No man is an island: Tip of the iceberg

Sex in the future will require us, as a society, to face and understand how the most powerful are able to find and abuse the most vulnerable, or the Epstein scandal will play out again and again.

Because Jeffrey Epstein had a blue-collar background—yes, he’s from Brooklyn’s first gated community, but his parents were a groundskeeper and a teacher’s aide—he had to schmooze and service his way into the Establishment. We discussed this briefly last time, and that’s all the attention I’ll give his dubiously laudable “daylight accomplishments”—you can read his 2002 profile in New York magazine for that.

Epstein had a head for numbers and politics, that is certain, but he was a schemer and grifter more than a savvy businessman. He made his money helping the rich expand the wealth gap, rather than contribute anything remotely valuable to human flourishing on planet Earth. This is why he and Trump get along so well: he is exactly the type George RR Martin had in mind when he wrote Littlefinger’s line, “Chaos isn’t a pit, it’s a ladder.” Not even his philanthropic donations have any merit: the tainted money he gave caused turmoil and controversy when his crimes were brought to light.

Had he simply strolled up to Buckingham Palace and asked, “Would anyone in the royal family like to rape some children,” Epstein’s career would have been cut much shorter than it already was by his alleged suicide. But in fact, Ghislaine Maxwell was the only person outside the royal family able to come and go from Buckingham Palace as she pleased. Clearly, Epstein and Maxwell never acted alone.

We see through a glass, darkly

I mentioned Ron Eppinger last time, who trafficked girls from Eastern Europe with promises of modeling careers and then bait-and-switched them into forced prostitution, all under the auspices of his “modeling agency” Perfect 10. Epstein gave a million dollars to help Jean-Luc Brunel found MC2, and then, according to Virginia Giuffre, bragged about raping Brunel’s clients. We already know about Harvey Weinstein, whose downfall was made possible by the hashtags #MeToo and #BelieveWomen.

After Epstein’s first joke of a sentence was served, it was Party On until his next arrest in 2019. Nearly everyone who publicly spurned him was back to buddy-buddy behind the scenes. Nextdoor neighbor Howard Lutnick testified that he and his wife resolved never to see Epstein again after their first meeting in his creepy Manhattan mansion; but Congress grilled him on a visit to Little St. James in 2012. Lutnick defended himself by saying, basically, “Not sure why I did that, but don’t worry, my wife and kids were there.” Somehow, we are not reassured.

Howard Lutnick is the sitting Secretary of Commerce, a Trump appointee, and a billionaire.

A White House official once said dismissively of Epstein, “OK, so he has a girl problem,” at the end of a laundry list of Epstein’s daylight accomplishments. But he said it to Vicky Ward, who first tried to sound the alarm on Epstein more than a decade prior. She discovered while researching her 2003 profile that “he had allegedly assaulted two young sisters, one of whom had been underage at the time.”

Ward continues, describing highly unethical pressure to ignore said allegations:

“Very bravely, they were prepared to go on the record. They were afraid he’d use all his influence to discredit them—and their fear turned out to be legitimate… Epstein made a visit to the office of Vanity Fair’s then-editor, Graydon Carter, and suddenly the women and their allegations were removed from the article. ‘He’s sensitive about the young women,’ Carter told me at the time. (Editor’s Note: Carter has previously denied this allegation.) … (Epstein had also leaned heavily on my ex-husband’s uncle, Conrad Black, to try to exert his influence on me, which was particularly unwelcome, given that Black happened to be my ex-husband’s boss at the time.)”

These are not one-off events or coincidences.They are a pattern of abuse and exploitation, perpetrated by the transnational capitalist class upon us lowly mortals, and their attitude is that there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s the way the world works, to them: when the rich abuse their power, it’s not a crime, it’s just reality. Now get back to work.

How billionaire predators traffic children

You can read victim statements yourself for the firsthand details; I am not a muckraker. The general idea is that you need a machine where victims go in and money comes out. If those victims or the money can generate more victims, then you have an efficient machine.

Billionaires start with money, traffickers start with victims. Traffickers deceive victims into entering the machine with deception: promises of life-changing money, modeling careers, a chance to meet royalty, whatever. It’s all a ploy to get the victims away from their support networks and into the clutches of abusers. Then, once isolated, abusers can then create a reality that overwhelms the victim’s defenses. How is such a reality created? With confidence and more deception: “Don’t worry, this is fine. Plenty of girls your age do this, you’re just getting paid better. Just relax and try to enjoy it. Nobody will believe you anyway.” They might even say you’re free to leave at any time, but what are you gonna do? Swim home?

That reality is backed up every time we see victims dismissed in the media, watch a politician resign for a crime but serve no jail time, or tighten our belts when the oligarchs flip the economy to shake us down for pennies. The reality of “the rich do what they like and the poor do what they must” plays out in every nation and at every stage of history, even though it doesn’t have to be this way. But this is the way we’ve done things so far, and that cultural inertia is then used as a cudgel to threaten girls into participating in their own ongoing abuse, while they’re just trying to feed themselves or provide for their families.

And make no mistake: that is the demographic they target. I pointed out last time how Barry Ferns showed that extreme inequality manufactures vulnerability, and this is how that plays out. We live in a knowledge economy, but U.S. public education is so worthless that most citizens can’t afford to participate in it, which sets them back both economically and financially (i.e., choice-wise and money-wise). Coupled with our predatory for-profit insurance industry, we now have the three-stroke engine of “Keep ‘em poor, ignorant, and sick” to crank out an endless supply of boys to compete over a shrinking job pool, and girls to serve as cheap entertainment.

With this engine in place at the center, we have a machine that churns through a perpetually desperate population of exploitable children for the elite to dispose of as they see fit. And as a byproduct, you even get a bunch of blackmail opportunities, free for the taking! But make sure you only use the blackmail to keep your social class toeing the line. Whenever someone threatens to speak out, or do something a little too nice for the poor, then whip that sucker out and disgrace them individually, while the machine continues apace.

Don’t forget the hate

Of course, if the only outrageous news were about natural disasters, accidents, and the occasional trafficking victim rescued (or trafficker thrown to the wolves), then we would eventually piece it all together. So the news cycle also plays into this, because the oligarch class has been deliberately using social wedge issues to keep us fighting a culture war to distract us from the class war that they have been waging for centuries.

Epstein played into this, tapping Christopher Poole—founder of 4chan—and encouraging him to start the Politically Incorrect message board /pol to foment outrage and hatred among young men. Movement misogyny, racism, and queerphobia are the ideological progeny of internet fascists, who have been online since ARPANET and prototyped the alt-right pipeline in the nineties. If that’s their daddy, then Christopher Poole is their mommy, providing the fertile ground of 4chan/pol for their hatred to germinate and develop. (Is this too subtle? Does it sound like I buy into the “fertile ground” theory of womanhood? Or is the ironic tone obvious enough?) He even tapped biologist Robert Trivers to start smearing trans people, as a distraction from his own ongoing abuses.

Abusers and traffickers aren’t isolated individuals, they exist in an ecosystem. Barry Ferns notes that Epstein himself was just a henchman; the real villain is extreme wealth and power. We can fight that extreme wealth and power, tooth and nail, without harming a single hair on a billionaire’s head (the assets on their balance sheets are another story). I am not advocating violence against the rich—I am saying we have a systemic problem that must be solved at the systemic level. We cannot individually punish our way out of this.

But neither can we let it go on. If we want this to stop, then we have to make it stop, and that means stripping the billionaire class of their extreme wealth and power in order to lower the ceiling of prosperity and raise the floor of poverty. Gasp all you want, it doesn’t have to be socialism, but it can’t be laissez-faire capitalism. We can’t just ask politely for the rich to stop abusing the poor, we need the rich to be taken down a peg so that the poor are able to say no without jeopardizing their ability to survive. The Epstein files have shown conclusively that the elite will never stop of their own accord. They will lie about it, they will pretend in public, they will make token reprimands to appease the masses. But the second we weren’t looking, they went right back to it.