll soon get millions of views and your only naysayers will be a handful of commenters who for some reason feel compelled to spend hours unwinding the arrant bullshit you’re putting about, only to have dozens of hysterical lunatics accuse them of defending paedophiles and advocating genocide in Gaza for their troubles. That’s the state of the discourse right now.

As I said, my internet is terrible so we’re going to have to proceed by example here. Epstein enthusiasts love to provide variously highlighted screenshots of email exchanges like this one:

Probably a dozen people have posted this exact exchange in my mentions and DMs over the past days. They believe it totally vindicates all the wildest Epstein theories, they believe it sheds new light on the Blackmail Paedo Cult at the centre of world politics, they think they have really stumbled upon some amazing shit, here. (For some reason a few of these people also have profile pictures of pretty young women posing in front of American flags that seem likely to have been generated by AI and they’re posting from accounts created in India, but I’m sure that’s just an odd coincidence.)

Anyway, I invite you to read this correspondence for yourself, and then maybe consider subscribing if you haven’t already, just so I can explain to you why all of this is driving me crazy.