3 ½ Things You Haven't Yet Read About the Epstein Files

Including the truth of QAnon, the essence of immorality, and a newly infamous act of fellatio.

Well, it turns out QAnon was partly right.

There really is an elite cabal of pedophiles and enablers out there, orchestrating US foreign affairs in clubby, semi-secret networks and helping put presidents into the White House.

Only it’s got a whole lot of Republicans in it.

First and foremost, there’s Steve Bannon, who was plotting political conquest with Jeffrey Epstein at the same time as he was promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory alleging a left-wing pedophile network. Every accusation is a confession indeed. More on that one below.

But obviously, the lead story coming out of the 20,000 documents from the Epstein estate (a small fraction of the ‘Epstein Files’ held by the Department of Justice) is that Donald Trump is personally implicated by the world’s most infamous sex trafficker, who says he “knew about the girls” and that Epstein could “take him down” if he wanted. (You can search through all 20,000 documents here.)

You’ve probably read about that already, and it will be headline news for weeks. But there are other revelations as well that haven’t gotten as much attention, and that also relate to the subjects of this newsletter: the intersections of politics and religion, spirituality, ethics. I’m going to focus on three of them: the confusion about the moral core of the scandal; how MAGA supporters have correctly understood it; and how deep the betrayal really is, now that one of MAGA’s principle architects is revealed to be thoroughly implicated.

And then, as a bonus, bit about how the Internet is responding.

1.

First, let’s again center the survivors of Epstein’s crimes. Here’s a moving, compelling PSA featuring four of them. Please watch this first:

Fundamentally, that is what this scandal is about: the abuse of these young teenagers by some of the most powerful men in the world — men who rightly believed themselves to be invincible.

And consider: If the president of the United States knew that these girls were being abused and scoffed at it — let alone if he actually participated in the exploitation — that is an indelible stain on his character. It is real. And while progressives may be tempted to simply add it to a long list of Trump’s profound failings, it is, for millions of people, something different. It is new, and it is horrible.

Contrast that reality with one of the side-shows of this scandal: the dependably awful Megyn Kelly explaining that, technically speaking, being sexually interested in 14- or 15- year olds isn’t actually pedophilia, since that term refers to being attracted to pre-pubescents. This disgusting commentary has been justifiably repudiated by anyone with a conscience, but I’m interested in what Kelly unintentionally revealed by offering it.

Diagnostically speaking, Kelly is right, of course; there are different kinds of sexual disorders that may have different psychological causes. But did you watch the video? Is it not abundantly clear that Kelly has completely missed the point of the entire affair: namely, that powerful men sexually abusing 14-year-old girls is morally wrong, psychologically devastating, and absolutely horrible?

This lapse is revealing because I think Epstein’s enablers seem to have made a similar error in judgment: that this isn’t all that bad. After all, in many cultures and time periods, including quite recently, it has been legal to marry teenage girls and culturally permissible for men to desire them. It would be absurd to say that our current taboos are universal; they are not.

But none of that is the point. What matters is not whether Epstein’s crimes are gross, but whether they are evil — more specifically, that these girls, who grew up in in our society and century, could not possibly have consented, did not consent, and were clearly traumatized by the abuse.

And, of course, that the criminal acts of their abuser(s) were enabled by a host of other people, systems, money, and power, apparently including the current president. As the New York Times related in detail, Epstein hobnobbed with all the movers and shakers of New York, and with large swaths of the US foreign policy and intelligence elite. Epstein’s black book does not discriminate on ideology or area of focus: there’s Peter Thiel, Noam Chomsky, Les Wexner, Deepak Chopra, Larry Summers, Michael Wolff. And despite the protestations of these associates today, it seems painfully obvious that everyone knew what Epstein was up to, especially by the late 2010s, after he had been convicted (and then given a sweetheart deal by an associate of Pam Bondi’s) and written about in the press. But power is power, right?

That is the moral evil: not doing something disgusting, but doing harm to young people. It doesn’t matter whether you think a 60-year-old demanding a ‘happy ending’ from a 15-year-old is disgusting or not, or whether it is socially acceptable in some times and places, or whether it’s a vice shared by every man who ogles the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. It matters that, for God’s sake, dozens of girls were assaulted in ways that are profoundly harmful, violent, and abusive. It matters that it is rape.

This seems glaringly obvious, and yet to some people, apparently it isn’t.

2.

In contrast to New York elites and pundits like Kelly, MAGA-supporting Americans have understood this for years. Ro Khanna, the Democratic sponsor of the House Bill, now a law, demanding the release of the files, recently told the New York Times’ David Leonhardt this:

I was on Theo Von’s podcast and I was on the “Flagrant” podcast and I was going to places like Johnstown, Pa., and going to places like Warren, Ohio. When I was there, the issue would come up about the “Epstein class” — that’s what they called it. They said, well, are you on the side of the forgotten Americans or on the side of the Epstein class?

I realized how much the abuse by rich and powerful men of young girls and the sense of a rape island that Epstein had set up for people embodied the corruption of government. And then many of them saw Donald Trump as fighting this corrupt government and standing up for forgotten Americans. And this was the symbol for the most disgusting abuse and corruption of our government. And so when the issue came up that Pam Bondi said that there was nothing to release, I knew that this was a betrayal of the core promise that Trump had made to MAGA voters.

That seems exactly right, and useful for progressives to understand. This isn’t some peripheral issue, or a sideshow. For them, it is the core of Trump’s importance: not that he was a right-winger taking on the left, but that he was an outsider taking on the insider elites. It wasn’t the conservatism that put him over the top, but the populism.

And now that is revealed to be bullshit. Trump is all over the new emails, just like the liberal New York elites who funded and made money from Epstein or who clamored to be invited to his parties. He’s right in there with the rest of them.

This is not a right-left issue; it’s an inside/outside one, or if you prefer a class focus, an up/down one. The MAGA grievance against the ‘Epstein Class’ is not unlike the refrain of Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning diss track: “They not like us / They not like us.” The underage girls, the fake man-of-the-people shtick, the wealth and power and mansions — Epstein is just an older, whiter Drake.

And Kendrick and MAGA are right: these people are not like us at all, and in this case, “us” even includes upper-middle-class white people like me. We don’t have personal assistants or private jets, or houses on multiple continents, or a guy who arranges shell companies and tax dodges for us, or a team of publicists, or crypto scams and shady real estate deals, or the knowledge that we fundamentally operate above the law and the team of lawyers to make sure we get off scot-free.

Rep. Khanna put it well: the Epstein scandal is a “symbol for the most disgusting abuse and corruption of our government.”

Democrats need to pay attention, because the party continues to run people perceived, rightly or wrongly, as part of the Epstein Class — people like the Clintons, or even Kamala Harris, who worked her way up through the Democratic machine. Some of this is unfair; the real elites are the technology, finance, and real estate billionaires bankrolling Republicans. But there are many kinds of elites, and one kinds are the people who drank martinis at dinner parties with Jeffrey Epstein. MAGA is not wrong about that.

And of course, while Trump and Bannon are heavily implicated by the recent emails, so are many Democrats, which is one reason Trump had pushed to have the files released in the first place, before changing his mind and then changing it back again.

It’s not that every Democratic candidate needs to be a Zohran Mamdani socialist. But Democrats need to stop nominating septuagenarian insiders for statewide and national office instead of messy, problematic outsiders who actually speak to people’s ‘Epstein Class’ suspicions. Obviously, I’m not on board with the GOP’s association of “elites” with culture warriors or trans people; that’s propaganda. But MAGA is right to suspect the ultra-rich, the connected, the people who congratulate one another at Rao’s. As an essay by Jeet Heer in The Nation puts it,

Epstein trafficked not just in the bodies of the children he abused but also in social connections that could bring elites together. He well understood that the ‘desperation of those in power’ could make them eager to buy what he was selling: connections with other powerful figures and security systems to clamp down on dissent.

3.

And now Trump has been revealed to be just like the rest of them. The fifty year con of the Republican party — talk populist values and Christian morals while passing plutocratic economic policies — is temporarily up. The emperor has no clothes anymore.

That’s especially true because the surprise special guest of the Epstein Emails is none other than Steve Bannon.

Credit where it is due: I wouldn’t have known about this fact but for Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter, which, together with his podcast Panic World, is rapidly becoming an indispensable source for deciphering the current news matrix. I started following Garbage Day a year or so ago, kind of as a guilty pleasure, but especially since the Kirk assassination, which was perhaps our country’s first “extremely online” act of political violence, Broderick and his team have killing it.

Broderick, in a piece co-written by Adam Bumas, Ellie Hall, and Lester Feder, goes deep into the Epstein Emails to discern how big a scandal this ought to be. They write

Bannon and Epstein were in close contact during Trump’s first presidential term. Based on the emails and texts we now have between the two men, they gossiped and schemed with each other as Bannon traveled Europe in 2018, attempting to franchise his far-right populist movement across Europe.

The irony is rich. Bannon was in cahoots with a pedophile and his network of shady operatives while spreading a lunatic conspiracy theory about a network of pedophiles and shady operatives. He was literally talking about himself.

And it’s intimate. Epstein coaches Bannon on what to say to Qatari diplomats. He helps him catch a plane, and notes that massages are not included (!). The two plot ways to create a crypto scheme for the populist right and muse founding a church. They talk about toppling governments in Argentina, Venezuela, Slovakia, and Pakistan. (Many of those regimes were later overthrown.) In 2019, Bannon texted Epstein, “Now you can understand why Trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”

The rot goes right to the top, right to Trump and Bannon. Now are you persuaded that this is real news? This is a wrecking ball hitting the core of the MAGA movement. ICE is a big deal; cutting USAID, EPA, and the Department of Education is a big deal; the Supreme Court is a big deal; but this is also a big deal.

3 ½.

Finally, notwithstanding all of the foregoing, readers of Both/And may not know about the Internet’s primary reaction to the release of the Epstein Emails, which has nothing to do with any of the above. Fox News, for its part, is ignoring everything that’s just been talked about, focusing on one redaction of one victim’s name and claiming the Democrats are falsely trying to implicate Trump. But the Internet, which is not controlled by sycophants, is focused elsewhere: on the following email thread from 2018:

You read that right: “the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.” I.e., Bill Clinton.

That was not on anyone’s dance card, I don’t think.

Now, I don’t think Epstein’s brother is really being serious here. My assumption is that he’s speaking metaphorically, or just making a joke, or who the hell knows. (He has also denied that “Bubba” refers to Bill Clinton, but that is wildly implausible: not only is it a common nickname for the ex-pres, but he’s referred to that way numerous times in the released emails themselves.) But the Internet has taken the exchange literally, spawning a thousand memes and TikToks reminiscent of one of my favorite Onion headlines of all time.

I admit, I had not guessed that Monica Lewinsky and Donald Trump would have this much in common.

Since this is a family newsletter and I am a rabbi, I’ve decided not to embed my favorites of these. The Garbage Day piece links to several. But while the focus on Trump Blowing Bubba may be a distraction from the serious ethical and political aspects of the Epstein scandal, I’m on board with anything that keeps this story alive, especially as Bannon’s acolytes will continue to “flood the zone with shit” just as they have done so far. And unlike Epstein’s crimes, the AI videos and memes aren’t making light of horrible stories of abuse and violence — just a couple of philandering chief executives in flagrante delicto. And if you need any more proof that Trump has lost wide swaths of his extremely-online base and that this scandal is here to stay, well, here you go. Enjoy. See you next week.

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It’s been quite a week! In addition to following the news, I’m busy in my other career as well — my Emory colleagues and I will be presenting new data from our studies of psychedelics in religious communities at the American Academy of Religion conference this weekend, and the website for that project just launched.

Here are some great pieces I read this week:

• First, just a re-shout-out to Garbage Day’s coverage of the Epstein Emails.

• Second, Andrew Rice wrote an absolutely brilliant piece on the schools crisis here in my very privileged hometown of Montclair, and how both liberals and conservatives have played a part in creating it. I’m chest-deep in this local story already but I think it’s a great read even for people who aren’t.

• Paul Krugman had a great piece on the Heritage Foundation’s descent into the abyss.

• Despite some dubious decisions by the Grey Lady of late, I really enjoyed this piece by Daniel K. Williams on why so many Gen-Z people are embracing conservative Christianity — pairs well with last week’s Both/And Newsletter actually. And also this revealing and disturbing look inside Trump’s DOJ, in the words of people who’ve quit.

• And, for a break, I really enjoyed

  Why is this interesting?
  ’s explainer of the importance of Greenland and rare earth minerals.

Thanks to all my subscribers, and thanks for helping to spread the word.