The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Should Never Stop Shocking Us (and Won’t)

The relentless pummeling of the internet by the Epstein files is making for a winter of vertigo. Nearly every day we’re reminded anew that the American ruling class is not just greedy and power-hungry but unspeakably depraved.

It’s miserable. And whatever reckless wag-the-dog distraction Attorney General Pam Bondi tries to stage with the coming show trial of the kidnapped leader of Venezuela, the Justice Department is still compelled by law to make the Epstein files public.

So we have a ways to go. In clear violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which gave the Justice Department a December 19 deadline to release all the files, Bondi has published only 400,000 pages. Many references to Trump, her capo, have clearly been scrubbed.

All this slow-walking and redaction suggests just how much the lapdog DOJ is panicking about the old man’s innumerable Epstein ties. On Thursday, Bondi admitted there are some 5.2 million Epstein pages still to come.

Of course there are.

But what does any of this mean for those following along at home, trying to brook (or ignore) the gigabytes of putrid Trump-Epstein material now in the public domain?

Simply put: We’re way, way beyond the what-do-I-tell-my-kids-about-grab-’em-by-the-pussy part of the Trump proceedings. That was a decade ago: a veritable age of innocence. After 10 years of this corrupt felon and adjudicated rapist holding center stage in our politics, everyone knows who Donald Trump really is.

Mind you, there are credible suggestions in the files that Trump sexually abused and harassed teenagers (just as, of course, he abused many women, harassed teens, and was found by jury to have raped E. Jean Carroll). But that’s almost beside the point. He enabled and even attaboyed Epstein’s child rape enterprise, sending young Mar-a-Lago employees to the child rapist’s house to cater to his whims, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Of course he knew about the girls,” Epstein said of Trump, the man he called his closest friend.

So all this is obvious, but the country has developed a weird epistemology when it comes to Trump’s moral rot. Those who don’t like him greet new proof of his disgusting behavior with a kind of studied indifference; we’re close to despair and unshockable. Those who do like him call the proof in the files a Democrat hoax.

We’ve thus become submissive. That might be the saddest part. There’s not going to be a righteous special prosecutor this time, let alone a Twenty-Fifth Amendment play. Robert Mueller and Jack Smith have long since folded their tents. Investigative reporters appear exhausted by Epstein.

With no public defense of our dignity, the American people have been left alone to make what we will of the vile inhumanity being exposed in the files.

The major takeaway should never stop shocking us. America’s corporate elite have spent the last five decades living like feudal lords, convinced they were entitled to exploit the masses and molest women and children with abandon.

Noam Chomsky, one of Epstein’s most left-wing running buddies, inadvertently described the dynamic of his own cohort in 1990: “The cool observers—meaning us smart guys—it’s our task to impose necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications to keep these poor simpletons on course.”

Plenty of these “smart guys,” including Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Jean-Luc Brunel, the late French model scout, exploited women. But the Epstein clique’s exploitation expanded far beyond that. These men had designs on anyone who shopped in malls, studied in universities, voted in elections, had ambitions in the arts—all of us simpletons.

Examples abound in the files, many in unlikely places. If you liked Poetry in America, the PBS special, you were enjoying an Epstein joint that set out to feature his buddy and accused fellow child molester Woody Allen. According to the files, the production included Epstein’s bonding in 2013 with the director, Elisa New (Mrs. Larry Summers), over pedophilic romances, including that of “a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl.” Epstein’s connection to PBS and poetry after his conviction as a sex offender just five years earlier certainly would have helped launder his reputation.

Above all, the Epstein elite—whether from their perch at Mar-a-Lago or Silicon Valley, Harvard or MIT, the White House or Buckingham Palace, the Lolita Express or Pedophile Island—licensed its members to gouge as many resources out of the simpletons as they pleased. They staked a claim to our bodies, our minds, our loved ones, and a country that was supposed to belong to the people. Trump “loved to fuck the wives of his best friends,” Epstein said in 2017. As Trump himself said about his grabbing habits, “When you’re a star they let you do it.”

But do they? The story of the Epstein circle’s extractive approach to the rest of us is a story not of seduction or consent, but of coercion and force. Epstein specifically licensed a grabby, monopolizing impulse in other men, priding himself on teaching nerds to mog. “He changed my life,” said Martin Nowak, a physicist and especially craven Epstein hanger-on. “Because of his support, I feel I can do anything I want.”

Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and husband of Elisa New since 1995, turned to Epstein in 2018 for a pep talk on sexually exploiting a mentee at Harvard. Epstein, in full manosphere style, urged Summers to see the young woman as fated to submit: “She’s doomed to be with you.”

For decades, Victoria’s Secret, overseen by Epstein’s star client and benefactor Les Wexner, conditioned the aesthetic of anyone who so much as visited a mall.

The look of hairless, skinny, undressed figures saturated visual fields, displacing the more mature hourglass forms of Playboy’s heyday. This skinny-child aesthetic happened to comport with Epstein’s perverse eugenics, which further informed the evopsych departments he lavishly underwrote. The exploitation thus hit the poor and privileged alike. While Epstein used the promise of Victoria’s Secret stardom to coerce underclass girls into sex, generations of overclass Ivy League students learned cartoonish ideas about rape being a male prerogative.

You can take all this from victims of the Epstein circle, or you can read the sinister files yourself. Sunlight in this case really does disinfect. But the reckoning will come one way or another. For decades, regular people ceded our time, treasure, and culture to the Epstein class and its systems, which were quite explicitly designed to exploit us.