Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny. Sometimes Colorado. Today is July 7th, 2025, and I was hoping I’d never have to make a video like this, but after the release today from the FBI, I’m pissed. I’m sad. I’m angry. The lies are so bad and so corrosive and destructive that it doesn’t even surprise me anymore.
For context, let me share my screen here. This is Pam Bondi, our current attorney general. The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients. Will that really happen? It’s sitting on my desk right now to review. That’s been a directive by President Trump. I’m reviewing that, along with JFK files and MLK files. That’s all in the process of being reviewed because it was done at the directive of the president from all of these agencies.
Have you seen anything that made you say, "Oh my gosh?" Not yet. As part of our commitment to transparency, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigations have conducted an exhaustive review of investigative holdings related to Jeffrey Epstein. To ensure that the review was thorough, the FBI conducted digital searches of its databases, hard drives, and network drives, as well as physical searches of squad areas, locked cabinets, desks, closets, and other areas where responsive material may have been stored.
These searches uncovered a significant amount of material, including more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence. These files related to Epstein include a large volume of images and videos of victims who are either minors or appear to be minors, and over 10,000 downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography. Teams of agents, analysts, attorneys, and privacy and civil liberties experts combed through the digital and documentary evidence with the aim of providing as much information as possible to the public while simultaneously protecting victims. Much of the material is subject to court-ordered sealing. Only a fraction of this material would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial, as the seal served only to protect victims and did not expose any additional third parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing.
Through this review, we found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials and will not permit the release of child pornography. This systematic review revealed no incriminating client list. There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.
In other words, after all this time, after all the victims who have come forward saying that they were raped by other people than Epstein, after having multiple rooms, not just one, wired for sound and video, and people on the island and in the New York apartment saying that the purpose of that was blackmail and extortion, the FBI has the audacity to come forward and say, "No one was blackmailed. It was just Epstein. There’s no client list. He’s dead. Move on. Case closed." They also said in another release that he killed himself. There’s no evidence that anybody else was involved, even though the cameras didn’t work. They released a videotape in a different area that was unrelated to his area and didn’t explain any of the discrepancies.
It’s so far beyond fantasy at this point. It is what I would expect from the Soviet Union, with Chernobyl 3.4 royen. Not good, not terrible. Everything’s under control. The government is lying to us at a scale that is so unbelievable, disgusting, and sickening. We all know this is a lie. Every one of us knows this is a lie. What they’ve done is just closed the case, which means there will be no further investigations. There will be no more FBI looking into it, no more releasing information and talking about it. Everyone who raped over a thousand children over a 20-year period just got away.
What did Ghislaine Maxwell go to prison for if there was no trafficking and no client list? What is she in jail for? Just Epstein raping people? A thousand-plus victims. So he raped a different person every day for three years himself. Honestly speaking, is this the society that we want to live in? Is this the society we are, that we’re just comfortable with children being molested and no oversight, no special prosecutor, no one looking into it, and having a frank adult conversation with us?
When people ask you why cryptocurrencies and blockchain exist, it’s stuff like this. We don’t trust the institutions anymore because the institutions are no longer capable of regulating themselves. We don’t trust the institutions anymore because when we ask them to do the right thing—and believe me, it is absolutely, definitively, unambiguously the right thing to put child molesters in prison—they don’t do it because the people in power apparently have some connection to it.
How can you then trust them with your healthcare, your education, the roads, the water you drink, the air you breathe, and the food you eat? How can you trust them to make the right call about who we go to war with and who we make peace with? How can you trust them with your money in your pocket? All moral legitimacy dies when you fail these basic tests of decency and allow some of the most disgusting and despicable people in the world to walk scot-free, living lives of luxury, knowing that they raped children.
It’s a dark, terrible day for the government to do this, but it’s expected. The Soviet Union was the ultimate example in the 20th century of a society addicted to the concept that there is no objective reality and truth. It’s just whatever the state happens to say. There’s the truth, and then there’s the truth. The truth is what actually happened, and that’s the single most dangerous thing to know and say. Then there’s the truth that the state said happened. Your first job is to figure that out as quickly as possible so you don’t believe your eyes, your senses, or try to look for objective reality. You try to find the authority figure who’s high enough on the food chain that he or she is allowed to tell you what the truth is.
Everybody listening knows it’s a lie, but they’re so used to being lied to that they no longer even know what the truth looks like. Our society is becoming like this. Any person who believes what has just been said here is the truth no longer has the ability to discern what’s real and what’s not real. The minute you succumb to that is the minute tyranny takes root because tyrants then own a monopoly on reality. They can tell you up is down and down is up. The sky is yellow. The sky is blue. The sky is red. It doesn’t matter; you don’t see it. You’re told it. Blockchain doesn’t do this. Our industry doesn’t do this. The technology that we work on doesn’t care what your feelings are. It creates an objective reality, and the consensus is that we can all see it and verify it ourselves.
As angry as I am, it reinvigorates me in a certain respect. It tells me I’m on the right road. It tells us all that we’re on the right road. When we looked at technology like Midnight and Cardano, these are necessary, not necessarily sufficient, but at least necessary components on the long road of restoring integrity. Our society is deeply broken, deeply partisan, and we are divided by design through massive amounts of propaganda to hate each other. The left versus the right. This side is evil; my side is virtuous. We’re not allowed to have a discussion about objective reality, objective KPIs, and what is good for the nation as a whole, how humans should live in 2030 and 2035.
We’re also told that when evil people do things based upon who they know and who they are, we just have to accept that they get away with it because that’s just the way things are. That may have been the way things were during the Middle Ages when we had kings, but that’s not how things are if we assert to live in a free society with the rule of law. As long as it takes for the victims to get justice, there are many of us listening right now who will remember them, and we will find a way. It’s not over.
I’m glad, in a certain respect, that these institutions have put the final nail in their coffin. They’ve proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they’re broken beyond repair. For America, I think the only solution now is a constitutional convention. There is no way at the ballot box or with third parties to elect our way out of this. For the last 24 years, we’ve either been ruled by a Democrat or a Republican—equal time, 12 years and 12 years. Every problem we have is bipartisan. Every single senator and congressman, every executive in their own way, Democrat or Republican, continues to lead us down this road to hell.
I’m old enough to remember weapons of mass destruction. I’m old enough to remember DARPA and the Information Awareness Office trying to inflict total information awareness upon the American public, only to be slapped down by Congress, and now it’s being resurrected by Palantir after being dormant for years, hiding in places like Carnivore and Einstein. I’m old enough to remember all the lies told about CO, and I’m old enough to remember that Epstein was an agent of governments to extort and blackmail some of the most powerful people to contort and use them for dark motivations.
We don’t forget these things because authority figures tell us to forget them. We remember them because they’re an indication that the moral legitimacy upon which this nation stands is broken. Only by coming together as a people at the state level through a convention are we ever going to be able to rewrite the DNA of the society we live in so that we can begin the process of healing the nation.
We need technology. We need AI. We need blockchain. We need new organizational design. We need incentives engineering. We need the last 200 years of political science theory to guide us through. The cryptocurrency space has taken many of these challenges by the horns. We’re testing these systems at a scale of hundreds of millions of people, soon to be billions. In real-time, we’re learning how to do governance, all its warts and all its glory. In real-time, we’re learning how to do incentives. In real-time, we’re learning how to build voting systems.
We have trained up millions of people who do not tolerate mediocrity, and those people can and will be engaged in the great project of reinvigorating things. I love the United States of America because it’s the original country of rebels. We had the audacity to stand up for ourselves against people much more powerful and fought a hopeless fight just for the privilege of being a nation—very divided—and we had to fight it again in a civil war. Then we had to overcome the perils of totalitarianism and communism in the 20th century.
But I also, as an American, freely acknowledge that we have many sins in addition to our blessings. In fact, the national motto of the United States ought to be, "We know we’re working on it." I’ll never give up on the American promise and the American dream. I’ll never leave. I’ll never exile. I’ll never rescind my citizenship. My bones will be buried on my ranch in Wyoming. I’ll never stop fighting because who we are is worth fighting for.
Even though our government has let us down and today is a really sad one, the American people never let us down. They still fight. They still believe. We just had our Independence Day, and we celebrate it by showing who we really are: a nation that’s willing and able to fight. In the coming years, we’re going to have a lot of fights. We’re going to fight for the soul of America. Do we belong to an unelected oligarchy, a plutocracy, and massive corporations worth trillions of dollars, now with super sophisticated tools that know everything about us and use it against us? Or do we live with liberty? God-given liberty.
That’s it. And how we get there is we have to use the same tools. We have to use constitutions. We have to use blockchain. We have to use AI ourselves. We have to use each other. We have to get along. We have to work together. We have to fall in love with the concept of an objective reality and truth. We should never become so cynical that we believe the truth does not exist. A society only dies when we give up on the things that unite us, and we’re perilously close to that.
I design. Don’t give up. Don’t get cynical. Keep the hope. Keep the pragmatism. Let’s find a way to bridge this gap. These are the moments that should unite us. I don’t care about your politics. There are certain things in life that are just plain wrong, and there are certain things in life that we all have to agree need to be remedied. This wound will not heal until we come together to heal it. Today, we have a clear example of where we’ve been failed as a society. Let’s wake up tomorrow and start fixing and healing.
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