The Paranoid Style of Jeffrey Epstein Has Come for Us All

There is a pattern in Epstein’s consumption of ideas and the type of people he finds compatible. It wasn’t a desire to rub shoulders with the famous and much-loved, generic fucking star. Epstein did not collect people for status; he identified and aligned himself with the intellectual machine that now justifies our current dystopia, including the academic rationalizations and motivated reasoning that hover behind the Trump administration’s most terrible excesses: glorified phrenology, violent misogyny, genetic determinism, and elite impunity.

It is no coincidence that Epstein was also interested in cryptoIn AIIn right-wing populismIn Cath traditional extremistsand anti-trans ideology, in addition to frightening experiments on pain tolerance, psychopathology and advantageous genetics. Epstein was drawn to fields and numbers that classify humans, explain cruelty, or biologize inequality. He did not form bonds with these people: he saw that they were already aligned. And for each of them, the question “Why them?” is almost as important as “Did they know?” I don’t believe that everyone in Epstein’s orbit is secretly and knowingly pushing us toward a patriarchal eugenics regime. One of them, Elon Musk, certainly is. Others simply have ideas that are useful for this project.

Epstein is less the thread that connects the rich and powerful than a lens through which all those existing connections fall into place: the common denominator of the cursed ideas—white supremacy and patriarchy, the debasement of human life, human values, and human choices—that propel the apocalypse.