Examining Epstein’s Entrails

With plenty of other Substack contributors busy examining Epstein’s entrails, I’m not sure I have much to contribute to the soothsaying. But for what it’s worth, here’s a few banal observations about power and privilege in the surveillance age.

The Epstein Files, a massive tranche of government‑generated records that relate to the investigations, prosecutions and civil actions surrounding  Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and a wide network of associates, includes an extraordinary two-hour interview conducted when the American financier, child sex offender and sex trafficker was in between jail time, sometime around 2019.

I watched Steve Bannon’s interview in its entirety, and to my surprise, the perp came across as supremely gracious and self-effacing. As well as utterly brilliant and scientifically literate.

“Fascinating! Epstein is a brilliant, likeable, humble polymath, yet a horrific predator,” a psychologist friend wrote me after watching the video.

There seemed nothing in Epstein’s smiling, slightly nebbishy demeanor that suggested the sense of ‘evil’ testified by multiple people who came into his presence, victims and otherwise. Of course, a near-supernatural ability to charm is one of the keynote features of psychopaths. The charming predator’s lengthy tentacles slithered around some of the most elite figures on Earth, among them figures like Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky (whose friendships did not cease after Epstein’s criminal conviction and first jail stretch).

As my friend observes:

We type (categorize) people based on small cues that may not be predictive of other dimensions of personality. For example, because a woman is pretty and smart, we assume she must also be kind: this is known as the “halo effect”. We expect a serial rapist to not be as brilliant and modest as Epstein was. The larger, overall bias is that, as a cognitive shortcut, we categorize people instead of assessing them multi-dimensionally. This makes charming, attractive, intelligent, self-aware psychopaths the most dangerous.

On to the brilliant part. The conversation with the clearly disgusted Steve Bannon— himself no dummy, whatever you think of him—ranged from high finance and fiat currency to the philosophy of science. Bannon insisted that Epstein was “the smartest guy in the room” in almost any situation, and he picks the perp’s brain to fill in his own gaps in knowledge.

The MAGA rainmaker wants to know how Epstein thinks the world is run, from the perspective of a highly-connected guy exploiting a global network of associates, both professionally and criminally.

My jaw dropped when I heard Epstein claim to have worked with the Rockefeller group, and was a close personal friend of David Rockefeller. He added that he was invited (but declined) membership on the Trilateral Commission. The financier said he was responsible for financing and starting the legendary Santa Fe Institute (the epicenter of complexity theory in the 1990s), which Bannon previously knew.

The legacy media’s previous rendering of Epstein as a rich Wall Street player of no particular brilliance, who used his vast sums of money to feed his perversions while luring big-name figures into his web, is incomplete and misleading. It’s now been undone and updated by revelations from The Epstein Files.

The silver-haired spider was indeed brilliant, much-sought after, and hard-wired to the very apex of power. His claims to Bannon sound more likely than not.

The biggest global players are cited in the redaction-heavy email exchanges: intelligence agency officials, the heads of big tech, the leaders of the too-big-too-fail banks, prize-winning scientists, and politicians and policy-makers, in personal correspondence and/or professional association with Epstein or otherwise mentioned by name.

And all the while, the human-trafficking financier was compromising as many high-level figures as possible with flights on his “Lolita Express” to his paradisiacal retreat in the Caribbean.

Was this in service to a global blackmail operation to Mossad and/or one of the US letter agencies, as writer Whitney Webb has suggested for years? It’ll take some time for the researchers to pull apart these sticky entrails; the Epstein Files comprise more than  three million pages of documents, plus  2,000 videos and 180,000 images, all made public and electronically searchable through a US Department of Justice portal.

It’s impossible for the average person to do more than dip their toe into this kraken-infested cesspool. However, some investigators have done some deep dives by focusing on certain keywords, and come up with extraordinary findings.

Here’s one: like other billionaire elitists, Epstein had a jones for eugenics and transhumanism, yet his interest went far beyond intellectual. He recruited NSA codebreakers for a biohacking ‘Manhattan Project’ on human genomics at his New Mexico ranch, recognizing a new profit centre for wealthy investors eager to get in on eternal life extension and related Faustian frolics, like support for a Ukraine biolab to produce “designer babies.”

Here’s another: philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates was friends with Epstein, and the friendship continued even after the latter’s first conviction as a sexual offender, purportedly fueling Melinda’ Gates demand for a divorce. Yet the professional connection between two creeps was unknown until the release of the files, in which the former Microsoft leader is named in an effort by Epstein to coordinate financial mechanisms to profit from pandemics. I leave it to the interested reader to go here to determine if researcher Sayer Ji is justified in his argument:

What [the Epstein Files] do show—in the participants’ own words—is that pandemics and vaccines were treated as standing financial and strategic categories years before any declared pandemic, complete with capital vehicles, legal frameworks, communications strategies, patent portfolios, simulation programs, reinsurance products, and rehearsal events.

Is it just coincidence that the Covid-19 pandemic, which followed years after the email exchanges in the files, resulted in the greatest transfer of wealth upward in human history?

It’s safe now

Why has this massive trove of information appeared now, after all the farcical back and forth from President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi on the issue? Writer Whitney Webb, who was on the Epstein beat earlier than any other serious researcher, concludes that the elites feel it’s “safe” to release “the info that Epstein was really a sex trafficker as a side gig and was mainly an intelligence asset of Israel and the US, a big-time financial criminal on behalf of transnational capital (I would argue transnational organized crime disguised as transnational capital), and an arms trader because the people he was helping have stolen so much of America’s wealth and have taken control over so much of the government.”

That is why even admitting the true breadth of the scandal and operation doesn’t even seem to move the needle. Criminals are in charge and they run both parties, they have created the infrastructure for neo-feudalism enforced by technology and are herding us into the corral.

In other words, the ‘deep state’ (or whatever placeholder you prefer for top-down influence and control) is okay with letting the cat out of the bag because all effective means of opposition or regulation—government, judiciary, or mass media—have been mostly bought off, compromised or otherwise parasitized by Epstein’s merry band of apex predators, who are making out like bandits in the making of a prison planet.

She has a point. I’m trying to imagine Americans taking to the streets in massive numbers in demonstration against…what, exactly? An amorphous yet clearly growing surveillance state with all freedoms circumscribed and both parties controlled? With the US population divided between MAGA pitchforks and liberal torches, deep state operatives and enablers probably aren’t imagining guillotines and tumbrels in their future.

On top of this, it’s hard to imagine mass enthusiasm for the Epstein Files persisting for more than a few weeks in a culture with a TikTok attention span. The vast majority of adults are already amusing themselves to death with digital distractions other this, and those remaining will scan a headline or two from legacy media, or dial into some short-lived fulmination from their chosen influencers, and that will be that. Most will remain blissfully unaware of the scale and depth of this darkness.

As for those sticking to it with secondary and tertiary readings, if only out of perverse fascination, I can easily imagine the millions of pages in the Epstein Files making for the ultimate cultural Rorschach blot, with contending tribes of interpretation arguing over what they see.

Remember the Wikileaks release of the State Department cables/ Iraq War leaks, in the early aughts? The revelations made it into publications like The Guardian and the New York Times, which profitably partnered with Wikileaks leader Julian Assange in the reporting. That is, until the latter two outlets pivoted to kill the messenger, by demonizing Assange through allegations that have since lost credibility. The leaks themselves remained on Wikileaks servers, but public interest waned. And that was in an era before the introduction of attention-fracturing smart phones. Needless to say, the revelations didn’t result in any criminal charges or political consequences for the perps involved.

A big proviso here. Revelations from the document dump by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 did result in the 2015 USA Freedom Act, which repealed the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone‑metadata under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. And in the UK, there’s already been massive fallout from the release of the Epstein Files. Further details on Prince Andrew have seriously rattled the British monarchy, and the scandal surrounding UK Labour peer and “Prince of Darkness” Peter Mandelson threatens to bring down Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government.

So in spite of the odds otherwise, here’s hoping further inspection of this festering pile of entrails will help bring high-level perps to justice — on both sides of the Atlantic —along with the introduction of further regulations of surveillance state overreach.

Puny secrets and big discoveries

Whitney Webb has some advice for taking action at a personal level. “Opt out of AI, digital ID and the surveillance state that Epstein associates built now because we still can.” Alas, millions of people outfitted their homes a long time ago with Google Nest, Alexa, or other consumer-friendly snoop devices. Millions are now sharing their most intimate details with ChatGPT in between cooking tips. For years it’s been two steps forward and one step back in the “totalitarian tip toe,” and even with possible concessions from the corporate state, it seems the elites are screwing in the last bolts of the holding pen with mass compliance of the sheeple.

That said, I still prefer to think it’s better to have a big window opened into our conspiratorial meta-system than not. “Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity,” wrote the Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan. Epstein’s messy entrails make for a big discovery, and incredulity is no option for anyone paying serious attention.

.