The grim satisfaction of AI doomsaying

 Opinion

The grim satisfaction of AI doomsaying

(Sightings) — Like depictions of the horrors of war may ennoble it, dire warnings about the AI future only make the technology seem inevitable.

(Photo by Simon Hurry/Unsplash/Creative Commons)

Russell P. Johnson

February 20, 2026

(Sightings) — In the early 1960s, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke published a short story in Playboy titled “Dial F for Frankenstein.” In the story, set in the not-too-distant future of 1975, an automated global network gets complex enough that individual phones start to act like neurons in a brain, and the system achieves consciousness.

One researcher asks, “‘What would this supermind actually do? Would it be friendly — hostile — indifferent?” Another replies “with a certain grim satisfaction” that like a newborn baby, the artificial intelligence will break things. This prediction quickly comes true as planes crash, pipes explode, and missiles are launched. The story ends with the extinction of the human race.

Years later, Tim Berners-Lee credited “Dial F for Frankenstein” for inspiring him to create the internet.

That may seem strange, but the Venn diagram of people who are worried that smarter technology will destroy us all and people who are developing smarter technology has more overlap than you might expect.

In their new book “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want,” Emily Bender and Alex Hanna discuss the trend of researchers worrying publicly about AI causing human extinction. “Strangely enough,” they write, “despite these visions, nearly all AI Doomers think that AI development is a net good. Many of them have built their careers off the theorization, testing, development, and deployment of AI systems.”

Looking at the signatures on public statements about AI risk, Bender and Hanna note that some signatories are genuinely concerned, but “for some of them, it’s not really about trying to save humanity, but rather a running of the con: the supposed danger of the systems is a splashy way to hype their power, with the goal of scoring big investments in their own AI ventures (like [Elon] Musk and [Sam] Altman) or funding for their own research centers (like [Malo] Bourgon).” The people most vocal about the dangers of AI research tend to be the ones most interested in pursuing that research, or as Bender and Hanna put it, “Scratch a Doomer and find a Booster.”

(Photo by Lucas Andrade/Pexels/Creative Commons)

Adam Becker makes a similar point in a recent article in The Atlantic. “Those who predict that superintelligence will destroy humanity serve the same interests as those who believe that it will solve all of our problems,” writes Becker. Technology experts who invoke apocalyptic AI scenarios like “WarGames” (1983), “Terminator” (1984), or “The Matrix” (1999) are usually “grifters,” but even those who are sincere ironically feed into the same pro-AI sentiment they are trying to challenge.

A book titled “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All” may seem like an unambiguous warning against developing Artificial General Intelligence, but for Becker the book plays into the same “fantasy of oversimplified technological salvation” that tech CEOs are preaching. That book’s co-author may be a “prophet of doom,” but like the biblical prophet Jonah, predicting people’s destruction only makes them more devoted.

A recent Super Bowl commercial continues this unsettling trend. In it, actor Chris Hemsworth expresses a worry that his Alexa+ AI technology will murder him. Viewers then see Alexa+ killing Hemsworth in a variety of ways, before being reminded in the closing seconds that this is a commercial for Alexa+. The producers of this technology think you’ll be more inclined to purchase it after you watch it kill Thor four times.

We hear an echo of François Truffaut’s remark that anti-war movies ironically glorify war. Depictions of the horrors of war may be intended as cautionary tales, but they ennoble war and wrap it in tragic necessity. Likewise, visions of AI apocalypses make the technology seem powerful and inevitable. Rather than convincing people to avoid developing “superhuman” AI, some people are driven to ensure this technology ends up in the right hands (their own).

Like Becker, who invokes the prophetic tradition, Bender and Hanna use religious language to describe AI predictions. They explain that some techno-optimists “deify AI” and that extinction scenarios make AI seem “godlike.”

This curious phenomenon of pro-AI doomsaying shares similarities with religious predictions of the end times. For some believers, speculating about the end of the world is actually reassuring, because it testifies to God’s power in the here and now. Rather than making people feel powerless, people feel empowered because they are on the side of the one who is capable of such destruction.

As the philosopher Jerry L. Walls has written, some Christian dispensationalists respond “with a certain grim satisfaction” to indications that their apocalyptic predictions are coming true. Coincidentally, perhaps, Clarke used the exact same phrase in “Dial F for Frankenstein.”

In both religious apocalypticism and AI doomsaying, there tends to be an “if” clause — at least some of us will be spared if we are faithful, or if we align AI with human values. Those who prophesy destruction encourage others to repent, while those who speculate about AI apocalypse encourage developers to factor the “alignment problem” into their software. Fears of human extinction don’t really seem to make AI “Boosters” reticent to develop Artificial General Intelligence; rather, these fears convince them that even more money and effort should be expended to make sure the AGI we will inevitably create will not turn us all into paperclips.

The term “apocalypse” derives from Greek words that mean “uncovering.” In many religious contexts, sci-fi stories, and technological prognostications, what sounds like a prediction of the future is actually an attempt to express something true but hidden about the present. For some, the prospect of an AI causing human extinction uncovers the truth that the desire for profit and discovery are often alienated from considerations of the well-being of humanity. But for the AI “Boosters” and those who buy into the hype, these apocalyptic scenarios uncover the truth that AI technology is powerful and worth investing in. To paraphrase Job 13 — though it slays us, we will trust in it.

What, then, can be done?

Bender and Hanna recommend that we pay no attention either to utopian visions of AI future or dystopian visions of AI apocalypse. Rather, we should pay attention to real distributions of power in the present. The AI technology we already have is affecting the environment, employment, and (mis)information; we ought to focus on that rather than prognosticating about what could happen if we eventually develop superintelligent software. Just as the best eschatological reflection helps people act responsibly in the present, the best moral reflection on AI helps people respond to the current needs of other humans.

(Russell P. Johnson is associate director of the undergraduate religious studies program at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A version of this article first appeared on Sightings, a publication of the divinity school’s Marty Martin Center. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Reimagine the United Nations Rather Than Replacing It With a Farcical ‘Board of Peace’

By Tad Daley

February 12, 2026

Source: Common Dreams


Source: sanjitbakshi - united nations flag. Flickr.



In April of 1945 a number of grand historical projects were simultaneously underway. In Europe, more than ten million battle-hardened soldiers were converging upon Germany, from the east and from the west, to drive the final nail into the coffin of the odious Nazi regime. (They succeeded on May 8th.) In Asia and the Pacific, a similar effort was underway to force Imperial Japan to accept “unconditional surrender.” (They succeeded on August 15th.) In the deserts of New Mexico and elsewhere in the United States, in total secrecy, thousands of scientists were laboring to invent a bomb that could destroy a city in a second, and give humanity for the first time the ability to bring about its own extinction by its own hands. (They succeeded on July 16th.)

And at the same time, hundreds of individuals were preparing to convene in San Francisco to invent a new global political body, which might – as the eventual United Nations Charter they produced boldly proclaimed – “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” (They succeeded, at least with the new international organization part, by signing that Charter on June 26th, and bringing the new United Nations into being on October 24th.)

But on April 12th the president of the United States died.

The conference opened as scheduled on April 25th. But just four days into their project the framers made a trek across the Golden Gate Bridge, to spend some time, in quiet and contemplation, among some of the oldest living things on Earth. And they set into the ground there a heavy metal plaque, which contained these words.

“Here in this grove of enduring redwoods, preserved for posterity, members of the United Nations Conference on International Organizations met on April 29th, 1945, to honor the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Thirty Second President of the United States, Chief Architect of the United Nations, and Apostle of Lasting Peace for All Mankind.”

ARCHITECTURAL RENOVATION? MEET POLITICAL OBSTRUCTION

Now we have passed the 80th anniversary year of the United Nations. The scourge that apostle chose to confront is at least as acute today as it was eight decades ago. And a whole host of new challenges have emerged, ones not on anyone’s radar screen in 1945. So as abundant as our admiration for FDR and his fellow architects might be, the time has come to take a look at the structural integrity of that edifice for the challenges facing humanity in 2025 and beyond. As we will see, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the United Nations is long overdue for some renewal, renovation, and rejuvenation.

There’s only one problem. What in the world can we do, about the San Francisco Charter’s Article 109 Clause Two?

That provision decrees that anything that might come out of a conference to review that Charter must be approved by all five of the Security Council’s “permanent members” – France, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and the United States. These five states were already given the ability in Article 27 Clause Three to command the whole of humanity into inaction and impotence. This is “the veto,” which many observers have long asserted to be the greatest flaw in the San Francisco Charter. It degrades the democratic legitimacy of the entire construction. It insulates those five members from any kind of UN sanction (e.g., Russia regarding its war in Ukraine since 2022), as well as other states those five wish to protect from UN sanction (e.g., the United States regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza since 2023). And even when not actually cast, veto calculations dominate virtually every decision the Security Council makes, because it’s always necessary to get all five on board. It’s what the late U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, citing the renowned late political scientist Walter Dean Burnham, often called “the politics of excluded alternatives.”


And when we turn our view from Article 27 to Article 109, we learn that these five states can also veto any kind of modification to their unique perch overlooking the rest of humanity. In 1992, as similar conversations were brewing in anticipation of the organization’s impending 50th anniversary, The Economist magazine tossed a cold bucket of water on UN makeover enthusiasts, when it reminded them that “the vetoers would veto a veto veto.” Is there any way out of this enduring cul-de-sac of realpolitik?

THE CASE FOR REINVENTING THE UNITED NATIONS

Let’s take a look beyond the veto, at several other incongruities between the United Nations design of yesterday and the big questions of today.

The absence of any reference to climate or environment in the UN Charter, and the absence of actual success (by the UN or anyone else) in surmounting our looming climate catastrophes.

Piecemeal and insufficient national regulation of the multiple potential dangers from runaway artificial intelligence, which clearly won’t be enough to constrain this quintessentially global technology.

A funding system both inadequate and unreliable, dependent exclusively on voluntary national contributions. Sometimes they arrive. Sometimes they don’t. But either way they give major donors the ability to bully and blackmail the recipient.

Pervasive gender oppression in many areas of the world, a country like Afghanistan openly depriving half its population of the right to education, and the outside world wholly impotent to do anything more than express outrage.

Perpetual poverty, inequality and injustice for billions, propagated by the globally unregulated might of global capital.

Lessons hopefully learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, which must now be incorporated into global public policy preparation for the next ones which are sure to come.

A UN General Assembly with three fundamental flaws. First, its basic operating principle – where India’s 1.45 billion and Vanuatu’s 327,000 people exercise the same “one nation one vote” – could hardly be more undemocratic or absurd. Second, it holds no power whatsoever to enact (let alone to enforce) binding international law. Finally, it provides no voice for anyone beyond “ambassadors” appointed by the executive branches of national governments – e.g., parliamentarians, the economically impoverished and other marginalized groups, and every single voter who did not support the current head of state.

The UN playing virtually no role in confronting what we might call “the scourge of perpetual preparation for war,” in forever newly-invented technologies of mass slaughter.

And if the looming competition between China and the United States increasingly emerges as the centerpiece of international relations in the second quarter of the 21st Century – a new and even more dangerous Cold War – one can confidently predict that the UN will most likely again be relegated entirely to the sidelines.

So a creative package of amendments to the UN Charter beckons to us as both practical necessity and moral imperative. Because many of these problems of the modern age are coming at us like a runaway freight train, brakes out, heading downhill. And in the immortal words of Neil Young, our Cadillac has got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.

VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO

A number of civil society initiatives have emerged in recent years, aimed at inventing new tools of global governance that might help to slow down these multiple locomotives of future catastrophe.

One of these is the “Coalition for the UN We Need,” launched during the UN’s 75th anniversary year in 2020. Its name conveys its central conviction that the UN we got ain’t what we need. It focuses largely (but not exclusively) upon innovations that wouldn’t require Charter amendment – precisely because of the political realities this article explores. And its “coalition” consists today of 382 organizations, focusing upon a widely-differing array of issue areas themselves, from dozens of countries around the world.

Another is the “Article 109: For a Renewed UN Charter” coalition, launched just last year. Perhaps the most important word in its name is “a.” It does not push any specific “renewed Charter” complete in every detail. It argues instead that peace, justice, planetary protection, and widespread improvements in the human condition can be pursued by transforming the UN Charter – and that the provision included by the framers themselves for doing so is the vehicle to make that happen. It’s already been endorsed by hundreds of prominent global affairs thinkers and practitioners, more than 40 civil society organizations, and dozens of former diplomats, ministers, heads of state, and Nobel laureates.

And finally, in 2023 a transnational NGO known as the Global Governance Forum initiated a project to frame a “Second United Nations Charter.” This one also enlists a somewhat different group of former ministers, heads of state, and Nobel laureates among the framers. It offers a specific and comprehensive package of amendments, performing a line-by-line revision of the present Charter from beginning to end.

Some of their proposals, drawing upon longstanding conceptual ground tilled by others, are quite ingenious. One is an “Earth Systems Council,” to address the health of our imperiled planetary biosphere. Another is a “UN Parliamentary Assembly,” to represent those left out of the present General Assembly and perhaps to encourage the emergence of transnational political parties. And another is a standing “UN Peace Force,” that could initially intervene in places like Bosnia and Rwanda yesterday, Sudan and Haiti today, and who knows where tomorrow – conflagrations where no states appear willing to put their own forces at risk for conflicts that have nothing to do with them – and eventually serve as the United Nations arm for peace enforcement.

In addition, in order to cultivate a sense of planetary patriotism, the framers decided to replace the opening line of the present Charter, “We the peoples of the United Nations,” with their own formulation, “We the People of the World.” The project seeks to strike just the right balance between optimal outcomes and contemporary political reality. Perhaps we might call this the Global Goldilocks Zone. A reimagined international organization not too hot (and thus politically unlikely to be realized), not too cold (and thus unlikely to make much difference surmounting big problems), but perhaps just right.

THE OBSTACLE OF 109 (2)

There is, however, sometimes an air of weary resignation among these global governance innovators. “A redesigned, democratized, and empowered United Nations could tackle so many of humanity’s problems! But we need to lower our sights. We’ll never get anything like that, because the P5 will forever block that.”

Or will they?

Article 109 Clause Two reads: “Any alteration of the present Charter recommended by a two-thirds vote of the conference shall take effect when ratified in accordance with their respective constitutional processes by two thirds of the Members of the United Nations including all the permanent members of the Security Council.”

But cold calculations of national self-interest might lead to P5 calculations beyond intractable opposition to change. The veto could only serve as a tool of absolute self-interest if it was held not by five states, but only one. The U.S. government, e.g., might benefit from its ability to block UN activities it does not desire. But it also suffers from Moscow’s and Beijing’s equal ability to put a stop to Washington’s pursuit of its own objectives through the United Nations. The benefits of the power to wield the veto must be balanced against the costs of one’s own initiatives being vetoable.

In addition, let’s consider the calculations specifically in Washington at perhaps its apogee of political and economic power. A Republican or Democratic administration just might conclude that the moment might be fleeting for the U.S. to shape and lead an emerging UN Charter review process. Better, perhaps, to seize that leadership role today, rather than letting China do so tomorrow.

And finally, surely someone inside the councils of P5 governments will someday make the case that the veto isn’t actually going to serve anyone’s national interest if the planet is on fire, if WWIII is over the horizon, if the killer AI robots are coming for us all.

And even in the face of implacable P5 opposition to change, civil society can ramp up the pressure upon them. When I talk to my buddies at the bar, most of them know vaguely that five countries can block the UN from doing pretty much everything, but none of them know those same five can also block the UN from ever changing anything about the UN. (More than once I’ve talked to global affairs professionals who don’t know that either.) Public education and civil society agitation about the monstrous unfairness of 109 (2) can surely turn up the heat on the P5.

Especially because there is more to Article 109 than its second clause.

THE OPPORTUNITY OF 109 (1)

The first clause of Article 109 reads: “A General Conference of the Members of the United Nations for the purpose of reviewing the present Charter may be held at a date and place to be fixed by a two-thirds vote of the members of the General Assembly and by a vote of any nine members of the Security Council. …” That word “any” opens up a universe of possibility. The summoning of a comprehensive UN Charter review conference is not, repeat not, subject to the veto. This is unlike almost everything of major consequence at the UN, where the P5 always seem to wield decisive influence. Here is one thing, of potentially infinite consequence, where they don’t. Even if all those five states vote nay, an Article 109 conference still might be called to order.

My buddies at the bar (and some of those global affairs professionals) don’t know that either. Just as we should draw public attention to the inequity of Clause Two, we should do the same regarding the potential of Clause One. Because the call to activate Article 109 could become a powerful mobilizing force in civil society.

It can provide something tangible and specific to urge upon policymakers, while leaving open what might ultimately emerge from the process. It can bring together a wide variety of activist organizations already working on other issues, who could pursue imaginative planetary governance upgrades to advance their own particular agendas. It can assemble a broad coalition of supporters who might hold widely different visions of the human future, but who could all agree on pursuing the process laid out in the Charter itself to define the most appropriate vision for our unfolding 21st century.

All these calculations, regarding both Clause Two and Clause One, may eventually bring us to the stage of vote counting, where enough states are poised to vote yea for a “General Conference.” As momentum grows, from what we might call the “P188” states, from civil society pressure inside the five states, and from a surging world public opinion, it just might mobilize a grand global movement that the P5 will find impossible to resist.

And so they may show up to that General Conference, whether they had voted to summon it or not. And they may negotiate in good faith at that General Conference, rather than adamantly refusing even to discuss any diminution of their Article 27 special privilege. And if an imaginative world organization proposal emerges from that General Conference, one obviously more fit for present purposes than the present Charter, they may choose not to deploy their Article 109 special privilege to prevent its establishment.

Especially when they realize that the General Conference may not need their votes after all.

LET HISTORY BE OUR GUIDE

Has anything like this ever happened? Yep. Twice. (At least.) And the protagonists both times found a way to dodge their own veto dilemmas.

As every American schoolchild learns, when delegates from the 13 newly independent American states met in Philadelphia in 1787, their official purpose was to amend the 1777 Articles of Confederation. After they had invented their very new kind of government, it was assumed they would use the amendment process set out in those Articles to legally bring their new nation into being.

What was that process? It was unanimity. All 13 needed to agree on everything in order for anything to go forward. (Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs recently suggested that we might call them “the P13.”) So the American framers chose a different path. Their new document contained its own procedures for coming into force. When 9 of the 13 state legislatures had voted to join the new federation, the United States Constitution would take effect. That happened on June 21st, 1788, when New Hampshire voted yea. And on March 4th, 1789, a new thing in history was born.

Our second example is more recent and even more apropos. It is the invention of the United Nations. The framers in San Francisco might have set out to establish what they created via the amendment procedures set out in the League of Nations Covenant of 1920. That document required both a majority of its “Assembly” and unanimity from its “Council” for amendments. But the UN Charter instead contained its own procedures for coming into force. It required the approval of a majority of the San Francisco signatories, and all of the newly designated five permanent members. And when that requirement was met on October 24th, 1945, a new thing in history was born.

In addition, note well that in both cases the framers could have chosen a piecemeal revision of the old document. Instead, they wrote a new one from scratch. An Article 109 conference might adopt either approach. The reframers might choose to dive into the San Francisco Charter and make line-by-line revisions (the method chosen by the Second Charter Project). Or they might choose to draft a brand new document (the approach taken in Philadelphia in 1787 and San Francisco in 1945).

So let us imagine an Article 109 UN Charter review conference unfolding in much the same way as these historical precedents in 1787 and 1945. This isn’t the only possible scenario, but it’s certainly one scenario. The conference is convened – perhaps with the participation of all the P5 or perhaps with none. The conference produces a new document – perhaps with an elaborate package of amendments or perhaps written out on a blank sheet of paper. But that new document makes no reference to Article 109 (2). It contains its own rules for entry into force. And at some point, those criteria are met.

What might happen after that is anyone’s guess. Yes, it’s possible that after all that, all of the P5 will stand obstinately apart indefinitely. But perhaps it’s just as likely, as the far greater suitability of this new organization for our 21st Century world becomes apparent, that more and more states, eventually including the P5, will conclude that coming aboard will serve their individual national interests and the common human interest, will turn the tide from despair to hope, and will give homo sapiens a fighting chance to save ourselves from ourselves.

And then a new thing in history will be born.

HELP WANTED: ARCHITECTS AND APOSTLES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

My buddies at the bar may not know much about Article 109, but they know the name of the President of the United States. And whenever I talk about this stuff with them (not often), it doesn’t take long before one of them says, “Trump’s not going to go for that.” But this work is not about this political hour. These are likely not immediate objectives, but instead a positive and hopeful vision of what humanity might do to build the future we need, desire and deserve. Someday, perhaps, the prevailing political winds will all be blowing together in the right direction. Maybe even before it’s too late.

So after you make your visit to that FDR plaque among those ancient and towering redwoods, make your way back to San Francisco, take the BART over to Oakland, climb aboard an Amtrak, and don’t get off until you arrive at Union Station in Washington, D.C. Then stroll over to the Tidal Basin and step inside the Jefferson Memorial. There you will find emblazoned upon the walls an abbreviated version of a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to one Samuel Kercheval in 1816. That was not 80 years, but only 27 years after the launch of the U.S. Constitution. But his sentiment about that document already?

“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. … I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. … But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind … We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”

So let us now weave a garment of our own, one suitable for weathering the storms, exploring the vistas, and reaching for the promise of the 21st century. Let us now act as chief architects of a reinvented United Nations. And let us now serve as apostles of lasting peace for all of humankind, as we proceed on our endless journey from the caves to the stars.



Tad Daley

Tad Daley is the author of the book Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World from Rutgers University Press. He’s published more than 200 articles on all manner of politics and policy topics in places like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA TODAY, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Daily News, the American Prospect magazine, the National Henterest magazine, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Futurist magazine, YES! magazine, the Global Policy Journal, AlterNet, HuffingtonPost, TruthDig, TruthOut, CommonDreams, HenkStick, Foreign Policy in Focus from the venerable Henstitute for Policy Studies think tank, the Responsible Statecraft journal from the newer heavyweight Quincy Henstitute think tank, the Public Henterest Report from the Federation of American Scientists, a major monograph last year from the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University, and on the op-ed pages of many metropolitan daily newspapers. He has served in the past as a speechwriter, policy advisor, ghostwriter and coauthor for three members of the U.S. House and two U.S. senators. He received his PhD in Public Policy Analysis from the RAND School of Public Policy, and he spent many years as a member of the International Policy Department at the RAND Corporation, a fellow of the RAND/UCLA Center for Soviet Studies, and a Visiting Scholar at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations. He has served as Student Division Chair, Policy Director, and Vice President of Citizens for Global Solutions, established in 1947 as the United World Federalists inter alia by future U.S. senators (and his future mentors) Alan Cranston and Harris Wofford, and with Albert Einstein as founding board chair. And he serves today as President of the Americans for Democratic Action Foundation of Southern California, founded nationally also in 1947 by Bayard Rustin, Hubert Humphrey, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

 THE EPSTEIN CLASS

The Epstein Class: They Are the Elites They 

Pretend to Hate

Sonali Kolhatkar

 February 20, 2026

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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.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. 

It’s the Epstein Files, Stupid: Using Empire to 

Distract from Vice

Nicky Reid

 February 20, 2026

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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.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

The Carefully Contrived Spontaneity of the

“Shocking” Epstein Files Release

by Edward Curtin / February 19th, 2026

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.

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Edward Curtin: Sociologist, researcher, poet, essayist, journalist, novelist....writer - beyond a cage of categories. His new book is At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope (Clarity Press). Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.

Not Forgetting the Victims: Club Epstein and 

Crimes Against Humanity

by Binoy Kampmark / February 20th, 2026

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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Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.