When fashion designer Georgio Armani died on September 4, commentators noted how influential the Armani suits were as worn by Richard Gere in the 1980 film "American Gigolo." The plot had Gere's character, a male prostitute, framed for a murder after he begins an affair with the wife of a California senator and his handler sends him on a kinky sexual assignment.
Sexual blackmail is the undercurrent of much of our politics these days, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal comes close enough to Trump for him to pull out every possible distraction he can. It made me think of the handmade sign I saw held by a Russian man at the "pussy power" march I attended after our Groper- and Grifter-in-Chief was first elected: "Trump is Kompromat," with a hammer-and-sickle image.
The sign-carrying man told me that Putin commonly used sexual blackmail to control his political puppets, and Kompromat is what such compromising evidence is called. At the time, it had come out that Trump was involved in a "golden showers" event at a Russian hotel, and it was thought that could be enough to put him under Putin's control.
Nowadays, Epstein's partner-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell, after being interviewed at length by Trump's former lawyer, was quietly moved to a low-security prison, the first prisoner to be so transferred after a child sex trafficking conviction.
Suddenly, this meme (above) popped up on social media, alleging that Maxwell's father developed the KGB "honeypot kompromat" scheme, which seemed to connect a lot of dots. I tried checking it out and was only able to confirm that Robert Maxwell was thought to be a triple agent, with ties to Israeli and Russian intelligence. Many mysteries remain, such as how Epstein amassed his wealth, what happened during the missing minute of videotape on the night he died in prison, and how deep his connections were to Trump, Bill Clinton, and many, many others.
Sept. 4 happened to also be the day that many of Epstein's accusers appeared at a press conference in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, a second meme (below) popped up connecting Trump's mentor Roy Cohn (as depicted in the once-censored movie "The Apprentice") as also involved in sexual blackmail.
Cohn was Sen. Joseph McCarthy's henchman during the shameful HUAC hearings that ruined many careers after people in the film industry were branded as communists and blacklisted by the studios.
Which brings us up to today's news that actor, film industry leader, and activist Robert Redford has died.
Redford appeared opposite Barbra Streisand in "The Way We Were," set during the 1940s when HUAC was in action. After reading (actually, listening to) Streisand's autobiography My Name is Barbra, I was struck by the description of the scenes that were cut from the film, to de-politicize it. Now watchable in an extended cut of the film released on its 50th anniversary, the scene where Katie (Streisand) and Hubbell (Redford) break up originally centered on her having been snitched on to the HUAC committee as a communist. She sacrifices their marriage to save his reputation and career, not because of his brief infidelity (as the film puzzlingly depicts).
Redford was vocal about his opposition to Trump's dictatorial ways, and now that rounding up liberals and their supporting organizations has been called for in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, it's looking more and more like McCarthyism every day. With a lot of Kompromising material thrown in.
UPDATE 9/19/25: Much to my horror, I saw Steve Bannon on his "War Room" podcast this morning touting the 2009 book "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies," which he said Ann Coulter called the most important book next to the Bible. According to its Amazon page, Author M. Stanton Evans "presents irrefutable evidence of a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our government, influence its policies, and steal its secrets."
In between shilling for a company that sells gold and spouting his usual dangerous nonsense, Bannon was derisive of people calling for unity after the horrible, indefensible Charlie Kirk shooting. You can have your kumbaya moments, he said, but I'll only call for unity after we've won, and only on our terms. After the attack on Paul Pelosi, Kirk said on his podcast, "Why is the conservative movement to blame for gay schizophrenic nudists that are hemp jewelry makers breaking into someone's home -- or maybe not" before suggesting "some amazing patriot" ought to bail Pelosi's attacker out. In recent weeks, Kirk came out against rescheduling marijuana and continued to call for the release of the Epstein files. None of which, or any of the many other disturbing things he said, means that he deserved to die, nor did Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert deserve to be silenced.
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