AB NDP’s Rakhi Pancholi dismantles Danielle Smith’s referendum claims

by David J. Climenhaga

February 23, 2026
RABBLE.CA

UCP strategists must be thanking their Judeo-Christian deity she’s not the leader of the Opposition!

Alberta NDP Deputy Leader Rakhi Pancholi as she eviscerated Premier Danielle Smith’s claims and policies with forensic precision during a news conference Friday.

 Credit: Alberta NDP


With Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi nowhere to be found Friday morning, Rakhi Pancholi took up the task of eviscerating the long list of intentionally confusing referendum questions announced by Premier Danielle Smith in her prime-time televised message the day before, not to mention the way the premier coddles separatists, her dog whistling about immigration, and her refusal to take responsibility for her government’s fiscal mismanagement.

“Cut the bullshit! Call the election!” Pancholi began her Friday morning news conference, cutting right to the chase.

“Danielle Smith and the UCP did not campaign on nine new referendum questions,” the Opposition party’s deputy leader immediately continued. “They do not have a mandate from Albertans for this. Not on separatism, not on pulling out of the CPP, not on breaching the Charter rights of Albertans, not on coal mining in the Eastern Slopes, and not on bringing in two-tier health care!

“The premier is trying to distract us ahead of a UCP budget that will contain billions of dollars in deficits,” Pancholi rolled on. “She’s trying to distract us from separatism – which she put on the agenda and is already putting our province at risk. The premier is blaming oil prices and immigration for her poor planning and financial mismanagement.” (And, as ever, she’s also blaming long gone former prime minister Justin Trudeau, it must be added.)

After that, it just got better. Pancholi never faltered in her forensic deconstruction of the house of cards Smith has built, starting with the premier’s plan for nine murkily worded referenda next October 19, the point of which appears to be to create a constitutional crisis in Canada that will help break up the federation.

Over the next half hour, Pancholi repeated the mild profanity she started with two more times – just to make sure everyone was awake and understood that she, at least, had had enough of Smith’s constant nonsense, and that political discourse in Alberta is shifting whether the UCP likes it or not.

One imagines the post-adolescent pundits at this province’s plethora of well-funded right-wing propaganda platforms were sharpening their crayons to accuse Pancholi of having a potty mouth. It won’t work. She sounded impassioned, not profane. And Albertans who listen to her presentation will want to hear more.

On the low oil prices the premier blames for Thursday’s sad-sack deficit budget: “Oil production is hitting record levels, and resource revenue from the past five years is the highest it has been in decades. Only the UCP can blow a resource boom!”

On the premier’s pivot to condemning immigration from demanding it: “The hypocrisy on immigration is unreal! Less than two years ago, in 2024, Danielle Smith herself asked Justin Trudeau to increase immigration levels because Alberta wanted more than what Ottawa was offering. Also in 2024, she stated publicly that she wanted to double Alberta’s population to 10 million people, grow cities like Red Deer 10 times their size to one million, all while promoting the ‘Alberta is Calling’ campaign asking people from Canada and around the world to make Alberta their home.

“She did all this without a thought or plan for how to create the jobs, build the houses, schools and hospitals that we already needed!”

And now, Pancholi continued, the premier wants us to blame immigrants and asylum seekers and to send us to the polls to vote on a raft of referenda to enable such a campaign pulled right from the pages of Donald Trump’s agenda. “Again, what a load of absolute bullshit! She’s trying to make people angry about things that she can’t even back up with facts. She’s stoking the flames and raising the temperature. This is the opposite of leadership!”

Pancholi’s performance made an interesting contrast to the premier’s “media availability” the same day, during which Smith was by turns shouty, defensive, cranky and smug, all the while offering a master class in gaslighting. Just listening to Smith was exhausting. More than a whiff of panic was in the air.

But the UCP, after all, is a party that has made a cult of avoiding deficits at any cost. Now they’re going to bring down a budget expected to have a deficit of at least $6 billion to $8 billion because … what? They haven’t figured out the price of oil fluctuates?

Once again, Alberta is reduced to playing to poor little rich kid of Confederation, only this time with a separatist problem of its own creation to complicate matters. UCP fiscal incompetence will be revealed in all its glory Thursday, and blaming Trudeau and asylum seekers isn’t going to cut the mustard with anybody except the UCP’s MAGA base.

“The UCP has been in power for six years now,” explained Pancholi. “This is the premier’s fourth budget and will now be her second big deficit. Tell me how this is not a disaster in managing Alberta’s finances!”

When a reporter suggested it might be dangerous for the NDP to demand an election – after all, they might just get their wish – Pancholi said confidently she was willing to take the risk. As she put it in her formal remarks: Danielle Smith “wants to champion direct democracy? We have a direct democracy, and it’s called a general election. Call it!”

Packed Emergency Rooms, crowded classrooms, a million Albertans without a family doctor, no caps on sky-high insurance rates, soaring utility bills, the lowest minimum wage in Canada? “Where’s the premier’s leadership on any of this?”

So, concluded Pancholi, who ran for the NDP leadership in 2024 but dropped out in favour of Nenshi when his victory was clearly inevitable: “Cut the bullshit, premier! Stop with the distractions, and if you’re so convinced this is what Albertans want, call an election and let Albertans decide.”

It was a delight to see Pancholi tear into the UCP with an aggressive spirit that has been largely missing from Alberta politics on the Opposition side since Jason Kenney defeated Rachel Notley’s one-term government in April 2019.

This is what NDP members thought they were voting for when they chose Nenshi as leader in June 2024. Instead, it has been almost completely absent since Nenshi took over.

And where was Nenshi Thursday night, immediately after Smith’s remarks, or Friday morning for the news conference Pancholi handled so well? The deputy leader assured reporters that her leader had just returned from a well-deserved vacation and would reappear soon. I’m sure the UCP was relieved.

Danielle Smith remains a talented communicator skilled at setting political narratives before the Opposition gets out of their seats. She is not to be underestimated.

Pancholi, a lawyer by profession, seems to have the ability to destroy an overconfident and glib witness with forensic precision. With 20/20 hindsight, we can see that she might have been the perfect opponent for a premier with such a casual relationship with the truth and such a destructive ideology.

We can only hope that Nenshi has the sense to set her loose on the premier while he practices politics in full sentences, or whatever his passive strategy is called.

Alberta politics


David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike... More by David J. Climenhaga

'No thanks': ​Greenland leader gives icy reception to Trump's bizarre hospital ship plan

Alexander Willis
February 22, 2026   

RAW STORY

Johannes Hansen poses with his hunting rifle in Kapisillit, Greenland, January 21, 2026. "People here are interested in the day that is coming. Is there food in the fridge? Fine, then I can sleep a little longer. If there is no food, then I will go out and catch fish or go out and shoot a reindeer," said Vanilla Mathiassen, a Danish teacher in Kapisillit who has worked in towns and villages across Greenland for 13 years.

 REUTERS/Marko Djurica 

President Donald Trump’s bizarre plan to deploy a hospital ship to Greenland drew a chilly response Sunday from Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederick Nielsen, who politely told the president “no thanks” to his unusual proposition.

On Friday, Trump made the strange announcement that he would be sending a “hospital boat” to Greenland on an apparent humanitarian mission, which he said would help “take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there.” There is no documented health crisis in Greenland, and its citizens are all entitled to universal health care.

Nielsen apparently caught wind of Trump’s plan and issued the president a soft rejection in a social media post on Sunday, writing that such help wasn’t needed on the arctic island.

“That will be ‘no thanks’ from us,” Nielsen wrote in a post on Facebook, The Guardian reported. “President Trump’s idea to send a US hospital ship here to Greenland has been duly noted. But we have a public health system where care is free for citizens.”

Trump’s announcement came amid his ongoing campaign to acquire Greenland for the United States, and is theorized by some to be a direct response to an incident that unfolded on Friday just hours before the announcement.

Earlier on Friday, Danish forces evacuated an American service member aboard a U.S. submarine after they had fallen ill, and took him to a Greenland hospital. As to why Trump would respond to such an incident by deploying a hospital ship to Greenland, critics were mostly left baffled by the apparent connection.

Greenland does not need US hospital ship: Danish minister


By AFP
February 22, 2026


There are five regional hospitals across the vast Arctic island, with the Nuuk hospital serving patients from all over the territory - Copyright AFP/File Jonathan NACKSTRAND

Greenland does not need medical assistance from other countries, Denmark’s defence minister said Sunday, after US President Donald Trump claimed he was sending a hospital ship to the autonomous Danish territory that he covets.

“The Greenlandic population receives the healthcare it needs. They receive it either in Greenland, or, if they require specialised treatment, they receive it in Denmark. So it’s not as if there’s a need for a special healthcare initiative in Greenland,” Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen told Danish broadcaster DR.

In Greenland as in Denmark access to healthcare is free. There are five regional hospitals across the vast Arctic island, with the Nuuk hospital serving patients from all over the territory.

The Greenlandic local government signed an agreement with Copenhagen in early February to improve the treatment of Greenlandic patients in Danish hospitals.

Trump on Saturday posted on his social media platform Truth Social that “we are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there”.

“It’s on the way!!!” he added.

Trump has said the US must control Greenland to ensure its security, though he has backed off earlier threats to seize it after striking a “framework” deal with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence.

Lund Poulsen told DR he was not aware of the hospital ship’s possible arrival.

“Trump is constantly tweeting about Greenland. So this is undoubtedly an expression of the new normal that has taken hold in international politics,” he said.

Earlier Saturday, Denmark’s Arctic Command announced that it had evacuated a crew member of a US submarine off the coast of Nuuk after the sailor requested urgent medical attention.

Critics say Trump's 'frankly unreal' Greenland post shows he's 'suffering from dementia'

Alexander Willis
February 22, 2026  

RAW STORY


U.S. President Donald Trump attends a Governors Dinner at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 21, 2026. REUTERS/Aaron Schwartz

President Donald Trump made the bizarre announcement Saturday that he would be sending a hospital ship to Greenland on an apparent humanitarian mission, and with no explanation for what prompted the expedition – but critics have zeroed in on what they say is “almost certainly” the cause for the president’s confusing statement.

There is no documented health crisis in Greenland, a territory of Denmark, with all of its citizens entitled to universal health care that’s free at the point of service, as it is in most moderately wealthy nations other than the United States. Nevertheless, Trump suggested that he would be deploying the USNS Mercy to the arctic island, and that the hospital ship was already “on the way.”

As noted by critics, the peculiar announcement came within hours of an incident in which an American service member aboard a U.S. submarine off the coast of Greenland was evacuated by Danish forces and taken to a hospital after falling ill.

“I've now seen a number of comments on this mysterious Truth Social post from Donald Trump,” wrote Lars Christensen, a Danish economist, to their more than 32,000 followers on X.

“It demonstrates with absolute clarity that the man is suffering from dementia and cannot grasp the most basic connections. Why do I say this? Because what his post is almost certainly prompted by is the fact that the Danish navy evacuated a sick crew member from an American submarine near Greenland within the last few days.”

Trump’s announcement comes amid his ongoing and increasingly threatening campaign to acquire Greenland for the United States, which has included the deployment of a submarine off the coast of the arctic island.

Whether the USNS Mercy can even depart to Greenland is another open question, with maritime expert Mike Schuler noting in a report Saturday that the hospital ship is currently sitting in a dry dock in Alabama undergoing maintenance, maintenance that appears scheduled to continue through July.

“This Trump post is frankly unreal in its cynicism and gaslighting. He posted this because a US nuclear submarine – whose very presence near Greenland is already deeply provocative given the context – was just rescued by Danish military forces after one of its sailors fell ill,” wrote Arnaud Bertrand, an entrepreneur and frequent political commentator, in a social media post on X to their more than 380,000 followers.

“Denmark graciously rescued the sailor and evacuated him to treat him in a hospital in Greenland. The cherry on the cake is that there's no ‘great hospital boat’ coming to Greenland because both U.S. hospital ships – the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort – are currently incapacitated, undergoing maintenance. So ‘It's on the way!!!’ is simply a bold face lie.”

 

After Danish Medevac, Trump Sends Hospital Ship to Greenland

USNS Mercy during a COVID-era deployment (USN file image)

Published Feb 22, 2026 8:07 PM by The Maritime Executive

On Saturday, the Danish Navy medevaced a sailor from a U.S. Navy submarine and delivered the individual for urgent medical treatment in Nuuk, Greenland. Hours later, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he would be dispatching a U.S. Navy hospital ship to Danish-governed Greenland, where politicians insist that the assistance is not needed. The president has frequently expressed a desire to annex the island, and relations with Denmark are at a historic low. 

The exchange began Saturday when a U.S. Navy submarine requested a medevac for a crewmember. The individual needed urgent attention. Luckily, the sub was located just seven nautical miles off Nuuk, the capital of Greenland and home of the largest hospital on the island. A helicopter from the patrol vessel HDMS Vaedderen (Aries) picked up the patient and delivered them to shore for treatment. 

The nature of the submarine's mission so close to Greenland's capital - and the condition of the crewmember in question - were not immediately disclosed. The U.S. Navy and the White House have declined to confirm the incident.

Hours after the medevac, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he was ordering a U.S. Navy hospital "boat" to Greenland. The message was accompanied by an illustration of USNS Mercy, a 1,000-bed hospital ship typically deployed for medical diplomacy and natural disasters. 

"We are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland to take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there. It’s on the way!" Trump said. Louisiana Governor and White House Greenland envoy Jeff Landry, who has previously said that he will help "make Greenland a part of the U.S.," has been tasked with organizing the hospital ship mission. 

Of the places USNS Mercy has been tasked to assist over the last 40 years, Greenland has one of the more generous public healthcare systems. Under Danish governance, Greenland provides free medical care and free prescription drugs to all citizens, and it maintains a network of clinics and medical centers with no-charge access. Inhabitants of the farthest-flung settlements have to travel long distances to get care, and the central hospital is said to be due for renovation, but modern services are provided at no charge. For advanced medical care beyond that available on the island, patients are flown to Copenhagen for further free treatment. Greenlandic and Danish leaders have noted the differences between their system and American health care in pointed statements. 

“We have a public healthcare system where treatment is free for citizens. That is a deliberate choice — and a fundamental part of our society. That is not the case in the United States, where seeing a doctor comes at a cost," retorted Jens Frederik Nielsen, Greenland's prime minister.  

Both of the Navy's hospital ships are currently in Mobile for shipyard maintenance, and it was not immediately clear if either was in condition to get under way promptly. The vessels are converted single-hull oil tankers, and are now more than 50 years old (including their early years served in tanker configuration).  

The mission to Greenland means that one of these advanced hospital ships will be removed from Alabama, where more than 400,000 state residents lack health insurance coverage. The difference between the two locales was picked up by Danish politicians. 

"I am happy to live in a country where there is free and equal access to healthcare for all. Where it is not insurance and wealth that determine whether you get proper treatment," Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen wrote on Facebook. "There is the same approach in Greenland."

The Crook(s) of Revelation: There Is No Center to Hold

by Phil Rockstroh / February 19th, 2026

Part and parcel of the phenomenology of hyper-authoritarian Christians: The more they claim their affinity and psychical binding to Jesus Christ, the more pronounced their shadow half, that could be termed as demonic. In essence, individuals who insist they are light-bearers — who insist they are delivering good news to the world — who claim the mantle of divine radiance, yet, as a rule, cast a huge shadow within which broods palpable evil, and are bad news for all they have been given dominion. To wit:

Sports reporter Sarah Spain on sitting near JD Vance at the Milan Olympics:

When I see JD Vance’s eyeliner face, I literally feel ill. I feel like I just looked at a demon, like the devil, and I don’t even believe in that. My body felt like when you have been spooked and you have a little tingle that feels like, ‘Ooh, something’s not right.’ Or like when you get in a situation and you feel like, ‘Oh, some of the energy’s bad, something could go wrong here, maybe I should get out of here,’ or something’s dangerous. He’s a human being, allegedly, but he exudes demon energy….[His presence] was disgusting to me.

JD Vance’s mentor and key financial backer is Peter Thiel. The capitalist tech elite are maneuvering men like themselves to be the leadership templates of the future. The mythology of The Book Of Revelations was a Lovecraftian pulp jeremiad against the Roman Empire. Sarah Spain has sent back a dispatch from being within cringing distance of The Beast.

I had a friend since high school, an individual for whom the 1960s counterculture term, Jesus freak, would have been applicable. In those reefer-reeking, muscle car-deafening days Bill evinced the role of A lank-of-hair, love-you-neighbor sort of Christian. He and I had gone our individual ways over the span of decades. But, in recent years, we reestablished contact.

In the years since, his born again proclivities had drifted – then careened – rightward and authoritarian. His Episcopal Church domination had lapsed into schism between a liberal and conservative approach to Doctrine. Somewhere along the lines, he had donned the psychical mantle of a Christian Zionist thus he regarded me, a Jewish person, as somehow bearing a crucial element, expedited in the Final Days, that will summon Lord Jesus to appear in and then descent from the clouds and begin the redemption of this sin-sullied world.

In the days following the Oct 7 Israeli/Hamas hostilities, he became particularly solicitous, even to the paranoia-plangent point of offering his home as a place of refuge when (vaguely defined) forces would initiate US-style Nuremberg Laws against Jewish Americans. When I informed him that Jews were in zero danger from the US government, instead, due to the conflation of Zionism and Judaism, we posed a far greater danger to ourselves, he seemed dumbfounded, and even more so, and even to the point of taking offense, when, I posited, the role of Righteous Gentile should be fulfilled by shielding and sheltering the people that the US government terms as illegal. Withal, I requested he consider this verse from Scripture:

“When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” – Leviticus 19:33-34.

Bill, for all intents and purposes, simply could not wrap his scripture beholden mind around the notion that said verse was applicable to the “ the least among us” in present day terms:

And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” – Matthew 25:40

There was an obtuseness, to the point of protective prickliness, evinced by my good news bearing friend if I pressed the subject matter. Then, as Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people raged on and the coming xenophobia-rancid rise of MAGA 2, our friendship, at least from his part, became untenable and Bill outright ghosted me.

In a direct manner, I had not attempted to confront him with the obvious: The Christian conservative evangelical system of belief is so radically antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ that an argument could be made that he and his brethren, in a collective manner, display the spirit of The Antichrist.

Luca Signorelli 1501 depiction of the face of the Antichrist from the Orvieto Cathedral

If the often metaphorically abstruse aspects of The Gospels can be applied, in clear terms to contemporary situations, this much should be obvious: the least among us in the form of so-called illegal immigrants should not be imprisoned within ICE detention centers and the tech billionaire’s will to dominate the earth violates the admonitions of Scripture, both Old and New Testament. Indeed, the oceanic phenomenon of the Age Of Information has engendered the rise of A Beast (of sorts) in the form of megalomania as evinced by Peter Thiel et al. For example, Thiel’s obsession with the lurid imagery of The Antichrist should be regarded as classic projection. In short, every accusation the libertarian true believer Thiel asserts in regard to the Antichrist’s lust for global domination should be regarded as an inadvertent confession of intent.

There is the banality of evil and the evil of banality. A hideous example of both deranged states of the human psyche: Pam Bondi’s refusal to turn around and acknowledge the survivors of Epstein-related exploitation. Bondi soul-defying response reflects her agenda to protect moneyed predators, in particular her boss, Predator-in-Thief Donald Trump; instead, during, her, universally mocked, congressional hearing crash-out, she waxed cretinous about the rising Stock Market (a rigged for predators dominion as well).

Bondi’s mode of mind and attendant actions brings into focus and defines the mindset of economic elites; that is, those in possession of obscene amounts of wealth enabling them to move through the world, causing massive harm without consequences while the lower economic rungs only exist as fodder for their exploitation.

The present capitalist order views us in the same regard as the girls Ghislaine Maxwell culled from across-the-tracks trailer parks — we are disposable, gig economy workers, as if we are hirelings pressed into service for the creepopathic desires of the Epstein-adjacent elite upon one of his massage tables.

We are in the demeaning thrall of the Capitalist Order for their Happy Ending (for them only) Nation.

Capitalist imperium, and this is unique (in a dismal kind of way) among past cultures, insofar as the proliferation of the present moment’s ugliness and shoddiness (e.g., take a perusal of the US interstate’s off-ramp architecture) and of the superficial (e.g., the contemporary breed of grifters known as influencers). This is the lying, hideous criteria we have been induced to take as reality.

Deep within, we know this: The banal architecture and relentless lies are the antithesis of what we long for mind, heart, and soul. The ugliness and superficial come-ons inflict a sense of aloneness and alienation — when we long for intimacy with life itself, to regard the world as the face of the beloved.

We yearn for the secrets vouchsafed within life’s mysteries to find affinity with our secret places, and then happen upon the company of others who we desire to invite into those secret places, for we know the world we carry within is endowed with far greater, more resonate realities than the extant world of fleeting appearances, and, in particular, the soul-defying, ad hoc ugliness of late capitalist modernity.

Thus the banality of AI slop. The innate, Homeric mythos of oneself is in constant danger of being buffeted into oblivion by the proliferation and prevailing dominance of electronic media mediocrity. There is a story within that is uniquely our own…It is freighted with mythic resonance that is drowned out and trampled by the banal clamor and footfalls of the herded masses.

There are vast, tragic consequences when the political and economic elite’s abuse of power grow unaccountable to humanity. One example: The lust for the bottomless accumulation of wealth of the capitalist overclass. Withal, Pam Bondi bellowing, “have you seen the Stock Market…? — directly correlates to the exponential rise of the planet’s greenhouse gases.

Headline: Scientific studies calculate climate change as health danger, while Trump calls it a ‘scam’ and Climate Change is beyond the tipping point[.]

Among the myriad crimes against humanity perpetrated by the (unaccountable) holders of power ruling the present order: their gaslighting regarding human created climate chaos, a phenomenon that threatens to render the Earth’s climate unconducive to the continuance of large scale human life on the planet. (Even if the aforementioned octopi haven’t checked the Stock Market as of late, the warming oceans of the Earth are highly salutary to their needs as a species thus octopi are thriving).

In short, life on earth will go on. Yet unless the scales fall from the eyes of the willfully blind, the human race’s prospects for futurity are far less propitious than that of cephalopod lifeforms.

To paraphrase a climate catastrophe denialist of a few decades back who asked, is our elites learning? Are they even capable of learning in the thrall of their greed-driven mania? The chief spokescretin of climate denial, one Donald Trump, Trump’s ravaged by mindless indulgence, in rapid decline body is the very emblem of humankind’s assault on the Earth’s ecological balance. As the poet (WB Yeats) averred, in his seminal poem of the carnage upon the psyche inflicted on the forces (i.e., a devouring, soul-devouring beast) of capitalist modernity: “[…]rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born”:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”

All of which is anathema to the insight of a poet of an earlier generation:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
— John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

The present order’s political and economic elite are siloed within a culture so isolated from Truth that their notion of Beauty is embodied by flights by private plane to Epstein’s Island.

It is a reality that Truth and Beauty can redeem us yet the economic elite and their political operatives and bagmen (and woman e.g., Pam Bondi) seem beyond redemption. The question is not if the system will collapse but when? Thus the knowledge evokes the crucial question, how will the rest of us act in that time of soul-challenging transition?

Take a few breaths. Close your eyes. Patience is required. There is a deathless quality within. It has always been there. In fact, it existed before Time. It cannot be manipulated nor dominated by the degraded forces of the present moment. The quality cannot be owned by billionaires. Exploiters cannot take it from you. The reservoirs of this inner landscape are inexhaustible. The soul’s innate energy surges forth in every heartbeat. Brooding within you like eternal Spring in deep Winter, its presence provides the ability to endure the noxious shoddiness and malignant lies of the present moment.

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Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist. His poems, short fiction, poetry and essays have been published in numerous print publications and anthologies; his political essays have been widely posted on the progressive/left side of the internet.  Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website.

 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.