Epstein derangement syndrome: moral panic and hysterical overreactions

The Epstein file release has resulted in many people losing their minds: engaging in moral panic, filtering for worst-case interpretations of so many things; having hysterical overreactions. In this episode, I take a look at some of this hysteria. Using a video from the political influencer Kyle Kulinski, who has 2.5M subscribers on YouTube, as a case study, I examine how ambiguous snippets—like an audio clip of people talking about killing deer and crashing a boat—get instantly interpreted by Kyle and others as some sort of evidence that might point to murder. Why are smart, influential people speaking with absolute certainty about what pixelated photos and ambiguous recordings and emails tell us? Why are people claiming to find evidence of cannibalism in the files? And what does all this say about our toxic political polarization problems, and our tendency to assume the worst when our perceived enemies are involved? If you’re concerned about paranoid, conspiracy-minded thinking, and how that ties into our political divides, this episode will help you understand why emotional reasoning is so rampant, and why it’s important to fight against it, when we see others doing it, and within ourselves — not just for the sake of society, but for our own mental health.  

A transcript is below.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

(Transcripts are automatically generated and do contain errors.)

Kyle Kulinksi: No, it really does appear to be a shadow government of pedophile, billionaire elites that run the world. And they’re sadists. Some of them are into torture, some of them are into cannibalism. They are actually part of a clique, a club, a fraternity, and they keep humans like pets and do the most sadistic things imaginable to them.

Zach Elwood: So this will be a video examining some Epstein file hysteria. I think it’s clear that there are many people just losing their minds about the Epstein files and just thinking very badly and emotionally interpreting everything through the worst case filter, most pessimistic filter of what happened. And this includes some pretty popular and, uh, I’d say even some pretty smart people that, uh, you would expect.

More from, and to be clear, I should say here, nothing I am examining here is to deny that terrible things were done by Epstein and others. This is not what this video is about. It’s not any sort of defense of Epstein or his friends. And I don’t pretend to be any sort of expert on what happened with Epstein.

I haven’t even followed the Epstein news that much. That’s not what this video is about. It’s not really about. The Epstein case, it’s about people’s reactions to the case and there’s just clearly many people engaging in hysterical moral panic ways to this case and just plain dumb ways. Uh, and in turn, those people are spreading hysteria and misinformation to others, and it’s actually an ink in many cases, impacting people’s mental health.

Um, making them be overly paranoid and just reaching catastrophizing views of what’s happening, about what is happening in the world. Um, so you can see, you know, some of this stuff ties into some of the extreme things that happened with, um, extreme beliefs with Pizzagate a few years ago. It’s just more happening now with, um, more liberal democrat associated people.

Um, I mean, it was happening then too with an assorted variety of people, but it’s happening more now with, um, liberal associated people just because now Trump, you know, focusing on Epstein is more associated with, um, you know, Trump now. So you have more anti-Trump connotations, which gets more people into the mix.

One reason I’m interested in these topics is because I’ve examined, um, conflict and polarization dynamics in my work, um, my books and with this podcast. Uh, these things tie into our overly pessimistic views of other people. They quote other side and how that relates to how it shifts our thinking based on our emotions and such.

Um, so yeah, I’ll talk more about that in a bit. But one thing I want to focus on here is a video that, the video that made me want to make this episode was this video by, um, Kyle Kalinski, who has a show called Secular Talk, and he had this. YouTube channel or YouTube video that came across my feed. I don’t follow him.

Uh, the name of his YouTube video was Kill Them and Dispose Them. In quotes, we found the worst Epstein viles. The worst is in all caps, as is Kill them and dispose them. So that got my attention. I I wanted to see what that was about. First lemme back up and say, Kyle Kalinski is a pretty. A popular content maker.

He’s known for being, um, you know, progressive activist. His, his YouTube channel has, um, 2.1 million subscribers. The video I just talked about had 566,000 views. He’s been around for a while, since 2008. Pretty influential. You know, that’s why the things I’m gonna say about just how dumb his thinking is and emotional, his thinking is.

It is significant. I mean, this is a good example of, um, of just how bad a lot of these political commentators are these days, and I didn’t know much about Kyle until recently, but you can regularly hear him just speaking about, you know, the quote other side about conservatives as if they’re all the same, as if they’re all motivated by the, the worst possible, um, motivations, you know, which ties into the my polarization related work.

Yeah, he criticized the Never Trump movement. He discouraged people, praising Republicans who criticize Trump stating that establishment Republicans want Trump to do every single thing he’s doing, minus the mean tweets. You know, just, I think that’s a, gets into the polarization dynamics of, uh, worst case thinking about the entire other side and failure to distinguish between different approaches amongst your quote enemies and so on.

Another interesting thing about Kyle. I should mention this. He’s a, he’s the husband of Crystal Ball, who is a political commentator herself. She’s on a pretty popular show called Breaking Points. You might have heard of it. Okay.

Kyle Kulinksi: So the Epstein file scandal keeps getting darker and darker and more and more disturbing.

And the coverup is probably the most pathetic and sad coverup I think I’ve ever seen in my life. It is definitely amateur hour. This is Bush League stuff. Um, now they’re coming out and saying, that’s it. Alright. We released everything that we got. That’s, we got.

Zach Elwood: All right. I’m gonna skip ahead to where he.

And he’s talking about the failure to release the documents, which I actually agree with him. I, I think there’s legitimate views on the, the failure of, uh, to, to release the documents. They’ve only released like 2% of the documents and it’s been very haphazard. I don’t disagree with a lot of that, but let’s get to him talking about this specific clip.

Remember, this is a, I want to video title. We found the worst Epstein files

Kyle Kulinksi: and their language is a global criminal enterprise doing crimes against humanity, which sounds very similar to what I’ve told you. It’s a shadow government of moneyed interests, a cabal of pedophile, greatist, billionaire sadists who really run the world and view you and me as subhuman.

And I’ve never been more convinced in my life that class politics is is a factual truth. It’s an objective truth. That class politics is, is the end all, be all that extreme wealth rots your soul and turns you into a demonic entity based on what these people were doing. Alright? But you gotta,

Zach Elwood: okay.

Demonic entities, uh, people who are amazingly evil, who won’t, don’t think of you as subhuman. Okay? What’s, what’s Kyle gonna look at to back up these pretty incendiary claims?

Kyle Kulinksi: Epstein files a audio file of a woman saying kill them and dispose of the bodies. Huh? So this is on the Justice Department website, and I’m gonna play some of it for you here.

Let’s listen.

Epstein employee: No, you called me after the fact. You didn’t call me when the fucking boat crashed. No one called me. Let’s get that straight. Happened. We tried to, to hold out. I got the message from you. Midnight. Did it happen at midnight? No. Did anybody think to call me and say they’re gonna use the boat?

Come get some dead fucking Derrick. No. No. Right. No, you’re right. And now we’re dealing with this shit. Look at the boat. Look at the man’s boat. This is bullshit. No, that’s a nightmare. You are the head electrician. You like one of the head landscapers. I finally got you a gig as a boat captain, and this is the bullshit I’m dealing with.

This is bullshit. All y’all know better than this shit. This man is livid right now with us.

I mean, I don’t even know what the, I’m so fucking cross right now. Right? This fuck makes no sense. Oh, I

especially after we had good success.

This, this is just completely, completely, this makes absolutely no sense. This is, I pissed off about, told both of these guys. I said, do you want these? Dare you wait for the morning. And then all of a sudden, but that was the plan to kill them, wait till daylight and then we dispose of them properly. And then, and then I get these calls and this, and this bullshit happened.

This is the man’s crew boat bad enough. You don’t have another boat. You don’t have another boat. What are we gonna use a barge? How much money is that gonna cost us to run a staff back and forth on a damn barge? Then

Kyle Kulinksi: think about how what they’re saying here makes no sense. So they keep talking about a boat, a boat, a boat.

Like there was some sort of a boat crash. So you hear that and you go, okay, maybe they’re, maybe they’re talking about a boat crash, right? But then they go, they start talking about a deer. They go. The deer. The deer. Like there’s a problem with the deer. Well, if it’s a boat crash, how the fuck can a boat crash?

Kill a deer. Right? That that makes absolutely no sense. And then they go kill it and dispose of the bodies. Kill ’em, and dispose of the bodies. What? So, you know, I mean steel manning them, it’s like, I guess they’re talking about maybe there was some sort of an accident with a car hitting a deer and the car is damaged and that pissed off Jeffrey Epstein and they’re saying, kill the deer and dispose of the body.

The bodies. I don’t know. I, when you get the repeated references to the boat and then they talk about deer and then they go kill them and dispose of the body. I don’t know, man. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I’m, I’m still, this is, I’m just giving you a little taste here of what’s to come because these files actually get,

Zach Elwood: so, um, yeah.

So this is, this is how Kyle leads, we found the worst Epstein files. This is the way he leads with, I mean. Playing that video, listening to that video, I immediately, it did not sound like any, uh, murderous crime, that being committed. It sounded like a completely banal situation involving dead deer in a boat.

Now, is it a little bit hard to understand without knowing the specifics? Of course it is, and that’s why people are paying attention to it. That’s, you know, it’s, it’s vagueness is why people are paying attention to it. But the interaction, the way they’re talking, the specifics, I immediately just found it almost certainly to be something banal.

Uh, and then after listening it to it a couple times, it sounds like there were some workers who were supposed to kill some deer wait until morning to dispose of the bodies, but they instead took the boat late at night and ended up hurting, uh, damaging the boat. Now Kyle’s acting like that’s some crazy story, but you know, you have to remember this is an island environment, right?

Like, so, um. Jeffrey Epstein’s Island is an island called Little St. James was, which is part of the US Virgin I Virgin Islands. And, uh, you can find very easily that they have a big deer problem there. There’s, they were introduced and they run rampant. They’re only predators are wild dogs, cars, there’s deer everywhere.

And they apparently regularly have to, uh. Kill them and get rid of them because they are such a nuisance. So when you know that the idea that there were these deer that needed to be killed, maybe they were causing trouble, maybe they were injured, who knows what? Easy to imagine how that conversation.

Plays out. You know, maybe some workers were disobeying orders because they wanted to kill the deer and take the meat for themselves. You know, who knows? Uh, we don’t know. But listening to it, even once, it seemed likely to me that it was a completely banal incident. And, uh, you know, does Kyle really believe that this deer related audio is the worst of the Epstein files and worthy of inclusion in such a category?

And where are they making this video about? Is there an element for Kyle. Wanting to lean into sensationalism for clicks and attention to increase his YouTube views. Is that perhaps related to a tendency he has to do this kind of thing for other political topics when it comes to worst case, uh, framings of the quote, other side and such?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to what goes on in Kyle’s mind. I just know this is amazingly stupid stuff. So, uh, let’s look at later in the video. He goes, he starts going through images from the Epstein file release, and, and these are images as you’ll see. Well, if you’re listening on audio and not watching the YouTube video, these are images where they’ve been pixelated and where the faces have been blurred, uh, have been blacked out.

But Kyle says that he could, he’s, he confidently states that he thinks some of these images are of underage girls. So let’s watch Kyle watch these. Look at these images.

Kyle Kulinksi: This is the stuff of nightmares, y’all. This is the stuff of nightmares, okay? But still, now I’m gonna give you a warning. Everything we talked about at this point is disturbing.

This is perhaps even more disturbing because it deals with redacted pictures, but pictures nonetheless. But here are some of the things that people have dug up in the Epstein files within the past week or so, and uh, I’m giving you a warning again, you might not wanna see this one, but let me go ahead and show you.

Okay. Pam Bondy saw this photo, one of many from the Epstein files, yet declared there was no evidence of crimes. She now says the DOJ has released all the files even though we have seen only 50% of the files. And by the way, that’s outdated. Apparently it’s only 2% of the files we’ve seen. She is a, a pedophile protector covering up for these despicable perpetrators.

And this picture, ladies and gentlemen, it is redacted. It is a little bit pixelated, but it very clearly shows what is almost certainly an underage girl sitting on a toilet. Performing some sort of sex act on a guy. Okay? And we also happen to find, again, warning, if you don’t wanna see this, there’s a bunch of disturbing stuff here.

This stuff in the Epstein files. Alright? A lot of it is

Zach Elwood: now for people who are listening to this on audio. Uh, none of the pictures Kyle shows in any way to me. Making me confident that of anybody’s age in these photos. Like I, I would not be able to guess anyone’s age in these photos, and yet Kyle is able to confidently claim that he’s almost certain that it shows underage people, you know, similar to the, the boat audio.

It, it’s just so fundamentally dumb. Like you can easily find women that look quite young who are older. B, he seems to be basing that first thing on the fact that she’s in like a school girl uniform, but that doesn’t mean anything. Uh, people can dress in different clothes and then, you know, these are, these are pixelated images with the faces hidden.

Um. Again, I’ll, I’ll just, I’ll just keep playing this, but it’s just so fundamentally such a good example of the kind of level of thinking that Kyle Kalinsky and so many other people are doing, and not just on Epstein files, but this is the kind of thinking that goes on for politics. These are people influencing political discourse, and this is the, this is the kind of thing that political polarization gives rise to, like more emotional thinking, worst case framings of people we don’t like, et cetera, et cetera.

It’s just at a fundamental level, it’s dumb. And you know, toxic polarization, toxic conflict makes us dumber. It gives more support to people like Kyle Kolinsky, who in turn make other people more angry, more rage filled, et cetera. Let me keep playing this

Kyle Kulinksi: super pixelated, and a lot of it is redacted, but you can get the general gist of what’s going on here.

Some of these things, it looks like they may be, uh, you know, adults, but there’s clear examples here, maybe three or four different examples where the pictures are clearly it’s kids, it’s children.

Zach Elwood: He says clearly, but nothing about any of those images are clear at all.

Kyle Kulinksi: They’re underage and they’re naked and or involved in different sex acts.

So I’m gonna walk you through this here, as you can see, super redacted, but you get the sense some of them are fully redacted. My guess is that’s just flat out CS a and it’s undeniable. Um, but as I keep scrolling here, this one is clearly somebody beed over. Um, this one, you can’t tell the ages of this one, but we’re gonna keep going and you’ll see.

Somebody’s private parts here. Um, very pixelated, but clearly somebody maybe underage, maybe not,

Zach Elwood: maybe underage, maybe not. There’s literally nothing in this photo that you would ever make a guess about age.

Kyle Kulinksi: Showing their breasts. And you know, again, I, it looks like what the DOJ did is they, they hyper pixelated it to try to really obscure it, and then they also redacted on top of it.

I don’t think that in the original files, these pictures were this pixelated. Right. Um, unless what they did is they, you know, these pictures were like around his house and they zoomed in from afar, which I doubt it that we’ve, they’ve done that with other parts of the files. I don’t think they did that here.

I think this is just, it was. Not pixelated and not redacted and they try to pixelate it and redact it. But as I scroll here again, what you’re gonna win is, this is one that I think is for sure underage. This picture right here, thi this one to me looks for sure under,

Zach Elwood: uh, again, there’s nothing about this photo that would make me certain or even confident that this person was underage.

I would say if Kyle is so certain based on these, the slim information of who’s underage and who’s not, I’d say we need to look into his computers. That was just a joke. That’s the kind of thing that Kyle might say about somebody else. I, I am completely kidding. I think he’s just emotionally reasoning here.

Kyle Kulinksi: It just doesn’t give me adult vibes the way that this one is standing there for sure. I think that’s an underage, an underage one. All right. I’m gonna keep going here. This one also looks potentially underage. Um,

Zach Elwood: anyway, I’m gonna stop it there. You get the idea. It’s just a lot of supposition based on not much information, which is kind of Kyle’s mo I think in, in many cases.

And there was actually a couple weeks ago in the New York Times, there was an article about, uh, government publishing dozens of new photos in the Epstein files. Uh, these were unredacted. They showed young women, possibly teenagers, but you know, even in this case, even with the photos shown, it said the people in the photos appeared to be young, although it was unclear whether they were minors.

This is just to emphasize even when the faces are shown and when the images are not pixelated, it can be hard to tell the age of people, right? But somehow Kyle’s very certain about who’s underage from these redacted pixelated, uh, face hidden images, right? And so you can get a sense of how people are reacting, reacting to this stuff in general.

Um, reading the YouTube comments for Kyle’s and other people’s, uh, videos on this kind of stuff, this shit is absolutely appalling. Um. Burn the system down. It doesn’t deserve to exist. The system deserves to collapse. There needs to be a revolution. Now, no one freaks out like that over deer. They’re talking about murder.

We are at the tip of the iceberg on how dark this is. There was even some stuff about, uh, David Ick, I don’t know if you know, well, I can’t find it now, but there was some comment earlier that was re referencing. David Ick, who was the guy. Who known for, uh, promoting the, um, the lizard people, uh, idea that there’s Satanic or evil lizard people rolling us.

Somebody said, uh, I guess maybe the comment was deleted. The comment had re previously said, David Ick warned us about this evil, uh, or this elite satanic sick. Over 30 years ago, he is vindicated. So just to say there’s lots of people losing their minds over this stuff, and Kyle can be seen as a key contributor to ramping up people’s paranoia and fear and just outsized fear completely out of, uh, the realm of what should be the view of these things.

In the, in the YouTube comments, you had a lot of people saying, why isn’t the, why aren’t the mainstream media covering this? They’re all complicit. They’re in on this. Um, and I think it should be obvious that. Mainstream respected news outlets are not covering this stuff because it’s just a lot of supposition.

I mean, there’s so many things people are running with that are based on such little information, and yet you have so many people jumping to paranoid conclusions like that. The media’s in on it, that everybody’s in on it. Everybody’s, you know, covering up the obvious things that Kyle and others are talking about in my own work on, um, polarization.

I have, uh, do my books diffusing American anger and how Contempt destroys democracy. I wrote, I write about how polarization makes us more paranoid and conspiracy minded. We start to see more and more connections between the quote bad guys and, uh, makes us hate each other or hate other people more. Be more fearful of other people that in turn increases our paranoia.

So there’s this feedback mechanism between, uh, paranoia and polarization, self-fulfilling self-perpetuating cycle. And we just see so much of this worst case thinking around us. And as I talk about in my books and on the podcast, sometimes this is sort of the underlying primary engine for how toxic conflict gets worse.

We view and talk about them with more and more discussed and worst case framings. The kind of thing Kyle Kalinski does on his show about conservatives, for example. They in turn see us as more moral and dangerous and threatening, leading them to do the same to us, and so on and so on. And I think there’s even a level of not caring at some level, even though we know that we and others on our.

Side, maybe doing this kind of thing. I mean, we see this with a lot of political stuff too. When you tell somebody, Hey, that thing you just said is not true. You’re spreading very distorted and ultra pessimistic ideas, and you’re just straight up spreading untrue things. There will be some people, and I’ve encountered this myself, some people will just be like, who cares?

They’re bad. They’ve done bad things, so who cares if we exaggerate the bad things they’ve done? Uh, why are you defending them? You must be on their side or something. Uh, but hopefully it’s clear that my motive is just to try to get people to think better and not fall prey to the Kyle Kalinsky of the world and to fight back against hysteria, hysteria and emotional thinking.

And you should wanna do that, uh, not just for the sake of society. Society. You should wanna do that for your own mental health because it’s, it’s not pleasant to constantly be filtering everything through the worst possible framing. Getting back to his video.

Kyle Kulinksi: Two, for example, there’s evidence of deep connections with, uh, Russian intelligence as well.

And so the thing that’s perhaps the most mind boggling to people is that no, it really does appear to be a shadow government of pedophile, billionaire elites that run the world. And they’re sadists. Some of them are into torture, some of them are into cannibalism. Um, they are actually part of a clique, a club, a fraternity.

And they at, while they run the world, they. Keep humans like pets and do the most sadistic things imaginable to them. Okay?

Zach Elwood: They’re cannibals. They keep humans like pets. I, I got curious about the, the cannibal thing. Um, I was reading about, you know, New York Times had a good article about new wave of speculation, AI generated hoaxes bad, just bad information.

If I search for, um. There is including speculation about code words for pedophilia and cannibalism. Uh, some of the things people are examining are just plain false images and documents. Oh, yeah. There, there are various weird typos or, or like, um, badly formatted text in the documents. So there’s one reference to a, what seems like a 9-year-old, but it’s because the one had been somehow replaced maybe in some sort of.

Uh, automatic text recognition scan or something that a 19-year-old had had been, uh, converted to the equal mark sign for the one. So it says equal sign 9-year-old, just to say there’s all these, uh, you know, there’s so much data that people are primed, uh, to see what they wanna see as somebody they quoted said, if you have already decided who the bad guys are or what is really happening, then informational overload makes your life easier because you have so much raw material to work with.

And then the cannibalism thing specifically, Snopes had a good, uh, breakdown of one of the key things where people were thinking that cannibalism had occurred, these references to the word jerky in the, uh, in Epstein’s files and, and emails. Apparently Epstein was just actually a huge meat jerky fan. Um, so Snopes writes about this, where people are jumping into conclusions about this, this word.

They even interviewed a guy who worked for Epstein, who made food, who said that Epstein, uh, was known for just really liking beef jerky from, uh, high, like high end beef jerky. Um, so again, you know, as with the filtering for worst case interpretations, everything, the, the, the deer boat audio again. So again, uh, even though I’ve said multiple times that I’m not defending Epstein and not even, uh, getting into.

You know, my views of the overall thing of what, what was done, I’m just examining, uh, specific forms of bad thinking. And even though I’ve said that multiple times, I, I think, I still think, assuming, you know, anybody, uh, many people listen to this or, or watch this on YouTube or whatever, uh, I still think some people will be like, why are you defending Jeffrey Epstein?

But hopefully it’s clearer that I’m just calling for more nuance, better thinking, uh, even for, you know, your own sake. This ties into how toxic conflict works. Again, it’s polarization gets worse through all these various feedback mechanisms. Uh, the pressures it puts on, on us to, uh, go along with the crowd, right?

So there, there’s pressures against me, for example, examining the nuance here because so many people will put pressure on me and, and criticize me for, you know, wanting to. Uh, think better on these things, that there’s a pressure with polarization on both sides to, for when people try to inject nuance in thinking, uh, to say like, Hey, I think your views on the other side are wrong, distorted.

I think you’re taking too pe pessimistic and too catastrophizing, uh, stance on things about. Them. There’s many people that will push back on that for, for, in various ways. And so the, the people that are wanna draw attention and nuance and want people to see the, the better versions of, you know, their opponents, the, the better, um, aspects of them.

Those people get drowned out. And there’s just various feedback mechanisms at work for why the more polarized and emotional people get more attention, which then in turn drives more. Polarized and emotional people on the other side and so on and so on. So, I don’t know. I think, uh, it’s just important to work against these kinds of emotional forms of thinking wherever we find them.

It’s just good for society. It’s good for you as somebody who cares about truth and, uh, building a better future. So, yeah, hope people enjoyed this.