Become Who You Are
What’s the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my true identity? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness, joy and peace? How do I find love that lasts, forever? These are the timeless questions of the human heart. Join Jack Rigert and his guests for lively insights, reading the signs of our times through the lens of Catholic Teaching and the insights of Saint John Paul ll to guide us.
Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#653 The Epstein Files (3) With Investigator Tom Hampson: Dark Money, Deep Secrets, and A Two-Tiered Justice System
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What happens when money and power collide with justice? Crime investigator Thomas Hampson takes us deep into the troubling world of Jeffrey Epstein's case, revealing the stark double standards in our legal system.
The conversation exposes a stunning contrast: Keith Ranieri received a 120-year sentence and RICO charges for his cult involving 21 victims, while Epstein faced minimal charges despite evidence of over 1,000 victims across multiple countries. This glaring disparity raises profound questions about who our justice system truly serves.
Hampson reveals how JPMorgan Chase handled over a billion dollars in transactions linked to suspected human trafficking from Epstein, with evidence suggesting reports were deliberately suppressed. When powerful figures like Bill Barr have connections to cases they oversee, how can we trust the system to deliver equal justice?
Visit Tom Hampson's SubStack, For this Story and more.
Welcome to the Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. I'm Jack Riggert, your host. I'm here with Thomas Hampson. He's a crime investigator, crime reporter. He's been underground for child sex trafficking, child porn. Then he continues to dig in deeper, trying to stand up for the vulnerable, the innocent in the world. He's been working on the troubling case of Jeffrey Epstein, not just to talk about Jeffrey Epstein, but to talk about the victims, to try to protect victims.
Speaker 2:Some of the most troubling, tom before I bring you on to me and maybe you can, you know I'll throw this in your lap are the lack of transparency. You know what follows from that makes it clear that the justice system, our justice system, can be used by those who have money connections, can afford lawyers, for instance, who know how to get through loopholes, use legal tactics to hide their crimes. You know, creating this two-tier justice system that can be used to provide favors, empower people can use those powers and those favors to get their own way. And I'm not just talking about Jeffrey Epstein's, but the prosecutors, the politicians, the so-called elites.
Speaker 2:I think about the January 6th defendants who were put in prison, treated in inhumane ways, long stretches of solitary confinement, held without bail, held without trial, against our very laws of habeas corpus, for example, requiring the government to justify holding them or release them. Be transparent. What are you doing, right? Either charge me or not. And the vast majority of these detainees had no prior records. They're hardworking people, upstanding citizens, who lost their income, their businesses, in some cases their homes, sometimes even their families. Some even lost their lives and committed suicide. So, in Epstein's case, how many young women who should have had their whole lives in front of them, dreams of love and marriage, had those lives ruined by sexual abuse, by the trauma of being used by these powerful people? Where are they now, tom, and who's standing up for them? And I think this is really what interests me about this Epstein case.
Speaker 2:This is part three, so we can't rehash the whole thing, but as you're working on part three, you made an interesting observation, and this is really where my intro on this two-tiered justice system comes in. You talked about Keith. Keith, is it Ranieri? Ranieri? Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that. Just describe how this system can be used and abused, and maybe we can come up with a couple solutions for this.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, he created a self-help organization that turned into a sex cult, basically.
Speaker 2:Now, this is Epstein you're talking about.
Speaker 1:This is Keith Raniere.
Speaker 2:Okay, so yeah, let's clarify that again for our audience.
Speaker 1:So Keith Raniere, in this Nixxiom group he had created this sex cult and attracted vulnerable women to basically have sex with him and to pay him money and to do for helping them become more confident and more I don't know whatever more able to deal with the world. And so he attracted a whole bunch of people and he conned them out of their money and there was I think there were in total there was something like 21 women who wound up getting restitution. These are women that went to him for counseling.
Speaker 2:In total there was something like 21 women who wound up getting restitution. These are women that went to him for counseling Right, not counseling.
Speaker 1:It's like one of these self-help groups. You go there and you go to a conference and he talks about you know how good you are and you know I don't know Right, so he's attracting clients from there. One of these con kind of things. That's, you know, sort of in the same model as Tony Robbins. You know those self-help kinds of things, but he focused on getting women to be more self-actualized or whatever. Okay.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned 21. Were there 21 cases there?
Speaker 1:were 21 women that wound up getting restitution for money that they'd get. There was a lot more women that were involved in that, but not there weren't a whole, there weren't vast numbers of them and there was five women I think I think it was five who were victims but also wound up being prosecuted because they were complicit in helping Ranieri carry out his scheme. So there were millions of dollars that he conned out of these people. Most of the women had money. They were not poor people, they were pretty rich. Claire Bronflin was one of them, who was the daughter of the Seagrams people.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let me just read her little statement right from your article. Okay, so let me just read her little statement right from your article. And again, I'll link Tom's article for those of you who want more information. On the sub stack you can see all three of these articles. Claire Bronfman, seagram's heiress and daughter of Egner Bronfman Sr, was described by prosecutors and court records as being psychologically manipulated and exploited by Ranieri. Nevertheless, she used her wealth to support his activities, including funding legal harassment campaigns to silence critics and defectors. Ranieri exerted control over her through the same coercive techniques used on other members. She refused to cooperate with prosecutors or to denounce Ranieri. Besides Ranieri, she received the longest sentence of six years and nine months because she wouldn't, cooperate, I suppose.
Speaker 2:Okay, so they get manipulated to the point where, man, they just fall for this.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, you've seen people who've been victims of con men before that. They absolutely. We've seen it in the church, where somebody has complained about being abused and everybody goes after the victim rather than going after the abuser, and so this happens a lot, where people are conned by slick talkers.
Speaker 2:Well, you see, ghislaine Maxwell with Jeffrey Epstein, it's amazing.
Speaker 1:So here we have a case that involved dozens of women certainly dozens of women that he ripped off and he abused, he exploited, but it wasn't. There was one victim who was 15 years old, there was only one that was underage, and there were multiple different kinds of charges that they filed against him. But they also charged him with a racketeer-influenced, corrupt organization charge, a RICO action, which is a serious thing. Ranieri wound up getting 120 years in prison. That seems excessive to me, but I don't feel sorry for the guy because he's a total con man. Claire Bronfen was the second. She got the second longest sentence. Most of the people got, you know, three years or something. One of the women got two years probation, but they were still convicted. So they had. The accomplices, who were also victims, were prosecuted. Ranieri was prosecuted. They were prosecuted for a RICO action. They had to provide restitution, or Ranieri did anyway. He had to provide restitution and then he wound up being convicted right before Epstein was indicted. So it was right around the same time, right same time okay.
Speaker 1:And Ranieri was prosecuted in Brooklyn. Next door in Manhattan is where Epstein was prosecuted, and the charges for Epstein ranged for the period of 2002 to 2005. He had two victims that they included in his case and there was no RICO charge. Now, contrast this the FBI reportedly interviewed at least 1,000 of Epstein's victims at least 1,000.
Speaker 2:There's many more than that. This is the FBI records.
Speaker 1:Well, this is the report in the court file that the FBI had interviewed over 1,000 victims.
Speaker 2:Okay, so I see the part in the article here.
Speaker 2:So the FBI evidence confirmed that Epstein harmed over a thousand victims across multiple decades, states and countries, orchestrating what prosecutors acknowledged was an extensive sex trafficking enterprise that created a vast network of underage. You said only one with the other guy, and here's a vast network of underage victims for him and others to sexually exploit in locations including New York, new Mexico, florida, the US Virgin Islands and Paris, france. There are likely other locations as well that have not been disclosed, so this is a huge Right, but there was no RICO charge.
Speaker 1:It was basically charged for two victims.
Speaker 2:Let's define for our audience, who may not know what a RICO charge is.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a Racketeer, influenced Corrupt Organization. In other words, it's a group of people who conspire together to break laws. It was targeted for organized crime figures okay, but it's been used for many others and many other people since then, both civilly and criminally. And so, basically, you want to use it to break up a broad network of nefarious organizations and people. In other words, there might be multiple organizations involved, there might be multiple people involved and Epstein's operation fits that definition to a T. I mean it was like he had people in Lithuania, in France, we had the Baltic Model Agency over in Lithuania was providing models. He had Brunel in Paris that was providing models that were sent over for Epstein Epstein use and he had activities in New York, florida, new Mexico, virgin Islands, paris.
Speaker 1:He traveled all over the world, engaged in all of his financial operations and he brought people from all over the world to his parties. People from all over the world went to his parties. So if anything deserved to have a RICO charge against it, it was his organization. Now, ironically, I didn't put it in the article because it would have gotten too long, but in the same district Southern District of New York where Epstein was prosecuted just recently, they prosecuted P Diddy Sean Diddy Combs on charges and they brought RICO charges against him. He wasn't convicted on RICO but they brought a RICO charge against him in the Southern District of New York. Now, compared to Epstein, basically the Rico charge in New York for Diddy was more like they're indicting the organization of me, myself and I, because there were no other co-conspirators involved.
Speaker 2:I wonder why they even used Rico, then for that.
Speaker 1:Well, because it would have given them more time, more time in prison. So that's why they used it. But basically he was conspiring. So that's why they used it. But basically he was conspiring. The conspiracy would have been between him and organizations that he controlled. So basically you have a conspiracy between yourself which is the jury didn't buy it.
Speaker 2:It doesn't make a lot of sense. The jury didn't buy that.
Speaker 1:Is that case?
Speaker 2:over, by the way.
Speaker 1:Well, just the sentencing is left to go. He was convicted on Mann Act violations.
Speaker 2:Where do you think that one will go just to kind of get a comparison again?
Speaker 1:Well, I think he'll probably get five years. Maybe He'll be out.
Speaker 2:Do you see them? Taking down anybody else in his organization?
Speaker 1:No, there's no. Oh, it's him, that's it. It's just him, that's him. And ironically, one of the prosecutors in the Epstein case was the lead prosecutor in the Diddy case. Isn't that something that was Comey's daughter.
Speaker 2:Is that right? So here you have. You know the conclusion shielded hundreds of facilitators this is Epstein again recruiters, enablers, who helped Epstein abuse more than a thousand victims over decades. Many of Epstein's victims later became perpetrators themselves. Unlike in the Ranieri case, none of them were held accountable for the role. And getting back to your article, there were a number of people that helped Ranieri that were convicted of various crimes, et cetera, et cetera. And here, except for Jelaine Maxwell, you don't have anybody right.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, jelaine Maxwell was—they could not prosecute her. It's pretty hard to give her a pass when they're making all these allegations, when they're making all these allegations. But the thing about this is that these cases are so complicated and there's so little information that's available to the public. Nobody knows what's happening. They can't make a decision of what's really going on. I'll give you an example and I think I mentioned it in the article one of the parts they claim like in the beginning, both Kash Patel and Dan Bongino of the FBI said they reviewed the file and there's, you know, there's nothing there. Okay, which is what? And the Axios, when they leaked the report that says we're not going to do anything more on Epstein, they leaked the report to Axios and they said well, there's no co-conspirators. They can't make a case against a co-conspirator. What? This is ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Because what I just read was from the FBI reports. Right, this is like what the heck are you— when they're naming a thousand victims with other people, as you know. Perpetrators.
Speaker 1:But this is the other thing that's really significant here. As far as a co-conspirator, somebody that's involved in it, jpmorgan Chase Bank handled over a billion dollars in transactions that were linked to suspected human trafficking that came from Epstein. Okay, over you know, like a I don't know 10-year period or something. So they were linked to, you know, to human trafficking. That's Staley, who was an executive at JPMorgan Chase. Yes, suppressed reporting that information to FinCEN, financial Crimes Enforcement Network. There's supposed to be a suspicious activity report filed. He suppressed all the suspicious activity reports. Well, if that's not an element of a conspiracy, that's a crime in itself. Okay, if that's not an element of a conspiracy, I don't know what is.
Speaker 2:Now, that should be transparent also, right yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, it's out there. How can they say, well, there's no evidence of any conspiracy, what are you talking about? And so people say, oh, it's the government. They must be telling the truth. I've gotten to the point now where I say it's the government, it must be a lie.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because Bongino and Kash Patel both, and Pam Abadne too, you know they all said that this was. They all felt like something was going to come out of this, you know.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, the other thing is that they made these claims that they're going to release all the files. They're going to release the files and then they get in there and they don't release anything. Well, the very idea that they could say that they could release all the files is absurd. I make the point in the article that the president of the United States himself could not have authorized the release of the files. There are so many different laws and rules and regulations that govern different parts of this case that no single person can allow it to be released, and that's the problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the problem becomes what we stated in the beginning was a two-tier justice system. Somebody's trying to protect people in this and, when they want to. There's just so many layers and so many ways they can do this. So what is our solution to that? How do we get this? Because you know you talk about Bill Barr in here served as attorney general before and during Ranieri's trial, as well as when Epstein was indicted. The fact that Barr was the attorney general is significant. Barr's father hired Epstein at the Dalton School. He was legal counselor at the CIA during the Church Committee's investigation and hearings, and he's closely connected to Jay Lefthowitz, one of Epstein's attorneys and the architect of the NPA. So I don't want to get too much in the weeds there, but Bill Barr would have known everything that was going on here.
Speaker 2:He should have had a lot of details right.
Speaker 1:Well, he would have known right away that there's some. He was familiar with the Ranieri case. Barr is not a dumb man, okay, Anybody that has an insight into comparing Ranieri's case with Epstein's case can see. You know, Ranieri's case is maybe down here in terms of the impact on society and the broadness of the conspiracy he had. It's way down here In terms of the conspiracy with Epstein. It's way up here, but he's out of sight in the prosecution. There was a lot of publicity but he was really, in terms of the intensity of the prosecution, is pretty pathetically small.
Speaker 2:In the article you talk about many, many different ways that we could bury these things, keep them secret. You know it's given too many people too much power to suppress information that should be public. But why, in this case and again, I guess this is the big million dollar question why, in this case, are the Bill Bars of the world and all the other people not pursuing this? Why is again the FBI, the DOJ, why are they not more aggressively going after trying to get to the bottom of this?
Speaker 1:I think they're trying to protect the intelligence community, because I think the intelligence community knew all along what was going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if we don't expose that and we just push it down again, we ruin the trust with the American people, just like you said. You know, I mean, what's true anymore. You know who's on our side anymore.
Speaker 2:The big danger again when we start to suppress this information is we can create a two-tier, three-tier justice system. We can put certain people political, go after Donald Trump, go after again these January 6th guys, many, many other things, and not expose any of that information, not even say why. You're doing it right, and just make something up. So at the end of the day, we have to be transparent and this is really what your article gets to, especially toward the end, so we don't have time to go into all of those things but at the end we have to come up with a solution. We have to simplify the government, like we talked about, you know, make it smaller, make it more streamlined. These organizations and these layers of organizations they can bury this. It just gets to be too much. Everybody's got a hand in this manipulation and if you try to do the right thing, you got to fight other departments and judges in some cases, etc.
Speaker 1:Well, even delaying information coming out is a victory by a lot of these organizations if they can just delay things from coming out, and so you can spend years trying to get information that should be readily available under the Freedom of Information Act, but it's not. They use the Freedom of Information Act to suppress information as much as they do to provide it, and so- and here's where that two-tier system comes in.
Speaker 2:Another angle on it, if I'm a millionaire or a billionaire, I hire attorneys that know these things, that know these loops that keep pushing this thing backwards until you know what we're all you know. The next problem comes right, the next emergency comes up, and pretty soon I'm on the back burner. You know, I wait till some other people get into office, I wait till that prosecutor is gone and has moved on to private practice or whatever, and I know that we can bury these things. And again, people with money, with connections with power, and yet they're going to pull this little guy off the street for whatever petty crime that he did and throw the book at him.
Speaker 2:And this is really where you see people almost just throw up their hands these January 6th again. These defendants they never even had a criminal record, tom. They were upholding citizens with jobs and families and et cetera, and yet we could throw the book at them, put them in prison Again, inhumane practices.
Speaker 1:And without bail.
Speaker 2:Without bail, which is against the law, also Right. So we just twist and distort the law to our own.
Speaker 1:Again, in those cases the judges allowed that to happen. So if you think a judge is going to protect you from an overzealous prosecutor, you can think again, because it's been proven time and again that's not true and so we can't trust anything that people are saying. Look at these claims what's going on right now down in Texas that all these legislators have fled from Texas to here to Illinois and to New York and other kind of places and all the Democrats are saying, well, it's a threat to democracy.
Speaker 1:Well, it's such a joke. Illinois is the most gerrymandered state in the country. There's Pritzker huh A district, a congressional district, that goes from one side of Illinois all the way to the other. There's Pritzker huh A district, a congressional district, that goes from one side of Illinois all the way to the other and up.
Speaker 1:And up again, and there's another one that goes like this Looks like a bag of worms that's in there, it's like unbelievable. And so they make these claims that something is a threat to democracy when it isn't and they don't. What's is a threat to democracy when it isn't and they don't? What's a real threat to democracy is this secrecy that's going on in the government, the lack of transparency, the lack of accountability. One of the examples I had were in doing the research on Epstein.
Speaker 1:I looked up a deposition that Epstein took shortly after he left Bear Stearns and he was deposed about some case. I can't remember exactly the details of it. It wasn't real significant in the article that I wrote. But the thing that struck me was they had blacked out areas on the deposition and what was blacked out was the person conducting the deposition, who was an employee of the Security and Exchange Commission. So if I wanted to go back and check with somebody to find out, well, what about this case? I can't even find that out by looking at this deposition to say John Jones is the one that did the deposition, he's the one that was handling the case, this is a public employee, this is a guy who works for us, he's paid with government money and they're blacking out his name because they don't want anybody to know that he's the one that's conducting the investigation. This is outrageous.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we have to figure out a way to make this transparent above the board. This is a big job. Can Trump and his organizations? You know, I mean the people that he put in place. I know they're trying to simplify things, tom. Is it possible to simplify this to the point where transparency becomes the name of the game here? When it's possible, we know there's times when cases are under investigation that you can't give out all the details. We get that.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:But is there a point where we say things should be transparent? Is there a way, in other words, to make some system, some system of laws that don't complicate it anymore but decomplicate it, and say these are the times that you can withhold records? Is that possible?
Speaker 1:Well, I think one of the things they've got to do is, instead of passing, Because if it's not, we're screwed. The first thing they have to do before passing new laws is to get rid of some of the laws that are already there. A lot of these laws that grant privacy on certain things need to be removed. One of the laws under the privacy rules is like victims can be anonymous they can maintain anonymity in a case. That shouldn't happen.
Speaker 2:So if I'm a victim, something happens to me, I can what I can.
Speaker 1:You can be John Doe.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:That shouldn't happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because, I mean, you would think just at the top, you think, well, yeah, I won't come forward unless my identification is protected. But on the other hand, if we don't do this and again this becomes a paradox if we don't do this, everybody will come after everybody and they don't have to even say who they are. It's you know at some point, like you say in the article, you know there's always a victim in these crimes and these victims have to come forward. We have to know who they are, and maybe not right away, but certainly soon. So I can't just go after you, tom, and just say this anonymous person is suing me.
Speaker 1:You know it can't be like that In one of the cases with Epstein that I looked at, there were over 100. Jane Does, you can't have that.
Speaker 2:And these are all the victims that you're talking about. Yeah, they're all victims.
Speaker 1:They're supposedly victims.
Speaker 1:But here's the other case, virginia Giuffre. She was one who testified multiple times against Epstein and against Maxwell. She even filed a case against Dershowitz Mm-hmm. But she wasn't just a victim, she also was a facilitator. She recruited other girls, she trained other girls, she did these kinds of things. So she wasn't. You know.
Speaker 1:I've run into this in sexual exploitation cases a lot, where very often you find somebody who is a sexual exploiter was themselves victimized as a child and was abused, terribly abused, and they went through a terrible time but later on they become an abuser themselves. Now I can feel bad with the experience as a child. That shouldn't give them a pass for what they did as an adult, you know. So we're too easy on these people in terms of personal responsibility. So if a victim comes in and says maybe they are a total victim, there's nothing that they did, there's no additional responsibilities they have, that doesn't mean that they should be anonymous, because we have to be able to check to make sure that their story is true. If there's reason for them to be anonymous, let them be anonymous in the future, not when they're dealing with the case.
Speaker 1:You can get people in witness protection programs. We've done this. You can just really give them a new identity and give them a new life somewhere else if they want to start over. But you can't allow somebody to retain the life that they have and be able to testify anonymously against somebody because there's no check on them. It's like you're trying to investigate a ghost. You can't confirm information if that's the case.
Speaker 2:You can say anything.
Speaker 1:Anonymously, you can say anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I suppose there has to be some point of some protection, at least initially right Age, of course for underage people. But will people still come forward, Tom, if there isn't any protection? You know, I guess they're going to have to.
Speaker 1:Well, we used to get people the people who are most in danger are people that testify against organized crime groups okay, and we used to convince people to cooperate in our investigations against organized crime. But you have to work with them. You can't just do it. We'll let you testify anonymously. Even an anonymous person testifying against organized crime is terrified because they're terrified that somebody's going to recognize them and know who they are, which they would. So what the anonymity does is prevent people who know that person from saying wait a minute, this is not true. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 2:It's like if you all of a sudden—. It is a tough spot though, isn't it, tom?
Speaker 1:I mean, it seems to be a tough spot. Well, we need better investigators.
Speaker 2:That's the problem, yeah, but I mean it puts a person in a tough spot. I mean, if I'm going to push back on somebody like Epstein, somebody with power, I could be taking my life into my own hands, right? I mean, these are not easy things that we're talking about.
Speaker 1:Well, I remember what was it in the mid 70s? We looked it up that there were 15,000 lawyers in one zip code in Chicago and in the entire city of Chicago there are only 2000 investigators to investigate 250,000 class one crimes. So you know, look at that, there's something terribly wrong with our priority when we hire 15,000 lawyers and in dealing with criminal things you've got 2,000 detectives and not all of those are real good either. I mean, a lot of times there can be some pretty terrible investigators out there. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of good ones too. We need a lot more good ones, and there aren't nearly enough. Now there's only 700 FBI agents in the world.
Speaker 2:You wonder if somebody's picking up a case like Epstein and wants to push this through. It takes a lot of manpower to dig into all this time and manpower, et cetera, and so again you could see why these good lawyers, the amount of lawyers that you just said, you can have two, three lawyers if you have enough money for every person that's investigating you, right and to be able to push back and start investigating them and blah blah, blah blah. So again, bottom line. Tom, what are we going to do to solve this thing?
Speaker 1:I think to start is that we need another church committee, select committee between the Senate and the House that's dedicated to try to deal with this problem of transparency, the lack of transparency in our government, but it's also going to take the cooperation of the executive branch and the courts. Frankly, we need to start unraveling this labyrinth of laws that we've created that allow our government officials to operate in darkness, because darkness breeds evil. To operate in darkness because darkness breeds evil. Whatever, I don't care who you are if you can do something in the dark without accountability. You are gradually going to go, step by step, taking shortcuts, taking more shortcuts, until you wind up crossing over into the criminal. We can't allow that.
Speaker 1:We've already descended far enough.
Speaker 2:We need to stop that. Yeah Well, you see, look, you even see this. I'm going to switch it just a little bit here. You even see this at the local level. Once we don't stand up for the truth and expose the darkness, you and I are out speaking on stolen innocence, what we're doing to our own kids from a sexual exploitation standpoint, in our own schools, in our own public schools. If all of us decide we can't push back, we're not going to fight the system, we're not going to bring this into the light. What happens is more and more people think they can get away with it, my point being not only are they up here getting away with it?
Speaker 2:there's teachers in the classrooms that are teaching this critical gender theory and et cetera et cetera, and telling young kids that a boy can be a girl, and talking to them about all these sexual deviant behaviors when they're little kids and if they think they can get away with it and nobody's going to do anything, this becomes a big issue.
Speaker 2:And so some of us regardless and it's not easy. I remember Tom just in COVID, you know pushing back against these vaccines and then later on pushing back about the porn in the schools. Man, you can get attacked and you need to build a community, and I think that's my point is build a community around yourself. Get some people that you can trust. You have to work with them, you have to encourage each other and then, hopefully, you're not standing alone out there. You have some protection, some confidence that there are other people that will be there for you and if something does happen to you or people go after you, that you have your own community around that will stand up for you. And if something does happen to you or people go after you, that you have your own community around that will stand up for you.
Speaker 2:Otherwise they try to pick you up, tom, one by one. That's true. That's right, we need money. All right, tom. Well, thank you. God bless you. Thank you for taking the time to do this. Everybody. Go to Tom's sub stack. I'll have the link in the show notes. You can get all the information there with the articles. And, in the meantime, stand up for what's true, good and beautiful. Bring it into your community. Stand up at those local school boards. Let's start to get this thing right and start to protect the most vulnerable right around us. Build up a community.
Speaker 2:Right before we came on, tom said and I remember this, even in Chicago, I live in Chicago, in a neighborhood there in the South Shore, and we all knew each other. We all knew each other. We knew who the bad characters in the community were. We knew who the good people were. We watched out for one another, and all the way from the social media and these big tech companies and AI.
Speaker 2:We're going to have to realize, tom, that we have to build communities up again. We have to build up personal relationships. You know, get off those phones, whether it's in churches or wherever you decide to do it. Find associations, belong to those associations, spend less time on social media and spend those same hours getting to actually know real people, and you'll be exposing yourself. At that point, tom, you know, when I go into the darkness, when I'm a young guy, say, and looking at pornography, and going down to my basement, et cetera, et cetera, you can go to some dark places. It's only when you're exposing yourself to the truth, to the light, that you become a better person and build up other people. It's not easy.
Speaker 2:You know they crucified Jesus. You can expect you know some pushback if you're trying to do the right thing.
Speaker 1:Well, even Jesus said go out by twos.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Don't go alone.
Speaker 2:And hopefully armed, yes.
Speaker 1:Thanks everyone, Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye, bye, thanks everyone. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.