They Really Are Sickos

What we know about the Jeffrey Epstein files is bad enough

Epstein and Chomsky

On Monday, Congress will get access to the unredacted Epstein files, so in the interest of making predictions which I can be held to because they may or may not be borne out by future revelations, here’s where I think things stand.

Jeffrey Epstein was in the asset recovery business and carrying on an off-books settlements practice. He was a fixer. There is obviously a public interest in what he was doing. Deals within the elite class of all Western and some non-Western countries, some of which take decisions rightly within the purview of democratic governments, out of them, are something that needs to be scrutinized. Anyone who tells you otherwise is suspect.

It will be a generational turning point. It’s the sort of event that it feels trivial to go on about due process denied or the exposure of the innocent, if indeed there are any innocents as the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board insists. All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked. And as a question of equal treatment, friends of an avid buyer of offensive spyware who employed hackers do not deserve much sympathy on this point.

The verdict of the public, of course, is that they are guilty. These are the people who have misgoverned the West for the last few decades, and finally they get a measure of what’s been done to us.

The more difficult question is whether they are evil, and here I want to make the case that they are, but not in the way most people mean. One part of the Epstein story that speaks to justice denied is that he must, still, be referred to as an “alleged” sex trafficker, because his death came before his conviction. That we are now finding out about the existence of an SDNY announcement of his death dated a day too early, and the jail footage which contradicts official accounts, has turned the conspiracy theorists into model citizens asking important questions.

But these are questions of guilt, not evil. Plenty of guilty people are not evil, but there is much evil in these exposures. One of my strong convictions, and the reason I think of myself as a populist, is that I think ordinary people do have a strong, good, and generally accurate nose for evil. It is probably the case that as with Pizzagate, some specific claims will eventually be discredited. But what we see now is both less lurid and more sinister than what was held out for some time.

We are accustomed to certain kinds of hypocrisies attributable to normal human folly. The Bible-beater with a mistress is the most famous. The kinds of hypocrisies in these files are harder to see but they are more profound. The Russia piece is what will gall the careful observer of current events. Jeffrey Epstein’s friends are the ones who pushed the Russia, Russia, Russia conspiracy theories, which now reek of contempt for the public.

Michael McFaul helped get an Einstein visa for Epstein’s publicist, who ran a pro-Putin youth group. Epstein helping Naomi Campbell buy an apartment in Moscow is the sort of thing, if a conservative did it, would have gotten him bounced out of Washington during the last ten years, but they do it not just with impunity but without any scrutiny at all. As Peter Mandelson has resigned, we come to find out MI6 warned the British government about his closeness to the Kremlin. Because these are all liberals in good standing, all of this was overlooked in favor of Christopher Steele’s fairy tales.

There are two other issues I want to highlight because they touch on frequent subjects of this blog. One is Israel, and the other is the racism and eugenics piece.

Jeffrey Epstein seems to have been a more or less ordinary liberal Zionist. The question of whether he was trying to operationalize Ehud Barak’s concept of converting—and perhaps breeding first—a bunch of new Jews and moving them to Israel, is beyond what is known at this point. But he gave to the Jewish National Fund, the Friends of the IDF, fairly ordinary Zionist philanthropy.

I don’t see the evidence at this point that he was helping to move Israel in a more productive direction with respect to the United States. If he had lived, maybe he would be trying today. We can’t know that. But what I would look for would be giving to the U.S.-backed NGOs in Israel, or pushing for the Iran deal, neither of which he did. We also see him staffing top roles at Facebook, which is consistent with this blog’s analysis of that company.

Benjamin Netanyahu has put out a statement saying Epstein’s relationship with Ehud Barak shows he didn’t work for Israel. It doesn’t quite show that. It’s his fairly ordinary Zionism that is probably untenable going forward. His posture was a common one: I don’t like Likud very much, and I think they’re running Israel into a ditch, but I’m going to do them a solid by helping the country do an arms deal with Mongolia and I’m glad the Republicans are scotching that Iran deal. That dog won’t hunt anymore. But this is all unworkable, not evil.

The hypocrisy that gets me the most is that many of these people, Morgan McSweeney chief among them, who was involved in the Center for Countering Digital Hate, were either directly involved or shared the perspective of a para-state extremism and hate monitoring apparatus which operates on a hair trigger and violates the civil liberties of the public, while being a hop, skip and a jump from a man engaged in probably the largest eugenics project in the world.

This is relevant to the Intellectual Dark Web. The function that group of people serves is to kosherize, or de-kosherize, people who are or aren’t allowed to talk about controversial topics. If you’re in the IDW, you can talk about group differences in IQ or whatever and still be accepted in polite company, be it Charles Murray, or Stephen Pinker, or what have you. If you’re not, you’ll have a hard time holding down a job at a gas station, unless you pay your vig to the Israelis. It operates like a mob like most other things they do. This is why Chris Rufo and some others are downplaying the Epstein stuff.

Epstein was allegedly puppeteering 4chan. He was commenting on eugenics related material, a bunch of his close associates were involved with 23andMe and the dating app cartel. This is very sinister stuff that goes beyond the spotting of underage girls and various other evidence that supports the charge of sex trafficking. It points to the possibility of a kind of soft eugenic matching program deployed on an unwitting public, and this needs to be investigated. It’s in this stuff where one picks up the unmistakable whiff of sulfur.

Epstein tried to play God and now is hated and disgraced, along with everyone who helped him. There’s a lesson in that. And turnabout is fair play. The people involved in this should be put on trial for crimes against humanity, with the death penalty on the table.