I hate to be the middle-woman here, but this is where the saga currently resides, and I happen to have insight into both parties and their theories. Nick Tartaglione you know as a frequent subject, given the hours of airtime he’s received in audio clips published as exclusives. I don’t typically pursue true crime as an extended series, but in this case I realized his value in this whole sordid tale immediately.

The rest of the media is just catching on.

That doesn’t mean I closed the books on other possibilities.

Back in December, I sat down with Mark Epstein to hear his side. In the middle of holiday chaos and work events I was juggling at the time, I took a train from DC one evening to meet him and spent a little over 90 minutes in a dimly lit private members’ club—an old-school New York artist haunt—listening to his account without a recording device to rely on afterward. Somewhere, I still have a stash of napkins covered in scribbled notes from that conversation.

In person, Mark was guarded, precise, and adamant in refusing to answer questions about his upbringing, which I of course pressed him on, or about his relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell—aside from a couple of off-the-record anecdotes and an acknowledgment that he wouldn’t speak ill of her because she had been “very good” to his mother and always been pleasant in his presence. He had “nothing against” her he told me. His sole purpose for meeting me was to raise suspicions about his brother’s death.

Mark Epstein is convinced someone arranged to take Jeffrey Epstein out based on evidence gathered through an independent investigation and autopsy he commissioned alongside the official examination conducted after Epstein’s death.

You might remember parts of his story being told at length by Tucker Carlson a few years ago.

Up Ahead: Dr. Steven Greer’s UFO Conference!

There are certainly aspects of the Epstein files I hold strong — yes, controversial — opinions about. The portrayal of legal aged escorts as false victims, for one. Corrupt lawyers invested in defaming Trump, and unverified accusations repeated as fact by misinformed sleuths, another. But when it comes to how and why Jeffrey Epstein died, I’ve always maintained a neutral position and that remains true today. I’ve always been open to hearing every angle. I’ve never conclusively said: this is what I believe to be true.

NICK ON AUDIO

May 10, 7:10 pm: “The truth is the truth.”

“It’s a shame that everyone else can’t hear how emphatic Nick is when he describes all this stuff. You know, His authenticity and genuineness and truthfulness bleeds through, you know, and you and I hear it.” — Jonah, inmate on call

The Suicide Note

Mark Vs. Nick

Mark Epstein is highly skeptical of the newly released suicide note purportedly written in prison by his late brother Jeffrey.

Mark disputes the authenticity of a jailhouse note unsealed this week, calling it “the work of a professional forger.”

The Note: “They investigated me for month — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the note reads. “So 15 year old charges resulted. It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye.. Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!! NO FUN – NOT WORTH IT!!”

Mark claims the note is forgery but does not dispute that it bears striking resemblance to his brother’s penmanship. “It wouldn’t be hard to get some pro forger to forge a note,” he told Business Insider. “That’s the easiest f***ing thing in the world to do.”

He had also acknowledged that the “bust out cryin” line is a reference to the “Little Rascals” TV show that they grew up watching in the 1960s. The same phrase appears in multiple emails from Jeffrey to his brother and friends. “It’s public knowledge, it’s in the emails” he told the outlet. “So they stole it from me to make it sound like it was him.”

However, that timing doesn’t add up. The emails Mark is referencing were only revealed by the Justice Department in the past year, as part of a larger release of files related to him, while the suicide note has been under seal by a judge this whole time, as Nick has stated several times before.

The judge unsealed the note after the NYT’s petitioned for its release. This month is the first time it was revealed to the pubic, so it’s highly implausible Nick could have known Epstein was fond of this particular phrase.

“Jeffrey Epstein wanted to be put back in the cell with me. I didn’t even know this existed until recently. I mean, that should show you right there. Epstein offered me money to not return to general population and stay in the box with him because he felt safe with me.” — Nick Tartaglione

“You saw pictures of me. Jeffrey Epstein had marks around his neck because he tried to hang himself. At the time, I was, you know, 240, 250 pounds, and had a bench press over 500 pounds. If I wanted to hurt Jeffrey Epstein, I could have heard Jeffrey Epstein. I didn’t hurt Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.”

How Epstein Died Matters.

This conclusion—should we ever arrive there— will determine how this scandal-marred chapter of American history is ultimately regarded. An orchestrated hit suggests powerful people colluded to silence him.

Death by his own hand would deflate that theory and knock the wind out of a growing belief that a shadowy cabal controls the country and was responsible not only for his murder, but for the elaborate cover-up that followed.

Mark Epstein made it clear that evening that he has no interest in defending anything his brother was accused or convicted of. He doesn’t deny Jeffrey Epstein was guilty. What he wants is media attention on his findings, particularly the independent autopsy report.

Until there’s concrete evidence confirming either theory, I view both men as equally critical sources with compelling personal insight into this whole mess.

I’ll be back to expand on what I gleaned from my conversation with Mark.

What I have now is Nick’s response captured in a hectic soundbite. Because he is out of minutes until the 13th, he was forced to relay his thoughts on another inmate’s allotted call time.

Thank you, Jonah, for the facilitating it.

Statement From Nick’s Attorney, Inga Parsons:

“Comey was Epstein”s prosecutor as well as Nicks and PDiddy.”s. In my 35 years of federal criminal practice I have never seen such perjury, misrepresentations and obvious evidence tampering as in this case. You don’t need 90 meetings with federal prosecutors and agents if you are telling the truth but apparently you do when the three key witnesses started out exonerating Nick as not involved and admitting their own involvement in the killings. Nick is retired law enforcement - he rescues animals. He is not a killer. Nor is he a member of the Mexican cartel as the main cooperator and the men who were killed by the cartel were Cartel members. Nick Tartaglione is innocent and is unjustly serving life sentences for crimes he did not commit.”

I spoke to Nick this evening. He recorded a message to Mark Epstein I’ll share with you tomorrow.

Editor’s Note: Thank you Jay Beecher for compiling this entire case into one condensed article. You can read the narrative from Nick’s perspective, examine evidence from his hard drive, and click on the audio clips embedded throughout to hear Nick explain key aspects in his own words.

Refresher on the Cast of Characters Involved

AUDIO 1: “THIS ISN’T ABOUT TRUMP”

AUDIO 2: THE VICTIMS

On Paper,

The case against Nicholas (“Nick”) Tartaglione looks like the kind federal prosecutors love to present at trial: cartel money, a vanished crew, a former cop turned sanctuary boss, and violence so blunt it demands a villain. Four men disappear in Orange County, New York. Months later, four bodies are found buried on a property tied — however loosely — to Tartaglione. The story hardens when the government’s theory lands squarely on inevitability: Nick did it.

The trouble, as Nick’s petition for a pardon and the surrounding reporting insist, is that the case only looks inevitable once you accept a series of early decisions defended late — decisions he argues were shaped by grand jury perjury, witness coercion, and tampered evidence that turned an investigation into a conviction machine.

The four men were Martin Luna, Miguel Luna, Hector Gutierrez, and Urbano Santiago. In Nick’s account, repeated throughout his plea for clemency, they were not innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. He describes them as violent undocumented immigrants and members of a Mexican drug cartel. He also claims the government knew this — and that key aspects of the case only make sense if the murders are viewed not as Nick’s crime, but as cartel business handled by cartel-connected individuals, with Nick as the convenient fall guy.

The story begins with a relationship that, in Nick’s telling, was unremarkable. Marcos Cruz worked for him at his animal sanctuary and lived on the property. Tartaglione, a former K-9 officer on disability after an on-the-job injury, had poured his life into animal rescue. Over the years he had saved thousands of animals from abandonment, abuse, slaughter auctions, and neglect—dogs, horses, deer, cats—the endless stream of injured creatures he rehabilitated and tried to place.

AUDIO 3: MEDICAL LEAVE

Cruz, Tartaglione claims, was working with the cartel and trafficking drugs alongside Martin Luna. According to Nick’s account, Luna had made a dangerous mistake: he stole cartel money, then disappeared with it. His family, gripped by fear, told local police that Luna had previously been kidnapped over stolen drug money and had managed to escape. This time, they warned, he might not survive.

Tartaglione says this is how his name entered the picture — not as an enforcer, but as a former cop Cruz approached for help recovering money he claimed he was owed. Nick says he assumed Cruz meant unpaid wages from another local farm. At trial, however, Cruz testified that he had been tasked with retrieving stolen drug money from Luna by any means necessary. Tartaglione insists he refused any involvement in that kind of work. What he says he did do was refer Cruz to Gerard Benderoth, a former law enforcement officer he had previously recommended for outside security jobs, a history he says is reflected in their text messages.

In his petition, Nick identifies Benderoth and Joseph Biggs as two of the men Cruz allegedly recruited. At trial, Cruz testified that he arranged Martin Luna’s killing with help from Benderoth, Biggs, and a third man, Jason Sullivan, a drug dealer who had moved from New York to Florida. Cruz claimed Luna was targeted over the stolen cartel money and that three of Luna’s relatives — Miguel Luna, Urbano Santiago, and Hector Gutierrez — were with him when the plot unfolded. According to Cruz’s testimony, he also knew Nick had vacated the rental property once used for his animal sanctuary and selected it as the burial site. Cruz said the men were shot, apparently by Benderoth, and that he buried the bodies there afterward.

In later filings, Tartaglione argues Cruz’s story only took its final shape after repeated sessions with investigator William Young. Nick’s petition claims Cruz initially confessed to carrying out the murders himself, then gradually shifted into a cooperation narrative that implicated others. Tartaglione argues that change was not organic but coerced, alleging investigators pressured Cruz by threatening that his children could be placed in foster care and his wife deported if he failed to cooperate.

One of the men Cruz implicated, Gerard Benderoth, never testified. When FBI agents later attempted to arrest him in broad daylight, Benderoth grabbed a gun and shot himself inside his car before he could be taken into custody.

This detail, Tartaglione says, is central to his argument because it involves one of the few elements of the case that cannot be dismissed as courtroom rhetoric. In audio transcripts he returns to it repeatedly: Benderoth was his age, roughly his height, bald, a former cop, someone he knew from gyms and law enforcement circles and had referred for work. In recorded conversations with Jessica Reed Kraus, Nick recounts being told that federal agents had pulled over Benderoth — his physical double — and that he shot himself before agents could approach the vehicle. Nick says his reaction was not shock but recognition. In his telling, one of the men he believes responsible for the killings was now dead, and the case against him would not change course.

The government’s timeline begins on April 11, 2016, at a bar in Chester, New York, called the Likquid Lounge. Prosecutors presented it as the place where the plot unfolded. Video footage shown at trial captures the entrance area of the bar, though Nick’s defense has long argued the footage cuts or freezes precisely when the doors open and the identities of those entering or exiting would be visible. According to prosecutors, Martin Luna was strangled there that night before his relatives were later transported to Tartaglione’s property.

Nick disputes the reliability of the footage entirely. In filings and recorded conversations, he alleges the video contains freezing frames, skipped segments, reversed timestamps, muted audio, and missing minutes — discrepancies he says become visible only when compared against a wall clock in the frame. According to his account, the moments that might show who entered or exited vehicles outside the bar are obscured by these glitches.

The footage also includes the repeated appearance of a white van parked near the bar.

In Nick’s account, that vehicle becomes a lingering anomaly in the case — present in the video but largely ignored in the government’s narrative.

AUDIO 4: VIDEO SKIPS AT 1:57

We Never See Who Exits The Vehicle.

A 911 caller who lived next door to Martin Luna’s residence reported seeing two threatening men at the house: a heavyset Black man and an overweight bald white man arriving in a white van. In his petition, Nick argues that those descriptions align with Joseph Biggs and Gerard Benderoth. He further alleges that Investigator William Young later presented the account differently in grand jury testimony, describing the white man as a “bodybuilder” — a characterization Nick says was intended to resemble him — while also changing the vehicle from a white van to an SUV and omitting the van from the account altogether.

Despite the prosecution’s confident façade, Nick argues the case against him rested on unstable foundations.

No murder weapon was ever recovered.

Searches of Nick’s home and vehicles uncovered no drug money or trafficking paraphernalia.

His DNA was not found on the zip tie prosecutors claimed had been used to strangle Martin Luna.

And, Nick contends, a trained K-9 officer familiar with cadaver detection would never bury bodies on property connected to him — particularly at a location he had already vacated.

Nick also disputes one of the prosecution’s central claims: that Luna was strangled inside the bar. At trial, Joseph Biggs testified that Tartaglione used a zip tie to strangle Luna and that the men were beaten and tortured. But the medical examiner, Dr. Roman, testified that Luna’s cause of death could not be determined and said strangulation was unlikely. He also confirmed that none of the bodies showed injuries consistent with Biggs’s account — no cuts, abrasions, bruises, or broken bones. Toxicology reports did detect alcohol and drugs in the victims’ systems, but Nick argues the findings do not support the prosecution’s version of a violent beating followed by a zip-tie killing.

One of Nick’s most pointed claims concerns a zip tie visible in crime scene photographs. According to his petition, the earliest timestamped images show no zip tie. Photographs taken three minutes later show what he describes as a “clean zip tie” resting on top of the bodies.

Nick believes investigators planted it at the scene.

AUDIO 4: PHOTOS IN EVIDENCE

Taken Three Minutes Apart —Show a Zip Tie Mysteriously Appear in the Second Frame.

The Issue of DNA

The kind of evidence juries are trained to treat as holy. Nick says Luna’s DNA was “discovered” on a piece of molding or floorboard in a bar bathroom eight months after the disappearances, after the bathroom had allegedly been cleaned with bleach for months. He claims he may know how it truly got there.

Investigator Young was at the burial site, left without signing out, went to the bar without signing in, and was later the person who took custody of the floorboard.

Nick says he learned after trial, through an FBI agent, that the case agent picked up the molding himself. He argues this points to either planting or cross-contamination between the burial site and the bar. He also notes that proper protective gear was not worn at either location.

AUDIO 5: Phone Forensics

Shows Date of Tampering.

If Tartaglione is right about that, then the murder story is not simply about what happened to four cartel men. It is also about what happened to the evidence inside a system with a target already chosen. The human engine of the prosecution, in his account, is not video or DNA but the three alleged cooperators: Marcos Cruz, Joseph Biggs, and Jason Sullivan. Tartaglione claims they initially denied his involvement and that Cruz repeatedly confessed to Investigator Young that he himself committed the murders. He says Cruz told Young, “I killed them alright,” and told his own brother, Miguel Cruz, that he hired Biggs and Benderoth to do it.

He further alleges that an officer interviewing Miguel Cruz can be heard suggesting there “might be a U-Visa” if Miguel cooperated, and that when Miguel refused to implicate Tartaglione, he was deported.

AUDIO 6: THE AUTOPSY REPORT

Nick claims the revisionism of the key narrative took place over time. His petition repeats a number like a hammer: over ninety meetings. Over ninety sessions with Young and prosecutors, including Maurene Comey, to “get their stories straight.”

“You don’t need ninety meetings to tell the truth, but you might need ninety meetings to align three men’s lies into a single prosecutorial narrative,” Nick stated in email correspondence and audio obtained by Jessica Reed Kraus.

Nick says Cruz’s inducements were enormous. Cruz — a man Nick portrays as a self-confessed murderer — received time served, citizenship, and permission for his family to remain in the United States. Biggs, he says, will be out in under six years. Sullivan has already been released.

There are additional contradictions he points to — the kind that don’t require a forensic lab to understand. Contradictions that may, in fact, provide him with an alibi. Prosecutors told jurors that Nick’s phone records show no usage while he and the alleged killers were supposedly together at the bar killing Luna and kidnapping his relatives to be killed elsewhere. But that is not strictly true. Rather than showing no phone activity, Nick’s records indicate that he called Benderoth’s home phone at 4:00 p.m., during the window prosecutors claim he was with Benderoth inside the bar. The records also show calls to businesses, family members, and friends during the period he was allegedly committing murder.

Nick also claims there is evidence suggesting the victims were alive long after the prosecution’s timeline says they were dead.

He states records show Luna called Florida, California, and Puerto Rico after the time that prosecutors claim he was supposedly killed. He cites shocking police notes: a former state trooper reporting seeing the four victims eating breakfast eleven days after they were supposed to have been killed, and a diner waitress who confirmed that she served them.

Law enforcement and Nick’s own trial attorneys curiously never followed up on those leads.

Nick’s petition goes further, toward details that sound small until you try to dismiss them. Family members of Michael Luna said that Luna had been wearing white pants on the day in question, a claim echoed by Young. Yet Luna’s body was found wearing blue jeans. Prosecutors, and even the judge, suggested that dye may have leached from other clothing and turned the white pants blue - a physical impossibility, particularly because Luna’s body was discovered on top of the others, not beneath it.

AUDIO 7: WHITE PANTS TURN BLUE

A photo of the pants is included because, on the day Martin supposedly died (by zip-tie strangulation), his family identified him on a video wearing white pants. Yet, when they pulled him out of the grave as Body #1, he was wearing blue jeans. Nick’s defense believes this proves he was not murdered on the date listed.

Furthermore, Biggs’s shifting account is a central example of why guilt ‘beyond any reasonable doubt’ should perhaps never have been applied to the allegations aimed at Nick. When Biggs was first arrested, he told his lawyer that Gerard Benderoth shot all three men. This is allegedly evidenced in an email from Comey herself, where she wrote that Biggs stated Benderoth shot all three victims. At trial, however, Biggs testified to a different version: that he shot one man, Tartaglione shot one man, and Benderoth shot one man. Nick argues this version is not only inconsistent with Biggs’s earlier statement but physically implausible. All three victims were allegedly shot with the same pistol, with consistent bullet trajectories.

Nick also alleges that his team later learned, based on post trial discovery, that prosecutors engaged in their own form of editing, not only in video but in transcripts.

Sullivan’s interview transcript provided to the judge was missing thirty-three minutes. That missing segment, Nick claims, reveals investigators feeding Sullivan information and that Sullivan and his wife were interviewed together, contradicting what Comey later told the court. He also claims thatprosecutors gave a non-prosecution agreement to Sullivan’s wife, that was never disclosed to the jury, as an incentive to make false statements against Nick.

Evidence was also allegedly withheld and destroyed, including a “lot front camera” video referenced in police notes and by an officer speaking to families, later claimed not to even exist.

AUDIO 8: NICKS’ RECEIPTS

In a recorded conversation with Jessica Kraus, Nick described a moment that reveals, at least emotionally, why he believes the system will not reverse itself even when confronted with its own contradictions. He said that, after learning about Benderoth’s suicide, he told his lawyer, in effect, “I’m out.” Not because he thought the government would do the right thing, but because he thought the facts were too obvious to ignore, that one of the true killers had died, and that there was simply no evidence to keep himself behind bars. But then he said the lawyer replied, “No, they won’t admit it”.

Tartaglione realized at that moment a stark reality: once the machine is in motion, its job becomes not to find the truth but to protect the story already told.

AUDIO 9: WHO IS BRUCE BARKET?

Nick was arrested on December 19, 2016.

In his telling, the arrest did not follow a completed investigation pointing cleanly toward him, but instead preceded one that was still groping for a coherent theory. He argues that law enforcement did not arrive at him because evidence led them there, but because once his name entered the frame, it became easier to bend the evidence than to abandon the narrative and pursue members of the cartel.

By the summer of 2019, according to Nick, his case was compromised by a federal prosecution framing him as a violent former police officer turned criminal mastermind. But it was his transfer to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan that, he says, irreversibly altered both the public narrative around him and the internal dynamics of his case.

He was placed in the Special Housing Unit. It was there that he was assigned to share a cell with the prison’s most notorious inmate:

JEFFREY EPSTEIN.

At the time, Nick says he had only a vague idea of who Epstein was. Access to newspapers and television in segregation was limited, delayed, or nonexistent.

What he knew initially came largely from Epstein himself. They were housed together on J-tier, 9 South.

Early one morning, around 5:30 a.m., guards banged on the cell door and told Epstein to get dressed for court. Nick says he immediately understood what was actually happening. In his experience as a former police officer and long-term pretrial detainee, guards often told inmates they had “court” when, in fact, they were being taken to meet prosecutors for a proffer session, so other inmates would not overhear that someone was cooperating.

Nick says he explained this to Epstein before Epstein left the cell, and that Epstein was gone most of the day. When he returned late that evening, Nick describes him as visibly shaken, anxious, and withdrawn.

After some time, Epstein initiated a conversation. He asked Nick, explicitly referencing his law enforcement background, for his opinion on cooperating with prosecutors.

Nick told him what he considered the reality of cooperation: prosecutors do not release a valuable defendant unless that person can deliver someone more important to prosecute. Epstein, he says, then explained why he was asking. He told Nick that prosecutors had offered him the possibility of pleading to lesser charges and serving only a few years in a minimum-security camp, rather than dying in prison, if he could provide information that could be used to impeach Donald Trump.

Epstein was explicit about the pressure being applied. He told Nick that prosecutors had made clear the sooner he agreed to cooperate, the sooner he would be moved out of MCC. If he chose to go to trial, he would remain where he was. Epstein also allegedly told him that prosecutors said he did not need to prove the allegations against Trump — only to supply information or allegations that Trump’s people would be unable to disprove.

Nick challenged that logic. He reminded Epstein that, at the time, the FBI answered to the Trump administration. Epstein responded, according to Tartaglione, that prosecutors told him the FBI were “their people,” not Trump’s. Epstein also said prosecutors suggested his former girlfriend might corroborate his claims.

AUDIO 10: What Epstein Told Nick About Trump, Maxwell, The FBI

At that point, Nick says he reacted angrily and confronted Epstein directly — telling him he had already been incarcerated for years and was facing life sentences because of cooperators lying to protect themselves. He told Epstein that fabricated cooperation destroys innocent lives. Nick says this confrontation escalated into a serious problem almost immediately.

Shortly afterward, he learned that Epstein had accused him of assault.

Epstein had been found unresponsive in his cell, apparently strangled but still breathing. When he came around, he uttered five words: “Nick tried to kill me.”

AUDIO 11: EPSTEIN’S SUICIDE NOTE

“(Redacted) kept me in a locked shower stall for 1 hr. Noel sent me burnt food. Giant bugs crawling over my hands. No fun!!” the note reads.”

Media reports quickly followed, describing Tartaglione as a “killer cop” who attacked Epstein. But Nick insists this never happened. He says Epstein made the allegation to ensure placement on suicide watch, which would remove him from the cell and potentially shield him from further pressure or danger.

Nick recounts that Epstein later retracted the allegation, claiming he had merely passed out. He says Epstein apologized to him directly, including an exchange in which Epstein acknowledged that Nick had seen a suicide note Epstein had hidden inside one of Nick’s books. Nick describes the note as brief and bleak, referencing that the “feds looked everywhere, found nothing,” and ending with, “time to say goodbye.”

Nick states that on the night in question, Epstein appeared to be sleeping, snoring loudly. Nick put in headphones and went to sleep. At some point, he felt something hit his leg. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw Epstein hanging, his eyes partly open. Using a small razor blade inmates were allowed for grooming, Nick says he cut Epstein down and began chest compressions while calling for guards. He says Epstein regained breathing before officers arrived.

Nick says that this episode permanently recast him in the public imagination. Regardless of the evidence in his own case, he became linked in headlines to Epstein, framed as violent, unstable, and dangerous. The image that circulated secured the visual needed — Nick as a hulking figure in a white tank top glaring into the camera. He believes this association bled into judicial attitudes as well, reinforcing a narrative that he says prosecutors had already constructed.

He also describes conversations with Epstein that extended beyond Trump. Epstein, he says, talked about Ghislaine Maxwell, referring to her dismissively as a “cold fish,” and expressing fear that prosecutors would go after her if he did not “pack it in.” Epstein allegedly insisted that some high-profile accusations were false, including claims involving Alan Dershowitz, telling Nick that Dershowitz had never been near certain accusers.

Looking back, Nick now views the cell placement itself as deeply suspect. He questions why a man charged with quadruple homicide would be placed in a cell with one of the most high-profile detainees in the country, unless officials were confident he would not harm him. He also questions why, after Epstein’s death, no serious scrutiny was applied to the decision to house them together.

After Epstein’s death, Nick was transferred to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn due to deteriorating prison conditions. While there, he was on the phone with a friend; when the call ended and he began walking back to his cell, other inmates attacked him with a plumber’s wrench because he was a former police officer. The assault left him with a serious head injury that required a metal plate.

He now believes the Epstein episode had another consequence: it distracted from, and even insulated, the prosecution in his own case. Media focus shifted almost entirely to Epstein’s death. His own claims of prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and coerced testimony received little attention by comparison. His name became shorthand for menace rather than that of a defendant asserting innocence.

By the time his trial resumed, Nick says the damage was already irreversible. Jurors, judges, and the public had absorbed a simplified story. He was no longer just a former officer accused of murder; he was “the killer cop who attacked Epstein.” He argues that this framing made it easier for contradictions in the government’s case to be overlooked and harder for his defense to be heard on its own merits.

When his case finally went to trial in the Southern District of New York, nearly seven years after his arrest, the prosecution presented what appeared, on the surface, to be a tightly woven narrative. Beneath that surface, he argues, the case was defined by contradictions, shifting theories, missing evidence, and testimony that changed repeatedly to fit whatever version of events prosecutors needed at a given moment.

By the time post-trial motions were filed, Tartaglione argues the case against him depended almost entirely on cooperators who admitted their own involvement, whose stories changed repeatedly, and who received extraordinary benefits in exchange for implicating him. Physical evidence was either absent, inconsistent, or tainted, while exculpatory material was ignored, minimized, or never shown to the jury. As his post-trial filings expanded, his claims moved beyond individual evidentiary failures into a broader allegation: that his prosecution was shaped by institutional protection, prosecutorial misconduct, and a culture within the Southern District of New York that rewarded convictions over truth.

Central to this claim is the role of Maurene Comey, the lead prosecutor in his case, who also served as a prosecutor in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

Comey’s influence, he argues, extended far beyond the presentation of evidence at trial. From the earliest stages of the case, Nick says, the prosecution relied on perjury before the grand jury. Investigator William Young’s testimony included demonstrably false descriptions of witnesses, vehicles, and weapons. The 911 caller’s description of two men who came looking for Martin Luna as “a heavyset Black man” and “a heavyset white man driving a white van” was altered. Young recharacterized the white man as a “bodybuilder.” Nick maintains this was done deliberately to shift suspicion away from Gerard Benderoth and toward himself.

Comey presented this testimony without correction.

AUDIO 12: NICK ON WILLIAM YOUNG

Nick alleges DNA tampering.

Read recent accusations on Young here.

Judge Kenneth Karas accepted prosecutorial representations even when contradicted by records. Nick points to instances where demonstrably false statements were allowed to stand, including claims about phone silence, timelines, and cooperator conduct. He notes that Comey’s visible presence in the courtroom, standing behind the prosecution, underscored what he perceived as an imbalance of power no defense attorney could realistically counter.

Following sentencing, the pattern continued. Despite a judicial order that he be housed near his family and afforded protection as a former law enforcement officer, he was sent to Atwater Federal Penitentiary in California, one of the most violent facilities in the federal system. There, he was placed in general population. Staff and inmates were informed of his background.

His cell door was left open. He was attacked, strangled, stabbed, and left bleeding until he collapsed in the hallway. He required a blood transfusion and sustained permanent injuries, including partial vision loss.

Nick argues this was not negligence but indifference — bordering on intent. He notes that Epstein, too, was not protected despite obvious risks. In his view, both men were placed in environments where serious harm was foreseeable, and where the consequences of that harm would conveniently eliminate complications for the government.

Jessica Reed Kraus has played a singular role in bringing these details back into public view. Through repeated interviews with Nick from inside prison, she has documented his claims, examined trial records, reviewed exhibits, and highlighted inconsistencies that were ignored or minimized in mainstream coverage. Tartaglione argues that without this scrutiny, his case would remain frozen in its trial posture, never re-examined despite the volume of exculpatory material.

In his petition, Tartaglione does not ask to be viewed as sympathetic. He asks to be examined carefully. He emphasizes that he has already served nearly a decade in prison — longer than several admitted participants in the crimes. Cruz, who confessed repeatedly, is free. Sullivan is free. Biggs will be released in a few years.

While Nick remains in federal prison serving consecutive life sentences.

He frames his request for clemency as a question not just of individual injustice, but of institutional failure.

A case built on coerced testimony, manipulated evidence, shifting theories, and suppressed contradictions, he argues, is not a victory for justice. It is a warning that America’s justice system is not merely on the brink of failure.

In his view, it has already failed.

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.” — Stephen Hawking

Good morning from Georgetown. We’re less than an hour from disclosure. I flew in specifically for this drop, phase one, and a briefing later today led by David Grusch. I’ll have notes on that afterward.

I’m excited for more blurry images and distorted, grainy video.

What To Know:

The release will reportedly follow the same model as the Epstein files: a slow, steady drip of information released over several weeks so the public is not overwhelmed. I’m hearing the reports that pastors were briefed by the government on how to handle this may actually be true. According to sources, a select group was included to help prepare scriptural and spiritual messaging surrounding what some are calling a new era.

How will faith-based Americans respond to what may be revealed? Many in Congress believe these are spiritual entities. Some think angels and demons. Others insist they are only demons. The majority view seems to be that, whatever they are, they’ve “always been here.”

Requested videos, according to Anna Paulina Luna, will be included in the second drop.

I asked last night, “Where do I need to be tomorrow?” The source answered: “At your computer :)”

Obviously, I’ll have a hundred different things I want to discuss, so sign up for the chat if you’re as invested in this as I am. We’ll break down whatever gets released, and I’ll also post live updates from the Grusch briefing later today.

In this first drop, we’ll likely learn about specific topics: past crash events, Roswell incident, Area 51, recovered craft materials, and potentially even alleged non-human remains in government possession.

I’ve also included a few questions and theories from X that I found especially interesting and insightful. When I’m back, I’ll share more about what Eric Weinstein theorized while sitting in my office last month searching for orbs.

“The aliens on this planet are also attempting to clone or replicate the human form artificially. Their original form, being humanoid, cannot pass the field that was established around the Earth. But if they can clone or cybernetically change their forms, it may help their designs. This is why virtual reality, cybernetics, cloning, and nanotechnology are in vogue today.” — Michael Tsarion

The Government Launched Alien.gov.

Rafael @@uncannysignals : “Tonight is the last night before everything changes forever. Disclosure is imminent. What that looks like...I guess we’ll find out in a few hours. Throughout my life, l’ve carried this nagging feeling. A premonition, I suppose, something that always told me I would live to see the last era where humanity knew the world as it was. Like many of you, I’ve experienced things I can’t explain. I’ve known, in some quiet and certain way, that there is something beyond the edges of our reality. We’re about to open that door for everyone else. Sleep well.”

“The evidence points to the fact that Roswell was a real incident and that indeed an alien craft did crash, and that material was recovered from that site. We all know that UFOs are real.All we need to ask is where do they come from, and what do they want?”

— Edgar Mitchell

Tim & @MrOcelot1976: “They can time travel. They can go from 37000 bc to modern times like walking into another room. These objects have been dated pre flood by Alien carvings on Facebook. My theory is that they exist in all times simultaneously and are connectednwith helping create humanity. Not all are good. “Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. BELIEVE. There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING.”

@frayingreality: “Trump’s own spiritual adviser Paula White says what she heard inside the White House left her trembling in fear. She sat in rooms with Trump, Marco Rubio, and Susie Wiles. And whatever was discussed there, she says it will impact not just Americans but entire nations.

Paula White heads the White House Faith Office and has Trump’s ear in ways almost no outsider does. If she’s shaken, that’s not nothing.

In a sermon clip that’s now gone viral, White described the weight of what she witnessed in those meetings. “There are decisions being made that I literally tremble in fear over,” she said, “because I recognise what will be said in the meetings will not just impact 5-10 people, but millions and nations.” She called daily life inside the White House “absolutely hell, hounding you in every way you can imagine and not imagine.”

Here’s where it gets strange. Marco Rubio, one of the three officials White named in her discussions, has been one of the most aggressive voices in Congress pushing for UAP transparency. Rubio co-authored key UAP disclosure legislation and has made no secret of his belief that the public deserves answers. The fact that his name appears in White’s account, alongside language about decisions that will shake the world, hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Commentator Walter Kirn and others watching the intersection of faith and government disclosure have raised the question openly: is White bracing evangelical America for something specific? Is the “spiritual warfare” she describes a response to information about non-human intelligence that the White House is sitting on? Her language about millions of people and entire nations lines up uncomfortably well with what a UAP disclosure briefing might produce.

White has not clarified what the decisions were. No official statement has been issued. The White House Faith Office has remained silent on the specifics of what she witnessed.

If Trump’s closest spiritual confidant is trembling over what.”

According to Congressman Tim Burchett— the Trump Administration will start releasing classified UFO files in different batches of UFO files released on a weekly basis after today’s release.

Eric Weinstein • @ericweinstein : “It’s extremely hard to “do a little disclosure” and avoid the tight scientific/societal questions. The only way this has worked has been starving smart technical people for any detail at all.

What I will be watching:

Everyone: “Did the government psy-op us all with

BS? If so: Why????”

Biologists: “You said the government has alien biologics? Do they have eukaryotic cells? If so what do we know about their histones, matrilineal mitochondrial dna, hemoglobin atp synthase???

What is their placement on the phylogenetic tree?

Tetrapods??? Isolates?? If not eucaryotic, how are their cells/tissues organized? Do they use proteins?? What are their body plans??”

Linguists: “What is the structure of their communication schemes? Can it be mapped onto a generalized human grammar? Or are our languages not expressive enough to cover their languages?

Do they use sound or light or some other wave to transmit/receive? Do they have an analog of music??”

Physicists: “How do the standard model and general relativity appear as effective theories/ lagrangians of the alien understanding of the cosmic waves, media and fabric for lack of better terms? How many dimensions are there, are they engineering accessible and how many new ones are temporal? Are there new forms of energy corresponding to these new degrees of freedom? |s the speed of light gameable?”

Civil Libertarians: “How many innocent lives were ruined keeping this secret? Did we fake a lot of this?? Who authorized the lying, discrediting and possible wet work?”

NatSec: “Are we owned by an unknown force? Will it now be trivial easy for everyone to make WMD from new discoveries?”

Etc.

This is not going to stay controlled if it is at all specific. As soon as there are any specifics I guess that the game changes character instantly and goes into high gear with totally different players.”

“I can assure you that flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on Earth.”

— Harry S. Truman

“We are dealing with a yet unrecognized level of consciousness, independent of man but closely linked to the earth.... I do not believe anymore that UFOs are simply the spacecraft of some race of extraterrestrial visitors. This notion is too simplistic to explain their appearance, the frequency of their manifestations through recorded history, and the structure of the information exchanged with them during contact.”

— Jacques Vallee

Air Force News Special Report: “In July 1994, the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force concluded an exhaustive search for records in response to a General Accounting Office (GAO) inquiry of an event popularly known as the "Roswell Incident." The focus of the GAO probe, initiated at the request of a member of Congress, was to determine if the U.S. Air Force, or any other U.S. government agency, possessed information on the alleged crash and recovery of an extraterrestrial vehicle and its alien occupants near Roswell, N.M. in July 1947.

The 1994 Air Force report concluded that the predecessor to the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army Air Forces, recovered debris from an Army Air Forces balloon-borne research project code named MOGUL. Records located describing research carried out under the MOGUL project, most of which were never classified (and publicly available) were collected, provided to GAO, and published in one volume for ease of access for the general public.

This report discusses the results of this exhaustive research and identifies the likely sources of the claims of "alien bodies" at Roswell. Contrary to allegations, many of the accounts appear to be descriptions of unclassified and widely publicized Air Force scientific achievements. Other descriptions of "bodies" appear to be actual incidents in which Air Force members were killed or injured in the line of duty.

The conclusions are: Air Force activities which occurred over a period of many years have been consolidated and are now represented to have occurred in two or three days in July 1947.

“Aliens” observed in the New Mexico desert were actually anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research.

The “unusual” military activities in the New Mexico desert were high altitude research balloon launch and recovery operations. Reports of military units that always seemed to arrive shortly after the crash of a flying saucer to retrieve the saucer and “crew,” were actually accurate descriptions of Air Force personnel engaged in anthropomorphic dummy recovery operations.

Claims of “alien bodies” at the Roswell Army Air Field hospital were most likely a combination of two separate incidents:

Executive Summary

1. ) a 1956 KC-97 aircraft accident in which 11 Air Force members lost their lives; and,

2. ) a 1959 manned balloon mishap in which two Air Force pilots were injured.”

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

― Susan Sontag

This Week’s HK is Free to All Subscribers!

Before we get to UFO files sent for release—did you know that a growing number of people suspect time is bending? I’ve been tracking theories about a possible quantum jump during the pandemic. Scrolling fringe forums I discovered an onslaught of people convinced the planet is moving faster. Hayes, of course, was the first to tell me about this. I’m trying to book him for an interview next week on his twelfth birthday, but he’s cagey and yet to confirm. I need him to explain, scientifically, why our days feel shorter.

On Reddit a user opened a thread asking, “Does anyone feel like they’re living a different life since Covid?” This woman said she noticed culture had succumbed to a duller gradient. “I graduated high school during the pandemic, so that may amplify this, but I’ve asked people of different ages and they agree. It feels like I’ve been living in a different timeline since the pandemic. Time is warped. Before, things seemed to be changing for the better: new stuff, more social energy, people excited about day to day life. Since the pandemic, every year feels the same, but somehow goes by faster. I’m happy, but I still do a lot, and everything feels a little off. For the past few years, things have felt turned down a notch. There is less going out, less hype for music and games, quieter theaters, and even sneaker drops that used to feel electric. Everything’s gotten grayer since then.”

Another user chimed in: “I notice it even just going to the grocery store. Everyone is on edge. Almost no one speaks, no ‘excuse me’ or small courtesies. Kids and adults stare at their phones, oblivious. People seem tense. Shit’s dark.”

When teenage girls in prom dresses post videos dancing to a soundtrack lifted from Charlie Kirk’s talking points, shit is dark. When Hitler is revered openly and comfortably on popular podcast platforms, you know the devil’s gaining new ground. A quantum anomaly is not solely to blame. Let’s not ignore CERN as a possible factor that very likely may have opened portals by which nonhuman entities can now enter, and what we’re experiencing now could partly be linked to that. They also never explained their reasons for drilling into the center of the planet to extract the God Particle. What’s weirder, no one’s really even bothered to ask…

AHEAD:

A 2 part interview with Christopher Witcomb about his new book Broken Plea, regarding bombshell claims about the Idaho murders and why Bryan Kohberger might not be the one. A sample from the audio version is included here.

AUDIO:

Broken Plea: The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders

“The Explosive Search for Truth Behind the Idaho Murders is a 2026 true-crime book by Christopher Whitcomb that questions the official narrative of the 2022 Idaho murders, suggesting a rush to judgment may have overlooked critical evidence and alternative theories despite a suspect’s plea bargain. The book uses court records, timelines, and witness statements to explore inconsistencies and unanswered questions, inviting readers to re-examine the case.”

The more I read, the more convinced I am that biblical forecasts seem plausible: false prophets, phony martyrs, political betrayals, fractured morale among Christian mothers who take perverse pleasure in trashing a widow weekly, and now Tucker Carlson adopting the role of Judas. Sitting smug across from the New York Times, he denied ever calling Donald Trump the antichrist. Confronted by his own lies, his brow furrows, he shakes his head like a bothered dog and squints into the camera, settling into some kind of rebellious intellectual reduced to immature antics in competition with Nick Fuentes, antics people (like me) see through. Islamic infatuation over allegiance to this country at the crux of it. When a man confesses being under attack by bed demons, let’s believe him.

Trump as the antichrist is comical. Imagine humanity’s demise hinging on a New York real estate mogul with a penchant for drugstore tanner, Pavarotti, and ostentatious gold embroidery. He’s too stubborn to serve anyone more powerful than himself. Also, the Antichrist won’t be a Gemini; it’s too obvious. The devil is far too cunning. When it comes to end-times trends, Sweden is ahead of the curve. They rolled out a “mark of the beast” this week: thousands voluntarily implanted rice-sized microchips in their hands for convenience, unlocking doors, making payments, and storing data.

Which brings me to what I promised, a HIH-themed Bible study to discuss all of this. We’re going to need it. I’ll have details soon.

Confirmation of interdimensional nonhuman intelligence is what we’re currently facing. Word is that disclosure could fundamentally rewire our understanding of reality if we are forced to accept what’s rumored, that we are being surveilled by a higher consciousness.

I return to DC this week for an alien briefing covering an array of topics. I’ll be taking lots of notes.

A number of outlets credited me last week with being first to draw a connection to the two scientists murdered at their residence. On the phone they seemed genuinely interested in my findings; in print they’re overly cautious and slightly mocking, framing it as a harebrained conspiracy concocted by wacky MAGA radicals.

Off the record, they’re equally interested.

On a brighter note: Year of the Horse gave us Golden Tempo as a symbolic mascot for a new era—the horse era. Who can resist the long-shot racehorse with a white cross on his muzzle, ridden by a Puerto Rican jockey who beat his brother, honored a long lineage of jockey DNA, surged from the back to win the derby, and made his owner the first woman to take the prize. It had everyone I know crying on a Sunday. People love inspiring tales: a racehorse as the underdog. Imagine if we applied that same approach to stories about humans overcoming hardship and being miraculously rewarded for tireless perseverance. Cut to Trump courting a king with a bee in his palm a day after a third bullet failed to find him.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANNA PAULINA LUNA— WHOM I CONSIDER ONE OF THE HARDEST WORKING WOMEN IN DC

Flashback: In Office with Anna Paulina Luna

Nine days after the Hilton shooting my nerves have settled and my exhaustion is easing, but my anger is sharp. I envy how easily my peers bounced back. I watched them on TV documenting the king and queen’s visit—the same faces who ducked for cover on Saturday resurfaced, composed by Tuesday. Dutiful spectators to the president coaxing a King Charles, showcasing a beehive fashioned after the White House, Michelle Obama’s contribution, in one perfectly staged scene. Trump opened his doughy hand to reveal a honeybee, which seemed to delight the king. Melania stood there loooking slightly unnerved, dressed to perfection. Camilla awkwardly looming, as she does. Sun shining. Grass clipped. Flowers in bloom. Kaitlan Collins even broke character, clealry enamored by the queen’s son, whom I’ve always insisted is underrated. He’s handsome and charming—a poet at heart and a painter by passion.

I’m glad America is catching on.

In Other News:

I have updates on Ghislaine Maxwell’s potential pardon

Instagram will stop recommending accounts that don’t post original content.

I have serious regrets about not heading up north to cover Elon’s trial.

Ted Wait was deposed by Congress but “didn’t say much.”

The Olsen twins spotted together brought momentary unity online.

Courtney Love scored a sentimental gem at the Sylvia Plath auction.

Bottles of urine were found scattered around the MET hours before the ball.

Kim Kardashian showed up naked in what looked to me like an uncanny homage to Bianca Censori.

Anna Wintour might be an elitist snob, but she’s perfect as host for this event. Notably absent? Meghan Markle.

UFO files release coming ‘very soon,’ Kash Patel says – as pastors warned Americans may ‘abandon faith over revelations’

MAIN SUBJECT

Pastors briefed on “non-human intelligence.” Impending disclosure is not just scientific but psychological and spiritual.

In a recent discussion Perry Stone claimed a group of pastors were invited to a government-led briefing focused on preparing for potential revelations about extraterrestrial life and advanced technology. According to the account, officials allegedly discussed recovered off-world materials and reports of non-human entities, and emphasized that religious leaders must be ready for the questions that follow. If true, this suggests preparation for how humanity will process it. Government agencies are rumored to be quietly preparing religious leaders for potential disclosure of extraterrestrial or non-human intelligence.

Perry Stone described a reported meeting where pastors were briefed on:
• Alleged recovered off-world materials
• Reports of non-human entities
• The need to guide congregations through paradigm-shifting revelations

Tom Thompson, American novelist and literary critic, responded on X to Walter Kirn, pointing out his theory that something larger than a messaging debate is stalling disclosure. Basically, he’s suggesting what I’ve come to hear and believe — that the real fight in Washington is not just over whether disclosure happens but over who gets to control the way it unfolds.

Tom states, “If his read is accurate, and I believe it is, the delay may not be caused by secrecy alone. It may be the result of competing factions trying to shape the release, manage the framing, protect themselves, and decide which version of the story reaches the public first.

That would help explain why the entire process feels so unstable.

Hearings take place. Whistleblowers come forward.

Legislation appears, then gets stripped down.

Officials hint at extraordinary information, then retreat into careful ambiguity.

This does not look like a clean, orderly march toward transparency.

It looks more like an internal power struggle occasionally breaking through the surface.”

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A President a King and a bee.

BEST DRESSED

Kate Moss and Gigi Hadid.

BLIND ITEM

SNAPPED

“In an (even more rare) joint sighting in New York on Thursday, the Olsen twins were photographed taking the concept of “twinning” to new heights. Both forwent their beloved Margaux bags in favor of other iconic The Row pieces: Mary-Kate opted for the Lady bag, while Ashley toted the Agnes—in matching alligator. They were each in swaddling coats, dark sunglasses, and their signature, casually draped scarves. (It’s spring, guys.) — VOGUE

WATCH

Chloe Sevigny talk vintage fashion with Bazaar. One of the last remaining celebrities I find intriguing enough to watch a full length interview with.

HER FIRST BUY: “I was very into shopping from age 5. My mom was a thrifter, so we would go to all the local church-run, community-based thrift stores. I would buy Laura Ashley and Ralph Lauren and Asprey. I then slowly became more alternative and would scour those for interesting things, but then, in the ’90s I became obsessed with Margiela. I turned 18 and I wanted my first pair of Tabis and that was my first big, high-fashion purchase. My parents went halvsies with me and I bought them at If in Soho which is still there. That was a really defining, changing moment.”

RFK catches starling at airport / posts young photo of himself mounting a wild rhino / a user on X added AI image of him on giraffe after comments wondered what that might look like

STAR REPORT

Scorpio moon was not kidding when she arrived and delivered what was promised. My soul might be bruised and battered, but as timely gesture JK Ultra came to the rescue by completing my human design chart. I hope to go LIVE with her soon to discuss these findings.

See you soon!

JRK

It’s been awhile. Welcome back, Aaron.

Aaron Everitt:

I’ve been on an Orthodox Christianity kick again. Every so often, there’s a compulsion inside my soul to dive into what the Orthodox call the “Great Mystery.” In our world of solve-it-all-now enlightenment-obsessed approach to everything from geopolitics to religion, to Truth Social posts bordering between trolling and blasphemy, the Orthodox sensibilities about faith permit me, in my own mind, to leave things unsolved. I have been silent, almost evaporated from the discussion these last few months because of the war. I hate it. I am disappointed with the current choices in American global rulership. If I am critical of Trump, I am a traitor to the country. If I am critical of Israel, an anti-semite. Critical of the podcast gang, a sell out. It is exhausting and demoralizing how American politics makes people such tribal monsters. It has become the fundamental flaw in our system. The government requires watchdoggery; all governments who aren’t subjected to it have overrun their people. So I remain insistent that no politician is infallible. They all live within a system of tradeoffs and dubiously ethical boundaries, in order to make marginal headway within the exuviae of the good ‘ol Constitution. I have written it too many times to count, but this thing we insist on describing as a democracy is not one, and it particularly isn’t a constitutional republic as the term-nazis insist. This is a strange oligarchy, mixed with the state-run and managed economy. The traditional Kings and Dictators of the past have been replaced by an indescribable web of unaccountability, manifested as a theater of placeholders in Congress, and a vascular-type system of bureaucrats. I find myself more and more resolved that what we have will not hold together, or it will simply because the future citizens will refuse to take the mantle of a fake “democracy” on. Either way, it’s station as an enviable system is changing. It will not remain as a something that can solve the grievances and troubles of three hundred and fifty million people. It’s not that it’s a bad framework, or that the constitution is bad, it’s that the whole thing was never designed for the scale and weight it bears. When Jefferson purchased the Louisiana territory, he thought it would become its own republic, autonomous from the colonial one on the east coast. Neighbors of convenience and with similar interests, but one unbound to one another in a suicide compact that future American generations would insist on and eventual go to war over in the 1860s. What we are in now is the only thing that could have plausibly come from requiring all states and people to mutually live together in such a diverse and radically unique geography.

So, when I lose my patience with the political class or their commentators in my moments of frustration, I have learned to lean more deeply on the mystery of the spiritual world that surrounds all of this. It’s my own kind of “leaning” center, and in the hardest moments of watching problems in our world that seem unsolvable, it has served me well.

This moment in American history is an odd one. The world is realigning, and I think Trump realizes what is under the hood and is doing what he can to manage the coming discombobulation. I don’t want to give him a pass for his unforced errors of stupid tweets, starting wars, and dictator kidnappings, but I also have a fraction of the information that his team does. The reality that I think is setting in on him and others is that the American moment is actually over. That’s not the crisis that it might appear to be. Certainly, there will be Boomers that melt like a water-soaked Elphaba Thropp in her Flying Monkey castle, but the charade has concluded, and I think the people in Washington know it.

I’m probably being overly generous here in this assessment, but the longer this goes on, the more I think Trump realizes that he only has one option from this American collision course with geopolitical forces that have finally come to bear their ultimate burden on the brokest empire of all time. Trump, hopefully, is trying to leave the American people in the best possible position given the massive shift coming. His push at Greenland and Venezuala seem to be about consolidating the Western hemisphere into the last, consolidated, place of influence America can have, and his dealings in the Middle East and with Israel seem to be about damaging China and Russia, in an attempt to set them back economically for the longest time possible, rather than the podcaster speculations of Epstein blackmail or demon possessed control. Trump’s choices seem irrational and foolish, but only from the typical 21st century construct, where America has to win everything all the time to make sure the world remains dominated by the American empire. I feel like Trump has looked under the hood of this once-humming machine and realized almost all of the structure inside is broken and irreparable. America first, given his options, means that you manage the unpreventable decline to leave the people in the best position available, and that isn’t one where the status quo continues.

The dollar is dying, if it isn’t already dead. Its tie to the global oil market is failing. Russia and China are calling the debt bluff of the American experiment, and while the entire global system is based on a mutual hot potato of overwhelming debt, China and Russia seem to be saying that the United States has clearly lost its moral authority in managing that debt-based system. In a sane, free market, free of the collusion of governments and corporations, and one that isn’t subsidized to hide the real costs, gas should be closer to $8 a gallon. Gas has been a false marker of the health of the dollar since the oil crisis in the 70s. Politicians know that groceries and gas are the only things they have to keep insulated from inflation. There are simply not enough people willing to raise enough frustrations about other price increases to ever threaten their ability to show up to the theater every day. But the BRICS system threatens all of that. So we see Trump positioning himself to try to realign the West to minimize the impacts of what has become inevitable. This isn’t a “hate America” discussion, but a realization that America has to deal with its past sins of debt and global hegemony. If the Boomer generation could turn off their televisions long enough, they might remember that there was a time when being a conservative meant that the ideology wanted fiscal responsibility in the government. 9/11 obviously changed that opinion for many, but there are still realities that confront the hope-ium that everyone has been indulging in for the last twenty-five years. Systems fail when they go broke, and when they go broke, the realigning happens quickly. It doesn’t mean that America is going to disappear, but it does mean that the rest of the world has had enough of our style of leadership. They want the options to escape our way of doing business and government, and there are simple, pragmatic realities that are facing the United States.

Our military, filled with the most amazing men and women, is strangely on the confusing side of the conflict because our weapons, while impressive and technologically superior, struggle to deal with the new kind of warfare that we are seeing in this conflict. We also have to be honest about our own bureaucratic aspects of the military. Just because our men in uniform are amazing doesn’t mean the brass above them necessarily are in touch with the new version of war that the troops have to encounter.

It’s also easy to blame Israel for all of this, and to be sure, they have played a part in it by demanding that their interests are inextricably linked to ours. But to concoct a scenario where they are the dominating government of the entire globe is a bit far-fetched to me. Governments are notoriously bunglers. Their ineptitude typically knows no bounds. So, to insist that the Israeli government is somehow now a mastermind of world domination is giving all of those in government too much credit. I don’t think any of this is a grand game of chess. I think there are realities that are inescapable for all players involved, and what we are seeing is the managed outcomes that are based on that harsh reality. Israel wants land, and wants to protect itself from neighbors that they see as hostile to their existence. America doesn’t have the capabilities or tangible tools to remain as the only global superpower. So, Trump is going to do what he can to set up the new order of the world, the best he can, for the coming version of a non-empire style America. I don’t like it — particularly the style and subversive nature of it— and I have no interest in perpetuating a war on behalf of that realignment, but if it plays out as I suspect it might, what he will have done is cause enough disruption in the Middle East, and consolidate enough of American interests to the western hemisphere, to make the global landscape impossible for any one power to dominate the globe for the foreseeable future.

My detractors will say that building a world of exits like this gives Trump too much benefit of the doubt, and it might. But if anyone is honest about the moment, they have to admit that the government is a long series of clandestine batches of dishonesty, and so we have almost zero information other than what they allow us to see through their own propaganda and puppet mouthpieces on television. So any podcaster or sideline commentator, including myself, is simply too uninformed to do anything but prognosticate. I think Israel has definitely used its “greatest ally” card too much and has put the United States in a difficult position, but it was inevitable, given the world atmosphere. We are at the end of the British/American version of everything, so the maps will be redrawn and shuffled. I don’t see any other way around it. Interests will be realigned with people groups who are more closely assimilated with one another’s religions, global interests and money purchasing power. Nothing lasts forever, and the world is realizing that its insistence on everything being managed by one, singular, controlling, centralized force is not the way of the future.

Which brings me back to the bishop of Constantinople and the Orthodox. In 1054, the church went through its first major split. There wasn’t a moment of singular defection that created the schism. Instead, it was caused by centuries of accumulating theological, political, and cultural differences. The core flashpoint was authority and ecclesiology (how the Church should be governed). The West, led by Rome, insisted upon papal supremacy—that the Pope had universal jurisdiction over all bishops and patriarchs. The Eastern Church, however, viewed the Bishop of Rome as “first among equals” among the five ancient patriarchates (Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem), with no one having absolute power over the others. In the end, both the bishop of Rome and the bishop of Constantinople sent letters of excommunication to one another, and what had been a 600-year domination by the church of the Roman world had come to an end.

The church would still have influence in Western civilization, but both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox would be different forever. Their influences would be diminished, their voices upon governments and culture would never look the same again. Of course, the church survived, as will some remnant of Western civilization and the United States after this coming realignment, but it will look different. I think perhaps the US has been confronted with its excommunication letters and is going to figure out its future in a new role. Maybe Trump understands that and is doing what he can for the benefit of the people. Or perhaps he does really see himself as a different kind of figure that has come to usher in the end of the world. We won’t know until the dust settles on everything, but it’s the only reasonable explanation I can muster for strange tweets and erratic behaviors around the war. What I am confident in, is that what has been is changing. As has been described before, in a canoe headed towards a waterfall, an end is inevitable, but it makes a great deal of difference where the stopping happens.

HIH Archive Dedicated to His Case

This audio was recorded yesterday afternoon; I wanted his reaction to hearing his name again in the news again because of the NYT article about the suicide note— a year after I wrote about it. The note has been mentioned by Nick several times before in exclusive audio clips shared over the past two years. It goes to show how slow mainstream outlets are to pursue critical angles sourced and pre-packaged by independent efforts, and how much the public still relies on them to shape their perception on most things.

The NYT is now pushing to unseal the Epstein note; I expect they may have more success than I did.

Stay tuned.

“I still can’t believe we almost denied entrance to Melania’s makeup artist.

Can you imagine her returning to the White House to relay news of this rejection while applying perfected strokes of smoky eye to the First Lady’s eyelids?”

After-party texts recounted what went swimmingly and what went awry during our debut launch last weekend. Mistaking Melania’s makeup artist for a violent, deranged stalker was easily the evening’s most memorable mishap. The entry oversight came from well-meaning staff who were hypervigilant about matching guest-list names to IDs. Somehow the mix-up pinned Nicole Bryl, the first lady’s trusted makeup artist for more than two decades, as another woman on our red-flag list.

“I think we both know you’re not supposed to be here,” our staffer, clipboard pressed to her chest, told Nicole, repeatedly.

Thankfully Nicole has a great sense of humor. We all laughed about it once she made it upstairs to the party.

If you know me, you know I jump at any excuse to toast life in the company of good people, especially in this town where everyone at any hour could always use a drink. In light of everything that transpired at the official correspondent dinner on Saturday night, coverage of the parties has been regrettably sparse. Spotlighting wardrobes and society scenes feels too trite after a third assassination attempt on the president, I suppose. It is a shame seeing that the weekend revolves around parties and the gossip they generate. Three days of stacked cocktail receptions and full-blown galas hosted by a range of media organizations make party recaps what everyone expects from “nerd prom,” or, as I prefer, the White House Oscars. It is the closest political folk get to glam, a way to navigate invitations that exercise soft power, networking, and influence amid competing peers.

I have to wonder if the current administration has anything to do with the spike in excitement surrounding the event. As a semi-biased spectator, it certainly seems that MAGA has breathed new life into what had been viewed as a stuffy tradition. Veteran sources say the dinner has not seen this much momentum since the Obama years.

A historical note: the dinner was effectively male-only for decades. Not until 1962, when President John F. Kennedy reportedly threatened to skip it and Jacqueline Kennedy pushed for the organization to include women, did that change.

Thank you, Jackie.

Attendees Included:

Cheryl Hines, Sage Steele, Lynne Patton, Landon Clements, Yemisi Egbewole, Leah McSweeney, Dakota Meyer, Scott Jennings, Bobby Kennedy III, Harris Faulkner, Ben Domenech, Eliza Collins, Natalie Andrews, Mary Katherine Ham, Taylor Hathorn, Larry O’Connor, Meredith O’Connor, Ryan Colby, Kevin Walling Alex Stroman, Theresa Payton, Lydia Moynihan, Billy Binion, Emily Domenech, Nomiki Konst, Brent Scher, John Levine, Gloria Taylor, Jasmine Wright, Tim Rice, Georgia Cohen, Lady Victoria Hervey, Jen Sey, Sarah Mills, Hogan Gidley, Paula Dhier, Ryan Manion, Nicole Bryl, Alex Swoyer, Farahn Morgan, Caroline McKee, CJ Pearson, Hanne Winarsky, Sophia Efthimatou, Zack Peter, Robby Soave, AJ Edelman, Martin Marks, Jacqui Heinrich, Jamie Kirchick, Josef Palermo, Adam Coleman, Sean Spicer, Erik Rosales, Kara Voght, Beatrice Peterson.

Many thanks to our lovely sponsors: 2WAY and XX-XY Athletics.

I will share recaps of the events I attended in Housekeeping later this weekend, but for now I am happy to report that our first official kickoff, hosted as a trio, was a hit despite security concerns in the days leading up to it.

Cheryl Hines arrived in Dolce & Gabbana with a tiny purse embellished with gems to match. Lady Victoria in signature sequins and studs. Women from mainstream outlets in patterned dresses and bare shoulders, while Josef Palermo turned heads in an oversized black satin necktie.

Renegade Women’s Cocktail Hour was a vision hatched by Meghan McCain, Vanessa Santos, and me. We played the setting and the timing smart. A sweeping rooftop happy hour on the Friday before the main parties, with a 360-degree view of Georgetown, meant minimal competition and the perfect kickoff to mingle with an eclectically curated mix of guests, from mainstream outlets to Bravo personalities and a fabulous flush of right-leaning gays, convening before the evening’s deluge of events complicated everyone’s schedules.

An hour before the event a wardrobe crisis ensued when I realized the cream suit I packed was a size too big and would photograph as a rumpled mess. Alicia, my niece and assistant, came to the rescue with a white satin gown as a last-minute replacement. Zara, naturally. In a rush I created another catastrophe when I dragged a dull razor over dry legs and then had to wrap my shins in washcloths bound by rubber bands to stop the bleeding. I am still nursing those wounds and a lingering rash from an allergic reaction to dime-store tanning lotion.

Security, was a primary concern. The level of protection required to safeguard what was meant to be a casual event is a sobering reality of the times. As the Daily Mail reported— somewhat dramatically—framing it like an active terrorist threat.

Between us we have an impressive collective of passionate haters. Mine would nudge me off a steep cliff if they could get away with it, and one of Meghan’s is dedicated enough to have legally changed his last name to McCain.

The week before our party, credible threats forced us to double down on security. Anyone who works in conservative circles knows this is commonplace when hosting an event. As dystopian as it is, even casual cocktail parties in DC now require armed guards in plain clothes. We relied on private security coordinated through the hotel and they handled everything professionally. Because the situation was a bit more unusual than what they typically face, undercover police were brought in as an extra precaution.

All that said, the party delivered on what we set out to accomplish: bipartisan camaraderie forged by unlikely connections as ode to patrons of the free press. For one night we could raise a glass, set aside bias, muster mutual respect, and toast each other amid a rooftop at sunset, shoulder to shoulder, with uniquely branded visionaries.

The MAGA Whisperer: Publicist Vanessa Santos Reps a Who’s Who of Conservative Voices Others Won’t Touch

“Santos is a Michigan native and proud Republican who remembers watching “Hannity & Colmes” as a child and marveling as Ann Coulter gave the late Alan Colmes a tongue-lashing. She insists that conservative voices can only elevate programming that has become stale in siloed times.

“I am obsessed with Scott Jennings,” she says of the CNN pundit. “What he has done on Abby Phillip’s show is what our evening discourse should be like. I am so sick and tired of everybody just existing in their own echo chambers. And the fact that Abby Phillip is opening up her show to this is really smart.”

After all, Santos believes right-leaning voices shouldn’t cower just because their positions deviate from the Hollywood norm.” — Variety.com

The next night at the Hilton for the WHCD, a reporter who had attended our event stopped to compliment our turnout, noting an impressive number of gays in attendance— the chicest sector of conservatism. She saw it as a sign that we are attracting a different kind of crowd, one that rivaled diversity typically associated with liberal festivities.

Surely, I thought, “MAGA’s Carrie Bradshaw,” would approve.

Daily Mail:

“The Renegade Women’s Cocktail Party, a buzzy rooftop event in Georgetown co-hosted by Renegade DC CEO Vanessa Santos, Meghan McCain and Substack writer Jessica Reed Kraus, had been flooded with hate messages after its location leaked online.

What began as the usual online vitriol quickly escalated into something far more sinister.

The venue was hit with death threats serious enough that organizers alerted police, doubled security, and deployed undercover personnel inside the venue.

Cheryl Hines, the wife of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr attended the event.

The next night, she was rushed to safety by Secret Service agents after shots rang out just outside the Hilton ballroom.

‘That we must worry for our safety at a cocktail reception celebrating free speech is a grim symptom of the times,’ Kraus told the Daily Mail after the shooting.

Guests arriving at the Grand Hotel rooftop on Friday, sipped cocktails and took in Georgetown views as Washington’s political class gathered for one of the most anticipated weekends of the year.

The guest list spanned media heavyweights, political insiders and high-profile personalities, including actress Hines, broadcaster Clay Travis, commentator Scott Jennings and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer.

But behind the scenes, organizers were on edge.

Kraus was even asked to provide a list of known stalkers ahead of the event so security could block them from entering - an extraordinary step for what was billed as a celebration of free speech.

Despite the heightened precautions, the party went ahead without incident.

‘At every step of the way we were taken care of,’ Santos said. ‘At no point was I scared because event organizers took every threat seriously.’

The guest list spanned media heavyweights, political insiders and high-profile personalities, including actress Hines, broadcaster Clay Travis, commentator Scott Jennings and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer.

Santos, who had skipped the dinner and was heading to another after-party, said events across DC were suddenly thrown into lockdown.

‘Everybody was scared and stunned,’ she said. ‘Nobody really knew what the streets of DC were bringing that night.’

The Substack party she had planned to attend was locked down as a precaution. Instead, she went home.

Others made similar decisions. Kraus cut her weekend short and flew out of Washington early, abandoning plans to attend further events.

For many attendees, the threats of the previous evening now felt like a blaring warning.

The weekend’s events - from online threats to real-world violence - have left political insiders shaken, with many warning that security concerns are now impossible to ignore.

‘I think everyone feels really uneasy right now,’ Santos said. ‘Nobody is doing anything without taking security extremely seriously.’”

Read more

About three hours ago my phone started pinging. I answered one of the calls—an unknown LA number—and was greeted by a reporter from a network news station who informed me that an article had just published in the New York Times detailing Epstein’s suicide note, with my name credited.

I rushed to read it and found my interview with Nick linked near the bottom. I knew the NYT was interested in Nick’s insight on Epstein. I wasn’t sure what stage the piece was in the last time I spoke with Nick. On that call we weighed the pros and cons of speaking on the record, aware they could likely adopt a negative angle and kill interest in his appeal. Ultimately, I told him I thought it was a good idea to increase awareness of his case. When we hung up, he seemed excited.

That was three days ago.

AUDIO FROM THE ARCHIVES: “The Guy Who Shared a Cell With Jeffrey Epstein”

Normally I hear from Nick daily, sometimes several times a day—especially when something like this is looming. When Comey’s indictment was announced, for example, I expected Nick to call immediately; he listens to the news on a radio in prison. If the administration is chasing a cryptic seashell threat, imagine what they might find valuable on Nick’s hard drive.

As of now, no one has heard from Nick since Monday at 10:36 a.m. I’m noting this because I’ve come to see how critical timestamps are when tracking these cases.

I’ll update as soon as I hear anything. In the meantime, you can read about the suicide note HERE.

Written account to follow.

Officially, we are back on the Kohberger beat.

Ful…

Read more

I’m back from DC, still trying to recover from one of the strangest weekends of my adult life, and I pulled a transcribed recap of a no‑holds‑barred feud between two of the internet’s fiercest provocateurs out of drafts.

“I thought you hated Laura Loomer?”

No. I don’t, and never have. We had a falling out last year that prompted her to text-call me a cunt more than a dozen times, but I’m not vindictive and I don’t hold grudges. Plus, I can respect a mad woman’s tenacity when it comes to fighting deranged pundits promoting an upside-down world.

Only crazy can match crazy. No one besides Loomer is equipped for this battle.

She also brings receipts. So I don’t care who is funding whom. If forced to choose, I’ll always side with Laura over Candace.

Right now she appears to be juggling multiple investigations into Candace’s “secrets,” but primarily focused on digging up material that will aid the Macron’s in their defamation lawsuit, along with explicit mudslinging about Candace’s spouse and secret trust funds allegedly hiding millions in real estate assets.

The confrontation ignited last week and lasted three solid days. While the initial dust temporarily settled, Loomer is intent now on pursuing theories about why Candace and several like-minded podcasters suddenly dropped offline and reportedly fled the country amid news of the SPLC lawsuit.

I’m hearing Candace canceled her show again today without any explanation; Loomer insists the suspicious behavior is related to what might come exposed in this litigation.

“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” Kash Patel said in an official statement. “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups, even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal, and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”

It’s 6 p.m. and I’m headed to bed, but stay tuned for WHCD party reviews and photos, an exclusive interview with Substack’s CEO, a deep dive into plasma in relation to a stacking scientist body count, and a startling account of what it was like at the Hilton when a gunman interrupted Saturday night’s dinner.

Laura Loomer, April 17th, 9:16am

“You know who has the worst destiny? Candace Owens’ children. @RealCandaceO Imagine having that evil bitch as your mom. Poor kids. They will probably need serious therapy to deal with the long term social ramifications of having Candace as a mother. I wonder if she’s as cruel to her children as she is to Erika and her kids.”

The next day, Candace quotes the post

Candace Ownes, April 18th, 2:55pm

“How many children have you fathered, Larry?” (This is a reference to an internet conspiracy theory that Laura Loomer is a trans man named Larry.)

A swift reply comes in from Loomer

LL 3:02pm

“Zero, because I’m a woman. But my husband will likely father more children than your allegedly homosexual husband.

Did you use a turkey baster?

Who squeezed it?”

Candace doesn’t wait this time to respond

LL April 18th, 3:11pm

“A turkey baster? Larry, I really think your dad should put you on one more psych5150 hold. You just seem like you’re on the edge again lately. Maybe once more before the nuptials.

How’s the wedding planning going w. Andrew Simpson, btw?

Does he know you’re not actually Jewish?

Loomer comments back a video making her ring glitter in the light and correcting Candace’s assumption that they were still in the wedding planning phase by calling him her husband.

Loomer has the last word in that match. A new thread begins

LL 6:01pm

“Did you know that @RealCandaceO Candace Owens is allegedly a dual citizen?

Lots of hypocrisy from a woman who goes around calling people foreign agents…”

She attaches a page from the Macron v. Owens lawsuit as evidence.

Candace snaps back:

CO 6:43pm

Before she replies to anything else, she quotes a tweet from the day before with simple but poignant commentary.

But Loomer has other matters to attend to

LL 6:31pm

“Candace Why do you have two multi-million dollar homes in the same town?

Are you and George living separately?

Did you disclose these assets in your lawsuit with the Macrons?

Are you hiding assets to avoid being held accountable for your alleged defamation of France’s First Lady?

Should I keep going?

@EmmanuelMacron”

Candace turns to mockery.

The comment section appears to notice

Read more

Writing from the 5th floor of an old hotel in Georgetown.

Just past noon.

I must have made it to bed sometime after 3 and slept well past 10. I woke up in a bathrobe stained by party makeup in confused state trying to piece together the horror from last night.

Today, the city is quiet.

The rain’s stopped and the sun is out. Last night, post gun shots, the city became a war zone. The only photo I took shows a crew stranded in damp ballgowns and rumbled tuxedos trying to navigate the streets after a frantic exit, met with makeshift barricades, sirens, and armed guards with guns drawn pointing at misguided vehicles at every street corner.

A maze of obstructions keeping us from any decided locations.

The morning after, it all feels eerily distant. Like something out of a movie— recapped on reels and stretched across social media by online spectators — not a reality I was part of, seated among a banquet hall celebrating American journalism, first snapping photos, pouring wine, greeting acquaintances, and then in one startling instant— flat on the ground with eyes closed and face pressed against the carpet, cowering as muffled gunshots banged in the distance and armed guards we could hear but not see rushed in knocking over tables, yelling for everyone to stay down. Those minutes felt like hours. A mess of confusion swirling around me. The threat from my vantage was entirely unknowable. I laid as still as possible, locked in fear with my body wedged as much as I could get under a table clinging to the hands of strangers I’d just met. Women around me were crying and praying. Two waitresses on the floor were shielding their faces with plastic trays sobbing.

It’s strange the things that go through your head when you don’t know what your fate holds. When violence arrives without warning.

Paralyzed by grim circumstance, your mind narrows to what matters most.

Without reception I couldn’t call anyone to tell them what was happening, or say that I might not be okay. Or text anyone to tell them that I loved them.

Nothing in DC is normal and I’ve come to expect with each trip that something strange or extraordinary will occur.

Initially, I planned to extend my trip to cover specific events at the Supreme Court tomorrow but I’m headed home now on my original flight.

I’ll be back to share a full account of what I experienced this weekend, leading up to the horror that unfolded at the Hilton just as we had settled into our seats waiting on dinner, with the President and First Lady on stage indulging the first tricks of a mentalist hired to replace a comedian’s role.

—Donald Trump.

Forgive my extended absence. I’ve been offline preparing a new series I’ll debut next week that will shed light on what I’ve collected over recent months: a compilation of personal anomalies and signs illuminated by messengers I’ve documented in audio and text, offering confirmations and instructions on how to proceed into “the highest frequency” given what’s coming.

We’ll dive into quantum theories, declassified CIA files, mind control, frequency, transdimensional ascendence, and free energy.

Up Ahead:

An interview with my favorite independent investigator, who’s been obsessively tracking the Moscow murders and has information that will change everything you think you know about the case — and Kohberger as the killer(!)

At This Point Everyone Should be Asking Questions

Namely, what don’t they want us to know about plasma, and why are specialists in this field turning up dead under mysterious circumstances? Who is potentially behind the silencing of certain evidence?

I don’t consider myself an alien buff, but I’ve been closely tracking the phases of disclosure around UAPs for years.

In September I attended the congressional hearing led by Anna Paulina Luna, which received very little press; most people have no idea what was revealed. Testimony from respected, high-ranking military witnesses who encountered these craft up close was unnerving.

In January, orbs began appearing over the ocean near my office in Laguna. Unlike the sterile drones seen in New Jersey last year, these did not look man-made. They resembled the orbs described in the hearing surrounded by plasma barrier.

February 12 I published “LOOK UP,” urging readers to pay attention because a reveal was imminent. I was told the first phase would confirm crash sites, U.S. possession of some craft, and potentially non-human DNA.

February 20 I was one of the first to raise the alarm about a scientist shot dead on his California front porch: astrophysicist Carl Grillmair, who studied comets and asteroids that could threaten Earth. Three months earlier, Nuno Loureiro, a young, respected plasma specialist and MIT professor, had suffered the same fate.

On March 2, a general linked to UFO disclosure and Podesta emails vanished.

After the Brown shooting, a source urged me to drop what I was covering and investigate. He suspected a targeted hit, pointing out chilling similarities with past cases in which researchers went missing or were killed after getting too close to certain lines of inquiry. He predicted this was part of a larger cover-up.

As of April 20 it appears he was right.

The dead-scientist count has climbed from two to eleven and mainstream outlets are forced now to investigate the matter while still cautiously trying to frame it as an overactive conspiracy theory spun by internet sleuths.

Vanity Fair:

“McCasland is the most high-profile of 11 scientists whose deaths or disappearances over the last four years have formed the basis for a conspiracy theory that has recently crossed over into mainstream visibility. There are various spins on the line of inquiry, and the specifics are hard to pin down, but it revolves around the idea that these occurrences are connected and point to some manner of government cover-up (often, but not always, having to do with UFOs; other accounts deal with nuclear secrets or rocket technology). The missing-scientist theory has traversed the Daily Mail and New York Post, a leading Substack newsletter published by MAGA‑MAHA personality Jessica Reed Kraus, and the airwaves of prominent podcasters — Joe Rogan recently exemplified the typical tenor and precision of the coverage when he proposed that the disappearances could have something to do with ‘plasma technology, whatever the fuck that is.’”

Timeline Arranged by Jesse Michaels

The Air Force general who ran Wright-Patterson’s research lab, oversaw the Pentagon’s most classified programs, and was named in WikiLeaks emails as a central figure in UFO disclosure vanished from his Albuquerque home without triggering a single surveillance camera. Eight days earlier, Trump ordered the Pentagon to begin releasing UFO files. In the same twelve-month window, the NASA scientist who co-invented a strategic rocket engine super alloy at the same Wright Patterson lab overseen by the General disappeared on a hike, an MIT fusion physicist (who was as deep as anybody on “fast magnetic reconnection problems” which are the fundamental bottleneck to widescale nuclear fusion) was assassinated on his doorstep, and a very-polymathic Caltech astronomer working on the state-of-the-art Vera Rubin Observatory was shot dead on his porch.

There is a pattern: scientists at the frontier of fusion, exotic propulsion, advanced metallurgy, and space surveillance are being silenced and taken out.

1. The General Who Knew Everything Vanished Without a Trace

On February 27, 2026, retired Major General Neil McCasland left his Albuquerque home on foot. He left behind his phone, prescription glasses, and smartwatch. He took a red backpack, his wallet, and a .38 caliber revolver. His wife reported him missing within three hours. Despite FBI involvement, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, search dogs, drones, helicopters, horseback teams, FLIR sweeps, and 700 canvassed households, no confirmed sighting of McCasland has ever surfaced. Surveillance cameras covered both ends of his street. None captured his direction of travel. After weeks of searching, the only item recovered was a gray Air Force sweatshirt a mile east of his house. Testing could not confirm it was his.

2. McCasland Ran the Pentagon’s Most Classified Science Programs

McCasland graduated from the Air Force Academy, earned a PhD in astronautical engineering from MIT on a Hertz Fellowship, and studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School. From 2009 to 2011, he served as Director of Special Programs in the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisitions, Technology, and Logistics, the office that oversees acquisition special access programs accounting for roughly 75 to 80 percent of all SAPs in the Department of Defense. From 2011 to 2013, he commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, overseeing a $2.2 billion portfolio spanning advanced materials, exotic propulsion, and future weapons. Wright-Patterson is the alleged home of the Roswell crash debris. McCasland ran the entire lab.

3. WikiLeaks Emails Placed McCasland at the Center of UFO Disclosure

In 2016, hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta revealed correspondence from Tom DeLonge naming McCasland directly. DeLonge wrote that McCasland helped assemble his advisory team, was deeply aware of what DeLonge was trying to achieve, and had received a four-hour briefing on the project. DeLonge added that McCasland ran the laboratory at Wright-Patterson where the Roswell material was shipped. McCasland’s wife Susan later acknowledged he was caught up in the Russian hack and had less contact with DeLonge after the emails were released. Less, not zero. A Google Calendar invite in the same email dump shows Susan herself accepted an invitation for a DeLonge-Podesta meeting.

4. Disappeared Eight Days After Trump’s UFO Disclosure Order

On February 19, 2026, Trump announced on Truth Social that he was directing the Pentagon to begin releasing government files related to aliens and UAP. Eight days later, McCasland was gone. If McCasland was involved in legacy UFO programs, the release order could have been a pressure point. His wife had reported that both of them were seeing a doctor for anxiety, poor sleep, and memory issues. She also said he had made a comment about not wanting to live if his body and mind kept deteriorating, but characterized it as an offhand remark, not a genuine threat. She later stated publicly that McCasland was not confused or disoriented. The week before he vanished, he cycled 60 miles.

5. The Super Alloy Scientist Vanished 30 Feet Behind Her Friends

On June 22, 2025, NASA material scientist Monica Reza disappeared while hiking near Mount Waterman in the Angeles National Forest. She was 30 feet behind her group and then she was gone. Search and rescue scoured the area for eight days by land and air. They found her beanie roughly 400 yards off the trail. Nothing else. Civilian volunteer teams continued searching for six months. No remains, no dens, no evidence of animal attack. Multiple searchers who descended the nearest ravine described the terrain as steep but not steep enough to be fatal.

6. Super Alloy Invention Was Developed Under McCasland’s Research Lab

Monica Reza and Dallas Hardwick co-invented Mondeloy, a nickel-based super alloy engineered to survive the crushing pressure and oxygen-rich conditions that had defeated every previous rocket engine material. The alloy ended America’s dependence on Russia’s RD-180 engine for sensitive national security launches. Mondeloy was co-developed through a partnership between the Air Force Research Laboratory and Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne. Neil McCasland arrived at Wright-Patterson as AFRL commander in May 2011 while the Mondeloy program was still active. Dallas Hardwick was embedded in the lab’s materials directorate until 2012. The scientist who solved one of America’s hardest propulsion problems and the general who oversaw the lab where it happened both vanished within eight months of each other.

7. MIT’s Top Fusion Physicist Was Shot in His Doorway

On December 15, 2025, Nuno Loureiro was shot in the foyer of his Brookline home at 8:30 p.m. His wife, mother, and daughters were inside playing cards. His 12-year-old daughter had opened the door moments earlier and saw a man she thought was a delivery driver holding a package with a barcode. Loureiro replaced her at the door and was hit in the upper chest, abdomen, and both thighs. He was conscious and alert when paramedics arrived. He went into surgery that night and was pronounced dead the following morning. Loureiro was deputy director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and one of the world’s leading experts on magnetic reconnection, the key obstacle to sustained nuclear fusion.

8. His Killer Planned for Three Years, Then Went Dark for 48 Hours

The top suspect, Claudio Valente, a Portuguese national who had studied physics at the same Lisbon university as Loureiro in the 1990s, had already opened fire at Brown University two days earlier, killing two students. Valente spent three years conducting surveillance on the Brown campus before the attack. But between the Brown shooting on December 13 and Loureiro’s murder on December 15, Valente’s movements go largely unaccounted for. How he located Loureiro, confirmed he was home, and timed the approach remains unexplained. Loureiro had just returned from a trip to Washington. Valente’s confession videos describe both attacks as intentional but leave the motive for targeting Loureiro maddeningly vague.

9. The Caltech Astronomer Was Killed by a Man a Judge Had Already Released

On February 16, 2026, Caltech astronomer Carl Grillmair was shot dead on his porch in Llano, California. Two months earlier, 29-year-old Freddy Snyder had been arrested on Grillmair’s property carrying a loaded unregistered rifle. Despite the trespassing charge and an attempted jail escape, a judge released Snyder on his own recognizance and told him to take a gun safety course. Snyder returned and killed him. Grillmair had recently begun work on the Vera Rubin Observatory, the most powerful sky survey ever built, one capable of detecting interstellar objects and potentially UFOs in Earth’s orbit. He was also a renowned polymathic genius, like Loureiro. Every image Rubin captures is reviewed and filtered by the Pentagon before scientists are allowed to see it. Investigators have found no motive and no prior relationship between the two men.

Why This Matters:

But the concentration of loss at the exact frontier of fusion, propulsion, advanced materials, and space surveillance is difficult to dismiss. Congressman Tim Burchett told the DailyMail the numbers seem very high in these certain areas of research. Constitutional lawyer Danny Sheehan described a covert circle of 24 retired officials from the DOD, CIA, and private aerospace quietly working to bring classified UAP programs back under government oversight. The real crown jewels are not weapons or hard drives. They are the minds that solved the problems no one else could. And those minds keep disappearing. Full episode documents this in detail.”

A Comprehensive Roundup

Amy Eskridge: 34, died in Huntsville, Alabama, in June 2022.

Her death was officially ruled a suicide by gunshot. No police report, no coroner report, no toxicology results, no disclosed autopsy. She was cremated within days.

A physicist and nanotechnology researcher, Eskridge worked on advanced propulsion and what she described as antigravity. She said she was preparing foundational work for NASA review. Eskridge repeatedly said she believed her life was in danger. She reported years of being watched, harassed, and threatened, with the intensity escalating. At one point she warned, “If I stay private… they’ll bury me.”

In 2020 she appeared on a podcast outlining a plan for public disclosure of UFOs and extraterrestrials and said pressure on her research was growing more aggressive and personal.

Eskridge said: ‘I need to disclose soon, man. I need to publish soon because it’s like escalating. It’s getting more and more aggressive. This has been going on for like four or five years, and over the past 12 months, it’s been escalating, like more aggressive, more invasive digging through my underwear drawer and sexual threats.’

Before her death, she reached out to retired British intelligence officer Franc Milburn to investigate alleged harassment.

Milburn does not accept the official suicide ruling.

David Wilcock

The latest mystery involves the death of David Wilcock, 53, author & UFO researcher, who died of a reported suicide Wednesday.

Boulder County deputies say they responded to a 911 call about a possible mental‑health crisis and found him alone and armed. He reportedly turned the weapon on himself within minutes.

Officials haven’t released anything suggesting foul play; the coroner’s final ruling is still pending.

That said, Wilcock had publicly insisted he wasn’t suicidal — writing in December 2022, “I plan on LIVING. Not suicidal at all. Just concerned about what happens when you prove God is real.”

The FBI confirmed Tuesday it’s now looking for possible links between his death and the broader string of missing and deceased scientists.

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” — Nora Ephron

This morning the president posted an AI image of himself as Jesus healing the wounded, but then deleted it. He thought it was a doctor, he said. Shortly after he answered the Oval Office door to greet the woman delivering his McDonald’s DoorDash order. And, this is why I love Days of Our Lives in modern America.

I woke up Sunday morning with texts congratulating me on The Wall Street Journal feature. A two-part piece published this week that was, dare I say, flattering.

MAGA isn’t used to this. Texts from Trump world were taken aback. The idea that legacy media would spotlight a right-leaning voice with anything resembling a positive slant is a big deal among a group long conditioned to expect the opposite. Against the advice of many, I invited WSJ last month to shadow me at the office, at home with my family, and my living room, where they filmed a conversation with the MAHA women I rely on as top sources in real life. Nikki Bostwick, Shiva Rose, Eden James and Emily Kaplan. Eliza Collins and Jordan Kranse showed up with an open mind. I also loved the photographer they selected. Morgan Lieberman is so talented, a true gem to sit for.

I don’t have PR but I tend to trust that all press is good press if only because it invites curiosity on both sides, political critics included. On X I logged on to see a fresh wave of MAGA and liberal accounts newly following.

Up Ahead: Interview with Ian Maxwell | The Dead Scientist Society | Orb Conspiracies

On the flip side, it ignites fresh attacks from those intent on tearing me down. Slanderous warfare doesn’t phase me anymore. My blood pressure doesn’t even spike when I see this stuff now, as I’ve come to conclude: if you’re not making people furious, you’re not doing much at all.

Hayes Kraus makes a brief appearance in the MAHA video showcasing his brilliant approach to subtle trolling. The boy is cunning. I taught him how to make scrambled eggs with cottage cheese for added protein on camera, and then he went and cracked open a Diet Coke for breakfast like it’s routine, knowing it would clash with the MAHA messaging—and that he could not be scolded on camera. I feel obligated to note that Diet Coke is a rare treat in our house. We blame the president for its resurgence. Of course it made the final edit.

As for the group chat mentioned, Pam Bondi discussed it on Katie Miller’s podcast months ago. When WSJ reached out for comment, there was a brief moment of panic. Had China hacked us? Crazy we even have to worry about it. If this were a text chain of men in these same positions, no one would care.

Mark Halperin’s Vogue analogy sparked seething remarks in the WSJ comment section with one calling me “MAHA’s Anna Wintour.” Derogatory, but still appreciated. Under any inflection, I’ll take it.

Eliza Orlins, a former public defender and Democratic influencer, called me “dangerous,”

“She is hugely influential,” Orlins said. “She is being unbelievably reckless.”

The majority of the comments agree that I’m everything “wrong” with America.

While I don’t resent the VIP party girl framing, it does neglect to include that beyond the flashy society scenes, I’ve put in my time in plenty of unglamorous places across America—campaign buses, rundown hotels, a naval warship, dismal waiting rooms in federal prisons—on top of the endless hours I spend on calls with inmates and their families. Every hour of my life is more chaotic than you can imagine, delightfully unpredictable in its own rhythm, but it’s the unseen chapters that have carved my success, measured by the trust I’ve earned simply by listening to people others in media have callously tuned out.

The party I hosted for Jay Beecher last week turned up today in an exclusive for the California Post with a headline that determines an opinion on the book for you. Which Peter likely hasn't read yet.

Peter Kiefer showed up Thursday and relayed his thoughts in a recap: “Offensive new Epstein book paints Ghislaine Maxwell as victim, claims some girls were money-grabbers.” The highlight seeks to relay just how controversial it is to not only write, but read and discuss a book that strays from the popular public narrative—based on interviews with people overlooked by the media despite being main characters in the case. Caution over due diligence means never asking the hard questions or investigating claims that challenge victims.

The event was framed as a discussion, not a book signing. An excuse to gather writers and connect over cocktails the old-school way. Everyone had a good time. You don’t have to love Jay’s angle in the book or my stance on Ghislaine Maxwell as scapegoat, but the eggshell approach isn’t doing journalism any favors. To tread lightly with coded apology and bias is a coward’s call, IMO. But so goes the trends of a cursed literary era.

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“To be credible we must be truthful.” — Edward R. Murrow

Forgive me for being MIA since the last Candace piece posted. I needed a break, I suppose. As fair warning: things here are about to get weird. You’ll understand more soon, as I’m still deciding how much of this spiritual odyssey I want to share publicly. The fact of it is so surreal. I’m not entirely sure yet what to make of it.

For now, we’ll stick with what’s familiar.

Jay Beecher you know as frequent HIH contributor. On his Substack lots of these false narratives come exposed.

Over the past few months we’ve paired up to sift through the files together, offering measured commentary as a counter to the sheer insanity coming from online sleuths solely interested in spinning tales of global trafficking cabals as easy and enticing clickbait.

I don’t recall exactly when Jay first landed on my radar, only the sense of relief in discovering him. Another voice in media echoing my stance on Epstein and mainly Maxwell, backed by an impressive compilation of investigative research, facts, and legal filings that supported much of what I gathered but could not “prove.”

The Epstein files are bizarre enough in their factual framework. They don’t need additional conspiracies spun by misinformed interpreters to inflate them.

Jay’s new book Naked Lies leans into the facts as a counter-narrative backed by evidence mainstream coverage has largely ignored or deliberately excluded. Yes, it challenges the prevailing victim narrative. Yes, it asks readers to reconsider what they think they know about Jeffrey Epstein. But it does so on the merit of censored voices—those with information that disrupts pre determined narrative.

“This gripping exposé cuts through the headlines to examine how truth, power and profit collided in one of the biggest scandals of our time: the Epstein Scandal. Far from the media’s portrayal, Virginia Giuffre emerges not as a helpless victim, but as a complex figure manipulated by powerful legal and journalistic interests. With hundreds of millions at stake, reputations were sacrificed and stories reshaped. This book challenges the accepted narrative, re-examining the roles of Epstein, Prince Andrew, President Trump, and a complicit media machine. Were they all truly monsters-or pawns in a far more lucrative game? A provocative investigation into corruption, exploitation, and the price of control. Naked Lies contains exclusive interviews with key witnesses, from accusers to the accused, covers a five-year investigation, and finally lays bare the truth behind the entire sordid affair.”

IAN MAXWELL ON GHISLAINE | TRUMP | “THE GOOD FIGHT”

The files have consumed us in text threads privately. I figured why not discuss it in person with a small group surrounded by faded tabloids and candlelight in a dark West Hollywood bar? Having Jay here in the states to promote the book gave us perfect excuse to do so.

The backroom at Employees Only proved the ideal setting for Thursday night’s event. Tucked behind the main bar and accessed through a hidden door, the space opens into a handsome speakeasy with subtle mid-century flair. A fireplace, a private bar, wall to wall seating, and customizable drinks. “The Billionaire” was a favorite.

A reporter on the phone the next day noted that most in attendance had endured some form of cancellation themselves. He noticed I had arranged a “small but influential group.”

The invites were intentional, I told him. If I had my way writers and reporters would gather like this regularly to discuss cultural flashpoints as a matter of routine. Unfortunately, most in media these days are as guarded in print as they are in person, and who has time to entertain overly cautious people? Life is so short. I prefer those who are as daringly curious as possible. Cowards prevail in the industry, but not in my court.

The invites were deliberate because, I reiterated, it often takes the cancelled to recognize the significance of controversial work. Everyone else is content to tread on eggshells. And sanitized contribution offers nothing to most of the topics I’m interested in.

Brave Attendees ranged from Ken Bensinger of the NYT to a respected editor—“one of the most connected men in the city”—at The Hollywood Reporter, to OG Vice edge lords Shane Smith and Alex Chitty, my new adorable attorney, revered ballet choreographer Lincoln Jones, Peter Kiefer of the CA Post, Malibu transplant / “disgraced” novelist Olivia Nuzzi, X deplorable Matt Bilinski, and Substack on hand in quiet support thanks to brainstorming extraordinaire Hanne Winarsky, along with a handful who preferred to remain anonymous.

As far as timing, Melania’s press appearance that morning could not have been more perfectly timed. The intensity behind her denial that Epstein introduced her to Trump was notably odd and had everyone speculating what might have prompted it. Was she getting ahead of something, or simply fed up with the lingering rumors that place her as a confidant to Epstein and Maxwell?

Her remarks about the victims testifying under oath stood out to those of us who know many of these accounts to be fabricated or, at best, riddled with inconsistencies.

Under oath, a lot of these women’s testimonies are bound to shift and shrink.

Might this be part of a more strategic effort to clarify who is profiting from implicating certain parties? Narratives now amplified on a national stage thanks to figures like Thomas Massie, pushing a self-indulgent bid to bring transparency to files he knows nothing about.

Under oath, it would be hard to obscure cases like that of Haley Robinson, one of Massie’s current press pawns, given that she described her role in Epstein’s life as a Heidi Fleiss type, willingly scouting underage girls for him.

The evening kicked off with a call from federal prison. Nicholas Tartaglione greeted a room full of editors like a natural-born narrator, instantly compelling on audio. He had 15 minutes. He used them to walk us through what it was like sharing a cell with Jeffrey Epstein, what Epstein told him about Bill Clinton, and the night he woke to a shoe striking his cheek, opening his eyes to find Epstein hanging, unconscious. A bar full of fresh ears locked onto every word.

We also heard from Kevin Maxwell, who applauded Jay’s commitment to exposing uncomfortable truths, and Alan Dershowitz, who outlined what he described as glaring falsities in the case against him.

Jay read excerpts from the book and played an audio recording from Sarah Ransome, one of the most prominent faces in the Epstein documentaries—a woman who claims she would have swum through shark-infested waters to escape Jeffrey Epstein on the island, yet returned repeatedly over the years of her own will. A college-aged escort photographed in glamorous settings, seemingly at ease in her surroundings. The recording was a voicemail Ransome left Jay, threatening Nancy Mace and others, vowing to burn the country down—her fury so intense it drew the FBI’s attention after she allegedly threatened to harm Virginia Giuffre’s children over money disputes, and, for good measure, to torch the Anne Frank House.

SEE: Police Investigating After Famous Epstein Accuser Threatens to Harm Children, Burn Down Anne Frank’s House, and Issues CHILLING Audio Message

As we wrapped up, conversations had already splintered into different corners among people who had never met before.

We gathered afterward at the Chateau, where I caught sight of André Balazs—in blurred outline due to bad vision—watching from the bar with a cigarette in hand. His figure, even from afar, instantly recognizable from years of scattered secondhand accounts. A man whose name surfaces often in conversation unprompted, and for someone I’ve never met, I know an awful lot about. Specifically the aesthetic of his New York loft, unmatched according to my source. The funeral he hosted for Mary Kennedy, which her family attended over the one RFK arranged. And explicit examples of Andre’s overt sex appeal described by more than one in my circle as essentially the best lover of this era.

He was also quite close with Ghislaine Maxwell and those in her social circle post-Jeffrey Epstein. I’m sure he would have valuable contributions to add.

Regrettably, I did not introduce myself or invite him to join us in conversation.

He disappeared in an instant, leaving a late-night scene of guests splayed out as mismatched characters in varying shades of drunken joy, two women dancing in spite of an empty piano seat.

We exited just before midnight. A rowdy bunch leaving behind a bottle of vodka half full, ushered out alongside heeled starlets in deflated state recounting the famous faces they had spotted throughout the evening.

At the hotel the next morning I found myself marveling at how the Epstein of it all can still forge something unexpectedly good. Journalistic instinct united by strange circumstance among a room full of writers bound not by agreement but by a willingness to engage over complicated matter. Curiosity as reason enough to show up. A good reminder that investment in the craft isn’t entirely dead on the West Coast. And in a worst-case scenario, we could have all been invited to something far more dreadful, like an annual desert festival tracking atrocious bohemian fashion and bad music instead.

Regarding Melania Trump’s recent statement on Epstein, Ian Maxwell offered the following comment:

“The First Lady should never have been put in a position where she felt she had to make a statement, but it’s perhaps understandable as this scandal has needlessly engulfed countless lives and reputations. My own sister has experienced similar waves of false and damaging stories written about her, as indeed has President Trump himself. Of course, there is no credible evidence linking the President to the crimes associated with Jeffrey Epstein, and it is important that people are not condemned by association or speculation.”

NOTE: This series blends traditional reporting, cultural analysis, and firsthand reflection to offer coverage that is as fair as it is real. It’s personal, it’s political, and it’s only possible because of your support.

Start Here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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Thank You for subscribing. — Jessica Reed Kraus

The what of Candace Owens is what’s easy.

She’s a political performer who tried on different personas before she became influential among far-right Republicans once Donald Trump rose to power. Her rhetoric about Israel fractured her relationships with more establishment conservatives and ultimately drove her, in 2024, into the wilds of independent media. There, her reckless practice of populating fantasy content with real human beings has attracted attention and legal drama. When I published part one of this series in January, that content featured associates of Charlie Kirk, who had been fatally shot months earlier in what Candace had begun to speculate may have been an inside job. Since then, her assassination-profiteering has grown sharper teeth. She’s sunk them into Erika Kirk, who now finds herself the star of a series that treats her as a suspect in the murder of her husband while the man charged with the crime appears in a Utah courtroom ahead of his trial.

It’s the who of Candace Owens that’s harder to know.

The more you document other people the less knowable people seem. Some people couldn’t tell you who they are. Others might tell you that existence is the ceaseless project of establishing new answers to the question as we undergo imperceptible changes all the time. What can be verified. Who involves soul and psychology. With all the information and insight in the world, the answer could only ever amount to an educated guess.

Candace Owens snapped at me in the Year of the Snake.

It was a leap year that spanned thirteen months in the lunisolar calendar, and its qualities sounded good. Renewal. Regeneration. Shedding what no longer serves you. In practice, though, it was a lot of pain even when I believed it was for the best.

It seemed appropriate that I found myself wounded by Candace in this period. Even more so when I considered the irony that a false claim about the Year of the Snake was what led her to unhinge her jaw in the first place to level false claims about me.

Last March, Olivia Nuzzi arrived to my office in Laguna Beach, where I asked her to read the draft of a story about Candace submitted by a freelancer, since I knew she would be a good judge of its integrity in fact and prose. I documented the scene in the third installment of this series:

You know what happened next.

Lies, harassment, slander, threats.

Why bother with evil? I asked myself that question as I continued working on this series. There is so much happening right now, events that involve entire industries, governments, and the human race itself:

Millions of documents circulate connected to Jeffrey Epstein and those with whom he associated, a fraternity with inordinate influence across the modern world. I have spent years on that story and still have more to say about it. My reporting on Epstein’s cellmate Nick Tartaglione—a man condemned to life in prison for crimes he insists he did not commit—continues, too. Elizabeth Holmes also remains incarcerated, separated from her young children despite her claims of innocence and persecution by Big Pharma. She’s locked up in the very prison in Byron, Texas where Ghislaine Maxwell idles as the world parses her communications. The ugliness of the internet is exceeded by the ugliness of the geopolitical landscape, as war in the Middle East grows more violent, and as fears are stoked that the conflict will only remain in the Middle East for so long. Meanwhile, there are few signs that new technologies will present solutions to old human problems. Instead, we are faced with accumulating suggestions that artificial intelligence will soon rival our own—if it hasn’t already. Mysteries multiply. Drone sightings. Airspace closures. An Arizona grandmother still missing.

Why spend so much time on one woman whose slander against me, in the grand scheme of things, is so small?

The long tail on the Year of the Snake reached its end and I considered those questions as Candace raised new ones about her latest object of scorn.

She capitalized on Charlie’s assassination to sow outrage and profit attention through an “investigation” that increasingly comes across as a vehicle to refashion professional disappointments and personal devastations into the heroic story of her crusade against evil. It started slow. She was, as she’s prone to say, just asking questions. She had a right to do so as an American and obligation to do so as someone who cared deeply about her friend. “Mrs. Erika Kirk” was how she referred to his widow then.

Within a few months, the pretense of polite concern was gone. Her circle of suspicion contracted smaller and smaller. She suggested not only that the official story of the murder might be fake, but that “Charlie Kirk” as we knew him might have been fake, too—his entire life and career a big false flag waving right in our faces for the entirety of his thirteen years as a public intellectual and activist. In her retelling of events, she robbed Charlie of his agency in order to portray him as a puppet, too ignorant to recognize how he was being utilized for evil, and too powerless to escape his matrix once he began to recognize the truth.

As of this writing, since Charlie Kirk was killed, she has released 79 episodes of Candace on the subject, eight of them from Bride of Charlie, her effort to raise, but almost never to answer, questions about his widow. The 79 installments, an average of about an hour-long each, have been viewed about a billion times on YouTube alone.

Candace has staged this still-unfolding spectacle as she fends off defamation claims related to another made-for-independent-media “investigative” series. Her 2024 battle with the president and first lady of France seems telling. Her efforts to get the case thrown out have thus far failed, meaning the conflict is headed, slowly, toward a courtroom—meaning that her actions in public today, even about matters that don’t relate directly to the Macrons, may be calibrated with that looming legal crisis in mind. Evidence that antagonistic tactics are simply her standard combat procedure, rather than rooted in any personal vendettas, could prove useful. She is just an aggressive pursuer of the truth, she could attempt to argue, whether her subject is a stranger and foreign dignitary or the widow of a deceased friend.

Back at my office in Laguna Beach, Olivia and I sat at the same desk where she read the story I never published nearly a year earlier. We talked about the strangeness of having a false version of yourself introduced to the world by someone unconcerned with fairness or openly seeking to inflict harm, the strangeness of watching those efforts succeed at considerable personal or professional cost, and the strangest part of all, facing the dilemma of whether or how to explain or defend yourself without legitimizing the very efforts meant to debase you.

It’s an unusual subject to have any expertise in, and it’s one Olivia knows well. Not just because, according to Candace, she isn’t a writer whose career spiraled into scandal amid her entanglement with RFK, but a CIA or Mossad operative dispatched to secure blackmail on him so the two of us could control him on behalf of the allied states that secretly run the world, the Deep State and Israel. “American politics has been negatively polarized and tribal for as long as I’ve been writing about it. I’m used to incivility and I’m used to threats,” Olivia said. “But the threats prompted by her conspiracy about us were different, because they were defensive. It seemed these people believed we were an active threat—not just to her reputation but maybe to her safety.”

I thought about the words she spoke on camera that led to the threats and harassment directed at me, my family, and Olivia. Clean shot. The repeated use of both of our full names. The identifying details about the geography of our lives, not something I would have advertised to people who saw me as a predator rather than a human being whose minor children should be spared from online hate campaigns, and not something Olivia would have shared with just about anybody, since at the time only a few close friends knew she was living in a small West Coast beach town. Her verbiage was urgent and cinematic, the stakes set somewhere near life or death. She offered imagery of being hunted by the two of us through a jungle as we tried to secure our clean shot. The racial subtext was powerful, and the fact that she was, as she reminded her audience, eight months pregnant, only amplified the stark narrative of her victimization at the hands of the two of us and the evil masters we serve.

It hurt me emotionally and it hurt my reputation. It also hurt my business, which depends on trust. I struggled to process the experience and its aftermath.

I asked Olivia the question I had been asking myself: Why bother with evil? “My short answer is that we bother with evil because evil bothers good,” she said.

I asked what her long answer would be.

“It’s my view that when you’re cast here as a witness, someone who helps shape our consensus reality by interpreting the world through creative acts, your assignment is to move peacefully toward the greatest good against the current of any oppositional force, external or internal. For instance, the implosion of the life I led—I see now that it stemmed from misalignment. I had been moving through the world under the false impression that public and private acts were energetically different, that a public lie was corrosive, but a private lie was just my problem, within my custody, and that I controlled whether it reverberated beyond that realm. Energy doesn’t work that way. Spiritual wars are waged in cumulative microscopic battles. Every little thing matters.”

It was beginning to make sense.

I started to think my experience with Candace was not a small distraction from larger stories, but part of how I might better understand them. Chaos rules and distrust is rampant, and some see in that confusion an opportunity to shape reality to serve themselves, at great cost to the rest of us.

It may be the case that who we are is what we do.

And I can tell you what Candace Owens does. I can tell you what effect her actions have had on others, and how my reporting uncovered what appears to be private peril she has channeled into public hypocrisy. By giving voice to some of those burdened by their first-hand experience with corrosive lies Candace has told, I hope to release them—and anyone harmed by the culture of malice she perpetuates.

Anyone who inflicts this much pain is usually in pain themselves. Looking deeper into her past, it becomes evident this is typically the root of her projections.

The assassination of his legend and the reputation of his family continues to air on weekday afternoons and in viral clips that ricochet faster than their assertions and insinuations can be challenged. To move forward into the year, I had to part with what weighed me down. I’m grateful the snake’s time is up, but even more grateful for what it prepared me for. As the horse takes off running, I decided it was time to shed this for good.

It was hard to not take it personally.

Among her false claims about me, Candace implied that I am an alcoholic. Implied is a polite word for it.

These statements, made alongside other unfair and untrue allegations about me, were intended to degrade, demean, and discredit me. If I were intoxicated and out of control, then nothing I had to say about Candace could be taken seriously, and nothing I had to say about any other subject could be taken seriously either.

I inhabit the worlds I cover. That is not a pun on the name of my publication. It is the way I approach my writing. I exist not just among but with the subjects of my reporting, as fully as the access they grant allows. I go to parties. I spend time in homes. I attend weddings. I attend funerals. I go, I watch, I listen, I engage, and what those words come to mean, as they recur and accumulate, is that I participate in order to understand.

This is not the only way to do it, but it is an established one. The fact that I work this way does not make me unique among writers. Far from it. Others in this trade have done the same, sometimes to criticism, sometimes to acclaim. I am unaware, though, of instances in which a writer has been maligned as a ditzy drunk for the practice, though many writers, and many great ones, have been drunks. Fewer have been ditzes, but that quality has its place too.

Candace prefers a monologue delivered from her home studio, a prepackaged narrative condensed by a team and read from an invisible teleprompter.

My first reaction to Candace’s smear was acute hurt and humiliation. It felt terrible to be willfully misrepresented on a platform that reaches millions, and it felt terrible to read the harassment that flowed from that misrepresentation. Within the hurt was offense and a measure of anxiety. If she succeeded in her effort to tar me as out of my depth and out of sorts, it could damage more than my feelings. My writing often depends on the trust I establish with sources and subjects. What if they believed her claims that I could not be trusted, that I was not fully there? Within those feelings was fury too.

Many of Candace’s accusations about me fit neatly within her worldview. Israel, the great villain of her narrative, made it unsurprising that she wrote me into the script as an intelligence asset. But where did my alleged alcoholism fit? She had pulled away from politics, she told her viewers, because the closer she got to the center of things, the more she understood the fraud inherent in the scene. She cited the example of supposed adherents to “family values” who were often “drinking and drunk and sleeping with one another.”

Months later, a potential clue appeared in the form of a Tennessee court record from 2023 involving a vehicle, a weapon, and the scene of an accident that had been fled. The report named a “George Farmer” and a “George T. Farmer,” but did not conclusively establish that the individual arrested was George Thomas Stahel Farmer, the man Candace married in 2019. The man in the document was white and male. His height and weight were missing. The birthdate listed was July 5, 1990. Public databases list different birthdates for the George Farmer Candace married: December 1989, December 1990, July 1989, and July 5, 1990.

Because he is a UK native who only became a dual U.S. citizen in 2025, establishing basic facts about his American records is not straightforward.

Some chatter about the report surfaced online. Laura Loomer posted about it in December. A friend of Candace and George, speaking anonymously, confirmed the individual named in the report was indeed George T. Farmer, but that the record had been “buried.”

This week, more information regarding George’s legal issues has surfaced. Court records were obtained by two sleuths on X.

“Can you answer some questions about this? Was the accident your husband caused in 2023 a separate incident from the DUI and weapons charges he got that are now erased from the Tennessee government website?” one user asked.

Another replied to an older post, questioning visas. “This is a genuine question: Which visa program allows the son of a British Lord to move to America and influence our politics through his business ventures, and lets him stay even after being arrested for a hit and run and then blowing 3X the legal alcohol limit while illegally carrying a gun down the street?”

One screenshot shows a court date for a settlement hearing on 8/25/23, which would coincide with a medical claim being made four months prior. Because no settlement was reached, it proceeded to trial. In addition, the birthday of 7/5/1990 aligns with Candace saying they celebrated George’s birthday over the Fourth of July weekend.

Her scrubbing aligns with mounting turmoil. Around this time, Candace deleted everything from before early 2025, perhaps as a defense, hoping to cease examining her posts the way she examines others.

George Farmer or George Farmer?

Anonymous sources told me the DUI was strategically buried through legal maneuvering, and that his birthdate has remained deliberately elusive—making it difficult for sleuths to definitively tie the record to him.

“Technically—as it appears on file—he was never arrested, because the incident was sufficiently buried,” they explained.

In the course of my own investigation into her past, I learned that many were onto Candace long before questions about her credibility became a cause for viral sparring.

A shrewd producer and performer, Candace has always understood the value and the lure of drama. Sources who worked with her at The Daily Wire said staff often braced for offstage walk-offs. She had the largest studio on set, noticeably grander than those used by Brett Cooper and Ben Shapiro, who would at times roll his media cart into her space to film segments of his show. She also had a reputation for running late, occasionally leaving live audience members waiting in a neighboring parking lot for an hour or more before being welcomed onto set.

According to two people who requested anonymity, she was respected and even revered, “like a celebrity on set,” but not well liked beyond that persona. They described her as cold and oddly paranoid, a trait that surfaced during her introductory meeting with a team The Daily Wire had assembled to ensure her immediate success on the platform. She came off as accusatory, one person present that day recalled. The energy shifted as it became clear she was neither as grateful nor as enthusiastic as they were about building something ambitious together, but instead suspicious of the newly formed team and their intentions.

Later, staff were instructed not to look her in the eye when she entered the set. Her requests extended to specific straws to sip water from. One former staffer laughed while recalling the quiet panic that set in if the straw was misplaced before she arrived.

Candace was a skilled performer. She speaks on camera with unhedged confidence. Her scripted monologues were polished, but she was irritated by, and disinterested in, reviewing meticulously fact-checked outlines prepared for her, according to those who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. She often dismissed the reference material entirely as she pursued the most sensational angle, sometimes bending facts and strategizing ways to provoke guests in order to produce a viral clip.

When I asked one former colleague to describe her in a single word, he didn’t hesitate. “Instigator,” he said.

Her pattern is predictable in hindsight. She secures the stakes before she strikes as a matter of standard practice. Hypersensitive and volatile, she responds to any perceived threat quickly, forcefully, and often unfairly, while presenting herself as the victim. That pattern has followed her since she entered public life.

In 2016, she announced her plans to combat cyberbullying with a startup, SocialAutopsy. “The age of technology and social media has slowly disintegrated individual accountability, the consequences of which are devastating,” she said at the time. Her goal was to raise $75,000. Instead, the contradictory premise of an anti-harassment doxxing database stirred up an esoteric online culture war and ultimately killed the project before it could formally launch.

By 2018, as far-right populism surged across the Western world, Candace Owens was touring the United States promoting BLEXIT, a campaign urging Black Americans to abandon the Democratic Party. Backed by Turning Point USA, BLEXIT was pitched as a political awakening, with Candace as the face of the movement. Donor money flowed quickly, but behind the scenes some supporters began questioning whether it was persuading voters at all.

An early skeptic was Republican commentator and congressional candidate Kim Klacik. She told me she agreed with many of Candace’s political arguments but questioned whether the strategy was working.

“I asked my pollster what the numbers showed,” Kim said.

“He said, ‘Well… nobody actually BLEXITted.’”

Kim said she initially tried raising concerns privately. In her view, the issue wasn’t the premise of the movement but the delivery. Candace’s confrontational rhetoric, she felt, was alienating the very voters the campaign hoped to attract.

“We shared the same donors,” Kim told me. “From what I understood, people were reaching out to her about it, but she didn’t seem to care. When I looked at the financials and realized they were more than a million dollars in the hole, it started to make sense. She wasn’t worried about losing donors, even as people at BLEXIT were getting laid off. It felt like their livelihoods didn’t matter. Like nothing mattered except her.”

Financial filings show BLEXIT rose and fell quickly. In 2019, the organization reported $873,697 in revenue against $188,219 in expenses, leaving a surplus of roughly $685,000. Donations surged the following year. By 2020, BLEXIT reported more than $7.4 million in revenue and ended the year with $3.6 million in net assets.

But the trajectory soon reversed. By 2021, the organization was running deficits, spending more than it raised. Losses continued through 2022, and by 2023 revenue had dropped to $274,538 while expenses exceeded $1.3 million, leaving the group with no reported net assets in the same year it ultimately merged with Turning Point USA, according to nonprofit filings reviewed by ProPublica.

According to multiple sources familiar with the organization, Candace frequently traveled to events on privately chartered flights, with travel expenses paid through the group.

The tension between Candace and Kim eventually spilled into public view when Kim criticized Candace on Twitter over her stance on the Juneteenth federal holiday. In a now-deleted response, Kim suggested the issue was “classism rather than racism” and accused Candace of having a “lack of engagement with Black people.”

From there, the dispute escalated quickly. Kim accused Candace of perpetuating cancel culture. Candace responded by calling Kim “a fake and hilarious person.” Soon after, Candace released a 45-minute Instagram video leveling a series of accusations about Kim’s background. In the video, Candace claimed Kim had previously worked as a stripper, hired a Democratic Party operative for her congressional campaign, and was involved in what she described as “money laundering, tax fraud, and campaign fraud.” She also alleged that Kim’s husband owned a strip club.

“She was enraged,” Kim recalled. “She said, ‘I was waiting for you to say something.’ It’s the same thing she later said about Erika Kirk. ‘I was waiting for Erika to respond.’”

“I kept thinking there’s no way Charlie doesn’t know this about her,” Kim said, referring to Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk. “And the same with Ben Shapiro. But with Ben, it felt like they were just excited about how much money she was bringing in. After her Black Lives Matter documentary apparently pulled in millions, the Daily Wire deal started to make more sense.”

As the feud escalated, Candace began digging into Kim’s private life and circulating claims about her ex-husband.

“If you look up my ex-husband’s name online, it shows he’s the principal of one of these strip clubs,” Kim explained. “But he’s a CPA. His name shows up on filings for lots of businesses. She took that and ran with it, calling him a strip club owner.”

“He’s Ukrainian, very private, not a public person at all,” Kim added. “And he was furious. Absolutely livid.”

At the time, Kim says the two were privately separated, something the public did not know.

“She was blowing up my personal life while we were already dealing with things behind the scenes,” she said. “It was wild.”

Kim attempted to confront the accusations publicly.

“I told her, let’s go Instagram Live. Ask me anything,” she said. “But she wouldn’t do it.”

Instead, Kim says Candace insisted any confrontation take place on her own show.

“She only succeeds when she can completely control the environment,” Kim said. “The narrative, the angle, everything. That’s why she won’t face any of us live in our own words.”

The dispute escalated further when Candace accused Kim of serious criminal misconduct involving stolen campaign funds and drug use.

“She said I was on drugs. That I used campaign money to buy cocaine.”

Kim says the allegation came from an anonymous source Candace refused to identify.

“She kept saying, ‘I don’t want to reveal my source,’” Kim said. “Later we learned it was apparently a random dancer from the Gold Club. She claimed this happened during the campaign, but the clubs were closed because of COVID.”

To counter the accusation, Kim took a drug test and posted the results publicly the next day.

The dispute eventually spilled into civil court in Nashville, where Kim filed a defamation lawsuit.

“We were there for six hours,” she said. “It was awful.”

According to Kim, Candace frequently consulted her husband during breaks in the deposition.

“She kept calling George during the breaks to ask how to handle things,” Kim said. “The whole thing was a disaster.”

Ultimately, Kim says her attorneys advised her to drop the case. As a public figure, the threshold for proving defamation was high, and the financial burden even higher.

“My attorneys told me we could keep going,” she said. “But it would probably cost a million dollars, and we still might not win.”

Afterward, Candace publicly framed the outcome as a victory.

“She tells everyone she won,” Kim said. “But the truth is I simply couldn’t afford to keep fighting.”

The fallout lingered long after the lawsuit ended.

“It was awful. I was in tears for days,” Kim said. “People were attacking my daughter, saying CPS should come take my child because I was on drugs.”

According to Kim, Candace’s supporters began filing complaints with the Federal Election Commission, triggering a forensic audit during the Biden administration.

“Every time they called the FEC, my lawyers had to respond,” she said. “My accountants had to respond. We were getting hit with legal bills every single week because everything had to be documented.”

Eventually, the investigation concluded.

“The FEC released its forensic audit report and found no wrongdoing, not with my campaign, not with my PAC, Red Renaissance,” Kim said. “I have the file. It clearly states there was no wrongdoing.”

But the public narrative never corrected itself.

“She never fixed the record. Never.”

“If she had been right about me, I would have been in prison like George Santos. These were serious federal accusations. She accused me of felonies, even human trafficking. And her fans just ate it up.”

Before Kim Klacik, Nicole Arbour found herself in Candace Owens’ crosshairs. A Canadian comedian and media personality Owens once admired, Arbour said she had initially been invited onto Candace’s PragerU show when Owens was still establishing herself on the platform. According to Arbour, Owens reached out personally, telling her she was a fan and would love to have her on the podcast. The interview itself went smoothly. “I was doing comedy, and that’s what she was interviewing me about,” Arbour told me. “I was very anti–cancel culture. I’m all about saying whatever you want as long as it’s funny. Who cares? That’s the vibe.” But one comment from Owens stuck with her. “I remember something she said that struck me as weird,” Arbour said. “She told me, ‘I want to do what you do. I just want to be a contrarian. It seems like all you have to do is say the thing that isn’t what most people think, and it goes viral.’” After the taping, Owens followed up with a direct message suggesting they could remain friendly, at least for the time being. “She said we could stay friends until I surpassed her in followers,” Arbour recalled. At the time, Arbour said she laughed it off. “I thought it had to be a joke.”

They stayed in touch. Nicole offered to help if Candace ever needed guidance with social media or production infrastructure, and over the years the two shared occasional phone calls, maintaining what Nicole describes as a casual industry relationship that she considered a friendship. That was her miscalculation. People who knew Candace during that period describe someone intensely driven and highly ambitious and whose relationships were often opportunistic. Some said they believed she did not, or could not, maintain friendships that were unrelated to her professional goals, and shared recollections of social engagements at which the guest list seemed to reflect few and shallow relationships.

At one point, Candace reached out about a new series she was developing at The Daily Wire. As Nicole remembers it, the concept was pitched as a The View-style panel show where she would appear alongside Candace and two or three other women. The two discussed ideas and creative direction, but a few weeks before filming Candace called with an update. The format had changed and the network had decided there would be just one star: Candace Owens.

“She told me, ‘They want to make me the Oprah of the Right,’” Nicole said.

Nicole says she took the news in stride. “I was like, cool, all good. I’m cheering for you.” As consolation, Candace invited Nicole to participate as a regular contributor on a panel segment on the program.

When Nicole arrived to tape the first episode, however, the atmosphere surprised her. What had been described as a lighter, funnier alternative to The View felt, in her words, “mean and dark,” particularly on the subject of Cardi B.

“It wasn’t funny,” she said. “There were no jokes. It was just mean girl jabs.”

Nicole told me she has no problem joking about public figures, it’s part of comedy, but the tone struck her as unusually harsh.

“I’ll make jokes about artists,” she explained, “but I’m not just sitting there tearing someone down. I felt like I was standing with the mean girls at school while she screamed at someone she didn’t like, and I was just supposed to back her up. It was very, very strange.”

As the episodes aired, Nicole says she began noticing bits she had written during early development conversations appearing in segments on the show. She had never been hired as a writer or formally brought onto the team, and at the time she brushed it off as odd, but not serious enough to raise a dispute.

The permanent fracture came later, during Candace’s campaign against Chrissy Teigen, when she urged conservatives to pressure retailers into dropping Teigen’s product lines. “She wanted people calling Target saying they wouldn’t shop there,” Nicole said. “And I was like, no. We’re supposed to be the opposite of that.”

Nicole responded on Twitter without naming Candace directly, posting, “Cancel culture is for bitches.” At first, it appeared to be a simple philosophical disagreement. Then, she says, the tone shifted.

“She flipped a switch,” Nicole told me. “She was screaming at the top of her lungs.”

The intensity felt disproportionate. Nicole suggested they debate the issue live, believing the disagreement could be handled openly. Candace agreed. But minutes after emailing Nicole’s manager about scheduling the debate, Candace posted publicly that Nicole was refusing to participate.

“She sent the email two minutes before posting that we were nonresponsive,” Nicole said. “My manager was at church. Suddenly I’m the one backing out.”

By the time the logistics were clarified, the format had shifted from a one-on-one debate to a panel. Nicole says what followed was something else entirely.

“It wasn’t a debate at all,” she said. “She put two people between us and another on my other side. It was four on one.”

At one point, a clip of Nicole was played out of context, framed to suggest she supported bullying.

“Which literally wasn’t it at all,” she said.

As the exchange escalated, Nicole says Candace abandoned the substance of the argument.

“I’m debating the topic and she won’t debate the topic,” Nicole told me. “She just keeps screaming and making things up.”

When Nicole began pushing back, she says Candace turned the conversation personal.

“She started naming my stalkers on air.”

These were men Nicole had previously confided to Candace about, individuals with documented histories of harassment.

“Humans don’t act like this. That’s not a thing,” Nicole said. “These aren’t random people. They have a history. She knew I was literally terrified of them.”

According to Nicole, Candace named the men anyway, then “sat there with that smug look like, ‘What? What’s the problem?’” Nicole says she told her it was gross, especially given that she was actively working with victim services to distance herself from one of the men, someone who believed they were in a relationship.

What unsettled her even more, she says, came next. Candace suggested she could play a recording of one of their phone conversations.

“She’s like, ‘Can I play it? Nicole, can I play it?’” Nicole recalled. “And I’m like… did you record our phone call? The one from last night?”

Nicole says Candace implied she had been recording their private conversations.

“That’s when I realized she had recorded everything.”

What unfolded on set that day, according to one source present, was deeply uncomfortable to watch.

“It’s one of the worst things I’ve witnessed in all my media years,” the source told me last month.

Another Daily Wire staffer later reached out to Nicole in tears to apologize. But by then, the damage had already been done. The footage circulated online and, according to Nicole, the segment was live-streamed to individuals who had been stalking and harassing her. Nicole also says that while Daily Wire later edited the names of the men out of the segment, Candace repeated them on her own live broadcast.

To make matters worse, Nicole says she was effectively barred from responding. Because she had active legal cases involving the men, her attorneys advised her not to comment publicly in ways that might jeopardize those proceedings. She was instructed to issue only a brief explanation for her departure from the show, not a broader defense of her reputation. With her safety the priority, Nicole says she felt forced to remain silent while Candace’s version of events spread largely uncontested.

Candace soon released a video accusing Nicole of fabricating rape allegations and arguing that false accusers must be exposed. The fallout, Nicole says, was immediate. Death threats intensified. The stalking escalated. She hired armed security, relocated, and watched professional opportunities begin to disappear.

Months later, Nicole says she noticed that elements of her earlier investigative work on Black Lives Matter’s donation structure appeared in a Candace Owens documentary, presented without attribution. She says Candace had not previously been aware of concerns surrounding the organization’s financial transparency until Nicole raised them and shared her early findings, including information that had gained traction after being reposted by Brandon Tatum. Nicole says portions of that work were later edited out of her PragerU appearance and subsequently reappeared, reframed as Candace’s own analysis on The Daily Wire.

“She accuses people of what she’s guilty of,” Nicole told me. “She always goes after reputation. It’s the same game over and over. I tried to tell people in 2021 that this is who she is.”

In Nicole’s view, Candace has repeatedly turned on prominent figures within the conservative movement itself.

“She went after Tomi Lahren. She went after Steven Crowder. She went after The Daily Wire. Jordan Peterson. Ben Shapiro. Turning Point USA. Kim Klacik. Donald Trump,” she said. “It’s a hit list. She wants to take down influential conservative voices.”

Nicole Arbour in her own words

Her bombastic style had reach across the globe.

In 2019, when 49 people were killed in shootings in two New Zealand mosques, Candace was cited by one of the gunmen in his manifesto as an influence on his radicalization.

“…The person that has influenced me above all was Candace Owens. Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness. Though I will have to disavow some of her beliefs, the extreme actions she calls for me are too much, even for my tastes,” he wrote, according to reports.

In response, Candace was blasé.

“LOL! FACT: I’ve never created any content espousing my views on the 2nd Amendment or Islam. The Left pretending I inspired a mosque massacre in...New Zealand because I believe black America can do it without government handouts is the reachiest reach of all reaches!! LOL!” she said. “HAHA OMG you racist Leftists are taking your racism and crazy to a whole new level hahah. ‘Black people don’t have to be Democrats’ now means...mosque shootings in New Zealand? This clearly won’t stick but damn if I won’t grow #BLEXIT highlighting your sheer desperation.”

The Daily Mail located her grandfather to ask him about her reaction to the tragedy and her unlikely tie to it. “This is not my granddaughter’s behavior,” he told the tabloid. “Why would she be laughing at it? That doesn't seem proper. She is a religious person and we taught her. She has family all over the world. Members of our family and her grandmother's family are all over the world in many nations. We just don't do that. We're not that type of people… I know how she was raised and the things we taught her. And no, that's not our character. We had a lot of influence on her life as a child and we try to be close to our grandchildren.”

“Charlie and me,” she said. “Me and Charlie…” “Charlie was by my side…” “We were happy warriors…” “Charlie always had my back and I always had his.”

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens first established her credentials so that she could affirm her overwhelming authority to speak of his public and private life and its real meaning. The two of them had been a pair. They were partners. They were deeply bonded. They shared goals and ambition and work ethic. She spoke of him with familiarity, referring to his habits and who he was behind closed doors. How he packed his suitcase. Even how he slept.

This was September 11, one day after the murder, and Candace seemed sincere. He had been much more than her friend of eight years. He was the other half of the puzzle piece that clicked into place with hers, fusing their forces into one powerful whole. “I was the culture, Charlie was the politics.” Yin and yang. “Charlie needed more culture,” she said, “and I needed to learn more about the rules of politics.” Together they were better. Together they were complete.

That she cried was understandable. In retrospect, though, it seems telling that she made a point to tell viewers she had cried, the same viewers who would have presumably seen it themselves, as though she wanted to make sure they understood how dramatic the moment had been. “Well, that has never happened before,” she said. “I guess we could say Charlie broke the internet one more time.”

It was subtle at first but nevertheless unmistakable: Charlie Kirk’s death was, in this way, somehow about Candace Owens. And if that was not apparent to others yet, she would make it so, and to accomplish this, whether it was deliberate or just an unintended effect of her pure-hearted pursuit of the truth, she would narratively sideline anyone whose proximity to Charlie presented an obstacle to her status as the most important woman in his universe.

“His wife, Mrs. Erika Kirk,” is how she first referred to his widow, her voice softer then. But her compassion for Erika soon shifted into doubt. Doubt hardened into judgment. Judgment curdled into open hostility. At times, the hostility began to sound like something closer to paranoia. Eventually, she called for law enforcement to treat Erika as a murder suspect. “Erika should be dragged into a police precinct,” she said. “Erika needs to be questioned.”

“Let me just tell you how God works,” Candace said. She had become interested in Erika’s time as a real estate agent. Erika received her New York real estate license around the time she met Charlie, she noted, which she found strange, since she remembered being told Erika worked in fashion when they first met, and her work for the Corcoran Group had gone unmentioned.

As she explored this part of Erika’s life, Candace said she came across a video posted by an amateur sleuth on the same subject. The sleuth noted what he described as a suspicious coincidence: the president of the Corcoran Group appeared in the Epstein Files. For anyone in need of legally sound ways to be paid for illegal services, the sleuth suggested, real estate is a convenient business.

The video had been posted on TikTok and explicitly directed at Candace during the same period she was researching the topic. Algorithms predict and pander by design. Your recent behavior determines what you see next, and the odds of encountering content tied to your interests rise even higher when the content tags your account. But Candace said she was not “a TikTocker” and could not remember how she first saw the video. Maybe someone sent it to her. The how was not important, she added, because she was certain about the why: It was divine intervention. God wanted her to have this information.

“I just feel like” is a phrase Candace often uses before sharing an inflammatory theory for which she has weak evidence or none at all. She would have viewers believe she is referring to powerful intuition. In reality, it functions as a legal hedge. If she is merely expressing feelings rather than making statements of fact, she can never technically be wrong. She invites viewers to help her, asking anyone with information about Erika to send tips and issuing an open call for former classmates to get in touch. Who is Erika Kirk? Candace shows little humility about the enormity of that question. She trusts what she feels, and she feels that Erika is not who she seems.

She performed an onscreen blitz. She was the woman who had been close to him first. She was the woman with whom he had been very, very close. She was so close, in fact, that she had the authority to rhetorically enter their home, their bedroom, and wield her mysterious expertise against the woman she previously identified as “Mrs. Erika Kirk” and now needled as a prime suspect, in a murder in which the suspect identified by law enforcement had long ago been apprehended and charged, however fishily.

“The implication is that’s what woke up her three-year-old daughter at 2:45 in the morning. That’s not when toddlers at the age of three wake up, okay? These are sleep-trained toddlers. Okay, Gigi wakes up at 2:45, a three-year-old kid who should be in the REM stage of sleep. Toddlers knock out. Maybe Gigi is a light sleeper. It’s also just curious that they’re all awake at 2:45 a.m. I don’t know what’s going on.”

This was the sham story about how Charlie ended up sleeping in his daughter’s bed on the final night of his life. “I’m starting to get a feeling that there might have been another reason why the daughter woke up. But stick with me. Maybe there’s noise not from excitement but from an argument,” she said.

Essential to the case Candace was building was the claim that it was hard to believe Charlie would have been filled with adrenaline on the eve of an event at a college when he had done hundreds of similar events at hundreds of similar colleges throughout his career. He was a pro.

Left unmentioned was the fact that this event was the start of a tour, the kickoff of a prolonged period of travel and taxing public events. This is true for any performer.

Candace focused instead on what we’d have to take her word and interpretation for. “Charlie messaged multiple people to say that they were going to kill him the night before,” she said.

She pointed again to the matter of Charlie’s wedding ring and what Erika had disclosed in her interview with The New York Times in the immediate aftermath of his assassination: that when he returned to the bedroom they shared on that next and final morning together, he grabbed his wedding ring and put it back on his finger. “I immediately, immediately clocked that. I said, ‘that’s weird,’ just because I know Charlie, but I couldn’t explain that to the audience. I know Charlie. Charlie’s the kind of person who could sleep with his boots on. Like, this little ring?”

“Erika is exceedingly uncomfortable discussing Charlie’s final day,” she said. She scrutinized Erika’s every breath and syllable, assuming the worst and with little apparent appetite to be dissuaded from those assumptions.

“I am told…” she said, though she would not say who told her what she was about to share. She reminded viewers that Erika mentioned, in an interview with Glenn Beck, that a priest had visited their home the night before his death. “We did what we usually did before tours,” Erika had said. “We said our prayer and we asked the Lord to protect us, and we asked the Lord that his will be done.”

Candace distrusted the story. It was implausible, she suggested, that a priest would have prayed with Charlie and Erika on that fateful night simply for the usual protection. In fact, what she knew from her unnamed source was that the prayer was for something else, something that supported her swelling suspicions about Erika. The priest had not arrived at the Kirk household to compel God to protect the family from harm, but to protect the Kirk marriage from ruin. “[The] priest came over to pray over Charlie and Erika’s marriage,” Candace said.

Absent from Candace’s telling was the appropriate context for the event she discussed. Glenn Beck interviewed Erika Kirk as conspiracies related to the assassination of Charlie Kirk engulfed her. The script in which Erika was cast as a potential suspect in the shooting that killed her husband and permanently disfigured her family was authored, in considerable part, by Candace. Since his death, she has devoted dozens of episodes of her weekday program to an “investigation” that has implicated many institutions and individuals, but has increasingly focused on the state of Israel and Erika Kirk. As Candace sought to wrest control of the narrative around her husband, Erika tried to survive the one unfolding around her.

Erika said this was because Charlie had received death threats, and their children had received threats, in increasing numbers as the polarized American political mood grew more volatile. What Candace had been told lacked that context.

“The picture that is starting to emerge is that Charlie’s last day consisted of a lot of arguments. Arguments over his shifting away from the pro-Israel position, him communicating to people that he was over it, that he did not want the money, him communicating to people that he wanted to bring me back to Amfest.”

“I feel, and I could be wrong, that there was a knock ’em dead argument that happened. That’s what makes logical sense to me about what I don’t know. That’s what makes sense.”

“They have not been honest about that relationship,” Candace said. It wasn’t “this amazing, godly relationship.”

Take it from her. Donald Trump welcomed Erika as his guest at the State of the Union last month, a decisive statement that, no matter how fractured the conservative movement may be, and no matter how the hatred against her spins jagged and viral, the conspiratorially aligned president himself has made his choice and his example clear. This could be because it’s the right thing to do. It could be, more cynically, because it’s the politically advantageous thing to do: It’s an endorsement from Charlie Kirk that now polls almost as powerfully in intraparty contests as an endorsement from Trump himself, and the midterms are on the horizon, with all their implications for the second half of the president’s second term in office and his legacy to follow. Whatever the intention, it’s true that it’s Charlie who inspired loyalty and who received, officially, some decency and some shelter for his family in return.

Candace Owens was not invited to the event in Washington. The last time she heard from the president, the moment was so monumental that she announced it to the camera in her studio, her smile wide and prideful.

The next afternoon, she debuted Bride of Charlie. Its horror-style aesthetics were no match for the horror of the program itself, which has featured mimicry of the tearful words spoken by Erika in the hours after the event that transformed her, by a matter of seconds and centimeters, from wife to widow and mother to two fatherless babies.

The series has featured unwieldy climbs through tenuous branches of the Erika Kirk family tree; accusations that Erika is connected to foreign governments, intelligence agencies, Jeffrey Epstein and global trafficking operations, war contracting, and ambiguous child abuse committed, perhaps, against hypothetical war-ravaged children; and allegations that she had a sexually inappropriate relationship with an underage girl, which is then tied to the implication that she is a closeted lesbian, which is then tied to the insinuation that she is just like the First Lady of France, by which I mean a biological male.

By the eighth episode of the series, Candace had succeeded in further sullying Erika, but had turned up no proof that she was anything other than a widow trying to continue on without her husband and the father of her children. Nevertheless, the show has been popular. For some viewers, this is just entertainment, the 2026 version of a daytime soap opera.

For all her dramatic expertise, it occurred to me that she has failed to plot out one crucial thing: when the hero is always Candace Owens, and the villain is never in doubt, viewers who don’t get turned off will, eventually, get bored.

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“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,” — H.P. Lovecraft

What I’ve come to love most about this weathered corner suite overlooking Laguna’s sea-swept stretch is how unpredictable the daily drop-ins are. I never know what—who—a week might bring. A guy I don’t know shows up selling me my life as a scripted movie before reenacting, step by step, the murder of Nicole Simpson to prove his theory that an accomplice was present as backup to the slaughter. A woman selling handmade bundles of sage. Nikki with Persian snacks for the new year. Eden with healing sprays and chiseled sheets of crystals. Teenage friends of my sons on dates, using my bathroom as a changing room to trade board shorts for slacks on date night. The sound bowl owner irritated by the heavy footfalls above her studio during sessions that demand silence. A nosy editor from the local paper. The grumpy neighbor from the apartments across from me, glowering over his sport shades and asking what I do and if I have a license to do it. The young girl vomiting her evening cocktails into the bush at the bottom of the staircase, refusing water.

This week attracted another perfectly disjointed cast of characters. My friend Gabby emerged like a mermaid after a midday dip in the cove down the street, wet hair, black bikini, wanting to show me her new book about frequency. The day before, two women wandered up, delighted to find Hayes here with me on the couch, ditching school under a fabricated internship. A boy, they said, they had hoped to meet on the long drive over. Both from out of state, here for a reunion after 20 years. They lingered to encourage me, offering thoughtful compliments and thanks for what I “do.” Before they left, they asked if they could pray for me. Hayes, no stranger to this request, closed his eyes on cue until she was done.

On Sunday, I welcomed a congresswoman from Florida, familiar to most from the file hearings. Anna Paulina Luna arrived with her son, Henry, in a stroller to tour the town with me. We wandered up the hill, past the strip where the angel orbs loom, subjects of her handling, parsed in stages ahead of whatever full disclosure may eventually look like. Anna had just finished a guest spot in the hot seat beside Bill Maher. She is one of the hardest-working people in Washington. The declassified files fall under her oversight, and the president trusts her enough to delegate the logistics to her. Transparency is central to her approach. Her solution is to release the files in full, without interference or explanation, allowing the public to decide for themselves what is what in an era when trust in government is already so low.

What’s funny is that Luna knows this town better than I do, so I end up trailing her through a handful of shops on her list, places she remembers from growing up. She’s disappointed to learn the iconic sock shop that once carried Trump socks, complete with a swoosh of fur for hair, is now out of business, but the old-fashioned barrel candy shop is exactly as she remembers it.

We settle in for lunch at a table facing the water at the old Hotel Laguna Inn, two longtime staffers and her security detail folded in around us. Before she leaves, we take a quick spin in the cartoonishly tiny electric car parked nearby, her security jogging behind us to keep pace, even at the slowest speed imaginable. We grab iced coffee, catching up on what she’s carrying next and her perspective on the UAP files still ahead.

Of course, Bill loved her.

WAR OF THE WORLDS

13 US service members have died in Iran over the last three weeks in what Donald Trump is calling an “excursion” and critics are calling an illegal war. At least 21 Israelis have died in retaliatory blows fired by Iran. Strikes from the US and Israel, meanwhile, have killed a reported 1,500 people in the region, including 165 Iranian children in an attack on an elementary school that a military inquiry concluded was the fault of the US—a misfire, it seems, that sent tomahawks intended for an Iranian Navy facility into the bodies of children instead.

The war in Iran has led to warring within the US government. Veterans from the staff and the press corps of the first Trump term have regaled me stories about infighting, firings, and high-profile resignations. But tumult such as that was absent from the second Trump term—until last week, when the top counterterrorism official in the administration, Joe Kent, resigned in protest of the military action ordered by the president. In his letter of resignation, Kent contradicted the president, who has sought to justify US engagement in the conflict with claims that Iran “could soon” send a nuclear weapon to obliterate America. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Kent wrote.

Still, not everyone is buying the protest narrative. Counter-speculation suggests Kent may have jumped before he was pushed. Rumors circulating inside the White House claim he had already been sidelined from key meetings related to the Iran strikes in recent months and was possibly suspected of leaking information to Tucker Carlson.

More news:

Associated Press | Iran Threatens Retaliatory Attacks On Tourist Sites Worldwide

PBS | Dozens Injured In Israel After Iranian Missile Strikes

Axios | Trump Team Game Planning for Potential Iran Peace Talks

THE STARRY MESSENGER

In preparation for the disclosure of more files related to extraterrestrials, the Trump administration has registered the domain Aliens.gov. Between March 9th and 15th, an Air Force base in Louisiana was a hive of unexplained drone activity. A fireball that NASA claimed was a broken-apart asteroid tore through the daytime sky on Tuesday, according to witnesses in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Steven Spielberg announced he has a “strong suspicion” aliens are real. At least 65 percent of Americans agree, according to Pew Research. 44 percent think the government is hiding the truth.

Jennifer Carmody’s Abduction Story

National Alien Abduction Day is March 20th. An unofficial holiday (for now) for UFO enthusiasts but also a great excuse to remind you that three years ago I sat down with Jennifer Carmody of JK Ultra for a debriefing on the history of UAP and extraterrestrial beings. In the article she shared her own abduction story.

Listen by clicking the audio here.

SPECIES MISBEHAVIOR: DOMESTIC DEMON EDITION

The blitzes of war and space are not enough to deflect all interest in the Epstein files. The Miami Herald broke news this week about a prison officer’s call to the FBI regarding activity in the days that followed Epstein’s 2019 death, in which “bags and bags” of documents were shredded and discarded. The princess of Norway came out to defend her association with Epstein on the grounds that she had been “manipulated” by him. Trump’s nominee to chair the Fed, Kevin Warsh, has to clear an Epstein obstacle on his way to confirmation. Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche appeared on the Hill for a briefing on subpoena compliance related to the files, which took place behind closed doors, except for the spectacle in the hallway when Democrats stormed out. Unable to leave her quarters, still, is Ghislaine Maxwell, imprisoned in Texas, one of the women held accountable for crimes that benefited men and harmed girls, while the men, with some exceptions (Peter Attia, punished for bad-look old emails that suggested nothing by way of criminal behavior) have safely climbed to higher rungs on the ladder to power.

SHADOWBOXING WITH NOSTALGIA IN THE BLOCK-UNIVERSE

If we needed support for the theory that past, present, and future are all happening all at once, the drama surrounding Love Story helps. The past isn’t past, it’s true, since we’re always rewriting and relitigating it. Daryl Hannah took to the New York Times opinion page to complain that Ryan Murphy’s depiction of a needy, annoying, and self-centered “Daryl Hannah” is false and unfair.

The “tragedy-exploiting” series relies on “distortion” of her real-life character to achieve made-for-television drama, she writes. “Storytelling requires tension…but a real, living person is not a narrative device.” She goes on to defend herself against the behavior of “Daryl Hannah” as depicted by Murphy: “I have never used cocaine in my life or hosted cocaine-fueled parties. I have never pressured anyone into marriage. I have never…” and so on. “It’s appalling to me that I even have to defend myself against a television show. These are not creative embellishments of personality. They are assertions about conduct—and they are false.”

I should note that Love Story is not billed as a documentary. Like other Ryan Murphy productions based on real-life events (Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Gianni Versace, Nicole Brown and OJ Simpson…) it’s a camp dramatization of public drama. Still, I understand why Daryl Hannah felt aggrieved by “Daryl Hannah,” and even more so, I understand why the New York Times opinion editors wanted her to write the column. It’s a 90s-style multimedia spat fit for the pages of George—and I love it. I love Love Story, too.

Daryl Hannah is aligned with JFK Jr.’s nephew, Jack Schlossberg, who is not a character in the show (so far…) since he was a small child during the period covered in the program. By the time she was filing copy to the Times, Jack had already called Murphy “grotesque” and a “pervert” who “looks like a thumb” and was “profiting off” tragedy.

When he announced his campaign in November, it was another stroke of genius casting by the Times, with a Maureen Dowd profile and gorgeous 16mm-style footage by photographer Sabrina Santiago that harkened back to the aesthetics of what his grandmother, among the best and most consequential editors of the twentieth century, named Camelot.

Ryan Murphy told Dowd that the term “pervert” was “a centuries-old vilification meant to condemn and weaponize hate against gay people” and “I received threats against my personal safety and that of my family because of it.” The hate Jack incited against him, he added, made him unfit to hold office. “How is that not disqualifying to someone who is asking to represent what has to be one of the highest concentrations of L.G.B.T.Q. voters in one district?”

Jack declined to apologize. “In my mind, that’s a form of perversion, to be so obsessed with somebody’s sexuality and their love life, to produce a multimillion-dollar series about them,” he told Dowd.

But it seems obvious that all the Kennedy nostalgia is helping Jack launch his own political career. He’s currently leading what few polls exist in New York’s 12th congressional district race to fill the seat vacated by the retirement of Jerry Nadler—to the dismay of Jerry Nadler, who endorsed a not-famous but qualified councilman to succeed him, only to find that his opinion hardly matters in the district he’s represented for as long as Jack has been alive. Nadler’s candidate trails the Nancy Pelosi-endorsed Jack and Republican operative-turned-Resistance-influencer George Conway, who enjoys popularity among the poshest liberals in the district. In January 1999, John said, “politics has migrated into the realm of popular culture.” He was explaining the conceit of his magazine, George, which confounded others in the media who couldn’t make sense of his glossy collision of movie stars and moderates. Popular culture has now migrated into the realm of politics, too—something his nephew understands better than others.

Jack is not the first Kennedy to find himself disgusted by perceived mistreatment of John Jr. or Carolyn. In the days after the July 1999 plane crash that killed the couple, as well as Carolyn’s sister, Lauren Bessette, RFK documented the contemptible conduct of his family members in his diary, which was obtained by investigative journalist Isabel Vincent in 2013.

RFK wrote that his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy (who died by suicide in 2012) had visited John and Carolyn, and that Carolyn had told her that her husband was “so depressed” because he was feuding with his sister, Caroline, over the division of their mother’s assets, including furniture. “John confided to me also about how hurt he was by Caroline’s actions,” RFK said.

John struggled, too, with reconciling his editorial ambitions at George with the obligations implied by his last name. After John welcomed Larry Flint, the controversial publisher of Hustler (and fervent free speech activist) to his White House Correspondents’ Dinner table, he received a chiding letter from his uncle, Ted, who was “disappointed” in his decision (here’s a 1969 report about how Ted sought to prevent his prosecution over the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, who was the passenger in his Oldsmobile when he crashed into a pond, freed only himself from the wreck, swam to shore, and failed to call for help as she drowned).

“John was hurt by that because his family is so important,” RFK wrote. “Mary and I resolved we will go see them this weekend and spend a lot of time with them.”

They had all been scheduled to arrive on Hyannis Port for his sister Rory’s wedding, but when RFK showed up at John’s house prior to the rehearsal dinner at 6 pm, he wasn’t there. He wrote that he stopped by again at 9 pm. Again at 10 pm. And again at 11:30 pm. He still hadn’t arrived. “I wasn’t worried at all because anything can happen with John,” RFK wrote. At 3 am, his sister, Kerry, woke him with news that John’s plane was missing. “I knew then that John was dead,” he said. The porch light was burning, he noted. “The water was 68 degrees so some people had hope they might still be alive but I had none.”

The following day, before the bodies were even recovered, arguments over the burial began. “Ann wants them close by and is terrified that the K family might try to spirit them to Brookline,” RFK wrote, referring to Ann Freeman, Carolyn and Lauren’s mother, who wanted to bury her two daughters close to where she had raised them in Greenwich, rather than the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts. The Kennedys were unsympathetic to Ann, according to RFK, and when a meeting was arranged to sort out the dispute in New York, John’s sister, Caroline, stood Ann up. She was represented by her husband, Ed Schlossberg, and Ted’s wife, Vicky, instead. “All the Bessette family knows that Ed hated Carolyn and did everything in his power to make her life miserable and . . . he bullied, bullied, bullied the shattered grieving mother,” RFK wrote.

The bodies were discovered days later and ultimately buried at sea. RFK described the scene: “The water had more jellyfish in it than anyone had ever seen. When they let go of the ashes, the plume erupted and settled in the water and passed by in the green current like a ghost. We tossed flowers onto the ghosts. Some of the girls tossed letters from a packet they’d assembled from John’s and Carolyn’s friends. It was a civil violation but the Coast Guard let it go.” The Navy band “played mournful music,” he added, “and we all cried like babies.”

The passages written by RFK are from one of the three diaries Isabel Vincent obtained in 2013. She published a spate of stories at the time and a few more a decade later, in 2024, amid the scandal that erupted over the entanglement between RFK and Olivia Nuzzi, focused mostly on what RFK disclosed about his “lust demons” and rampant infidelity, as well as some gossip about prominent political figures and subjects of tabloid interest, like Al Sharpton.

We now know that Vincent’s reporting on the materials amounts to just a fraction of their content.

On Sunday morning, the New York Post published an excerpt from RFK: The Fall and Rise, her forthcoming book (out April 14, from Harper Collins), which relies on over 1,000 pages of diary entries in addition to interviews and more traditional reporting.

The last three presidential administrations have features the publication of private communications belonging to people associated with the chief executive. Paul Manafort’s daughter’s trove of text messages. Ashley Biden’s diary. Hunter Biden’s laptop. Already in this administration, RFK’s alleged private writing to Olivia Nuzzi was published by her vengeful ex (you can watch our conversation about that here).

RFK: The Fall and Rise represents something less common and maybe even unheard of: a book based on exclusive access to the private writings of a sitting member of a presidential cabinet featuring first-hand insight into an American political dynasty that has exerted unrivaled influence on our government and popular culture for an entire century and counting.

EXCUSLIVE

ISABEL VINCENT ON RFK’S DIARIES

Just after the announcement of her book, I got in touch with Isabel to discuss the project.

At the time that she came to possess the diaries, “I didn’t know much about him,” she said. Just the basic facts: He was famous because he was JFK’s nephew, and he was important because he was leveraging his storied name in service to his environmentalism. “We had a meeting at The Post about what was the public good in writing about the diaries. We came to the conclusion that Bobby had turned himself into a consequential public figure through his environmental work, and the diaries chronicle his importance to the Democratic Party in the early aughts.” He documents his associations with Bill Clinton and Al Gore, his activities traversing the globe to speak to corporations about his causes, and his civil disobedience in the Dakotas and Vieques. “And he is a Kennedy—American royalty, which has always been an endless source of curiosity and fascination.”

When Isabel first contacted RFK about the diaries in 2013, he said it was fake news. ““I don’t think there is any way you could have a diary or journal of mine from 2001…I don't have any comment on it. I have no diary from 2001,” he told her.

February 6, 2001: “I narrowly escaped being mugged by a double team of [two women]. It was tempting but I prayed and God gave me the strength to say no.”

July 25, 2001: “After daddy died I struggled to be a grown-up … I felt he was watching me from heaven. Every time I was afflicted with sexual thoughts, I felt a failure. I hated myself. I began to lie — to make up a character who was the hero and leader that I wished I was.”

November 5, 2001: “Despite the terrible things happening in the world, my life is … great. So I’ve been looking for ways to screw it up. I’m like Adam and live in Eden, and I can have everything but the fruit. But the fruit is all I want.”

“Kennedy writes near the end of his jail sentence that he has a ‘three-point plan’ for ‘fixing my greatest defect … my lust demons.’ He doesn’t write down the plan, leaving the subsequent days of the diary blank.

In a subsequent statement to Isabel in 2013, RFK retracted his denial that the diaries belonged to him and instead referred to them as stolen. He later blamed the theft on his second wife. “They are definitely his diaries. From what I understand from my source, he pretty much kept them lying around. He actually admits to losing a volume on a trip in one of the entries,” Isabel told me.

Vincent is an investigator and a journalism professor at Fordham University. Her previous books have ranged from subjects as varied as World War II, a Brazilian socialite, and US Senator-turned-convict Bob Menendez. RFK: The Fall and Rise is an unusual undertaking. An enormous trove of documents—seen only by her, interpreted only through her to the rest of the public and for history—that she’s lived with for thirteen years, in which the whole American political configuration has shape-shifted, and in which RFK transformed from a liberal hero to a Democratic Party outcast and then a conservative star, serving a president who, in 2013, was in Midtown sharing his opinions about celebrity breakups and Diet Coke on Twitter or Entertainment Tonight.

After spending so much time with RFK as perhaps no one else ever has, I wanted to know what Isabel thought about him.

“Some days I really liked him,” she said. “He really grapples what he calls his sins of addiction, mainly to women.” He wanted “to be a decent person,” she said, and to “live up to” his father. “There were times I felt so sorry for him, when he goes back into his 14 year old self.” He writes about “after ‘daddy’ died,” she said, and the “emptiness he faced.” She said the writings reflect curiosity about people and the natural world.

But the writings also reflect malformed aspects of his character, she added. “He doesn’t take responsibility. He claims he was ‘mugged’ when he goes after women,” she said. “There were other times that I felt he was writing for someone else to read and setting forth his version of what went wrong with his marriage to Mary in order to justify his own bad behavior with respect to his cheating and not sharing his burden of the child care.”

“I set out to tell a story of a complicated man,” Isabel told me. “Some days I was astounded at the depth of his thought, his knowledge of religion and history. Other days, his sense of entitlement was infuriating. I hope I’ve conveyed that duality and complexity in the book.”

RFK: The Fall and Rise comes out on April 14. Preorder your copy here.

STAR REPORT

Mercury went direct on Friday, ending one of the worst retrogrades of my life, in which I and seemingly everyone I know was plagued by inconveniences and insanities big and small.

Seriously wondering how one might flag him.

I have an idea but I need him on board to execute it.

After two years of tireless begging, I’ve accepted that my hounding of mainstream media to examine Nick Tartaglione’s case is a wasted effort. What I didn’t expect was to wrangle Drea de Matteo, but here we are. Go ahead and count her now as a colluding factor in my plot, a source I’ll happily drag with me to Rogan’s studio as an incentivized offer.

It’s common knowledge by now that I adore her, which is why I sat as a good-natured participant for a three-hour conversation on film without a comfortable amount of makeup after no sleep.

I was first introduced to Drea at the start of 2024. I showed up at her house in the canyons with a camera guy to document her in the late stages of an unjust industry crisis. How she went from Emmy Award–winning actress to rejected talent overnight, exiled for her stance on COVID and politically aimless in the wake of it, seeing she wasn’t entirely in sync with the ideology on either the left or the right. To save her house from foreclosure, she signed up for OnlyFans and began leaning into the conservative movement, in part because they were the only ones defending her. Tucker Carlson was good to her. Tim Pool was not.

As an early admirer of RFK, Drea was also curious to see how far his campaign would go. It was her support for Bobby that led her to reconsider Donald Trump, whom she calls her “favorite comedian.” We spent a lot of time together on the campaign trail, highlights discussed in the episode below.

In person, she’s exactly as you’d expect. Energetic, brazen and flirtatious by nature. The kind of woman you feel like you’ve known forever. A good mother. Unapologetically Italian in every way imaginable. Hence, the lavish outlay of vintage dishware lined with her favorite salami, olives, nuts, and exotic cheeses, arranged on the kitchen island that greets you upon entrance.

Not a big drinker, she sips tequila on ice sparingly and curses like a drunken sailor when sober.

Her dogs are spoiled. The newest “puppy” is offensively huge. I’m talking the size of a small horse.

Drea’s house is like mine, loud, filled with love, never dull.

March 2024

I could go on about my affinity for her, but I’ll let our three-hour conversation speak to that instead.

For those interested, the full episode is here.

As for Rogan, he may be the only option Nick has left and he’s been interested in Nick for years. He’s referenced him multiple times since Epstein’s death. It certainly seems the key pieces of this story would interest him and his listeners. There’s so much he doesn’t know, and while I’m not naturally at ease in a podcast setting (Drea’s house doesn’t count), I’m willing to step outside of that if it means getting Nick’s story in front of a wider audience.

Last week, when I sat down with her to catch up after a year off the campaign trail, Nick called unprompted. The call you see there is raw. She had no idea he would be reaching out and no idea about his past. Podcast gold, I’d say. Interruption from federal prison, Nick learning who’s on the other end of the line. A revered New York idol from the same parts, matched accent and grit, asking how he’s holding up. How meta the scene. Adriana La Cerva on the phone with a cop accused of aiding the cartel in drug crimes. A case tangled by a secret gay romance between thugs, a roadside suicide, four bodies buried in a shallow grave, no weapon recovered, and claims that DNA was planted by a dirty investigator on a strip of molding inside a bar called Liquid Lounge.

We have to believe Tony Soprano would approve.

If Rogan’s listening, the line here on the West Coast is open.

“In March I'll be rested, caught up and human.” — Sylvia Plath

Housekeeping should ideally post on Sundays. I’m a day late. But are we convinced time is even real?

My first inclination in honor of the anniversary last week was to revive COVID-era rage from my diary notes from those first few months. I didn’t get around to it, but I plan to.

My only confession for now is that I ended up enjoying Love Story more than I want to admit. We can discuss this later.

Last month I learned a lot, mostly against my will. Apparently time is speeding up and our bodies are adjusting to it, which might explain why everyone seems extra achy and irritable lately. Our joints are calibrating to some new-world frequency.

Yes, I’ve been reading Dolores Cannon. When I welcome JK Ultra back, she’ll explain what she discovered in Cannon’s archive six years ago.

Cosmic recalibrations aside, it turns out that an acute awareness of Mercury in retrograde doesn’t actually help one avoid or escape the chaos it unleashes. Mercury in a bad mood is no joke. Unfortunately, knowing that doesn’t do much to prevent the consequences tied to it. The fact that I’m writing this at three in the morning tells you everything you need to know. By noon I’ll likely be boiling eggs in a bathrobe with Masters of War on the stereo.

Typically, predictably, winter invites in me a mild depression that lingers until about mid-April. Everyone in the family knows to ignore it. This version of me, hollowed out by winter shadows, driving aimless circles around town. Like clockwork, come early spring I’m back to myself. Notably a far more delightful woman in warmer weather.

We have four days left of retrograde. I’ll be hibernating until then.

Despite deflated state of mind, I’ve been making more of an effort to honor simple resolutions. I organized my closet and bathroom cupboards so all of the beautifully gifted beauty products I’ve accumulated are easy to access and actually useful. I signed up for two print newspapers, one mainstream and one fringe publication, because news delivered on the doorstep is sexy. I also committed to a morning stretching routine, added sunset beach walks to my midweek schedule, and replaced an hour of live news in my office with Carl Jung on audio in the hope they might guide my current manifestations. Sadly, none of the above has done much to ease my AI anxiety.

Friends of mine agree there’s a new paranoia in the air, and our conversations have drifted accordingly. My local MAHA committee is usually focused on food and chemicals. Discussions revolve now around simulation theory, holographic universes, and box theory. I suppose we’re all trying to figure out what’s real and what’s simulated to mirror what we believe to be real.

In the middle of all of it, we’ve become obsessed with a rejected baby monkey. Punch seems to be the only thing capable of pulling our attention away from the gripping horror of the Epstein emails. Rejected by his mother and bullied by the other monkeys, he clings to his caretaker’s leg to avoid beatings and drags a stuffed toy everywhere he goes. The toy is a maternal stand-in he’s carried since birth. One day he wraps the toy’s long arm around his shoulders to mimic a hug. Another time he tries to feed it the end of a smashed banana. All he wants is to be loved, yet I can’t help but wonder if the algorithm handed us a Japanese psyop right when it was needed.

In Punch’s case, artificial kinship softens the echo of abandonment. In our case, artificial companions are seducing us with convenience.

Before we get into crazy conservative pundits, please click this new audio from Nick Tartaglione publicly requesting that Joe Rogan pick up his story. He needs our help. Rogan mentions Nick frequently, but has no idea what is actually on that hard drive. I would love the opportunity to sit down and explain it to him. If you’re willing, tag Rogan and ask him to consider it. Nick could answer Rogan’s questions directly. Joe seems like the kind of guy who appreciates guests willing to challenge his opinions on this type of thing.

UFO disclosures are reportedly on the way. David Grusch claims he’s already drafted a speech for Donald Trump.

Two scientists have been murdered in their homes within months of each other. Now a retired general with UFO connections has disappeared, and his wife’s latest update reads rather strange.

Tucker Carlson claims that he’s going to be federally charged for being foreign agent after CIA read his texts.

Benjamin Netanyahu appeared at a café this morning to prove he is alive with five, not six fingers. In the video, he steps up to place an order when the cameraman tells him, “Prime Minister, they’re saying on the internet that you’re actually dead.” Netanyahu smiles and replies that he’s “dying for coffee. I’m dying for my people. Look how they behave, fantastic.” He then raises both hands toward the camera and adds, “Do you want to count the fingers?”

But Netanyahu wasn’t the one who stole the scene. A pretty unnamed young woman briefly visible behind him in the video—meant to quash rumors of his death—quickly became the internet’s unexpected sweetheart. Viewers fixated on her cameo instead of his message, while TikTok users jumped frame by frame trying to prove the clip was AI.

Another viral video has the internet convinced that Jeffrey Epstein fled Israel to cruise around South Florida in a convertible.

Candace Owens, live from Hades, is attempting to redirect attention with her new series The Bride of Charlie, which relies almost entirely on insinuations about Erika Kirk. One day her children will know how this all went down—how their mother chose to publicly torment another man’s widow in the aftermath of his assassination.

I doubt she cares.

According to a source connected to Toria Brooke, most of the day-to-day child-rearing is handled by a fleet of nannies who live in a separate house on her property. The staff is rumored to be sourced through an elite Jewish agency.

After accusing Erika Kirk of being a handler for Epstein, a claim swiftly debunked by Jay Beecher, she is now floating another theory suggesting that Erika’s dying mother is “faking” her illness, using a wheelchair as a prop. This, according to Candace, is where Erika “learned her behavior.”

SPOTTED: The Newsoms along with a third unnamed woman relaxing over wine at BICE in Palm Beach yesterday afternoon. Red for him. White for her. It brought back fond Covid-era memories. While the governor was busy closing beaches and filling our skateparks with sand, he managed to keep his winery in Northern California open for walk-ins.

5 HOT TAKES

Shia LaBeouf sounds like every addict we’ve ever loved and had to distance ourselves from. But also like one of the most under appreciated intellects of our time.

No one’s talking about Gwyneth Paltrow’s recent boob job and facelift, which is fine, I guess. But are we still supposed to pretend her insanely expensive skincare products are what’s giving her that youthful glow?

Dakota Johnson looks gorgeous in the new Calvin Klein ads but has the sex appeal of a cardboard box.

For the first time in my life, I didn't know a single person nominated. Am I old, or is Hollywood officially dead?

Lana Del Rey’s new album — inspire by her swamp-bred, alligator-snatching man proves that women right now are attracted to conservative men with rugged skills because liberal men proved their worth in crisis when they asked us to wear masks during lockdown instead of building bunkers and romanticizing hunting for food during a virus apocalypse.

FLASHBACK

John Lennon described seeing a UFO flying over NYC, August 1974. In the booklet for his album Walls and Bridges, he included a short note: “On the 23rd August 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O. — J.L.”

Thank You Britannica For Including Me In Your “Popular Newsletters” Roundup.

MAIN PRIORITY

Tucker the traitor?

A lot of us are fed up with the in-house fighting across right-wing media. The industry has become something of a dumpster fire lately, thanks in part to network personalities who left the cushy framework of mainstream news but don’t quite know how to operate without it. Instead, they’re scrambling to stay sensational enough to compete with edgier voices like Nick Fuentes.

Now we’ve got Megyn Kelly, in her mid-fifties, behaving like a millennial provocateur. She refuses to condemn or even mildly criticize Candace Owens for ruthlessly attacking Charlie Kirk’s widow. Instead, she throws on another outdated ballgown to deliver monologues with huffy intensity and a trucker’s vocabulary, staring directly into the camera trying to embody the tough-bitch persona she’s imagined in her head.

When she isn’t chasing Candace and Tucker’s talking points, or insulting men’s genitalia, she’s criticizing Margot Robbie for looking gaunt, which is laughable coming from a rail-thin host.

Megyn recently bragged that her podcast is now more popular than every show on CBS News combined and that it has doubled the audience of her former show at NBC News. She took to X to boast that her show generated 138 million YouTube views in a single month compared with CBS’s 70 million.

Just for reference: my story slides—posted from the confines of my bed with zero production or promotional push, routinely pull somewhere between 120 and 200 million views. And they manage it without using Israel as a punching bag or enabling grotesque slander of a dead man’s wife.

Megyn Kelly hits rival pundit Mark Levin where it hurts: ‘Sorry you have a micro penis’

As for Tucker Carlson, this could get ugly.

His video struck me as someone trying to get ahead of something.

One theory making the rounds suggests Trump may have pulled off another checkmate.

Afshine Emrani called it “the plot twist no one saw coming.”

The idea is that he invited Tucker Carlson to the White House shortly before the strike on Iran, deliberately. If Trump already knew of rumors that Tucker had been communicating with figures connected to the Iranian regime, the Oval Office invitation takes on a different meaning. In this version, Trump understands that anything said around Tucker could travel quickly through those channels. Iran sees the image of Tucker meeting with Trump and assumes that if an attack were imminent, Tucker would pick up on some signal and relay it back. Their conclusion: Trump is bluffing. Meanwhile, Trump is perfectly content to let them believe it. If the theory holds, the meeting becomes calculated misdirection, with Tucker unknowingly carrying the wrong signal back through the very channels Trump expected.

Also, the implications could stretch well beyond Tucker himself, depending on whether he was acting independently or functioning as a proxy.

THE AI DOC: OR HOW I BECAME AN APOCALOPTIMIST Coming 3. 27

Last month I accepted an invitation from the Pentagon to board Air Force One as a witness to history: a nuclear reactor flown across state lines like a metallic prophecy. I had no idea what I’d agreed to cover, but quickly learned it marked a significant “historical milestone.” Before takeoff, we stood in prayer to bless the nuclear cargo. During the ninety-minute flight I sat face to face with a massive piece of machinery designed to power critical infrastructure if our electrical grid is ever taken out by foreign adversaries.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
― Rumi

SUBJECTS OF ATTENTION

A Reader Shared This List of Dead Scientists 2004-2015

Is President Trump a Time Traveler?

This girl moved into a New York loft and SJP is helping her furnish it via IG commentary.

Steven Spielberg says we’re not alone.

Zach Bryan buys Kerouac scroll for 12 million.

IN OFFICE

A crystal gift from Eden picked up at the world’s largest crystal convention.