Sometimes The Media Ignoring A Major Story Becomes The Story—And Other Notes

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

One of the craziest things happening right now is how there’s been report after report confirming that Jeffrey Epstein really was an Israeli intelligence operative, based on publicly available documents, and yet it’s had no measurable impact on mainstream media or politics.

Over the last month and a half, Drop Site News has published four reports about Epstein’s intelligence ties under the headlines “Jeffrey Epstein Helped Broker Israeli Security Agreement With Mongolia”, “Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad: How The Sex-Trafficker Helped Israel Build a Backchannel to Russia Amid Syrian Civil War”, “Jeffrey Epstein Helped Israel Sell a Surveillance State to Côte d’Ivoire”, and the most recent report titled “Israeli Spy Stayed for Weeks at a Time With Jeffrey Epstein in Manhattan”.

In the latest article, Drop Site’s Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussein write, “we’re left wondering why the rest of the media, which has demonstrated no lack of excitement when it comes to the saga of Jeffrey Epstein, has all of a sudden lost its reporting capacity, in the face of reams of publicly available newsworthy documents.”

“A question for editors reading this newsletter: What are you doing?”, Grim and Hussein write. “From a place of competition, we’re glad the media are sitting on their collective hands and we’re proud to have broken this series of stories, which give us a glimpse of a world that is often hidden from public view. But it’s also a topic that would benefit from the collective attention of our national media. Here’s hoping some will join in.”

Sometimes the biggest news story of the day is the fact that all mainstream news outlets are completely ignoring a major news story. It is interesting how often such instances involve the state of Israel.

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Speaking of Israel, the Knesset just passed the first reading of a bill that would impose the death penalty for “terrorism”. Those pushing the bill say that the death penalty would only apply to Palestinians and not to Jews, because “there’s no such thing as a Jewish terrorist.”

But remember, under the IHRA definition of antisemitism that western states and institutions are trying to shove down our throats with ever-increasing aggression, it is forbidden to say that Israel is a racist country.

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A lady on TikTok has made headlines with a social experiment where she calls up churches in the United States pretending to be a mother desperately seeking a can of formula for her hungry baby and documents which ones are helpful and which are not. The overwhelming majority of the places of worship she contacted have been unwilling to help a mother in need, including Joel Olsteen’s multimillion-dollar megachurch.

Which is interesting, because it invalidates pretty much every argument that gets made for American conservatism. The whole premise of a Christian nation guided by Christian principles with low taxes and no welfare because caring for the needful is the job of the church and charity services instead of the state gets blown out of the water when it’s shown that these institutions would turn away a mother with a starving baby.

When I posted about this on Twitter I got a deluge of conservatives telling me the church shouldn’t be expected to just give handouts to the needful, saying anyone who can’t feed their own baby should get a job and feed it themselves.

They don’t think poor people should get food from the government. They don’t think poor people should get food from the church. If poor people break the law to get food, they want them locked up for years. They really do think poor people should just stop being poor or die. It’s a completely depraved ideology.

Another savage blow to American conservatism in 2025 was the fact that one of the few places of worship to immediately offer to help the woman was a mosque in North Carolina, who not only agreed to help her immediately but asked her what specific type of baby formula she’d be needing.

It’s amazing that it took so long for someone to run these tests on American churches as a social media campaign. Fundamentalist Christian churches have been corralling Americans into support for political agendas which benefit capitalism, imperialism and Zionism for generations, and it’s always good when they get looked at with a critical eye.

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Feature image from U.S. Virgin Islands, Department of Justice, Sexual Offender Registry via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).