DEAD SOULS: Who the heck are we the people?

THURSDAY, JULY 24, 2025

Anthropology 101: Is something wrong with Tulsi Gabbard? Much remains to be said with respect to that very sound question.

(We suggest that you remember to pity the child, who may have been raised in a cult.)

Is something wrong with Gabbard? Much remains to be said! As for (the rest of) us the people, we were struck today by the highlighted passages which appear near the start of this Wall Street Journal report:

Justice Department Told Trump in May That His Name Is Among Many in the Epstein Files

When Justice Department officials reviewed what Attorney General Pam Bondi called a “truckload” of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein earlier this year, they discovered that Donald Trump’s name appeared multiple times, according to senior administration officials. 

In May, Bondi and her deputy informed the president at a meeting in the White House that his name was in the Epstein files, the officials said. Many other high-profile figures were also named, Trump was told. Being mentioned in the records isn’t a sign of wrongdoing.

The officials said it was a routine briefing that covered a number of topics and that Trump’s appearance in the documents wasn’t the focus.

They told the president at the meeting that the files contained what officials felt was unverified hearsay about many people, including Trump, who had socialized with Epstein in the past, some of the officials said. One of the officials familiar with the documents said they contain hundreds of other names.

When this report appeared yesterday, it became the latest "bombshell" within our own Blue America's prevailing cable news realm.

That said, what was surprising about that report? Should anyone have been surprised to hear that President Trump's name appears within "the Epstein files?" 

Also, should anyone have been surprised by such assertions as these?

Claims about the Epstein files:
The files contain unverified hearsay about many people.
The files contain the names of hundreds of people other than President Trump.

If we assume those claims are true, should anyone be surprised? Why wouldn't a sensible person have assumed such things all along?

"Being mentioned in the records isn’t [necessarily] a sign of wrongdoing," the Journal says early on.

 Wouldn't that also have been a fairly obvious fact? And if so, why would this report by the Wall Street Journal qualify as the latest bombshell—as the bombshell of the moment?

Did President Trump engage in the type of grave criminal misconduct for which the late Jeffrey Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, have each been convicted?

We can't answer that question. Having made that admission, we can also say this:

An overwhelming amount of focus is now being directed on this matter. That overwhelming degree of focus comes to us, live and direct, from a certain set of textbooks.

We refer to the textbooks with which a wise academic would be teaching some current version of Anthropology 101.

The massive focus on this topic teaches us something about ourselves—about who we the people actually are. Consider the recent history upon which this bombshell exploded:

We're so old that we can remember when we the people, along with our tribunes, struggled to maintain a focus on such matters as these:

Recent significant matters:
The claim that the legislation childishly named the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" would result in ten to twenty million people losing their health coverage.

The claim that the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" was going to add $3.5 trillion to the deficit—or possibly to the debt—or at least that it was going to do something vaguely like that.

(Full disclosure: As we noted in this report, the business specialist on Blue America's cable news channel couldn't even seem to describe this claim in an accurate way.)

The claim that President Trump's chaotic tariff regime was going to fuel a great deal of inflation. 

(Full disclosure: Just this past Tuesday night, NBC's Christine Romans, in a report for Nightly News, seemed to misstate who will pay the newly announced tariffs on products which arrive here from the Philippines. Yesterday morning, Steve Rattner called attention to Romans' bungled presentation during a segment on Morning Joe.)

Stephanie Ruhle couldn't explain what was projected with respect to annual deficits and accumulated debt. Romans incorrectly explained who actually submits the payments known as tariffs. 

This is the way our world typically works when we the people, along with our major journalists, try to make ourselves focus on matters of apparent major importance,

We people! We find it hard to focus on questions of health care or tariffs or deficits or debt. But when it comes to questions of sexual conduct, including gross sexual misconduct, suddenly we sit right up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!

Everything else is swept away. It's the one topic on which we can focus. The modern history rolls out something like this:

President Kennedy engaged in remarkable sexual conduct during his time in the White House. In 2011, one part of that history was described in Mimi Alford's well-written book, Once Upon a Secret. 

We the people weren't told about this in real time. Perhaps a bit like Pepperidge Farm, the leading authority remembers:

Mimi Alford

Marion Fay "Mimi" Alford (née Beardsley; born May 7, 1943) is an American woman who had an affair with President John F. Kennedy while she served as an intern in the White House press office between 1962 and 1963.

Despite the affair's consuming influence over her life at the time, Alford managed to keep the illicit trysts a secret for 40 years, until clues were leaked in 2003. Alford published her own book about the affair, Once Upon a Secret, in 2011.

The young Mimi Beardsley was only 19 when she, a brand-new White House intern, was procured for President Kennedy by several of his aides. As far as we know, no one doubts that Alford's account of this matter is accurate—but at the time, there was a strict rule against reporting such matters in major news orgs, and the so-called "democratization of media" hadn't yet occurred.

Journalists who knew about President Kennedy's general conduct agreed that it mustn't be reported or discussed. By the early 1990s, that rule had begun to disappear.

From that moment on to this, one basic piece of anthropology can be observed by anyone who's willing to study our flailing attempts at conducting a national discourse:

We the people like to talk and think about matters involving sex! As a people, we find it very hard to focus on much of anything else. 

That doesn't mean that we're "dead souls." It doesn't even mean that we're bad people.

It does suggest that we're people people! But however you choose to score it, those are the fairly obvious facts about who we actually are. It would be silly to say something different:

As of early 1992, the democratization of media had produced radio stars like that era's version of Howard Stern. When Gennifer Flowers appeared on the scene, reaping a very large series of paydays, people like Howard Stern and his sidekick, "Stuttering John," had soon gone wild. 

The exciting tales which Flowers told almost overturned that year's presidential election. Despite the obvious problems with the stories she told, she was still being dragged out in 2016 as the debates between Candidates Trump and (Hillary) Clinton approached.

After Flowers, the deluge! When Kathleen Willey came along, the lovesick boys of the national press fell in love with her obvious rectitude. When her credibility came into serious question, that story got disappeared.

After that, there followed years of pleasure involving the 21-year-old intern—the 21-year-old intern who wasn't actually 21 and wasn't actually an intern. Those were days of serious pleasure and enormous fun.

The backwash of these sexual stories dogged Candidate Gore for two years, and then Candidate (Hillary) Clinton. By the time the 2024 cycle came along, we the people of Blue America were thrilling to the disputed claim—a claim we would assume was true—that Candidate Trump had engaged in (consensual) sexual relations on one occasion, in 2006. with someone who wasn't his wife.

By that time, Candidate Trump had been accused of sexual misconduct, including criminal misconduct, by a large number of women. Regarding that alleged act of consensual sex in which he may have engaged in 2006, we the Blues came up with what may have been the dumbest idea in recorded human history:

In support of an actual criminal trial, we alleged that we had needed to know, back in 2016, if that one assignation had actually taken place. We had needed to know about that before we could have decided how to vote!

Incredibly enough, our tribunes all over Blue America bought into that very strange notion. In that way, we the people got a chance to see who we actually are.

Who are we the actual people? Who are our putative journalists?

We the people struggle and strain to pretend that we care about health care and federal budgets and possible fiscal ruin. The truth of the matter seems to be somewhat different:

We the people really want to sit around pondering sexual conduct. Only then do we sit up, fully engaged.

What may emerge about President Trump? We have no earthly idea—but for the record, this:

Five years ago, the president's niece—a clinical psychologist—told the world such things as this about her very important uncle:

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

[...]

None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather’s sociopathy and my grandmother’s illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.

The mere fact that she made those assessments doesn't mean that her assessments are accurate. 

That said, she is a trained clinical psychologist—and the book was a major best-seller.  Our journalists quickly agreed that the medical analyses made by the niece must never be discussed—must instead be disappeared. Do it goes within the frequently juvenile national discourse created by us the people.

Is something wrong with President Trump? Our journalists continue to struggle to find the way to pursue, or perhaps to avoid, that fairly obvious question.

Also, how many people could lose their health coverage under terms of his megabill? What will happen to our annual deficits and to our accumulated national debt?

How the fark do tariffs work? We the people, including our journalists, struggle to stay awake when we're asked to focus on such questions. 

But starting in 1992, textbooks used in Anthropology 101 have added a fairly obvious chapter. There's only one topic which seems to let us the people fully focus.

This doesn't mean that we're bad people—and no, we aren't dead souls. It does suggest that we're people people, with all the imperfections that flesh is heir to. 

Most chillingly, it suggests that we the people may not be built for this particular type of work. 

Girls (and boys) just wanna have fun! Or at least, that's what the major anthropologists may already be teaching.

The current hubbub may work out well. Or then again, possibly not!

Tomorrow: In support of Gabbard's sad presentation, young Master Gutfeld explodes!