Epstein Implicates Everyone
The entire ruling class and the capitalist system are guilty
It’s an odd place to be, not being surprised that the President of the United States is all over the emails of the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker. There are surprising details in this latest Epstein email drop, and by now you’ve probably seen at least a few (and maybe many more) references to a possible Trump-Clinton liaison. But, by and large, little of it’s surprising. We’ve known that Trump is a sexual assaulter, that he was deeply tied to Epstein, and that he participated in the very worst activities on that private island.
I haven’t fully scoured these latest emails, and there are thousands of them, but what jumps out to me from reading about them is the breadth of people implicated. We’ve known for some time that Epstein was a broker, and that, as Edward Helmore writes, Epstein acted “as a channel between political figures and business titans, greasing up the former with lifestyles they could not afford and the latter with avenues of political influence.” The most nefarious and revolting details understandably get the most attention, but the countless shady dealings, the introductions, the role he played at the nexus of business and politics is equally significant, and might point us toward the most important implications of this scandal that won’t die.
The way Epstein’s ghost refuses to stop haunting Trump, and countless other elites, is a gift. There is almost no event, no disaster, no development that persists in the public consciousness quite like this unending saga. People are, understandably, horrified and captivated by the idea that the rich and powerful are a no-longer-secret pedophile cabal. For once, a conspiracy turned out to be startlingly true.
But, the thing is, that way of understanding this scandal is ultimately limited. If we think this was just a weird one-off, if we think Epstein and Maxwell were uniquely nefarious and uniquely good at entrapping the ruling class, we fail to understand what really happened here. Because, while these emails are unusually candid and disturbing, they point to much bigger forces that we need to take on if we don’t want to be ruled by the sort of people who traffic and rape minors and send each other weird messages joking about it all.
The vast number of people in this latest batch of Epstein emails helps point us toward the fact that Epstein isn’t some anomalous fiend. Billionaire Palantir co-founded Peter Thiel, billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, billionaire Victoria’s Secret founder Les Wexner, Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black — the super-rich have countless Epstein ties. Neoliberal economic policy shaper Larry Summers, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler — political elites are all over these emails too. And, of course, these names are just a fraction of a long list.
Seeing the scope of the people implicated, and knowing that Epstein worked to bridge the gap between the wealthy and those in politics, we start to see that this thing is much bigger than a pedophile ring. When you zoom out far enough, the full implications of the Epstein scandal wind up being, in some ways, mundane. The richest people on Earth want corrupt people in politics that they can use, and those corrupt politicians want wealth and luxury. As one Epstein acquaintance told the Guardian: “Anyone he thought had influence he would try to add to his collection. Mandelson [UK ambassador to the US] is slippery, and impressed by money, so Jeffrey liked that.” Repeat this again and again, and you have Jeffrey Epstein’s role in our corrupt world.
Of course, there’s no full escape from the sordid details. They’re what makes this case stick, unlike thousands of other instances of obvious and gross corruption. When you hear about the nightmare scenarios on Epstein’s Island, it’s natural to ask why the hell so many of the rich and powerful were interested in raping underage women, and in the other depravities that took place there. I won’t pretend to know the answer definitively, but there is one trend we see across time and space that might point us in the right direction.
It’s hard to know whether power corrupts, or whether the corrupt are drawn to power. The answer, as with so many things, is probably both. Depraved people seek out positions where they can dominate and profit, and the temptations of debauchery and exploitation are likely to be too much for people who find themselves in those imbalanced positions. These tendencies are exact ones that society should be organized to counter-balance.
But that’s not how things work around here. As Morris Katz recently said, we need “reluctant candidates” for office, because “if you’re someone who wants to be in the U.S. Senate, you have something wrong with you.” And he’s absolutely right. But, at the moment, instead of reluctant public servants we have eager self-servers, people who want to get powerful positions so that they trade that power for gifts and cash and access to even more elite circles. As Katz says, the Senate is currently a club of millionaires who do what billionaires tell them to. The real lesson of the Epstein saga is that this isn’t an anomaly, it’s that this is how our world works.
The other lesson we need to take from this mess is that society is structured so that these people, those without a shred of morality who trade their souls for wealth and power and access, are abundantly rewarded. The people listed in these emails have, by and large, faced zero consequences for their reprehensible lives. Instead, as we see from the long list of billionaires and successful politicians in Epstein’s correspondences, they’ve been handsomely rewarded.
This is what capitalism incentivizes. Those who are willing to sell out, those born with sociopathic tendencies, those willing and eager to trample everyone around them and purge their own humanity, are rewarded. Endless greed, endless thirst for power, the total absence of values — the dominant world system rewards these traits and behaviors. So the people who rule us, from Wall Street to Washington, are people with no concept of enough. When they have everything anyone could ever want and more they seek out new ways to get drunk on power, relishing the fact that they’re above the law and using it to engage in depraved exploration of the darkest corners of human behavior.
It’s not enough to go after the individuals in Epstein’s circle. We should do that, but we shouldn’t stop there. We should, and if we want a decent future we must, go after this warped system that rewards sociopathy and depravity. Capitalism creates an incentive structure where the worst among us are rewarded for their ruthlessness, their lack of empathy, their willingness to ruin lives. When guardrails get in the way of the ruling class exploiting and harming us, they organize and pour money into bulldozing those obstacles to their endless accumulation of wealth. It’s not enough to gently check their greed, we have to take away the system that enables and rewards them and gives them vast power.
It’s easy to say “no one is above the law,” but it’s a lot harder to reckon with the fact that a select group of people is in fact far above the law, so far above it that even when we know they commit the worst sorts of crimes they still go on to become President and accumulate billions. And that’s because the ruling class wrote the laws, and shaped our government to primarily to serve this small slice of the population. As we see more clearly every day, our government facilitates vast transfers of wealth from the working class to the .1%, and it’ll take a massive societal overhaul to change that fact.
Epstein refuses to die, his correspondence is endlessly horrifying, and Donald Trump is all over these files. But he’s just the tip of the iceberg. Below the water lies the systems that dominate our lives and our world. We should certainly ensure that Epstein’s ghost haunts Trump and others for the rest of their lives, but we should also make the legacy of these horrible men the transformation of society such that there can never be another Epstein’s island. Society must be restructured such that this greed, power, depravity, and the systems that enabled all of are pulled up at the roots and replaced with something vastly different. - JP
Underage women are CHILDREN.
You have so succinctly delineated the mechanisms of our society. I have been an activist and organizer for almost 40 years and still many in this space do not have this clarity of the realities of the system we live under. Instead they focus on single issues or work to get a democrat in office and "hold them accountable" to their campaign promises. I've started a different approach by making a documentary that seeks to speak to the theme of empathy and our basic humanity told through the voices of activists, posing questions that touch the basic question of what it means to live in a just society.