Are We Sick of This Shit Yet?
The power structure that covered up Epstein's New Mexico crimes is about the charge us $158 a ticket to hear them continue the coverup but call it accountability.
A fancy invitation to a stupidly expensive and ridiculous event is circulating in Santa Fe, New Mexico right now.
On June 12, 2026, as part of the inaugural Santa Fe Magazine Festival at St. John’s College, a South African-born self-described feminist activist named Cecile Lipworth will moderate a ticketed public conversation called The Web that Epstein Wove: Zorro Ranch and the Reckoning in New Mexico. The panelists will be Representative Andrea Romero, who chairs the state’s bipartisan Truth Commission; Clara Bates, the Santa Fe New Mexican reporter who has covered Epstein’s New Mexico ties; and Sally Denton, a veteran Santa Fe-based investigative journalist.
The billing promises to follow “the threads others have left hanging.” To ask “what happened. Who knew. Why has accountability been so elusive.”
And you, too, can attend, for just $158 per person.
Before that panel convenes, I want to tell you exactly what it is, besides insanely overpriced, but also exactly what it is NOT.
It is not a fucking reckoning, no matter how expensive the publicist is. This “discussion” is, rather, the managed and profitable appearance of a reckoning, produced by the same institutional network that has kept the deepest threads of the Epstein story in New Mexico buried for thirty years.
And, yeah, they’re assholes.
The Festival and Its Founding Partner
Owen Lipstein, the festival's founder, is a former publishing executive who in 1990 collapsed his magazine empire — which included Psychology Today and Mother Earth News — losing an estimated $20 million and leaving employees and vendors unpaid. He has since reinvented himself multiple times, as only rich, incompetent men can, most recently as Santa Fe's chronicler of artists, mystics, and visionaries, with his Santa Fe Magazine.
The founding partners of Lipstein’s Santa Fe Magazine — entities that took eight-page advertising spreads in the inaugural issue — include the Santa Fe Institute.
That Santa Fe Institute detail is the key to understanding why this particular panel, at this particular festival, sponsored by this particular magazine, founded by this particular man, in this particular city, in this godforsaken fucking state, will ask the questions it will ask and avoid the ones it won’t.
In a 2019 interview with Steve Bannon, Jeffrey Epstein said he chose New Mexico for his ranch because of the scientists at the Santa Fe Institute. The same Santa Fe Institute that gave failed publisher Lipstein the bread to give fucking up another shot.
The Santa Fe Institute is a research organization founded in 1984 by scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the facility the United States government built in secret during World War II to design and build the atomic bomb. Six of the Institute’s eight founders were active Los Alamos National Laboratory employees at the time. The institute was conceived in the conference room outside the LANL director's office.
Epstein publicly courted and funded — and secretly surveilled and collected kompromat on — the Santa Fe Institute’s members for decades, seemingly as part of an Israeli military intelligence operation running through New Mexico's nuclear infrastructure. Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist who co-founded both Los Alamos National Laboratory's theoretical division and Santa Fe Institute, was among Epstein’s closest contacts there. Ghislaine Maxwell testified in 2025 that she was the one who introduced Gell-Mann to Epstein — which is only surprising if you did not already know her dad, Robert Maxwell, was the Israeli spy to sold Israeli backdoored PROMIS software to New Mexico’s nuclear weapons labs in the 1980s. Robert Maxwell also donated $100,000 to Santa Fe Institute in 1990. Two months later, Ghislaine’s older sister Christine joined the Santa Fe Institute board.
Anyway. Lipstein’s “new” cultural magazine that the Santa Fe Institute paid to launch will be hosting a”paid “public: conversation about how New Mexico is finally investigating Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Oh. And it’ll run you more than $300 if you bring a date. Frankly, I’d trust a wolf to guard a whole warehouse full of hens before I’d trust these fuckers to host a legit conversation about their pals.
But this is what the Santa Fe establishment does. It circles. It contains. It produces events that look like accountability while the institutions that enabled the original harm remain intact, unnamed, and in the room.
It protects the rich and dishonest at all costs. It just so happens that this time around, the cost is $158, and your whole entire fucking soul.
The Chair Who Cannot Investigate What She Is Part Of
New Mexico State Representative Andrea Romero (D-Santa Fe) will appear on that stage as the reformer in charge of the New Mexico Epstein Survivors Truth Commission — the legislator who ostensibly finally forced New Mexico to reckon with what happened at Zorro Ranch.
Just one problem. She is absolutely not that. At all. Back in January, I thought she was. Then I started investigating, and lost all innocence. Romero is a participant in the system the investigation is designed to look like it is examining.
Begin with her biography. Before she was elected to the legislature, Romero worked as a Project Manager and Program Manager directly at Sandia National Laboratories (LANL’s Albuquerque counterpart), interfacing with export control, security and classification, NNSA, and other government agencies on national security programs. She worked inside its administrative apparatus, with access to its most sensitive classification functions. This detail does not appear in her current public biography, magically erased I guess.
From Sandia, Romero moved to become Executive Director of the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities from 2015 to 2018 — a federally funded organization whose explicit mandate was lobbying Congress for increased Los Alamos National Laboratory funding. The coalition’s annual budget of approximately $200,000 came overwhelmingly from the Department of Energy and Los Alamos County. In plain terms: Romero was paid with federal nuclear weapons money to lobby for more federal nuclear weapons money, for an organization whose stated and somewhat misleading mission was representing the interests of the largely Hispanic and Indigenous communities surrounding Los Alamos
Her entanglement with LANL ran deeper than her salary. While serving as the coalition’s chief advocate for increased LANL funding, Romero’s private business — Tall Foods, Tall Goods, a commercial ostrich farm in Ribera, NM (I shit you not) — received an award from the Venture Acceleration Fund, a program established by Los Alamos National Security LLC, the Bechtel Corporation-led consortium that held LANL’s $2.4 billion annual management contract. The amount she received was not publicly disclosed. Nuclear Watch New Mexico Director Jay Coghlan stated at the time that it was “at a minimum unseemly for the Executive Director of the Regional Coalition, which lobbies for increased LANL funding, to receive funding for her private business from LANS, who runs LANL.”
Then came the audit. A 2018 review found Romero had charged the coalition for alcohol, an $1,850 Washington D.C. dinner, and baseball tickets — expenses routed through lobbying trips to schmooze federal officials on LANL’s behalf.
This is the woman chairing the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico operation — the operation built roughly equidistant between the nuclear laboratories where Romero worked and lobbied, a quick drive to the farm where she grazed her ostriches on Bechtel’s money.
Romero’s conflicts do not end with her biography. As I have reported in detail in The Pugilist, the Truth Commission’s newly hired legal counsel — the firm conducting hearings, issuing subpoenas, and shaping the official record — is Faddoul, Cluff, Hardy & Conaway, P.C., an Albuquerque personal injury firm with no investigative law experience. Josh Conaway, FCHC’s lead partner on the commission work, previously served on the board of the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association. The NMTLA’s political action committee donated $1,000 to Romero on October 4, 2024, and $1,000 to Marianna Anaya, the commission’s other Democratic member, on October 3, 2024 — one month before their elections. Both Romero and Anaya then voted to award FCHC a $750,000 contract to run the investigation. That financial relationship is documented in the New Mexico Campaign Finance Information System. It has not been reported by the Santa Fe New Mexican.
The procurement process for the legal counsel selection, meanwhile, was overseen by Gerardo Antonio Paredes Jr., the New Mexico Legislative Council Service’s chief procurement officer, whose prior employment was at the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts under a MAGA Republican administration. Don Huffines — the man who now owns Zorro Ranch — is running to become Texas State Comptroller. The man who controlled the selection window for the Truth Commission’s investigative counsel had previously worked for the office currently sought by the man who owns the property being investigated.
Romero will sit on that stage as the face of accountability. But make no mistake about it: She is the accountability problem.
The Reporter Who Received the Tip and Sat on It
Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper reporter Clara Bates has done creditable work around some parts of the Epstein story. She broke the Huffines ownership story, for instance. She has covered the ranch’s history with diligence and her reporting has been picked up nationally.
She also received, from me, my documented reporting on John J. Kelly, and thanked me, then did nothing.
In 1993, John J. Kelly served as Jeffrey Epstein's attorney-in-fact for the purchase of Zorro Ranch from Governor Bruce King. Attorney-in-fact is not the same as being someone's lawyer. It means Kelly had legal authority to act as Epstein himself — to sign documents, make decisions, and bind Epstein contractually as if he were Epstein. A few months later, President Bill Clinton appointed Kelly United States Attorney for the District of New Mexico, a post he held for two terms, until 2000. Kelly carried Q clearance — the Department of Energy's highest classification, granting access to nuclear weapons design and restricted data — and specific jurisdiction over investigations involving unauthorized removal of classified information from the national laboratories. The first witness reports about Epstein and Zorro Ranch reached the FBI in 1996. Kelly, whose office would have fielded those reports, never investigated Epstein.
Bates will sit on that stage as the investigative press holding power accountable. She is the press that chose not to do the job in its entirety. But you can’t blame her. Had she done that, she’d not have been invited to this expensive stage at all.
The Establishment Journalist Lending Her Reputation
Sally Denton will also be on that stage. A self-described investigative reporter, author and historican, she has a formidable record. A Guggenheim fellow. Award-winning books on Bechtel — hilariously, considering Romero’s ostriches — Las Vegas organized crime, Mormon corruption, the LeBaron massacre. Forty years of serious work. A Santa Fe institution.
But she has published nothing on Epstein. Nothing on Zorro Ranch. Nothing on the nuclear contractor nexus, the Israeli intelligence threads, the LANL connections, the Henry Singleton network, the architects of the Zorro house and their connections to Israeli military intelligence, the FCC microwave licenses the ranch held, or any of the threads I have been documenting in these pages.
No, no. Denton’s presence on the panel will lend it exactly what it needs and has not earned: the credibility of a journalist known for taking on powerful institutions, attached to an event whose function is to protect them.
Denton is not bringing reporting to that stage. She is bringing a reputation. In a room like this one, a reputation functions as laundering.
The Moderator, the Frame, and the Intelligence Question This Panel Will Not Ask
Cecile Lipworth is a South African-born self-described feminist activist and event producer with a track record in movement-building. She has no background in investigative journalism and no prior record of engagement with the Epstein network or Zorro Ranch investigation.
What she does have is an Instagram feed that shares content arguing that the American left fails to adequately defend Jewish and Israeli interests — a framing consistently deployed in service of Zionist exceptionalism, and intended to conflate criticism of the government of Israel with antisemitism as a tool for shutting down opponents of the genocide in Gaza. Her South African Jewish background places her in a community that historians have documented as one where Zionist identification has been culturally normalized across generations.
This is important because the question of Epstein and the Maxwells’ Israeli intelligence connections is not peripheral to the Zorro Ranch story. It is the fucking story. But the people who are keeping the story from the public don’t want you to know that.
Former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou has stated publicly and on the record — on Piers Morgan Uncensored and the Diary of a CEO podcast — that he believes “very strongly” Epstein was a spy, and that he is “confident it was the Israelis.” Kiriakou described Epstein as a “textbook example of an access agent” — someone recruited not for his own secrets but for his proximity to power. He added: “I’d bet everything I have on Epstein being a spy. I feel very confident in that assessment.”
World-renowned security expert Gavin de Becker, whose firm has protected heads of state and whose threat assessment work is considered authoritative in intelligence circles, was asked directly on the same podcast whether Epstein was an intelligence asset for a U.S. ally. His answer was one word: Israel. When told there was no direct evidence, de Becker replied: “There is direct evidence” — and said he could discuss it for forty minutes.
An FBI document released in the January 2026 Epstein files states that a confidential human source “became convinced that Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent,” and that Epstein’s attorney Alan Dershowitz told a U.S. Attorney that “Epstein belonged to both U.S. and allied intelligence services.” The same document states that after calls between Dershowitz and Epstein, “Mossad would then call Dershowitz to debrief.” It describes Epstein as having been “trained as a spy” under former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Drop Site News has separately reported, based on hacked Barak emails, that Epstein brokered deals for Israeli intelligence, helped sell mass surveillance technology to Côte d’Ivoire on behalf of former Israeli intelligence officials, and advised Barak on how to engage with Mossad — telling him to “not go to number 1 too quickly.” Number 1 is a known nickname for the Mossad chief.
An Israeli intelligence officer named Yoni Koren, whose career was built in covert operations alongside Mossad, lived in Epstein’s Manhattan apartment for multiple stretches between 2013 and 2016.
And Robert Maxwell — Ghislaine’s father, the man whose daughter introduced Epstein to New Mexico — was himself a confirmed Mossad asset, per the public testimony of Rafael Eitan, the Mossad operations chief who ran him. Maxwell sold backdoored PROMIS software to Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory in the mid-1980s, creating a penetration of America’s nuclear weapons complex that has never been fully accounted for.
These are documented facts, named sources, and released government records. They are also the precise threads that will not be raised at a panel moderated by a Zionist-sympathetic activist, at a festival whose founding institutional partner was Jeffrey Epstein’s preferred intellectual home in New Mexico.
They will tell New Mexico that this event is all about accountability. The captured New Mexico media will regurgitate it like cows and cud.
What This Panel Will Not Ask
The event promises to follow threads others have left hanging. Here are the threads it will leave hanging, that I have already covered here in The Pugilist:
John J. Kelly. Epstein’s power of attorney at the Zorro Ranch closing. The U.S. Attorney with Q clearance who never charged him. The future chair of the New Mexico Democratic Party. His name will not be spoken.
Bradbury Stamm Construction. The classified military contractor at LANL and Kirtland AFB that built the Zorro Ranch compound — a company with no business constructing private homes that built Epstein’s anyway, whose telephone number appeared in his personal phone book. Not on the agenda.
Cooper Robertson & Partners and Philip Johnson. The architects of the ranch main house, whose documented ties to Philip Johnson connect the building itself to a network spanning Nazi intelligence and Israeli nuclear infrastructure. Not mentioned.
The Henry Singleton network. The OSS-connected Teledyne founder whose family’s San Cristobal Ranch sits adjacent to Zorro Ranch, whose company defrauded Sandia National Laboratories, and whose estate retained a parcel inside the Zorro Ranch perimeter. Unaddressed.
The FCC microwave licenses. The communications infrastructure registered to ranch manager Brice Gordon covering frequencies and coordinates that map onto the ranch’s operational security architecture. Not raised.
The Santa Fe Institute. Epstein’s stated reason for choosing New Mexico. The organization whose relationships gave him social legitimacy in this state for nearly three decades. The founding partner of the magazine hosting this festival. Not questioned.
What a Real Reckoning Requires
I have been reporting on this network since early 2026. My pieces on Kelly, Bradbury Stamm, Cooper Robertson, the Singleton family, and the Truth Commission’s procurement conflict are in the archive of this publication. Every claim is sourced to primary documents — deed records, FCC filings, DOE procurement databases, DOJ interview transcripts, released FBI records, campaign finance filings.
None of it has been picked up by the Santa Fe New Mexican or any other New Mexico media outlet, though national ones have: The New Republic; Raw Story; Collective Evolution; Rick Wilson; Zev Shalev; Wajahat Ali. None of it has been raised by the Truth Commission. No elected official I’ve contacted about it in New Mexico has bothered to respond. None of my reporting will be on stage at St. John’s College in June, because the event is not meant to inform. It is meant to seem like information whilst being more of the same coverup.
A real reckoning would put Kelly under oath. It would subpoena Bradbury Stamm’s classified contract records, and Karyna Shuliak herself. It would ask what the Santa Fe Institute knew about Epstein’s activities and when. It would examine the Maxwell-PROMIS penetration of Sandia and Los Alamos and trace it forward to the ranch. It would ask what communications were routed through those FCC microwave licenses, and who held the receiving equipment.
A real reckoning would be chaired by someone with no financial relationship to the investigating firm and no career built inside the nuclear weapons institutional complex. It would be covered by a press that follows documented leads rather than buries them. It would be held at a venue with no institutional ties to the man who said he chose New Mexico because of its scientists.
A real reckoning would not charge for tickets at all, and certainly not more than most New Mexico families get for a week’s worth of groceries on SNAP.
What New Mexico will get instead, on June 12 at St. John’s College, is four gatekeepers in different costumes — the compromised legislator, the compliant reporter, the credentialed name, and the ideologically useful moderator — performing accountability at a festival co-founded by Epstein’s preferred intellectual institution.
The silence is not being challenged at that event.
It is being produced there.
I’ve said it before. Allow me to say it again now: Fuck these people.
I have been reporting on the Epstein network in New Mexico since early 2026. Previous reporting referenced in this piece: “The Gatekeeper” (John J. Kelly, Parts I and II); “The Company That Built Jeffrey Epstein’s Ranch House” (Bradbury Stamm); “Exclusive: I Finally Found the Architects” (Cooper Robertson and Philip Johnson); “The Terrifying Real Reason For Jeffrey Epstein’s Remote Zorro Ranch” (Henry Singleton and San Cristobal Ranch); and the Truth Commission procurement conflict series. THE PUGILIST is reader-funded investigative journalism. If this work matters to you, please subscribe — paid if you’re able — and share it widely.
One word keeps coming back to me as I read this:
circular.
In every sense. The same names, the same institutions, the same money, the same protection racket, recycling through each other across decades.
Town to city, state to country, political party to intelligence agency to media to festival stage. It’s all one organism feeding on itself.
A compromised legislator who worked inside the nuclear complex. A reporter who buried your leads. A credentialed name lending legitimacy she hasn’t earned here.
A moderator with ideological reasons not to pull the thread that matters most. All sitting on a stage co-founded by Epstein’s favorite intellectual institution. For $158 a ticket.
This isn’t a reckoning. It’s a reunion.
The same network that buried this story for thirty years, dressed up in accountability costumes, charging admission.
You named it perfectly: the silence isn’t being challenged at that event. It’s being produced there.
Absolutely and totally sick of this shit. Grateful to you for wading through it and sharing what’s going on.