I Made Epstein's Text Messages Great Again (And You Should Read Them)

Be careful how long you stare into the iMessage abyss.

This is part three in an investigation in Jeffrey Epstein’s connections to the crypto industry. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 4)

      “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” - Napoleon

---

A few days ago there was a massive discharge of Jeffrey Epstein related pestilence from the American government. It arrived in two separate effluences, neither of which, it should be noted, were sourced from “The Epstein Files” held by the DOJ. They all came from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, meaning the people managing what’s left of Epstein’s money carefully curated what was made available.

1. Congressional Democrats on the oversight committee released a detailed, strongly worded press release accompanied by three carefully curated emails from the keyboard of Jeffrey Epstein that seemed to suggest there might be a much darker side to the Epstein/Trump relationship than has previously been reported.

2. In at attempt to drown out this fresh injection of energy into EpsteinGate (can we call it that yet? because I’m calling it that) elected Republicans on the exact same congressional committee shat out a two sentence “press release” accompanied by a blunderbuss of 20,000 pages of unsorted digital garbage that allegedly came from Epstein’s electronic devices. Emails, text messages, novels, scientific papers, lengthy and detailed guidebooks explaining exactly where the line between legal and illegal activity is drawn by the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act - all of these and more forms of the every day digital flotsam that slowly accretes on any normal person’s smart phone as they go through life were sprayed into the American media landscape without even an AI generated statement about what these documents were supposed to mean.

You may have heard Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and self-described “MAGA Leninist” Steve Bannon explain that the way to win the “war against the media” is to “flood the zone with shit”. Love the man or hate him it’s pretty undeniable that few more perceptive observations have been made about the state of modern American journalism. “If we hit ‘em with 20,000 pages of informational diarrhea,” Bannon’s theory goes, “it will generate such a confusing shitstorm that the American public won’t even notice the incriminating emails the Democrats want them to focus on.”

Bannon’s theory is, of course, correct. Whatever was in the emails released by Oversight Democrats has long since left the public conversation (if it ever even fully arrived), drowned out by a flood of scandalous revelations about the relationships many American elites enjoyed with Jeffrey Epstein well after the man’s first sex crime conviction.

But as depressing as all that is I’m here to tell you that there’s actually a pretty fun and unexpected silver lining to the cloud that is this particular deployment of Bannonite media praxis, which is the fact that one of the American elites we’re all suddenly learning a lot more about from this window into Jeffrey Epstein’s world is his close friend Steve Bannon.

If you just want to skip right to the good stuff the deanonymized and reformatted text messages can be read here.

[UPDATE] There is also now a site where you can read color highlighted versions of all of His Emails here.

THE ZONE, NOW FLOODED

Over the last few days the U.S. has seen a lot of news items come out about the things journalists are learning as they pore over thousands of pages of Jeffrey Epstein’s email correspondence. Reporters have focused on the emails for a lot of good reasons:

1. Many of the emails were written by people who are rich, famous, and/or powerful (AKA “newsworthy”).

2. The emails were released almost unredacted and in a format everyone recognizes (they look like emails).

3. There’s a lot of them.

Carefully parsing the meaning of the advice dispensed by Jeffrey Epstein to important crypto bros like former Harvard president Larry Summers on important topics like how to best convince the younger women you are mentoring to have sex with you is time consuming, arduous work, so it makes sense that journalists are still working their way through the man’s Gmail account. I myself had a grand old time using a searchable archive of Epstein’s online footprint created by Courier Newsroom to hunt for proof of my suspicions which I laid out over the course of two previous Substack posts that Epstein might have been far more involved in the evolution of cryptocurrency into the multi-headed hydra we are living with today than anyone knew.

Now that I’ve seen the thank you note emailed to Epstein by Joi Ito, the disgraced former head of MIT’s Media Lab, explaining that he (Ito) was able to use “gift funds” presumably provided by Epstein (because that’s how thank you notes usually work) to fund bitcoin’s development team it’s safe to say that my hypothesis about Epstein and crypto has been proven to be true roughly in line with some of my wilder imaginings.

Witnessing a conspiracy theory come of age and grow up into an actual history is a beautiful thing.

But emails aren’t the only form of written communication that emerged in this explosion of epistemic Epstein diarrhea. Among the unsorted detritus there could also be found a large number of Epstein’s text messages. Unfortunately, however, the texts were dumped onto America’s psychogeography with blank spaces where their authors’ names should be and in a format not designed to maximize legibility. Instead of text messages we got text message log files.

A page of Epstein’s text messages from the document dump. Following a conversation written like this can be kinda tough sledding.

After a day of trying to read these log files - a day where I managed to repeatedly and publicly confuse the messages sent to Epstein with the messages sent by Epstein - I decided to do something that would simultaneously improve the readability of the Epstein archives and dramatically accelerate the onset of schizophrenia for conspiracy theorists all around the world for decades to come: I made Epstein’s text messages great again. And I put them on the internet so everyone can read them.

Now you too can experience the vicarious thrill of reading an election denier send a serial sex abuser messages like “Yep : but that will all be reversed when regime falls” and other crazy shit that would sound outlandish in a conspiracy theory.

The transformation of this noisy information from “machine readable log file” to “normal text message chain” brought immediate benefits. With the help of a few resourceful people over on The Everything App¹ (shout out to @ImDrinkNWyn) as well as some assists from the poor redaction skills of the Republican congressional staffers tasked with shoveling 20,000 pages of source material for a future history of American sexual deviance out the door in a hurry, I was able to deanonymize the vast majority of text messages in the Epstein archive.

You can view the results here.

ed. note: There is also now a site where you can read color highlighted versions of all of His Emails here.

If you are the kind of person who self assesses as being in possession of a reasonably good grasp of how power and influence work in this great world of ours I recommend you read them. But fair warning: that self assessment might not emerge from the experience of following along as Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Bannon try to overthrow global democracy in between teasing each other like schoolgirl besties in the same good health with which it entered. I know mine didn’t.

---

---

THE CRYPTO OF IT ALL

As I said above, the first thing I did when the archive dropped was ctrl-F my way through Epstein’s digital footprint looking for things the man had said about crypto or to well known people in the crypto industry, all of which I posted to X (the everything app). The occasionally annotated, occasionally incorrect² evidence supporting my case that Epstein was an important crypto bro is all collected here (or here if you don’t have a Twitter account). As much as I’d like to collect the highlights from that series posts and run through them with you here, realistically that’s not going to happen today so you’ll have to be content with the link for now.

But just to reiterate what the email I screenshotted above because it’s so remarkable: in 2015 Jeffrey Epstein was literally funding the entire bitcoin developer team after they had been absorbed into the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, a subsidiary of the MIT Media Lab.

Epstein might have been bitcoin’s first “VC”.

---

---

THE BANNON OF IT ALL

The thing I really want to talk about but am possibly going to have to extend into a future post is the overwhelming Steve Bannon of it all. It is impossible to read the man’s conversations with Epstein over the years of their apparently close relationship without realizing that at least some of the following statements must be true:

1. Steve Bannon views himself as a Great Man Of History, one of the most important and central figures in the 21st century.

2. Bannon turned to Epstein as a means of reaccumulating some of the power and influence he lost when he was cast out of the Trump White House (possibly for being the kind of guy who too fervently believes himself to be a Great Man Of History).

3. Bannon and Epstein were engaging in something resembling a globe destabilizing crime spree that they hoped would topple most of the world’s democratically elected governments as well as many of its autocratic Communist dictatorships.

4. Republicans in Congress (possibly at the urging of outside forces) singled out Bannon to be discredited by the release of these documents. I’ve only identified 2,108 text messages in the archive sent by someone not named Jeffrey Epstein and 1,255 of them - well over 50% - were sent by Steve Bannon. There are roughly four times as many texts from Bannon in the archive as there from any of the other 10-12 people in Jeffrey Epstein’s texting circle. The 2nd place with 340 messages is held by Melanie Walker, an airheaded doctor with whom Epstein discusses fantasies like “bitcoin health” and plant vibrations. 3rd place finisher has 56 messages. One gets the feeling this is more of a “Bannon Files” than an “Epstein Files”.

There are moments in the texting history when Bannon and Epstein seem to very much be plotting against the Trump administration at a time when Bannon was on the outs with the white house. There are also moments where they are brainstorming a scheme to generate newspaper headlines (or at least Breitbart headlines) that they hope will discredit former president Barack Obama with “the blacks”. They have it in for Xi Jinping in a major way and they also spend a lot of time complaining about people in Europe. At one point Bannon even says he is “about to deliver a death blow” to France’s Emmanuel Macron.

This was 6 years ago. Somehow Macron survived.

But it’s not all bad. There are moments of great levity, such as when Epstein makes a joke about how what he calls “Eurabia” (which I guess means “Europe with Arab immigrants”) should really be called “Yourlabia” because people in Europe are “like women.”

Just two wild and crazy guys yukkin’ it up.

The only world leader they seem to approve of is Hungary’s Viktor Orban, a man whose kleptocratic regime has rapidly reduced his country to the poorest in Europe. That’s what these guys see as a “good” outcome.

---

---

THE CRIMING OF IT ALL

There’s so much to highlight about the Bannon / Epstein conversations that I feel guilty about hitting “publish” on this piece without going through more of it. There may have to be a fourth Epstein post because there’s a lot of things that are headed for the cutting room floor. But there are some things I just can’t let slide, even though Substack is once again complaining that my post is “too long for email”.

For instance here’s Jeffrey Epstein asking Steve Bannon about “coin issues” with respect to “flows of funds” and “foreign donors” in “campaigns” under an email subject line concerning the fact that the QAnon crowd’s favourite military general - literally the guy who was going to implement martial law and put Hillary Clinton’s head on a pike in some versions of the fantasy - was considered untrustworthy by the outgoing Obama administration.

Jeffrey seems to be in the process of working through a plan to use cryptocurrency to smuggle foreign money into European elections so they can get their far right Putin friendly friends elected (at least one of whom, Slovakia’s Miroslav Lajčák, shows up in the text message history).

Jeffrey follows this up by asking Bannon “do you have coin guys? brocks (sic) people”.

“Brocks people” is a reference to the crew of degenerates that surrounds Brock Pierce, a “crypto visionary” whose career is so sordid and so long that I can’t begin to summarize it here. Please refer to the Den Of Brockiquity section of my post about corrupt New York City mayor Eric Adams if you’re unfamiliar with the man’s oeuvre. Suffice it to say there’s fraud and pedophilia involved on a scale that has made a lot of people refer to Brock Pierce as “the gay Epstein” but the pedophilia in the Brock Pierce case is of the coercive, drug induced kind.

Perhaps it was teaming up with characters like Brock Pierce that made these schoolgirl besties realize they were going to have and/or were currently having “cripto coin issues” (sic) which could only be resolved with assistance from officials in the United States Treasury Department.

Another blow-your-hair-back moment is a conversation where our two besties commiserate about their mutual acquaintance Miles Guo AKA “Miles Kwok”, a currently incarcerated but at that time extremely dangerous and extremely wealthy criminal from China whom Epstein only knows “by his Chinese name”. Miles Guo has what you might call a “checkered past” that, like the saga of Brock Pierce, is way too long and sordid for me to even summarize here. Thankfully like Brock Pierce he is also a bit player in the Eric Adams saga and so there’s some discussion of the man over in that post you can read, along with links to more detailed reporting in publications like The New Yorker and Vice. I’ll just give you a few highlights:

1. Guo has at least four names (that we know of).

2. He used to work for (probably corrupt) high ranking leaders of the MSS (China’s equivalent of the CIA), almost definitely as a bag man, and possibly as a hit man.

3. He allegedly stole an incredible amount of money from powerful people in the Chinese government, fled to America, and promptly ingratiated himself into the MAGA movement by founding a media company devoted to attacking the Chinese government. The Chinese government has been after him ever since.

4. The previous bullet points might all be lies concocted as part of an elaborate cover story to disguise his real job, which is to spy on the MAGA movement on behalf of the Chinese government.

5. Steve Bannon was arrested on Guo’s enormous and ostentatious yacht while it was anchored in New York City.

6. When Guo was finally brought to justice himself a few years ago (current residence: a maximum security federal prison) a firebomb went off in his Park Ave. penthouse, presumably in an attempt to destroy evidence.

7. Pathological liar, former U.S. Congressman, and convicted felon George Santos was among Guo’s staunchest defenders.

Epstein warns Bannon to be careful about his relationship with Guo, whom he also knows (how many murderous Chinese fraudsters and/or double agents do you know?) and believes to be an extremely violent individual with a habit of ripping nostrils off of the faces of those who cross him. Bannon replies by saying Guo, like Trump, is an “instrument” - a tool Bannon can use to bend the world to his will. They then launch into a discussion of how they need to recruit a “populist” to topple the Argentinian government, after which they will be able to make enormous amounts of money investing in Argentina’s recovery. And it doesn’t get less crazy from there. At one point they start talking about adding a “Christian component” to a cryptocurrency they plan to launch to fund the think tanks and other tools of the trade that make up any good revolutionary’s toolkit in 2018.

Are Epstein and Bannon delusional? Possibly. Are they legitimately dangerous and a threat to global stability? Obviously.

Good luck, democracy.

---

1. FKA “The Privatized Public Square” FKA “Twitter”.

2. My two big mistakes were 1) assuming that some of these conversations were with Epstein’s personal assistant (they’re not) and 2) mixing up who is Steve Bannon and who is Jeffrey Epstein in some of the screenshots, in particular the first batch of screenshots of the text message logs, which start to appear roughly halfway down the thread.