But there's plenty of threads American Dream started over the years that took off on their own - the Jeffrey Epstein one being a good example.
And on the topic of Epstein, this is probably an appropriate excerpt that I came here to post:
IanEye » Fri Jun 26, 2009 1:52 pm wrote:“Hey,” David Coe said, “let's talk about the Old Testament. Who would you say are its good guys?”
“David,” Beau volunteered.
“King David,” David Coe said. “That's a good one. David. Hey. What would you say made King David a good guy?” He was giggling, not from nervousness but from barely containable delight.
“Faith?” Beau said. “His faith was so strong?”
“Yeah.” David nodded as if he hadn't heard that before. “Hey, you know what's interesting about King David?” From the blank stares of the others I could see that they did not. Many didn't even carry a Hebrew Bible, preferring a slim volume of just the New Testament Gospels and Epistles and, from the Old, Psalms. Others had the whole book, but the gold gilt on the pages of the first two thirds remained undisturbed. “King David,” David Coe went on, “liked to do really, really bad things.” He chuckled. “Here's this guy who slept with another man's wife—Bathsheba, right?—and then basically murders her husband. And this guy is one of our heroes.” David shook his head. “I mean, Jiminy Christmas, God likes this guy! What,” he said, “is that all about?”
The answer, we discovered, was that King David had been “chosen.” To illustrate this point David Coe turned to Beau. “Beau, let's say I hear you raped three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?”
Beau shrank into the cushions. “Probably that I'm pretty bad?”
“No, Beau. I wouldn't. Because I'm not here to judge you. That's not my job. I'm here for only one thing.”
“Jesus?” Beau said. David smiled and winked.
He walked to the National Geographic map of the world mounted on the wall. “You guys know about Genghis Khan?” he asked. “Genghis was a man with a vision. He conquered”—David stood on the couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern hemisphere—“nearly everything. He devastated nearly everything. His enemies? He beheaded them.” David swiped a finger across his throat. “Dop, dop, dop, dop.”
http://harpers.org/archive/2003/03/jesus-plus-nothing/
From the book:
Coe cites one of his favorite scripture verses, Matthew 18:20, “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” “Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had, these nobodies from nowhere. Actually emotional and mental problems. Prisoners. From the streets. But they bound themselves together in an agreement and they died together. Two years before they moved into Poland these three men had a study done, systematically a plan drawn out and put on paper to annihilate the entire Polish population and destroy by numbers every single house”—he bangs the podium, dop, dop, dop—“and every single building in Warsaw and then start on the rest of Poland.”
It worked, Coe says; they killed 6 1/2 million “Polish people”. (The actual sum was closer to 5 1/2 million, 3 million of whom were Polish Jews. But that, as Stalin would say, is just a statistic.)
“These three men by their decision alone.” What he’s trying to explain, Coe says, is the power of friendship: between man and Christ, between brothers in Christ.