From conspiracy logic to Trump’s base turning on him to the $10B lawsuit against Murdoch—In this article, I trace how the Epstein myth is collapsing under the weight of its own expectations, and how those who once leveraged its power are now paying the price for promises they couldn’t keep.

Most people seem to think Epstein was murdered. I don’t. But what fascinates me more than the theories is what happens after they fall apart.

My latest piece looks at what’s unfolding, why it matters, and why the erosion of constitutional enforcement deserves far more alarm than it’s getting.

A system built on checks and balances only works if each branch accepts its limits. When one stops caring about the authority of the others, the structure doesn’t immediately collapse — it hollows out, leaving a shell behind.

When a branch of government decides it can sidestep a Supreme Court order without consequence, it’s not politics as usual — it’s a constitutional crisis.

This isn’t just some partisan political fight — it’s a direct assault on due process, judicial authority, and the core premise that no one, not even the executive, stands above the law.

People just act like if the mainstream narrative had any flaws, it proves every wild alternative was right—then rewrite history to pretend their original take was the most “reasonable” version of those alternatives all along.

It's an untenable information environment to exist in.

This bleeds into everything. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard Joe Rogan-types say, “It’s crazy how many conspiracy theories turned out to be true.”

No, it’s not. Because most haven’t.

A huge chunk of the initial discourse was built on mistranslations, flimsy or false claims, and wild speculation—with many not just claiming it was an accidental escape, but a deliberately engineered Chinese bioweapon.

People will see this and go, “yeah, obviously,” then turn around and claim all the early “Lab Leakers” have been vindicated.

Even if you assume Covid came from a lab (which I don’t think the current evidence supports), that doesn’t retroactively make the early arguments sound.

If John tells me, “Joe’s going to win the lottery tomorrow because I saw a dog with four spots,” and I call that prediction ridiculous, then Joe does win—and John comes back with, “See? Told you so”—he’s still wrong. The logic was garbage. The outcome doesn’t retroactively validate it.

So, I wrote out some thoughts on how I think the framework of conversation laid out by Grice’s Maxims is undermined by the presence of “bad-faith” participants, how that factors into this feeling, and what happens when the quiet norms that hold conversation together start to erode.

Check it out!

It feels like everyday more and more of the norms so valuable to the relative success and stability enjoyed by contemporary society are falling beneath said threshold.

Highly effective relative to the investment required by each participant when adhere’d to by a large enough percentage of the public—but rapidly diminished in effect once the number of individuals engaging with them falls beneath a critical threshold.

People seem to have a tendency to just forget that supporting liberal free speech standards means defending the right to it even in cases where you might disagree with it/find the content of that speech abhorrent.

There’s a meaningful difference between looking thoughtful and actually engaging in rigorous inquiry. The obscurement of the gap between the two has real consequences for how audiences perceive expertise and critical thinking.