EPSTAINED: Why Mainstream News is Protecting Epstein & Friends

In 1976 a Movie Predicted the Media Would Protect the Elite and That is Exactly Where We are at Today.

The jokes on all of us.

I’m going to tell you something that will make you physically sick, and then I’m going to prove it to you with documents that your own government just released.

The news isn’t news anymore. It stopped being news decades ago. What you’re watching when you turn on CNN or Fox isn’t journalism. It’s theatre. It’s spin doctoring. It’s a protection racket for the billionaire class, and right now, that protection racket is working overtime to make sure you don’t understand what the Epstein files actually say.

Three and a half million pages dropped. Trump’s name appears over one million times in the unredacted documents. One million. And somehow, the dominant narrative on every major news network is that there’s nothing to see here. Move along. Look at the stock market instead. Aren’t you proud of how high the Dow is?

This is not incompetence. This is not bias. This is coordinated institutional capture at a level that would have seemed impossible to articulate in polite company until very recently, except that a screenwriter named Paddy Chayefsky laid out the exact blueprint in 1976, and nobody wanted to believe him because the truth was too ugly.

The Mad Prophet Was Right About Everything

Network won four Academy Awards in 1977. Peter Finch played Howard Beale, a news anchor who has a breakdown on live television and starts telling the truth about the systems that control your life. The network executives, instead of pulling him off the air, realize his insanity is great for ratings. They package his mental collapse as entertainment. They build an entire show around exploiting his deteriorating mind. And when his message starts to threaten the actual power structure, when he begins exposing corporate control that goes beyond mere television, they murder him on live TV to boost sweeps week.

The film was called satire in 1976. Critics described it as “outrageous” and “impossible to accept.” CBS News President Richard Salant said flatly it “simply couldn’t happen.”

Fifty years later, it’s a documentary.

Chayefsky’s script predicted reality television. It predicted the weaponization of outrage for ratings. It predicted that news divisions would be subsumed by entertainment divisions. It predicted that corporations would prioritize profit over truth to such an extreme degree that human life itself would become a commodity to be packaged and sold. The entire architecture of modern media was spelled out in 120 pages of dialogue in 1976, and we watched it all come true in slow motion while pretending it was progress.

But here’s what Chayefsky couldn’t have predicted, or maybe didn’t dare write: The news media wouldn’t just exploit tragedy for ratings. It would actively participate in covering up systemic evil at the highest levels of power to protect its access to that power.

That’s where we are now.

A Million Mentions and a Massive Coverup

The Department of Justice released over 3 million pages of Jeffrey Epstein documents on January 30th, 2026. This came more than a month after President Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law, and only after Congress forced their hand.

Representative Jamie Raskin searched Trump’s name in the unredacted files and reported it came up “more than a million times.” Not a thousand. Not ten thousand. One million references to a sitting U.S. President in documents related to the largest sex trafficking and blackmail operation in modern history.

Trump appears in dozens of photos with Epstein and Maxwell. He’s mentioned thousands of times in news articles Epstein shared. He’s quoted in a 2009 email exchange between Epstein and Maxwell contradicting his own public claims about kicking Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago. FBI documents include a 2019 interview with former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter, who says Trump contacted him about the Epstein investigation and reportedly told him “everyone has known he’s been doing this” and that Maxwell is “evil.”

There are unverified FBI tips alleging Trump attended parties with underage girls. There’s a heavily redacted 2008 court document listing Trump as number four among people believed to have “knowledge of finances and defendant’s sexual desire for minor girls.”

Are all of these allegations true? I don’t know. Some are unverified tips from sources the FBI deemed not credible. But here’s what I do know: When you have a million data points connecting someone to an investigation, that’s not a coincidence. That’s a pattern.

And the mainstream media’s response to this volume of material has been to... talk about the stock market.

The Attorney General Who Wouldn’t Face the Victims

On February 11th, 2026, Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee about the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files.

Eleven survivors of Epstein’s abuse sat in the hearing room wearing white. They came seeking accountability. They came seeking answers about why their names appeared unredacted in public documents when they were promised protection. They came seeking an apology for the Justice Department’s failure to contact them before releasing files that contained their personal information.

Back in October Bondi claimed, ‘I’m not a liar’ and has since lied under oath. And 50% of Americans do not care if our government is protecting a global ring of pedophiles.

Representative Pramila Jayapal asked those survivors to stand. All eleven raised their hands when asked if the DOJ had failed to contact them before releasing documents with their information. Then Jayapal asked Bondi to turn around, look at these women, and apologize for what the Justice Department had done to them.

Bondi refused.

She literally kept her back turned to abuse survivors standing directly behind her and said she would not “get in the gutter” for what she called “theatrics.” When Democratic Representative Ted Lieu pointed out that unverified tips about Trump in the files count as evidence and suggested Bondi was not being truthful under oath, she exploded: “Don’t you ever accuse me of committing a crime.”

She spent five hours attacking Democrats, deflecting questions, calling one representative a “washed up loser lawyer,” and defending Trump rather than defending victims. When asked if Trump had attended parties with underage girls, she called the question “ridiculous” and insisted there was “no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime.”

A million mentions in Epstein files is apparently not evidence.

Bondi also appeared to have surveillance records showing Representative Jayapal’s search history from the DOJ’s Epstein database. She brought a binder to the hearing labeled “Jayapal Pramila Search History” containing printouts of exactly which documents Jayapal had accessed. Members of Congress were given access to unredacted files two days before the hearing, ostensibly to prepare. Instead, the DOJ appears to have used that access to track what questions might be coming and prepare defensive talking points.

This is not justice. This is not law enforcement. This is a protection racket.

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What Network Taught Us About Power

There’s a scene in Network where corporate executive Arthur Jensen takes Howard Beale up to a darkened boardroom and delivers what might be the most important monologue ever written about how power actually functions in the modern world.

“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.”

Jensen explains that the world is run by a small number of corporate entities that transcend national borders, that view human beings as data points in profit calculations, and that any threat to this system will be eliminated. Not through violence, necessarily, but through institutional capture. Through making people dependent on the system. Through controlling the narrative so thoroughly that people can’t even imagine an alternative.

Beale is destroyed not because he’s wrong. He’s destroyed because he’s right, and his rightness threatens profits.

Sound familiar?

Jeffrey Epstein ran a multinational blackmail and trafficking operation that compromised politicians, scientists, business titans, and royalty across multiple countries. He had connections to CIA, Mossad, MI6. He named a bank account after Baal, the ancient Canaanite child sacrifice deity. He built a temple on his island with pillars modeled after Solomon’s Temple. He traded in human beings the way most people trade stocks, and he did it for decades with the protection of multiple intelligence agencies and the willing blindness of everyone who benefited from his network.

The files prove he wasn’t operating in secret. People knew. Powerful people knew. And they participated anyway because the network protected them as long as they were useful.

Bill Gates caught an STD from trafficked Russian girls and allegedly begged Epstein for secret antibiotics so he could dose his wife Melinda without her knowledge. This is the man who shaped global pandemic response. Harvard scientists emailed Epstein discussing hormonal experimentation on toddlers and the “sexual economics” of transitioning children, written like a commodity trader analyzing market segments. A mother sold her baby to Epstein and sent a photo with a thank-you note for the wire transfer.

The emails reference torture videos. They reference “stage three” victims who were abused young enough to “gradually develop special and supernatural abilities” from the trauma. They reference ritual sacrifice. The word “pizza” appears over 900 times, matching FBI-documented coded language used by trafficking networks.

This is what’s in the files. This is not conspiracy theory. This is in the documents your government just released.

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The Protection Racket Goes Primetime

So why isn’t this the only story on every news channel in America?

Because the same forces Paddy Chayefsky warned about in 1976 are still running the show. The news isn’t independent. It’s owned by the same corporate conglomerates that own defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, tech monopolies, and financial institutions. The people implicated in the Epstein files aren’t just billionaires. They’re shareholders. They’re advertisers. They’re board members of the same parent companies that own your news networks.

Six corporations control 90% of American media. Comcast owns NBC. AT&T owns CNN through Warner Bros. Discovery. National Amusements owns CBS. Disney owns ABC. Fox is still the Murdoch family. And every single one of these entities has financial relationships with people whose names appear in those 3 million pages.

The news media can’t report honestly on Epstein because doing so would implicate the power structure that signs their paychecks.

So instead, they talk about Trump’s name appearing in the files as if a million mentions is somehow exculpatory. They interview legal experts who parse language about “credible” versus “unverified” tips while ignoring that the FBI dismissed trafficking victims as “not credible” or “emotionally unstable” when they walked into field offices to report ritual abuse. They focus on the unredacted victim names and the DOJ’s incompetence while ignoring the systematically redacted names of powerful men whose identities were blacked out to protect them, not the survivors.

They turn it into partisan theatre. Democrats attack Bondi. Republicans defend her. Everyone argues about process and redactions while the actual content of the files, the descriptions of torture and ritual abuse and baby sales and occult worship at the highest levels of global power, gets memory-holed before most Americans even knew it existed.

This is not an accident. This is the script.

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(FYI: I am a registered Republican and have never voted Democrat.)

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Forty Years of Conditioning

Your parents’ generation watched Network in theatres and thought it was a clever satire about television getting too commercial. Your generation watches cable news scream at each other about whether Trump knew Epstein was trafficking girls when he introduced Virginia Giuffre to him at Mar-a-Lago, and somehow nobody is asking why we’re arguing about levels of knowledge instead of demanding arrests.

The media has conditioned you, over decades, to accept that the news is entertainment. That facts are negotiable. That truth depends on which channel you watch. They’ve trained you to treat politics like sports, where you pick a team and defend it regardless of evidence. They’ve taught you that being “informed” means watching an hour of cable news that tells you what to think rather than reading documents and forming your own conclusions.

And most importantly, they’ve normalized the idea that powerful people are above the law. That billionaires and presidents and princes operate by different rules. That justice is for regular people, not for the ones who write the checks.

Jeffrey Epstein trafficked children for decades with the knowledge and participation of intelligence agencies, corporate executives, scientists, politicians, and royalty. He died in federal custody under circumstances so suspicious that even mainstream outlets acknowledged it looked like murder. Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking children to nobody, because prosecutors refused to name any men who raped those children except Epstein himself.

And now we have 3 million pages proving that dozens, maybe hundreds, of powerful men were involved, and the Attorney General of the United States spent five hours insulting Congress and defending the President instead of defending victims.

The news isn’t covering this honestly because the news is part of the cover-up. The media isn’t failing its job. It’s doing its job exactly as designed: protecting the powerful and managing your expectations until you’re too exhausted to be outraged anymore.

Why You Need to Watch Network Right Now

My friend over at Diligent Maniac on YouTube recently released a video essay called “Network (1976) is the Most Important Movie of the Past 50 Years” and I need every single one of you to stop what you’re doing and watch it right now. Ten minutes of your life. That’s all I’m asking.

He breaks down exactly how Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay predicted the complete moral collapse of American media, how the film’s structure demonstrates the simultaneous corruption of the moral observer (Max Schumacher), the betrayal of the prophetic voice (Howard Beale), and the triumph of pure exploitation (Diana Christensen). He shows you how every single beat of that movie has played out in real life over the past five decades, and why understanding this film is essential to understanding what’s happening to you right now.

The movie isn’t just entertainment. It’s a warning system. It’s a blueprint. Chayefsky spent years researching television news organizations and he saw where this was headed. He understood that once corporate profit becomes the only metric that matters, everything else gets sacrificed. Truth. Ethics. Human life. All of it becomes content to be monetized.

If you don’t understand how we got here, you can’t fight back. And right now, most people don’t even realize they’re being lied to because the lies are packaged as news.

Watch the video. Subscribe to Diligent Maniac’s channel. Comment “The Wise Wolf on Substack sent ya!” so he knows we’re paying attention. Then share it with everyone you know who still thinks CNN or Fox is telling them the truth about anything that matters.

You can find it here:

This is not optional. This is essential viewing if you want to understand what the hell is actually happening in your country.

What Comes Next

Howard Beale’s famous speech, the one everyone knows, goes like this:

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it... We sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad, worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD!”

Fifty years later, that speech hits different because we’re living in it. Except now the punks aren’t running wild in the streets. The predators are in boardrooms and courtrooms and Congress, and they’re trafficking children while your news anchors talk about the Dow hitting record highs.

You want to know if today’s mainstream media is nothing more than spin doctoring to protect pedophile billionaires from being arrested?

The evidence is sitting in 3 million pages of documents your government tried to bury. The Attorney General just spent five hours defending a president whose name appears a million times in those files instead of defending the children who were raped and sold. And your news networks are treating this like a partisan squabble instead of a civilizational emergency.

So yes. The answer is yes. The mainstream media is protecting them. Not through conspiracy in smoke-filled rooms, but through institutional capture that’s so complete, so total, that most journalists don’t even realize they’re doing it. They’ve been trained to treat access as more valuable than truth. They’ve been conditioned to protect their sources, and their sources are the same billionaires who sign their paychecks.

Paddy Chayefsky tried to warn you in 1976. Howard Beale screamed at you to get mad as hell. And most people changed the channel because the truth was too uncomfortable.

Don’t change the channel this time.

The files are real. The crimes are real. The coverup is happening in real time. And the only way this stops is if enough people get mad enough, loud enough, persistent enough that the system can’t ignore us anymore.

Go to your window. Open it. Stick your head out and start screaming ‘I’m mad as Hell!’

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And watch that video. Seriously. Ten minutes. Do it now.