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Central Air r/IfBooksCouldKill
I regret to inform you that that Josh Barro, Megan McArdle, and Ben Dreyfuss have a podcast now where they presumably get together every week and pat each other on the back for being centrist and reasonable, not like those hysterical pundits on the left.
a man steps forward: i assaulted that child
another steps forward: no, it was i who assaulted that child
trump steps forward: no it was i. i assaulted all the children. all these men are innocent. i am to blame.
all of the men: but tr-
trump: i acted alone! these men are innocent. they’re good men. not like me….
bill gates cries: don you don’t have to do th—
trump: god bless america and god bless the usa
alan dershowitz: he was right hes not a good man,,, hes the best,..!
he took the fall for everybody. never say trump isnt a lion…! 💪
GUYS I SWEAR HE JUST OFFERED ME A RIDE FROM FLORIDA TO NYC I HAD NO IDEA WHO HE WAS AT THE TIME!
No we aren’t!
This isn’t a “we” thing. The fact that you think this is a “we” thing is writing paragraphs.
The only way I'm in the epstein files is if you consider talk about getting rid of all the poor people to include me
Oh nooo don't keep showing solidarity with pedophiles, you're owning us so hard right now.
grains and grains of a pedophilic heap
archived the site because it had a transcript but it didn't capture correctly https://archive.is/tqPyd so posting it here for posterity:
spoiler
Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for The Washington Post, and also Ben Dreyfuss, who writes the Substack newsletter Calm Down. Hi, Megan. Hi, Ben.
Hi. Hi.
And we have a very special guest this week, Ross Douthat, columnist for The New York Times and host of the Interesting Times podcast for The Times, is also here with us. Ross, thank you for joining us.
Thank you so much for having me. It is an honor. Yes, it is an honor. Mostly to be here with Ben. You know, Josh and Megan, I've talked to before, and I know what that's like, but I'm mostly here for the Ben. To your sorrow, I'm sure. I'm here for the Ben Dreyfuss experience, if I'm being honest.
This is your first Ben Dreyfuss experience? Certainly. I mean, yes. We've tweeted. We've tweeted. But it's in terms of, you know, podcasting conversation. Yes. Dialogue. Yes.
I hope you're wearing a seatbelt, Ross. That's all I can say.
Let's let's let's throw them right in the deep end. Ben was going through the Epstein files last night and had an interesting. We're all in the Epstein files. So, by the way, I want to say congratulations to everyone, although some of us are more in the Epstein files than others. Ben,
a human actually sent Jeffrey Epstein some tweets of yours and was like, these tweets are funny. This is Jewish humor you will enjoy. Do we know who sent him your tweets? I don't.
I didn't care enough. Their name was redacted to protect the innocent, right? Unlike them. I know that last night I got a text from my brother, and it said, answer, answer, call me now, call me now. And I called him thinking he's in a car accident or something, and he said... You're in the Epstein files, man.
And I was like, the what? And he's got some tweets, some tweets you pretend sent some joke tweets. You're right in there. I was like, I got to go. I got to click. I then thought, I've got the golden ticket. I've got the golden tick.
I'm now going to write a story today, maybe about this podcast that begins. I am in the Epstein files. Yeah. Here's what you need to know.
And so the rest of us are on the Epstein files, but in less illustrious ways. There's like an algorithm that selected some tweets of mine and sent them in a digest to Jeffrey Epstein a couple of times. Like Twitter thinks you may be interested in these tweets. And Megan and Ross, you're both in there.
There's some like one of these guys who before newsletters were a thing was just like sending around a thing that was BCC'd to a lot of people with a lot of all caps and highlighting at various points chose to highlight some of your columns.
Although Ross, only once you have the lightest Epstein footprint of the four of us.
But I'm in. I'm in. You're telling me this for the first time. I didn't realize this. So you're a pedophile.
This is a big deal. I actually remember this chap. He used to BCC me.
Oh, really? Who is that? Can we reveal his name? Gregory Browne. Megan, I don't know if you should be admitting this. This is just like what Ken says on Josh's other podcast. Like, stop giving the feds evidence.
The exciting thing about being a columnist is that you get on the distribution list of a lot of extremely strange people, some of whom can be scary. I once found myself in Vietnam at two in the morning. on the phone with the San Diego Police Department, because someone had emailed me to say,
can you use your influence as a journalist at The Atlantic magazine, so this was a while ago, to stop my neighbor from spying on me? I know that he's plotting against me, and if he doesn't stop, I'm going to have to take action.
Oh, dear. And the name of that man in San Diego was Jeffrey Epstein.
Sadly, no. But he helpfully provided his address and name. And so I called the San Diego PD and had to explain that, A, I was in Vietnam. B, I had never been to San Diego. And yet, C, I was aware that someone with some sort of psychotic disorder...
Was on the verge of spying on their neighbor and needed to be. Yeah. You're also like a journalist with a duty to report here. You're Don Lemon could be so lucky. You know, I mean, you're calling the cops and tipping them off.
After, like, a very jet-lagged and confusing 40 minutes, I finally reached someone at the San Diego PD who was like, oh, okay, I understand. We're going to do a wellness check. Thank you for reaching out. But, like, I get—Ross, I'm sure you get these, too.
And so this guy would just—I mean, I have a guy now who just sends— me like five six seven emails a day mostly about my colleagues work in the newsroom in which he cc's me to let me know how unhappy he is with our coverage of
everything from like playgrounds in montgomery county to the war in ukraine and that's just a just kind of an occupational hazard
That's a long way of explaining why it's okay that you were in the Epstein files, Megan.
Yeah, that was a lot of verbiage. I mean, the reality is, I don't know what Megan is talking about. All of my email correspondence is totally normal and sane. And I think there may just be something about being... you know, either a tall libertarian journalist or a Mossad agent, you know,
protocols of the elders of Zion elite Jewish pedophile that you just people send you a lot of emails. Those are like the two categories where you get a lot of strange emails.
Yeah. I mean, I did grow up in the Upper West Side. It's pretty reasonable to assume that despite the fact that my name is Megan McArdle and my DNA is 100% British Isles, I could absolutely be working for the Mossad.
Why not? An amazing thing to me is there was this overwhelming bipartisan demand for the extraordinary release of these files that would not normally be made public. Files are full of gossip and some obviously false rumors, also of derogatory information not describing criminal acts that the government usually isn't supposed to just show the world.
we all asked for this in the sense that there was only one vote in Congress against the release of these files. And we've learned a bunch of interesting things, but I don't think we've learned much of anything going to the core allegations that were the reason that people demanded that these files be opened up.
Ross, do you see where we've gotten value in this exercise?
I mean, I have not gone through every, I haven't even seen the email with my name in it. But no, I mean, I don't know about you guys. I may be the most sort of Epstein conspiracy curious person on this podcast. Yes, that's why we invited you. That's why you invited me, right.
And, you know, I don't have the sense that... this has advanced things much at all on what seemed like the key outstanding questions, which are basically, you know, were there other people who were part of Epstein's friends group who should have been charged at some point, which is the claim, you know,
if you look at like Elon Musk's tweets, Musk said, who is himself in the Epstein files, like, you know, emailing with Epstein. Trying to arrange a trip to the island. Trying to arrange a trip to the island. And, you know, you have to give him credit. He, you know, he wanted them to come out,
and he's just tweeting through it, and he's insisting that, you know, there are people who should be arrested and charged. And it has always seemed very credible to me that the crimes that Epstein was guilty of are also crimes that some of his big shot friends participated in. But I don't think we're closer to figuring that out.
And if we're not closer to figuring that out, maybe the answer is in the end that he was sort of singular in particular kinds of
predation. As we go through more of these files and don't find that, it kind of seems to me like we are learning that. There were various kinds of, like, gross behavior, but, like, this volume of emails and stuff, it seems like at some point we would find the email about, you know, Mr. Epstein,
please deliver this 14-year-old to me. And that doesn't seem to be in there.
Right, exactly. I mean, if you're going to order a 14-year-old, you do it from Wayfair. But the thing is... Like, I've never understood why it's so expected that it would be like a complicated story that, you know, we're going to send... We're going to have to figure it out. Like, it's maybe a mystery.
Obviously, the wealthy pedophile was maybe just having sex with these women himself. I mean, these teenagers himself. Like... It's never seemed like Occam's razor seems to suggest that he would be doing that and that he wouldn't be going around reenacting Eyes Wide Shut. Because Eyes Wide Shut, I mean, that's a risky game.
You invite people and then sometimes Tom Cruise shows up and your whole life falls apart. The real the real victim of Eyes Wide Shut. Right. And the other thing is that like when we look at these emails and we don't find the smoking gun where someone says deliver the 14 year old at noon. Thank you.
Like I'm Bono. Thank you. Oh, God, Bono catching strays here. If they had that email, one of the departments of justice that has looked at this would have said, oh, we should go get him.
Ross, you had Julie Brown on your podcast a few months ago. This is the investigative reporter. She broke a lot of this news from the Miami Herald. And you say you're the most Epstein curious of us. But I think you got to a pretty good question with her at the end, which is, well,
if there was this broader conspiracy, why hasn't Jelaine Maxwell spilled about it? She presumably would have had to know and she would like to get out of prison. That seems to me like the major hole in this.
It does seem like a major hole. I mean, I think the most plausible story is that you have, you know, scenarios involving Epstein in which rich and powerful men had sex with women, not
The victims break down, they contradict themselves, etc., And that really shifted with Me Too, but also the way it was settled, I think most people probably did not understand the details of his crimes. But the other part of this is that until Me Too, people just didn't think it was that bad. or a lot of people,
did not think it was a shunning from society, I never want to see you again, like go retire to a mountaintop and become a postal service driver because you're done in elite society if you had sex with a 16-year-old, even when you knew she was 16. Think about how many rock stars did that in the 60s and 70s, right? I mean, the way men behaved was not viewed entirely In the same kind of like that is a social death penalty offense if you commit it. And so, yeah, I think it is not improbable that someone else thought, well, this isn't really that bad.
She's 16. It's not like she's four. And we have now really shifted on how we think about that, I think, in a good way. Right. Right. I do not think that 50 year old men should be having sex with 16 year old girls. But I think that you're not going to find the evidence of a pedophile ring where he is actively trafficking these girls because until Me Too... It's not like a pedophile, right? There are 16-year-ol
'Its actually ephebophilia and Jimmy Page used to do its so its fine that we did'
become a postal service driver
Um actually we have to pass background checks. And fuck off.
Copypasta
We've tweeted. We've tweeted. But it's in terms of, you know, podcasting conversation. Yes. Dialogue. Yes. I hope you're wearing a seatbelt, Ross. That's all I can say. Let's let's let's throw them right in the deep end. Ben was going through the Epstein files last night and had an interesting. We're all in the Epstein files. So, by the way, I want to say congratulations to everyone, although some of us are more in the Epstein files than others. Ben, a human actually sent Jeffrey Epstein some tweets of yours and was like, these tweets are funny.
What an odd thing to say
sorry about lack of formatting taken up too much space so I can't edit it further it but you can see where the line breaks are p easily
Pretty much full of disgusting minimisation but it doesn't say who says what and I'm not listening to find out
Megan McArdle
Douthat, McArdle, we're getting the gang back together and the reading series is gonna be 
Just need to hear what John Kass has been up to and get Rod Dreher on 4th mic.
(feat. Ross Douthat)
That's the cherry on the turd sundae.
This is the same bit Jon Stewart just did
I had to google.
Jon Stewart is addressing his name coming up in the Epstein files. [On] "The Daily Show" Monday, Feb. 2, the comedian covered the latest batch of Epstein files and the who's who of names throughout the documents [before] saying that he wants "to get ahead of the story" about his name being in the files.
He said he searched his name – like "we all" did, he joked – and found himself mentioned in a concept for a hypothetical Woody Allen project. In a 2015 email to producer Barry Josephson, Epstein said he pitched the idea for a standup routine to Allen that would be exclusive to Apple TV or Amazon. The date is notably well after Allen's exile from Hollywood.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2026/02/03/jon-stewart-epstein-files/88491018007/
What a terribly written article.
I'm not in it, Xi's not in it, Kim's not in it.
In the sense where they talk about "getting rid of the poor", we are all in there as thorns in their sides
Xi is mentioned but only coz the I hate him lol
Let your haters be your waiters at the table of success.
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I have a small, laminated card in my wallet that reminds me that Megan McArdle did not originate the role of Annie in the Broadway musical of the same name.