way back with something called the BCCI, a big financial entity that apparently was sort of a CIA money laundering operation.

So Benz ties Epstein back to Bear Stearns again all the way back to I think if I'm not mistaken Iran-Contra where money was laundered around for the CIA and others. But so Benz finds the connection not just to the CIA but to I believe British intelligence, Saudi intelligence and Israeli intelligence. So the pattern that he identified and he shows receipts of who's involved and who Epstein knew and worked with and all that. It's very clear and now for the first time if you're wondering hey was he working for Israel sometimes. Hey was he working for the CIA sometimes. Was he taking that skill and using it for the British intelligence or Saudi Arabia? Apparently yes.

So he wasn't really wedded to one spy organization. He was very clearly somebody who worked for all of them.

Now I haven't gotten to the big aha because I know what some of you are thinking. Some of you are thinking but Scott really it's not about that. It's about the rich and powerful people that are being protected, right? And we already knew he was working with some spy agencies. So he's really added nothing, right? Oh no. It completely changes how you see it because once you realize how embedded he was with the intelligence agencies, let's call them the spy entities, you realize the following.

Thomas Massie said, I think yesterday, that he thinks that Pam Bondi broke the law by not releasing all of the Epstein files. Do you think the Epstein files will be released even if all of the rich and powerful people who might be named could be named? And the answer is no. You will never know what all the spy agencies were doing with him because they wouldn't want you to know.

So if the Department of Justice and the Trump administration genuinely wanted to release the entire files, could they do it? No. There's not any chance they can do it because the CIA, I'll just use them as a stand-in for the other intelligence agencies, the CIA, if they block it, and of course they would have the power, they would have all the power they needed to block anything. They could literally threaten you with death and total destruction if you didn't do what they said and block their secrets. And they don't even have to be the kind of secrets that protect the world. It can just be whatever they wanted blocked.

So here's the thing. Even if, well I'll put it another way. So what this causes is the rich and powerful people who obviously are part of the guilty entities. It wouldn't matter if they even told you go ahead and use my name. It wouldn't matter if there was great desire within the Department of Justice and the FBI to actually out the rich and powerful. As long as the CIA could keep that secret, they have a little bit more ownership of those rich people.

So let me put this in practical terms. If you were in the CIA and you knew, for example, that Bill Gates had something to hide, would you be better off making sure that that got blocked and it was never released so that you could blackmail him without blackmailing him? You would never have to say to him, you know, Bill Gates, if you don't do what we want, you're in trouble. You would never have to say it. You would just have to be the CIA and say to the rich people, "Here's the deal. We're going to protect you, but we own you."

So have you noticed how many of the rich and powerful people have government contracts? So if you're the CIA, and again, I'm just using them as a stand-in for spy agencies, your best case scenario is that you have an unspoken threat to make all the rich and powerful people do what you want. But you combine it with an incentive such as your multi-billion dollar company could get a lot of government contracts if you're just really good to us. But if you become kind of a dick and you out us for what we've done, maybe you won't make billions of dollars. Maybe you'll never get another government contract.

So here's my aha. My aha is this is not about the rich and powerful being protected. They get protected for free because the spy agencies want to keep control of both the powerful people and also hide their own secrets and they would be 100% capable of blocking any kind of information.

Now, one of the things that Thomas Massie may have been blinded to is that if they allowed within their legislation that anything that's too sensitive or mentioned a victim could be redacted, that guarantees that the people who want to redact other stuff can easily do it and just say, "Oh yeah. Yeah, we're just protecting the victims." Of course, duh. Obviously. And even if those rich and powerful people and even if those victims did want to be protected, they're not the decision makers. The spy agency would be in control of those people as well as what gets blocked and what doesn't.

So to me that answered the questions that will be answered. It guarantees that we'll never be satisfied with what comes out of the Epstein files. Would you agree? We'll never know why exactly, but once you see that Mike Benz's frame on this and you realize how deeply embedded Epstein had been with the spy agencies for decades, you realize that it wouldn't matter what anybody thought about the rich and powerful. They're just not in charge.

So if your frame was, oh, I think the rich people called up Pam Bondi and said, you know, hey, I'm a billionaire. Don't out me. They might have tried, but they don't have the power of the CIA. If the CIA calls the Department of Justice or the FBI and says, "Here's the deal. You will not release this, and we don't have to tell you what will happen to you if you do, but you won't." That would put the Department of Justice and the FBI in a very awkward situation, and that's what we see.

So the big aha here and why I call Mike Benz an artist is that nobody else could have pulled this together. And once you realize that the intelligence spy part of it is not just an also, but it's the dominant theme, then you realize you're never going to see the bottom of the barrel. They will completely nickel and dime us to death. They will drag it out. They might blame other people. Maybe there'll be a distraction. Maybe a UFO will land. But one thing you can guarantee won't happen is that the public will never be satisfied that they saw what really was going on.

So just to be clear, I assume it's obvious that rich and powerful people are being protected, but not for the benefit of the rich and powerful. They would be protected for the benefit of the spy agencies who would then have greater control over them for whatever it is that they wanted to control.

Pretty impressive. All right, so that's artist number two. You should follow Mike Benz.

Artist number three, you may have heard of this one. Donald Trump. Now, in my opinion, Trump has raised the art of trolling, maybe persuasion too, to a level that we'll never see again, completely unparalleled, and so successful that I laugh when I see it.

Let me give you some examples. So he did the Hall of Presidents where he put a presidential autopen instead of Biden and then he put insulting descriptions of Obama and the Obama presidency. And what did that cause? Well, all the Democrats and the legacy news are like, "Oh, you can't do that." And it made them focus on what had to be the least important thing happening in the world.

Meanwhile, while all that shelf space was being eaten up by what MAGA thought was funny, most of us and his critics thought, "Oh, here's an easy one. You know, he's left us this easy attack. We're gonna say that he's a narcissistic bad person and it's like a real easy story. Yeah. Yeah."

So that's just one thing. He also did the Rob Reiner insults, sort of insults that everybody said that's too soon. Like even MAGA people were saying no no I don't support that. It's too soon. But like the Hall of Presidents, it was a troll. Meaning that it wasn't just about what he thought was funny. He was again distracting Democrats and distracting the news into the least important thing that was happening. Was there anything in the world that Trump was doing that was less important than what he said about Rob Reiner? No. No.

So again, he's got the Democrats and the press that doesn't like him thinking, "Oh, you put an easy target on your back this time. Watch what bad things we say about your character." And then my favorite part is renaming the Kennedy Center or whatever it's called into the Trump Kennedy Performing Arts Center. Is that what it is?

Now, you might say, "But Scott, he's not the one who decided on the name change." But obviously he had to approve it. Obviously if he said, "Don't put my name in that building," they wouldn't do it. So clearly he's behind it.

Now, how was that interpreted? Well, once again, the Democrats and his critics treated it like it was the most important thing happening because it was a real easy story to write about. They can't resist an easy one. No research, no context. All you have to do is say, "Oh, there he goes again." Being a bad person.

Now, one of the things that these all had in common, and this is why he's a genius at persuasion, is that they were really easy to do. Super easy to do. It guaranteed that his enemies fell into their own trap. So what do I mean by their own trap? So for years now, the Democrats have tried to frame Trump as a narcissist, right? They try to frame him as a narcissist with a terrible character who would do things like what I just mentioned and that that's more evidence that he's an authoritarian narcissistic monster.

Now, you've probably noticed that 100% of the people who meet him in person, including Bill Maher and the CEO of Nvidia and a bunch of other people who would not necessarily have been pro-Trump, they've said that when you meet him in person, he's not the character that people talk about. That he's a really good listener. And that I experienced the same thing. He's way smarter than you think. I also experienced that. And he genuinely has empathy for the things you would want him to have empathy for. So his reality is quite different from what the Democrats believe he is and have been framing him as.

So having created their own frame, they can't get out of it. So if you looked at the Hall of Presidents, the autopen and the Rob Reiner comment and you were already primed and they have primed themselves to think the only way you can explain this is that he's a narcissistic bastard, then that's what you'll believe is happening. So there all of his critics, every one of them is interpreting this as well more proof that we were right. He's a narcissistic bastard.

Now, I've told you this before, but narcissism can have a bad version and a good version. I would consider myself a narcissist, but I'd prefer to be the good version. And what I mean by that is I'd love to get attention and credit, but only if I've done something that is genuinely good for the world or generally good for somebody, right? I would not want to get credit. It wouldn't really give me any dopamine if somebody accidentally thought I did something good. I want to get credit for what I actually did and it gives me a dopamine high. But is there anybody who loses in that scenario? Nobody loses.

If I do something that's good for me because it brings me attention or credit and dopamine, but it's also good for you. Don't we all win? If you look at what Trump does, he definitely likes putting his name on things. He's definitely a type of narcissist who likes to get credit. We all do. He's just transparent about it. He likes to get credit, but he likes to get credit for things he actually did. He's not pretending to help the country. He's trying to actually turn around the country, actually end wars, actually improve the economy, actually help everybody.

So once you realize that he's got the entire Democrat and critics and press doing what I call turning into cats chasing a laser pointer while he's doing useful stuff. You can see the genius of it.

Now, I predict and you know I've been right about this sort of thing that history will eventually come to understand his cat with the laser pointer strategy and they'll know that once the Democrats trap themselves in the frame that the only way you can understand him is as an evil narcissist with a broken personality, they can't get out of it. So they've trapped themselves in their own frame.

Meanwhile, he can go lower pharmaceutical costs, negotiate the end of wars. He can lower taxes, he can get bills passed, he can write a hundred EOs. And then once I introduced this idea on X, and by the way, if you don't think he has elevated trolling to an actual art form, pay attention. He has elevated it to an art form. There will never be another president, I'm assuming, who can match what you're watching happen right now. But people don't understand what they're seeing because they're mostly trapped in the other frame. Oh, he has a broken personality. That's why he's doing all this.

No, he is a narcissist just as I am. But only the kind who tries to help. You know, if I don't do something good for you or if he doesn't do something good for you, it's not going to be that enjoyable to get some credit. I mean, it might be better than nothing, but it's not really the aim anybody would have.

So the best brander of all time who's famous for putting his name on things put his name on a few things. I saw somebody, you know, one of his critics said to me on X, they said, "Scott, Scott, you fool, what do you think is going to happen when the Democrats get back in power? You know, don't you think they're going to change the name of the Trump Kennedy Center back to where it was?" To which I say, "Yeah, of course. That's exactly what I expect that if Democrats get in charge, they will change the name back to whatever they want it to be. And will that bother me? No. I will say three years of making them chase the laser pointer was all he wanted." Now if Republicans stayed in charge for longer, he would like it better.

And then somebody said to me, "But Scott, you know, sure you say he's persuasive, but why hasn't why are his popularity numbers low?" to which I say, "Well, did I miss an election? Was there some kind of election this week where it mattered what Trump's popularity was?" No. He can allow you to think bad things about him so long as he's building a record of doing successful things, which he is. And yeah, you're going to have to wait until the actual midterms to see where his popularity stands by then.

All right. So I call that art.

Speaking of persuasion, there's an article in Fox News that this is the year that conservative groups declared the tipping point on climate hysteria. Do you think there would be a tipping point on climate hysteria just because people like me and lots of other people on the right especially have presented the facts? Well, it helps. But I think it was Trump who has been steadfast in saying that at least the climate alarm part is overdone. Not necessarily that we are or are not getting warmer but how much worry we have about it makes sense.

He has also removed a lot of the impediments to nuclear power and also said if you're going to build a giant AI data center you'd better build your own power center. Now suddenly all these big companies believe they can build nuclear power plants that they would use for their own operations. How good is that? I mean, the benefit that that should bring to the world, even if just one of those big companies figures out how to build a functional, modular, smallish but big enough nuclear power center, either fission or fusion, is one of the biggest things that will ever happen in humanity. And that would be because Trump persuasively has been pro-energy energy energy in every form. He's been pro getting rid of regulations which allowed these big companies to have a path to do this and he's approved the idea that individuals could have their own power plants and he's pro AI. So he's exactly where we need him to be for society to get to that next level. So that's pretty persuasive.

I haven't talked about this much, but you know the story about US senator from Utah, Mike Lee. He introduced this legislation to have letters of marque. Apparently the Constitution specifies that you can do this. And what it does is it allows the federal government to authorize private citizens, should they be qualified to do it, to form their own little military to go after pirate ships. Now, in this case, they're sort of defining the pirate ships as the drug smugglers. So the idea is that free market people would get to attack these cartel assets and keep what they got. So if they found $10 million sitting around in some cartel asset, they could just keep it. And that's what the law specifically allows.

So we