Epstein

I don’t want to be writing this, and I have two reasons for my reluctance:

First, there is no way to address the massive conspiratorial edifice of Jeffrey Epstein without seeming at least faintly absurd. And second, there is nothing I could write on this immensely charged topic that won’t piss off at least half of my readership. But, that is just the way it will have to be. I’ve been pregnant with this essay for a few days, and I need to get it out of me so I can begin talking about other things.

What follows will not be a blind and opportunistic defence of the forty-seventh President of the United States. I’ve always been wary of Epstein and the stories people tell about him for reasons that have nothing to do with Trump. This would be why, in the entire history of the plague chronicle, I’ve dropped the man’s name exactly once, and then only in passing.

The Epstein legend combines a lot of analytical themes (they are almost literary tropes) of which I am sceptical. It rests heavily on the Myth of the Secret World, it invokes multiple black box theories of politics (from “the Jews” to “the bankers” to “paedophile cultists”), and in general the theses yoked to Epstein are too loose, too malleable and too dependent on elaborate innuendo to make sense of or even to prove.

But I am getting ahead of myself. We need some disclaimers here at the top: I am not saying that Epstein was not a sex criminal (he was), that he was not wealthy (he was), that he did not lead a very strange and enigmatic life (he did), that he did not associate with many celebrities and political figures (he did), that all of his associates are above all suspicion (they’re not), or that many aspects of what people believe about Epstein are implausible (they aren’t). It is primarily the political significance assigned to Epstein’s crimes that I tend to doubt.

I’m going to pull the paywall curtain for this one, because I don’t want to fight with half the internet. If you want to keep reading, I invite you to subscribe. Your support is what keeps me writing.

But be forewarned: Below the fold you’re not going to find yet another heavily-footnoted Epstein expose. The internet has too many of those already. Instead, I’m going to explain as straightforwardly as possible why I think Trump and his administration are telling the truth when they plead that there are no great revelations about Epstein lurking in the archives of the Justice Department. Many things that seem plausible from the outside and at low resolution turn out to be rather less plausible upon closer inspection. The stories commonly told about Epstein suffer from serious problems of internal coherence and remain unsubstantiated at crucial points.