The Epstein Class: They Are the Elites They
Pretend to Hate
February 20, 2026
Photo by Donald Teel
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s contentious House hearing about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files offered a clear message to the nation: sex trafficking of women and minors is perfectly acceptable as long as wealthy white men do it.
Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late sex trafficker, fixer, and political networker, was found to have ties to huge number of the world’s elites on both sides of the political aisle — including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, and of course, Donald Trump.
For years, Trump’s conservative backers have attacked LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, immigrants, and others, claiming a desire to protect women and children from rapists and groomers. Trump even boasted that “whether the women liked it or not,” he would “protect” them from migrants, whom he slandered as “monsters” who “kidnap and kill our children.”
But when given the opportunity to seek justice for countless women and children who were trafficked, abused, and exploited by the world’s wealthiest, most powerful people, the MAGA movement and its leaders have shown a startling disinterest in accountability. During her hearing Bondi tried desperately to deflect attention, claiming that the stock market was more deserving of public attention than Epstein’s victims.
Even the Republican rank and file is now mysteriously detached from the Epstein files.
Polls show that in summer 2025, 40 percent of GOP voters disapproved of the federal government’s handling of the Epstein files. But by January 2026, only about half that percentage disapproved — even after the Trump administration missed its deadline to release millions of files and then released them in a way that exposed the victims while protecting the perpetrators.
While some European leaders are facing harsh consequences for associating with Epstein, no Americans outside of Epstein and his closest associate Ghislaine Maxwell have faced any consequences, legal or otherwise.
That’s despite very concrete ties between the Trump administration and the sex trafficker. Not only did Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admit to visiting Epstein island after lying about it (and has so far faced no consequences), but Trump himself is named more than a million times in the files, according to lawmakers with access to the unredacted documents. Several victims identify Trump by name, alleging he raped and assaulted them.
And it’s not just Trump. Epstein was an equal opportunity fixer. He was just as friendly with liberals as he was with conservatives, including Summers, Clinton, and, disconcertingly for the American left, Noam Chomsky. For elites like Epstein, ideological differences were superficial. The real distinction was money, power, and connections.
Epstein was a glorified drug dealer and his drugs of choice were the vulnerable bodies of women and children, offered up to his friends and allies as the forbidden currency he traded in. A useful moniker has emerged to describe the global network of elites whose power and privilege continues to protect them from accountability: the Epstein Class.
Georgia Senator John Ossoff, who faces reelection in 2026, is deploying this label, understanding that voters — at least those who haven’t bought into the MAGA cult — are increasingly aware of the double standards that wealthy power players are held to.
“This is the Epstein class, ruling our country,” said Ossoff in reference to those who make up the Trump administration. “They are the elites they pretend to hate.”
He’s right. And if the Trump administration won’t hold them to account, Americans should demand leaders who will.
Photo by Donald Teel
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s contentious House hearing about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files offered a clear message to the nation: sex trafficking of women and minors is perfectly acceptable as long as wealthy white men do it.
Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late sex trafficker, fixer, and political networker, was found to have ties to huge number of the world’s elites on both sides of the political aisle — including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, and of course, Donald Trump.
For years, Trump’s conservative backers have attacked LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, immigrants, and others, claiming a desire to protect women and children from rapists and groomers. Trump even boasted that “whether the women liked it or not,” he would “protect” them from migrants, whom he slandered as “monsters” who “kidnap and kill our children.”
But when given the opportunity to seek justice for countless women and children who were trafficked, abused, and exploited by the world’s wealthiest, most powerful people, the MAGA movement and its leaders have shown a startling disinterest in accountability. During her hearing Bondi tried desperately to deflect attention, claiming that the stock market was more deserving of public attention than Epstein’s victims.
Even the Republican rank and file is now mysteriously detached from the Epstein files.
Polls show that in summer 2025, 40 percent of GOP voters disapproved of the federal government’s handling of the Epstein files. But by January 2026, only about half that percentage disapproved — even after the Trump administration missed its deadline to release millions of files and then released them in a way that exposed the victims while protecting the perpetrators.
While some European leaders are facing harsh consequences for associating with Epstein, no Americans outside of Epstein and his closest associate Ghislaine Maxwell have faced any consequences, legal or otherwise.
That’s despite very concrete ties between the Trump administration and the sex trafficker. Not only did Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admit to visiting Epstein island after lying about it (and has so far faced no consequences), but Trump himself is named more than a million times in the files, according to lawmakers with access to the unredacted documents. Several victims identify Trump by name, alleging he raped and assaulted them.
And it’s not just Trump. Epstein was an equal opportunity fixer. He was just as friendly with liberals as he was with conservatives, including Summers, Clinton, and, disconcertingly for the American left, Noam Chomsky. For elites like Epstein, ideological differences were superficial. The real distinction was money, power, and connections.
Epstein was a glorified drug dealer and his drugs of choice were the vulnerable bodies of women and children, offered up to his friends and allies as the forbidden currency he traded in. A useful moniker has emerged to describe the global network of elites whose power and privilege continues to protect them from accountability: the Epstein Class.
Georgia Senator John Ossoff, who faces reelection in 2026, is deploying this label, understanding that voters — at least those who haven’t bought into the MAGA cult — are increasingly aware of the double standards that wealthy power players are held to.
“This is the Epstein class, ruling our country,” said Ossoff in reference to those who make up the Trump administration. “They are the elites they pretend to hate.”
He’s right. And if the Trump administration won’t hold them to account, Americans should demand leaders who will.
It’s the Epstein Files, Stupid: Using Empire to
Distract from Vice
February 20, 2026
One might be forgiven for assuming that the man in the White House is a lunatic and Donald J. Trump certainly couldn’t be confused with the picture of mental health by anyone with half of a functioning brain in their skull. The man’s pathological ego appears to make him capable of literally believing his own lies with the truth standing naked in front of him, he has been credibly accused of more sex crimes than Albert Fish, and he seems to use the Executive Office as a giant hammer to throw homicidal temper tantrums with.
The last several months alone of Orange Man Mad’s second reign of terror feel a bit like an amphetamine blur of seemingly random war crimes and increasingly dictatorial outbursts. But as tempting as it might be to write all this mayhem off as pure and unadulterated lunacy, I do believe that there is a method to the madness, in fact, there is probably more than one.
Everything that Trump has been pushing at a manic pace this winter holds a place on the deep state’s to-do-list. With the American Empire’s finances and international reputation in tatters from decades of post-Cold War imperial overreach, the mandarins-at-be have been left with little option other than to refocus their war mongering endeavors on our own long neglected hemisphere with a new Monroe Doctrine while using their phalanx of nebulous forever wars on drugs and terror to consolidate their position domestically and keep an increasingly restless population in line.
All of this makes perfectly rational sense when you read the tea leaves carefully. What feels positively mad however is the pace and downright slap-dash delivery in which the Trump junta is carrying out such edicts. It feels as if Billy Burroughs took a deep hit off the opium pipe and then cut up the master plan with a big pair of scissors before haphazardly tossing the pieces together in random order. The only way to truly make sense of such harrowing disaster porn is to remember that nothing is ever truly random and attempt to read between the headlines in search of a recurring theme. Thus, amidst the madness, I myself have taken a long glance at Donald Trump’s Washington Interzone and this is the narrative that I’ve detected.
After months of empty promises to the toxic online manosphere largely responsible for the Donald’s post-January 6 rehabilitation, the fact finally became inescapable even for the most heavily deluded of MAGAloids that their hero was indeed the dog who didn’t bark and he wasn’t about to release the Epstein Files that prove it. Trump, misdiagnosing this flip flop as just another in a long line of broken campaign promises, essentially told his personality cult to chill the fuck out and get over it. This is when Trump’s approval ratings cratered and the people he had storm the Capitol began to call for his combover.
And then Donald Trump began bombing dinghies in the Caribbean before pounding his chest over the footage of these war crimes on live television while barking “I am not a pedophile!” And then he kidnapped some other broken democracy’s greaseball strongman in a highly choreographed reenactment of Apocalypse Now before declaring that nation’s oil to be American property and barking “I am not a pedophile!” And then he launched a military style invasion of the most annoyingly polite city in America with his orange guard of poorly trained federal goons tipping over small business’ in search of mythical Somalian kidney thieves while declaring the government’s inalienable right to shoot lesbian soccer moms in the face and once again barking “I am not a pedophile!”
Are we detecting a theme here? Is our cut-rate Ceasar’s unconscious perhaps coming in a little more consciously? Donald Trump spent 15 years palling around Manhattan and Palm Beach with the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker. What the fuck did you think they were doing between rails of blow? Collecting stamps? The Orange Bastard is already a well-recorded sexual predator in his own right. All the young bros cheered when he bragged about grabbing em by the pussy. He didn’t take the time to get their consent, why would he check their IDs?
I know a thing or two about sexual predators. I learned the hard way by getting preyed on by them as a parochial concubine in the Pennsylvania Catholic school system at a time when that institution had essentially been converted into an open-air marketplace for any fiend with a white collar and a skip in his step. These motherfuckers don’t care about sex; they care about power. That’s their kink. Most of them aren’t even into kids; they just like the thrill of obliterating something so helpless, and when they work in teams, and they often do, they take turns upping the ante; challenging each other to greater depths of depravity, and pretty soon the 17-year-olds become 14-year-olds and the rape becomes pedophilia.
But even pedophiles hate being called pedophiles because it is a word synonymous even in the underworld with ‘bottom feeder.’ So, Trump is doing everything in his frightening power to change the conversation to quite literally anything else while his cronies in the Department of Justice play games with the files he finally agreed to release upon threat of mutiny.
Only half of the six million relevant files in the DOJ’s possession have been released and they were released weeks past the congressionally obligated deadline with hundreds of thousands of pages still redacted, much of which was scrubbed clean by the FBI back in March of 2025.
However, even censored, these pages contain damming information about the wealthiest and most powerful men on earth canoodling with a Mossad connected convicted sex offender. We have Trump’s biggest financier, Elon Musk, begging this cockroach for an invite to his notorious island lair. We have Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, making dinner plans in the Caribbean with the pervert in 2012 with his underage children in tow. We have Qatari sultans trolling for literal torture porn. And we have an unknown Epstein victim telling the FBI about being given a guided tour of Mar-a-Lago by the dog who didn’t bark and his master.
People are going to tell you that all of this shit is just a distraction from bigger issues, but the moral rot of our sainted elites has historically gone hand in hand with the rapid decline of their gilded empires as their crimes against humanity in the Third World are increasingly dragged back home to their boudoirs. People are also going to tell you that the disproportionate right-wing fury over the Epstein Files is just more proof that MAGA doesn’t give a fuck about brown people and they won’t be wrong.
But even the Aryan Brotherhood draws the line on pedophiles, and if we are going to bring our perverted Duce down, we are going to have to destroy the cult of personality he uses to manipulate rural poor people in my red neck of the woods.
We as a country also need to face the fact that rape culture is a menace infecting western society and that its source is not pornography or gangsta rap or even sexism. The source of this systemic wave of elite extracurricular violence is institutional power itself, in all of its forms, from the Nuclear Family to the White House.
We can take aim at both of these targets at once if we simply release all of the files unredacted directly to the public and use them for kinder in a bonfire that begins at the White House and ends on Wall Street.
No more excuses. No more half measures. No more victims. Only survivors with torches. That’s how we make America fucking great again. That’s how we make America fucking break again.
One might be forgiven for assuming that the man in the White House is a lunatic and Donald J. Trump certainly couldn’t be confused with the picture of mental health by anyone with half of a functioning brain in their skull. The man’s pathological ego appears to make him capable of literally believing his own lies with the truth standing naked in front of him, he has been credibly accused of more sex crimes than Albert Fish, and he seems to use the Executive Office as a giant hammer to throw homicidal temper tantrums with.
The last several months alone of Orange Man Mad’s second reign of terror feel a bit like an amphetamine blur of seemingly random war crimes and increasingly dictatorial outbursts. But as tempting as it might be to write all this mayhem off as pure and unadulterated lunacy, I do believe that there is a method to the madness, in fact, there is probably more than one.
Everything that Trump has been pushing at a manic pace this winter holds a place on the deep state’s to-do-list. With the American Empire’s finances and international reputation in tatters from decades of post-Cold War imperial overreach, the mandarins-at-be have been left with little option other than to refocus their war mongering endeavors on our own long neglected hemisphere with a new Monroe Doctrine while using their phalanx of nebulous forever wars on drugs and terror to consolidate their position domestically and keep an increasingly restless population in line.
All of this makes perfectly rational sense when you read the tea leaves carefully. What feels positively mad however is the pace and downright slap-dash delivery in which the Trump junta is carrying out such edicts. It feels as if Billy Burroughs took a deep hit off the opium pipe and then cut up the master plan with a big pair of scissors before haphazardly tossing the pieces together in random order. The only way to truly make sense of such harrowing disaster porn is to remember that nothing is ever truly random and attempt to read between the headlines in search of a recurring theme. Thus, amidst the madness, I myself have taken a long glance at Donald Trump’s Washington Interzone and this is the narrative that I’ve detected.
After months of empty promises to the toxic online manosphere largely responsible for the Donald’s post-January 6 rehabilitation, the fact finally became inescapable even for the most heavily deluded of MAGAloids that their hero was indeed the dog who didn’t bark and he wasn’t about to release the Epstein Files that prove it. Trump, misdiagnosing this flip flop as just another in a long line of broken campaign promises, essentially told his personality cult to chill the fuck out and get over it. This is when Trump’s approval ratings cratered and the people he had storm the Capitol began to call for his combover.
And then Donald Trump began bombing dinghies in the Caribbean before pounding his chest over the footage of these war crimes on live television while barking “I am not a pedophile!” And then he kidnapped some other broken democracy’s greaseball strongman in a highly choreographed reenactment of Apocalypse Now before declaring that nation’s oil to be American property and barking “I am not a pedophile!” And then he launched a military style invasion of the most annoyingly polite city in America with his orange guard of poorly trained federal goons tipping over small business’ in search of mythical Somalian kidney thieves while declaring the government’s inalienable right to shoot lesbian soccer moms in the face and once again barking “I am not a pedophile!”
Are we detecting a theme here? Is our cut-rate Ceasar’s unconscious perhaps coming in a little more consciously? Donald Trump spent 15 years palling around Manhattan and Palm Beach with the world’s most notorious child sex trafficker. What the fuck did you think they were doing between rails of blow? Collecting stamps? The Orange Bastard is already a well-recorded sexual predator in his own right. All the young bros cheered when he bragged about grabbing em by the pussy. He didn’t take the time to get their consent, why would he check their IDs?
I know a thing or two about sexual predators. I learned the hard way by getting preyed on by them as a parochial concubine in the Pennsylvania Catholic school system at a time when that institution had essentially been converted into an open-air marketplace for any fiend with a white collar and a skip in his step. These motherfuckers don’t care about sex; they care about power. That’s their kink. Most of them aren’t even into kids; they just like the thrill of obliterating something so helpless, and when they work in teams, and they often do, they take turns upping the ante; challenging each other to greater depths of depravity, and pretty soon the 17-year-olds become 14-year-olds and the rape becomes pedophilia.
But even pedophiles hate being called pedophiles because it is a word synonymous even in the underworld with ‘bottom feeder.’ So, Trump is doing everything in his frightening power to change the conversation to quite literally anything else while his cronies in the Department of Justice play games with the files he finally agreed to release upon threat of mutiny.
Only half of the six million relevant files in the DOJ’s possession have been released and they were released weeks past the congressionally obligated deadline with hundreds of thousands of pages still redacted, much of which was scrubbed clean by the FBI back in March of 2025.
However, even censored, these pages contain damming information about the wealthiest and most powerful men on earth canoodling with a Mossad connected convicted sex offender. We have Trump’s biggest financier, Elon Musk, begging this cockroach for an invite to his notorious island lair. We have Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, making dinner plans in the Caribbean with the pervert in 2012 with his underage children in tow. We have Qatari sultans trolling for literal torture porn. And we have an unknown Epstein victim telling the FBI about being given a guided tour of Mar-a-Lago by the dog who didn’t bark and his master.
People are going to tell you that all of this shit is just a distraction from bigger issues, but the moral rot of our sainted elites has historically gone hand in hand with the rapid decline of their gilded empires as their crimes against humanity in the Third World are increasingly dragged back home to their boudoirs. People are also going to tell you that the disproportionate right-wing fury over the Epstein Files is just more proof that MAGA doesn’t give a fuck about brown people and they won’t be wrong.
But even the Aryan Brotherhood draws the line on pedophiles, and if we are going to bring our perverted Duce down, we are going to have to destroy the cult of personality he uses to manipulate rural poor people in my red neck of the woods.
We as a country also need to face the fact that rape culture is a menace infecting western society and that its source is not pornography or gangsta rap or even sexism. The source of this systemic wave of elite extracurricular violence is institutional power itself, in all of its forms, from the Nuclear Family to the White House.
We can take aim at both of these targets at once if we simply release all of the files unredacted directly to the public and use them for kinder in a bonfire that begins at the White House and ends on Wall Street.
No more excuses. No more half measures. No more victims. Only survivors with torches. That’s how we make America fucking great again. That’s how we make America fucking break again.
The Carefully Contrived Spontaneity of the
“Shocking” Epstein Files Release
Whenever a “scandal” like the Epstein files dominates the news, we can be certain that it is meant as a distraction from something more sinister on the horizon.
The Epstein files have been in the hands of the F.B.I. for eight years or more. Then why have redacted files been released just recently? Cui bono?
And who is behind the release that did not occur over the course of the first Trump and the Biden administrations? Cui bono?
Does the genocide in Gaza and the U.S. proxy war against Russia, both supported by Biden and Trump, fit into the timing and redactions since we can assume that the Mossad, CIA, NSA, and MI6 have also long had access to the files? A U.S./Israel attack on Iran? For, like movies, all propaganda and coverups have carefully chosen release dates.
Last question: Why would anyone be shocked by the contents of the Epstein files, although many people seem to be? Yes, more names have been added to the list of degenerate elites who were happily part of Epstein’s criminal enterprise, but the revelation of more names only confirms how extensive it was.
We have long known of the criminal activities of the degenerate Epstein, the financiers, celebrities, politicians, and public figures who joined him. Sexual blackmail, cooperation between intelligence agencies and the underworld, secret financial deals, war planning in the name of peace, etc. are how capitalism has long operated. While those who research such things have long known this (see, e.g., Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail, two volumes), the ordinary person may be finally grasping it; but shocking it is not. And the “may” should be emphasized. All of us have long been living in a culture of increasing “shock” rot where the most grotesque news and entertainment are staples of the mass media from Washington D.C. to Hollywood and all around the internet the monkey chased the weasel. The monkeys thought it was all in fun, and then Pop! goes the weasel.
Being shocked seems to be very popular; it spices up lives, induces that frisson that only sex, death, and the weather can bring to daily conversations. “Can you believe it?” and “Unbelievable!” echo across the land and spring from lips, screens, and websites everywhere as they invite you to come hither to be flabbergasted and have your head spun vertiginously. Ordinary people have become Regan MacNeil, the young girl possessed by a demon in The Exorcist.
If the corporate media ever went very deep, they would have to expose themselves as agents of the same forces behind Epstein’s rise to power. How often do these media connect Epstein to Israel, the Mossad, the CIA, etc.? It is not only evil individuals who rule but a structure of evil, a system, if you like, a social system deeply ingrained, publicly run currently by the evil moron Trump who, in a recent interview with the New York Times, when asked if he felt there were any limits on his global power, said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” This statement let the cat out of the bag. It is the nihilist’s credo, basic to today’s ethos. No honor, no traditional ethical standards, no God, no love for humanity, just fake and deceptive news meant to shock and a “do your own thing,” U.S. president talking punk kid talk. Yeah. Unbelievable!. “I know words. I have the best words. I have the – but there’s no better word than stupid.” (Cue the soundtrack.)
The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously said, “To make a film all you need is a girl and a gun.” Well, we have the Epstein movie, and in it he and his venal and sordid friends had the girls, but who holds the guns and not the penises behind their criminal enterprises, is left unaddressed.
When caught in flagrante, the media loves to expose certain individuals who take their pants down for sexual abuse purposes, but they find it impossible to take down those depraved villains who commit atrocities on ordinary people day in and day out throughout the world. Let’s call them the producers. They shape and pay for the news.
The Reality-TV President Donald Trump – the face of explicit imperialism and dictatorial domestic rule, a gross brutish thug whose core maxim is “might makes right” and whose name appears manifold times in the Epstein files – knows well how the game is played. After his televised fight with Zelensky last year (or was it before the fight?), he said “This is going to make great television.” So too the Epstein movie. Maybe a series.
And as in the past, none engaged in this wretched and criminal activity – except for Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell – will probably ever serve prison time. No shock there either.
As for shocks, it is better to watch the Winter Olympics and be “shocked” by favored athletes falling on ice and snow. Those falls are at least real.
There is a painting in a villa still visible at the entrance to the House of the Vettii in ruined Pompeii that tells us much about the Epstein files and power and wealth. It perfectly symbolizes one aspect of the gap between the international ruling classes – i.e. the dirty details in the Epstein documents minus the answer to who has been running the blackmail operation and why – and the rest of us. It pictures the God Priapus weighing his penis on a scale of gold coins, as if to say, gold, God, wealth, and power – we rule. Fuck you! It’s an old story told by nihilistic men desperate to prove their potency by dominating vulnerable girls and women and the entire world.
Many have been asking how is it possible for Epstein and all those named and unnamed to have done such evil and criminal things? Evil seems to greatly perplex modern intellectuals. Do they think El Diablo is a salsa brand?
Hannah Arendt’s explanation of Adolf Eichmann’s behavior – the banality of evil – is one such explanation being coughed up now for Epstein’s behavior. Others say that he had no conscience or couldn’t reason like an adult; that he wasn’t very smart but was an excellent con man. That he was a narcissist. These are superficial explanations. None get to the heart of the matter. As usual, and completely erroneously, some blame it on Nietzsche and the obermensch idea (the overman or superman). Nietzsche (like Russia) is often blamed for every modern evil by those who have internalized false notions about his work. In fact, Nietzsche warned that since men had killed God “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.” He was not happy about it.
The brilliant, underrated late writer Edward Dahlberg, in an essay about Nietzsche – “The True Nietzsche” – has this to say about him: “He denounced race politics, another word for Jew-baiting, calling himself a “good European,” an “anti-anti-Semite …. Nothing helped; the anti-Jewish Parteigenossen presented him to the public as a Teuton Politiker.” And so he is presented to the present day, distorted for ideological purposes. One wonders who actually reads anymore.
Apropos of language usage and the degradation of understanding, Dahlberg adds, “We have made language so common that we have ceased to be symbolic readers. Unless we examine the total intellect of the poet as his text we shall misinterpret Blake or Shakespeare just as foolishly as Nietzsche has been distorted.”
To grasp words symbolically is to understand how good writers use them in their many meanings, not just literally, like spalls fallen from a scree littering a road to nowhere; but how they make them vibrate and sparkle and dip deep and fly high like luminescent birds so others may contemplate deeply and think once, twice, and maybe more.
Think of Trump’s crude use of language; think of Epstein’s; think of the culture at large. We have descended into a time of gross ignorance and our cultural decadence is reflected in the decadence of our language. Trump and Epstein reflect the larger culture in this respect. Clearly one reason for this is the internet and digital media, particularly the cell phone with its camera and text messaging. It is also an important reason for the vast and constant communication between Epstein and his “friends,” as well as the ease with which blackmail could be effected. This is no accident.
Some of us have been lucky to have experienced at a young age the rot at the heart of the system. I think of the recently deceased great journalist Michael Parenti who because of his anti-war views was blackballed out of a career in academia, but who used that experience to become a free teacher to the world.
In my early naïve twenties, I was working nights in the 42nd Police Precinct in the Bronx, interviewing arrestees in holding cells. There I learned that many were framed by the undercover cops who planted drugs on them; that the precinct had a hoard of illegal drugs for that purpose. Thinking I was his ally, one cop told me this, and that “we have to get these dirty fucking bastards off the streets (by which he meant black and Puerto Rican men). This was 4-5 years before the honest, courageous NYPD undercover cop Frank Serpico (who in later life became a friend) was set up by other cops to be shot in the face. A few years later, the movie Serpico, starring Al Pacino, was made about him.
There is always a movie.
At a school where I was teaching, a man who held a high position and whom I respected, knowing I was involved in anti-war activities, tried – to my great shock – to recruit me into Army Intelligence. These, and numerous other examples, set me on the early path of skepticism about the faces of authority. I am grateful for these early lessons.
Like all stories, the Epstein movie takes place within a larger cultural symbol system that is mythic in its dimensions. How else to explain the near ineradicable hatred for anything Russian among Americans? In the U.S. the big myth is called the American Dream, which the late George Carlin has said you have to be asleep to believe in, but which nevertheless exists, although it may be crumbling. Every society has such a symbol system. Through its stories and symbols, meanings and values are conveyed. And people live by stories, stories within stories. Myth means story.
For many decades, we have been undergoing a massive symbolic transformation in which the controlling symbolic (from Greek: to throw together) order is being replaced by its opposite, a diabolic (from Greek: to throw apart, the devil, el diablo) order with new stories to scramble people’s brains, dissociate their personalities, set them against each other, and create a general sense of uncertainty. God vs. the devil.
All power is fundamentally power to deny mortality. This is true whether it is the power of the state or church, or secret groups like Epstein’s. And it is always sacred power. Holy or perverted. Many often ask why do the super-rich and powerful always want more. It’s simple. They wish to transcend their human mortality and become gods – immortals. They stupidly believe that if they can lord it over others, kill, dominate, rape, achieve status, become billionaires, presidents, magnates, celebrities, etc., they will somehow live in some weird forever. Thus Epstein and his circle.
In a process that has spanned at least a hundred and fifty years or so, our traditional cultural/religious symbol systems have been radically undermined, most momentously by the Faustian creation of Lord Nuke. All forms of symbolic immortality (theological, biological, creative, natural, and experiential) that formerly provided a sense of continuity have been severely threatened. This is the haunting specter lurking in the background of life today.
What is death? How to defeat or transcend it? What’s God’s cell phone number? Quick. Improvise.
Little men like Epstein, and those voluntarily captured in his web, all those desperadoes with their hands in their pants, lying through their teeth as they went with Pinocchio and the Coachman to Pleasure Island . . . .
Cut!
Forget the script.
We ain’t seen nothing yet.
Not Forgetting the Victims: Club Epstein and
Crimes Against Humanity
With a sex trafficking, flesh peddling empire of favours, logistics and the good time to be had by the powerful, the gigantic scale of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal network continues to disturb. The least savoury digital library on the planet, available through the offices of the US Justice Department as the Epstein Library, is being combed through with its 3.5 million items comprising 180,000 images, 2000 videos, email and text correspondence, not to mention an assortment of miscellaneous material.
The combing process has come to displace the sheer gravity of Epstein’s dehumanising enterprise. Like a gold mine of ill-repute, slime and crime, researchers, journalists, political hacks and the purely voyeuristic are fossicking for material about the next public figure to be tainted. Agendas abound. The central agenda – ruined lives and the despoiled innocence of young women and girls, and their retraumatising with shoddily redacted files – has been eclipsed.
On February 17, a panel of United Nations experts appointed by the Human Rights Council issued a sharp statement on the Epstein files urging a return to a focus on the victims. The members include, among others, Reem Absalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, George Katrougalos, independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, and Ana Brian Nougrères, Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy.
The documents revealed, according to the statement, “disturbing and credible evidence of systematic and large-scale sexual abuse, trafficking and exploitation of women and girls”. The panel members took note of crimes “committed against the backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption, extreme misogyny, and the commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls from different parts of the world.” A “global criminal enterprise” had “raised terrifying implications of the level of impunity in such crimes.”
The panel further proposed that the severe nature of the crimes required stern reclassification. “So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.” Acts such as sexual slavery, rape, enforced prostitution, trafficking, persecution, torture or murder can fall within such a determination, and if so, would deserve prosecution in international and domestic courts.
Unfortunately, the Department of Justice shows little interest in pursuing any of those named in the files, let alone conducting genuinely impartial investigations. (Impartiality is not a strong suit of the Trump administration.) Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche, in dismissive remarks made early this month, observed that, “There’s a lot of correspondence. There’s a lot of emails. There’s a lot of photographs. But that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody.” Just because the victims wanted “to be made whole” did not “mean we can just create evidence or that we can just kind of come up with a case that isn’t there”.
The bountiful nature of the Epstein files would suggest no evidence of any sort needs to be created, with the late financier and convicted paedophile most prolific in communicating with various associates on meetings, rendezvous and logistical matters. And there is that troubling failure to disclose the remaining 3 million files or so that remain sealed.
The panel experts relevantly insist that the allegations were so “egregious in nature” as to require “independent, thorough, and impartial investigation, as well as inquiries to determine how such crimes could have taken place for so long.” States were under an obligation to prevent, investigate and punish instances of violence against women and girls, including inflicted by private perpetrators.
Strong words were also reserved for the slipshod process of disclosure that left unredacted the identities and details of a multitude of victims while sparing the powerful, participating members of Club Epstein. “The grave errors in the release process underscore the urgent need for victim-centered standard operating procedures for disclosure and redaction, so that no victim suffers further harm.” That ship had sailed well before, given the utter lack of interest shown by the DOJ in involving victims in the process. Six survivors in a September 2025 interview confirmed that fact.
In the view of the panel, failing “to safeguard [the victims’] privacy puts them at risk of retaliation and stigma. The reluctance to fully disclose information or broaden investigations, has left many survivors feeling retraumatised and subjected to what they describe as ‘institutional gaslighting’.”
To date, promised investigations, such as those into former UK ambassador to Washington Lord Peter Mandelson, focus less on the victims than commercially and politically sensitive information he allegedly disclosed to Epstein when occupying public office. The standard formula used by those trapped in the web has been the fool’s defence, the implausible bliss of ignorance. There have been resignations aplenty, and cataracts of apology.
The UN panel had harsh words for such woeful responses, insisting on a few courses of action. Lift the statute of limitations preventing the prosecution for grave crimes linked to the Epstein enterprise. Provide full remedies and reparations for the victims. Government failures to “effectively investigate, and prosecute those responsible for these crimes, including by complicity or acquiescence, where jurisdiction exists, risks undermining legal frameworks aimed at preventing and responding to violence against women and girls.”
The Trump era of crude, vulgar might as the sole indicator of worth does not augur well for human rights advocates demanding investigations and prosecutions into the victims of Epstein’s predation. Even before President Donald Trump got the keys to the White House, there was impunity, complicity and permissiveness in the depravities of Club Epstein, a state of affairs tolerated, even encouraged by a ruling class bankrupted and soiled. If you were not in it, as the reprehensible socialite Lady Victoria Hervey scorned, you were a “loser”.
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