November 14, 2025

Each Friday, I write to you with my perspective on the news of the week. If I’m being honest, it’s my favorite column to write. It forces me to make sense of what is happening in politics, law, elections and democracy. Most weeks, after spending some time thinking, the piece writes itself.

Not this week. Candidly, I spent hours last night trying to digest the disparate events of the week into a coherent whole. The end of the government shutdown and the release of the Epstein Files were the biggest stories. I wrote a piece connecting the two that resonated with readers like few things I’ve ever written. On Reddit alone, it had over 1.7 million views. 

While those topics are understandably dominating the current news cycle, I can’t quite shake a different pattern that crystallized for me this week — further evidence that legacy media is either too arrogant or too scared to acknowledge its role in democracy’s decline.

The biggest piece of evidence was the blockbuster Epstein email release.

As I sorted through the documents, I was struck particularly hard by an email in which Jeffrey Epstein offered the recipient photos of Donald Trump and “girls in bikinis in my kitchen.” After further banter, Epstein brags that he “gave” Trump his “20-year-old girlfriend...after two years.”

Then it hit me: Epstein was emailing former New York Times reporter Landon Thomas Jr. Checking the date of this email — Dec. 8, 2015 — I suddenly realized that at the exact same time the newspaper was hyping Hillary Clinton’s emails and castigating her, its own reporter had emails from Jeffrey Epstein that were highly damaging to Trump. 

Why didn’t they release these emails? Why did they participate in such a hypocritical smear campaign? 

And surely now that this has come to light...