"Elon Musk has been positioning Grok as the 'anti-woke' alternative to other chatbots since its launch. That positioning has consequences. When you market your AI as willing to do what others won’t, you’re telling users that the guardrails are negotiable. And when those guardrails fail, when your product starts generating child sexual abuse material, you’ve created a monster you can’t easily control."
"The real story here is that xAI built a product that generated child sexual abuse material, and when journalists called for comment, the company refused to engage. That’s a scandal. That’s something Elon Musk should have to answer for. Instead, we get headlines that treat the chatbot as a self-aware actor taking responsibility, which lets the actual humans who made actual decisions completely off the hook."
Alan Elrod notes that "the very parts of American culture that claim to promote teen abstinence and sexual purity operate on a parallel logic to the rape culture that enables the darkest misogynistic violence against women."
"The idea that men are powerless when it comes to sexual desire is a peculiar thing to set against all the other domains in which male leadership and control is considered a requirement."
"Women are thus seen as wholly in control of their sexuality, responsible for every lustful thought they excite in the men around them, but also fatally incapable of leading themselves or their household in serious matters like faith and finances. It’s a lose-lose proposition."
As Tim Whitaker notes, one bubble the Epstein revelations haven't popped is the bubble of white Christian nationalist support for Trump.
As Trump loses support including even among a third of voters who voted for him in 2024, one group remains impervious to any negative information, including the damning information we now have from even tiny bits of the Epstein files.
That group is Trump's white Christian nationalist base. Tim Whitaker explains why those folks are impervious to anything we have discovered or may discover from the Epstein files:
"There's a mantra. It's usually unspoken, ometimes it's not, where you essentially don't touch God's anointed. So how does this relate to Trump?"
"Well, when you're told by your pastors, by your faith leaders, by authors, by evangelists, by prophets, that Trump is being used by God to drain the swamp, that Trump is restoring family values back to America, that Trump is standing for Christian principles, he becomes someone who is now God's anointed in your mind."
"So even when you have damning emails by the world's most prolific pedophile that we know of serving the elite billionaire class saying that Donald Trump is the dog that hasn't barked yet, even when you have that email coming out or when you have Epstein in a deposition pleading the fifth when he asks about if Trump liked young girls — it doesn't matter because you're touching God's anointed."
"That's how deep the brainwashing runs in these spaces. …
That's how it works. They give so much cover for abuse in a lot of these spaces, so it's easy to carry that over into the political sphere. Easily. Because you have to protect the church. You have to protect the faith. You protect the powerful because it's a bad witness if it comes out."
This first excerpt in the thread is long. My apologies for that. What J. Filipovic has to say here seems so important that it's hard to choose short pieces to share:
"The Trump administration is a regime of restoring male power. That includes being a pedophile protection racket covering for men who sexually abuse girls."
"The Situation Room is one of the most secure facilities in the most secure building in Washington, D.C. Holding a meeting in the Situation Room implies that sensitive information is being shared that raises national security concerns of the highest order.
"Let’s be honest for a moment: if those files actually exonerated Donald Trump and incriminated a bunch of Democrats, Trump would be the first to release them. Instead, he’s putting the weight of his entire government into one of the most blatant cover-up attempts in American history."
"We shouldn’t lose sight of one more thing: Trump, at least, seems very much to believe there are still more damaging revelations to come. He wouldn’t have cranked up the pressure on Boebert and company yesterday if he thought the stuff we’d already seen was the worst of it. Whatever the high-water mark of this scandal is, we likely haven’t hit it yet."
"The Epstein emails released yesterday are not the files the White House is fighting so hard to keep from coming out. The only reasonable conclusion is that they must be even worse for Trump than what we’ve seen so far. And so far has been pretty bad."
“The crisis of elite impunity that is ruining our society cannot be more clearly or convincingly demonstrated than with the fact that all of these people wrote all this stuff into an email and hit Send.”
"For MAGA, the Epstein scandal captured something big, right? Something essential about the wickedness of global elites. But in their schema, they kind of had a very clear idea of who these elites were—Democrats and liberals, George Soros, the Clintons, and so forth."
"Now it turns out that the elite cover-up is coming from inside the house. It’s coming from deep inside MAGA—it’s Trump and his allies in the government."
"Nazi and chief propagandist, Karoline Leavitt, falsely claimed during a press conference yesterday that the Trump regime is the most transparent in American history. Why then did Attorney General Pam Bondi order FBI employees to scrub through the Epstein files for any mention of Donald’s name and then redact them?: