The new naughty list just dropped, as the kids say these days. The pre-Christmas release of the Epstein files, or at least some of them – elves heavily redacted – has brought much-needed good cheer to all of us. Not every red face on Christmas afternoon will be down to port and brandy this year. And the cast of characters – Mick Jagger, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, Richard Branson and all the rest – sounds like the guest list for the worst Graham Norton Christmas Special ever.
The release of the files as they stand, though, seems to me to add fuel to all sorts of conspiracy theories. In the first place, they really do seem to confirm what many of us normies have long suspected. The rich and famous really do pal around with each other in a way that transcends ideological divides.
Much as we might be distracted by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor stretching like a showgirl across the laps of four young girls on a Sandringham sofa, or Bubba Clinton soaking smugly in a hot tub with another chick wearing a black box instead of a face, the real eye-opener was Noam Chomsky posing genially for a snap with Steve Bannon. This determined radical leftist, the picture will lead many to believe, is more than happy to break bread with a white nationalist representing everything Chomsky loathes, so long as there’s a good party with pretty girls, a free ride on a private jet and a bit of Caribbean sunshine. (Chomsky has said, incidentally, that he valued Epstein’s intellectual brio, and I suppose we must take him at his word.)
Impunity Club is still going gangbusters
Elites, from the look of this, really do operate on the basis of nothing more complicated than the premise that we’re both rich so we should be friends! If a complete or even a relative stranger invited most of us on holiday, we would run a mile. I think this is true, though perhaps it’s a bit less true, even if private jets and Caribbean islands are involved. You’d just get the ick. Yet there they all are. And at no point, having befriended this guy whose only apparent attraction was his fortune (the origin of which, incidentally, remains unclear to this day), did they seem to wonder, these clever people, what was going on around them. Why, perhaps, the plane was nicknamed The Lolita Express. Why this man in late middle age seemed to have a disproportionate number of attractive teenage girls as friends. What, for that matter, the purpose of all this hospitality might be.
I think it’s reasonable to imagine that at least some of them will have noticed that all this was a bit whiffy. And it’s reasonable to imagine, too, that they will have decided that it didn’t really matter, which leads us to point two. Namely, that the other thing the stupidly rich and famous have in common is a presumption that they can get away with things. That common decency, still less the law, doesn’t apply to them in the same way it does to the rest of us. That they’re in the impunity club. Even when Epstein was convicted, he got a whole wing of the prison to himself and spent his days wandering about the place on ‘work release’. Nor, which is just as important, was he socially ostracised. His friends – the then Prince Andrew and Chomsky among them – continued to stay in friendly private contact after his conviction, as if it were just a bump in the road, a misfortune befalling a good chap who remained, essentially, One Of Us.
The Impunity Club is in evidence, too, in the way in which the files have been released, or not released. The redactions are ludicrously heavy. The supposedly impartial US Justice Department has made a point of releasing the Bill Clinton stuff front and centre, as if to coordinate with a Maga campaign to rename them ‘The Clinton Files’. And it’s plausibly suggested that the roll-call of other celebrities from every and any domain of public life helpfully creates the impression that hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein was just a perfectly normal thing for anyone with a public profile and a fat wallet to do.
Meanwhile Epstein’s friend President Trump is in very scant evidence in what came out on Friday – which would seem a more convincing exoneration had the files been released, as both the spirit and the letter of the law passed by Congress insisted, in full. Is there a smoking gun in there? Of course I don’t know. But the heel-dragging does invite some conclusions. When they claim, piously, that they’re holding the files back to protect the victims, it’s easy to suppose that it’s one particular ‘victim’ that they have in mind.
There’s a certain amount of Schadenfreude to be had, of course, from seeing the way that the Trump administration is squirming over this: on the one hand, Trump rode to power in part by riling up a QAnon-adjacent base who were convinced that the Epstein Files would expose the vile sins of a cabal of the rich and powerful; on the other, he desperately wants to avoid any more conversation about his own close, longstanding and well-attested friendship with Epstein. To keep Maga happy he somehow needs to release the files and bury them all at the same time, and it’s plausible that this is what his lickspittles in the Department of Justice are, clumsily, trying to do.
But, as I say, there’s a bigger point than just whether there’s something to embarrass the president in those files, big though that point may be. And it’s that if one part of the US government is effectively defying a law passed by another, Impunity Club is still going gangbusters. It’s not about whether Bill Clinton was closer to Epstein than Donald Trump, or whether there were more Democrats or more Republicans in that man’s grubby hot tub. It’s that – as witnessed by Steve Bannon shoulder to shoulder with Noam Chomsky – being the type of person Jeffrey Epstein invited to his parties, and being the type of person who’d go, bound people far closer together than mere politics could divide them.
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