Kyle Kulinski Isn’t As Good at His Job As He Thinks He Is
- john raymond
- 18 hours ago
- 3 min read
When Kyle Kulinski says that what we are learning about Jeffrey Epstein’s operation is “worse than anyone could have imagined,” he is not describing reality. He is describing his own failure to reason from structure. In a coercive trafficking-and-blackmail enterprise, threats of murder are not where it stops. Threats of murder are the marker that murder is clearly in play.
This is not hindsight. It is base-rate logic.
A network like Epstein’s does not survive because it is clever. It survives because it is enforced.
If the product is silence, then the enforcement stack must be layered. Grooming. Dependency. Isolation. Surveillance. Compromising material. Legal intimidation. Social intimidation. And, when those fail, physical coercion.
A business model built on the containment of victims and the protection of secrets cannot rely on “please don’t tell.” It must rely on fear which is credible.
Credible fear, in the real world, is not sustained by bluffs forever. A bluff works once. A system needs durable compliance across many victims, across years, across changing circumstances, across the moments when one person decides the cost of silence is greater than the cost of speaking. To keep that decision from being made, the system must make the consequences feel more than hypothetical.
That is why the idea that “the threats were real” but “the violence probably stopped at threats” is not a mature inference. It is a comforting one.
Years ago, the public record already contained enough signal to update any serious prior: the anomalously lenient 2008 non-prosecution deal, the insulation of co-conspirators, the persistent institutional reluctance to fully prosecute, the scope of access to powerful elites, and the repeated pattern of secrecy around key facts.
Those are not the fingerprints of a lone predator. Those are the fingerprints of protected machinery. And protected machines do not protect themselves with polite warnings.
Under the Raymond Method, this is all quite straightforward:
Pillar One: regime security. The network’s first imperative is survival, which means preventing disclosure.
Pillar Two: asymmetric warfare. Blackmail is asymmetric power, and terror is its enforcement arm.
Pillar Three: the Traitor-General problem. When institutions that should destroy the network instead contain the scandal, that is not a mystery; it is a protective mechanism.
From that structure, the rational minimax posture has always been simple: if credible death threats are part of the control system, then actual violence is a near-inevitable feature of the system’s equilibrium. It may be disguised as “overdose,” “accident,” “suicide,” or “disappearance.” It may be outsourced. It may be rare relative to the total victim count. But it is not alien to the model. It is actually fully endogenous to the model.
So when Kulinski performs astonishment—“worse than anyone could have imagined”—he is advertising that he did not run the model. He did not take secrecy plus protection plus leverage and ask the only question that matters in asymmetric systems: what would they do to keep the victims quiet?
The answer, years ago, was not difficult.
If you build a machine that rapes children and traffics them as objects, you do not draw the moral line at murder. You draw the operational line at what you can get away with.
That is why “no one could have predicted this” is wrong in the only way that matters. It is wrong as analysis. It is wrong as a standard for commentators. And it is wrong because it trains the public to treat each revelation as a shock, instead of as confirmation of a structure that should have been recognized long ago for what it was.
The right posture is not surprise. The right posture is decision-grade inference.
The real question is not whether a coercive trafficking-and-blackmail network contains lethal enforcement. The real question is how much of it was protected, by whom, and for how long.
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