“Jeffrey lives in a vast house alone, one can picture him sleeping in damp earth” — Woody Allen, also from the birthday book
We have come to think of Jeffrey Epstein’s world as lucrative and louche. It is easy to imagine the suave networking going on at his soirées as well as the sordid sex scenes. Like any place super-elites gather, such as Davos, TED, and Palm Beach, cards were exchanged, statuses were updated, deals were made, and fun was had. As far as the participants were concerned, Epstein’s mansion and island were simply one more place to mingle, only more enjoyable than most.
The sobriquet “Epstein Class,” apparently coined by Rep. Ro Kahana, one of the members of Congress who viewed some of the supposedly unredacted Epstein Files, seems quite apt. But how is that class limned, who is part of it, how do they feel about it, and why should we care about them as much as for the girls (and occasional boy) he exploited?
Media watchdog FAIR points out how the “elite press” has covered Jeffrey Epstein’s debauchery. Most of these accounts played down the sordid violations that the more than 1200 women and girls suffered under Epstein and Maxwell, Times correspondent Raina Lipsitz wrote, saying “the spotlight has been on the lifestyles of Epstein and his rich and famous friends—and the supposed lack of evidence that anyone other than the late Epstein and the incarcerated Maxwell sexually abused or facilitated the abuse of minors.”
Her article takes to task her fellow reporter Shawn McCreesh, who wrote almost elegiacally “The emails are like a portal back to a lost Manhattan power scene,” depicting “the twilight of an old guard made up of Wall Street billionaires, media-industry heavyweights, politicians and old-money socialites.” That this is now a bygone era is news to me.
Since then, the Times has improved its coverage. It recently compiled a list of 28 politicians, business leaders, and academics who have faced consequences for their association with Epstein. Neither of the American politicians are currently in office. They failed to mention academics Noam Chomsky and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who just resigned from Harvard’s faculty. These are but the tip of an iceberg of those who countenanced sin and let it slide. The question is, how could they?
Lest We Forget
I want to focus on what Epstein’s circle had in common that allowed them to dismiss his and their trespasses so easily and not bring them up in polite company. This is not to dismiss the suffering of the victims of Epstein’s sex ring. We owe it to the late (of suicide) Virginia Giuffre, who, after being chattel for years, wrote a disturbing memoir of her captivity, for exposing the treatment they received. At one point in a 2019 interview on 60 Minutes Australia she says:
I was trafficked to a a lot of types of different men. Um, I was trafficked to other billionaires. I was trafficked to, um, politicians, uh, professors, even royalty. Um, so the circles that Jeffrey Epstein ran in weren’t your typical setting of human trafficking, you know, and it was it was the elite of the world. It was the people who run the world. It was the most powerful people in the world. And those are our leaders. Those are the people that we are supposed to look up to. It’s corrupt.
We continue to learn more about Epstein’s network (see below for how you can dig into the files yourself) and what has and hasn’t happened to its participants. The the fallout is far from complete. Times reporter Ginia Bellafante addressed moral complicity of those in Epstein’s orbit, especially those who received favors or funds from him:
Despite whatever commitment to charity and right-mindedness, no billionaire seems to operate at a comfortable distance from the causes of so many of our social maladies. Feeling powerless to dismantle the structures that have permitted so much damaging excess, those who live far outside the nexus of Harvard and Wall Street, Washington and Palm Beach believe they have found in the Epstein files an enraging validation, proof that the ruling class functions with so little respect for the actual rules that it cannot even be bothered to capitalize and punctuate. To them, the notion of complicity isn’t complicated at all. — The Many Shades of Complicity in the Epstein Fallout, 2/27/26
The Epstein Class’s Mindset
How do they not feel complicit or even contrite? In a Video posted on his Team Human podcast, Media and social critic Douglas Rushkoff explains the ethos of those clustered around Epstein. They inhabit, he says, a permission structure that says it’s okay to exploit people because they aren’t really conscious moral beings with feelings and agency. He met some at an elite supper party paid for by Epstein (who wasn’t present) for a literary journal with some famous scientists and philosophers who proceeded to pontificate. At first he was awed but soon became disturbed, and describes why very clearly and precisely.
At 19:15 in the video, he says:
Back at that party, Dawkins said he saw human beings, as I’m quoting here, survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. Dawkin’s model of of humans as hardware and and the other anti-human ones of Daniel Dern or Steven Pinker, they run out in Silicon Valley. Their views were entirely more compatible with business models that depended on manipulating human beings instead of empowering them, exploiting them for profit rather than giving them opportunities for collective creativity. If people were really just passively responding to lines of genetic or cultural code, then why not be the ones writing the code and capitalizing off of it?
Jeffrey Epstein liked and funded these scientists because they helped him formulate a picture of the world that gives cover to those who would exploit other human beings. As they see it, people aren’t really alive or aware. They’re just behaving in service to their genetics. And if you play your cards right, in service to your genetics — yeah, I’m talking to you, Elon.
The people Rushkoff met at that party were minor stars in Epstein’s firmament. There were many more people in his orbit, as the emails in the Epstein Files document. Brian Li has taken the trouble to collect Epstein’s correspondents as a spreadsheet that includes close to 200 names. For most he lists their full name, occupation, industry, and relation to Epstein, some with links. Find it here. You might even find some people you’ve met or are friends of friends.
Dig Out the Dirt
Parsing the Epstein files has quickly become a cottage industry. Organizations such as the New York Times, The Economist, and the Associated Press have full-scale AI-assisted investigations going on. So do public interest groups and organizations seeking justice for Epstein’s victims. Add to those a multitude of amateur truth-seekers who post findings on websites and social media. But because the documents posted by DOJ are unorganized and often duplicated, redacted in different ways, and contain OCR (optical character recognition) errors and artifacts, their analyses are not always consistent across investigators and platforms.
If you want to mine an Epstein archive, be aware of how much work has already been done and proceed with caution. Using AI can save a lot of time, but there are hazards and rabbit holes in using it. In her blog Artificial Inquiry, Natalia Cote-Munoz provides insightful advice on how to think about reviewing the documents and in a second installment describes the many tools one’s disposal, both AI-based and organizational. Her articles should be required reading for anyone doing research on the internet.
Lift the Curtain of Respectability
The “permission structures” Rushkoff describes helps to explain how Epstein got away with fraud and child abuse for decades without his clientele blowing whistles on him. Another reason, which has yet to be fully exposed, is that as a procurer, Epstein had enough damning evidence about the men whom he lured into his honey pot to, as we have recently seen, destroy their reputations. Reputation is a currency that political, financial, and cultural elites covet as much as wealth, and now is the time to strip them of it. Let’s see what we can do.
|
You can find this and previous Perfidy Press Provocations in our newsletter archive. Should you see any you like, please consider forwarding this or links to others to people who might like to subscribe, and thanks. |
Be First to Comment