Epstein And The Elite Shadow State

The latest Epstein emails and text messages confirm we’re ruled by a supercilious elite, dead of humanity and devoid of moral marrow who’ve carved for themselves a prerogative state operating outside of normative boundaries.

Maybe you felt this was true pre-Epstein. And yes, we can point to a mountain of circumstantial evidence to back the assertion up, but there is something about seeing the casual, direct correspondence between establishment elites that helps illuminate these realities like nothing else.

And just to clarify what has been illuminated: politicians, royals, academics, scientists, bankers, financiers, venture capitalists, every flavour of political, economic and cultural high society were associating with a man who had already been convicted and imprisoned for child rape and trafficking children for sex. I think we can forget the timeline (or it might not be clear if you haven’t kept up). These latest emails and messages between Epstein and friends are all from 2015-2019, years after his 2008 guilty plea and conviction for child sex crimes.

A couple of things are striking to me about these latest files. Firstly, they demonstrate that the broad outline, if not the details, of stories written off as conspiracies are substantially true. This is not a particularly original or deep insight, but I feel it deserves at least a little mental reckoning. And while we should resist full lizards-on-the-moon conspiracist positions, we should probably consider whether efforts to label the idea of an elite paedophile ring as a deranged conspiracy were orchestrated deliberately to deflect.

Secondly, and far more significantly to my mind, is the utter paucity of decent mainstream journalism attempting to make sense of the moment. The files are a goldmine of info. Twenty-plus thousand emails and text messages exchanged between a convicted child sex trafficker and the great and the good of western high society. This should be a golden opportunity for any reporter worth their salt. Yet all we’ve got, in the main, are plain vanilla stories listing people in the emails, an anodyne ‘who said what, when’ style of reporting. The remaining stories contain an obsessive focus on what it means for Donald Trump. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be very happy if this was the thing that finally took Trump down. I’m sure we all would. It’s well overdue. But the implications of the Epstein revelations go far beyond Trump.

The broad scope should be a gift to reporters, but paradoxically it is the scope that prevents traditional media from rising to the challenge. Because in their scope, the messages implicate and unmask the very organising structures and elite institutional arrangements these outlets exist to shield and participate in. The moment is simply way too big for them structurally. In the weak sauce we’ve been served up so far we see the steady hand of the status quo liberal who is desperate not to look beyond the veil. Beyond that penumbra and into the light lies a cognitive dissonance that could swallow a centrist mind whole.

The other, related reason why traditional media can’t get their heads around the story is because the people revealed to be in Epstein’s orbit are the types endlessly platformed by traditional media, figures presented to us as the brains trust of global liberal society. The people with the temperament, judgement and intellect that we’re supposed to trust to interpret the world, finance the world, entertain the world, run the world.

Prince Andrew is largely a distraction. The real meat lies elsewhere. With the closeness of Epstein to Bill Gates and Harvard lawyer and academic Alan Dershowitz, his pally messages with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Obama’s White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, his dealings with private equity billionaires Leon Black and Tom Barrack, men whose firms own large chunks of the US economy.

The real story is Epstein’s ties to these people, the Very Smart academics, the Very Sensible political people, the Very Serious financiers and bankers who set the rules and own our companies, our houses and our debts. The big brains of western civilisation in whose hands our world is safe.

Outside of the more household names the messages reveal numerous other significant, influential conduits for Epstein. One was Slovakia’s foreign minister Miroslav Lajcak who was president of the UN General Assembly in the period covered by the recently released emails. Epstein connected Steve Bannon to Lajcak and there are hundreds of references to Epstein meeting ‘Miro’ in Rome, or Paris or New York, or the Caribbean.

Another conduit was Melanie Walker, a neurosurgeon and former advisor to Bill Gates. Her husband, Steven Siofsky, is a tech investor and ex-Microsoft executive. Another Bill Gates connection was Boris Nikolic, a biotech investor and former science adviser to Gates. Epstein named Nikolic in his will as the backup executor for his estate.

Other figures who emerge as Epstein confidantes include Richard Axel, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology; James Watson, who co-discovered the double helix structure of DNA; historian Noam Chomsky, and the recently sacked British ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson.

But it’s not just the fact of their association with Epstein, it’s what these people said.

In one email I found which I haven’t seen reported anywhere else, Walker brags to Epstein about the loopholes she found for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to get around tax rules. In a February 2017 email she says: “Right now there are funny loopholes we figured out how to exploit….Like exercising expenditure responsibility on foreign grants so we could still count as charitable….I know where all the loopholes are bc I found them.” Later in the same exchange, referring to Gates, she tells Epstein “lord know how he’ll react…if the tax laws are enforced and he is forced to pay and has less.”

Nikolic, in a lurid email to Epstein, recounts a story of him hitting on a married Mexican woman who rebuffed him and jokes to Epstein about anything good “being rented anyway.” In another email Nikolic bitches about Bill Gates not financially supporting his “bridge” girl, understood to be Gates’ former mistress, the Russian bridge player Mila Antonova. “Bill’s former girl…this story would take Trump off the front page….the richest man in the world is so cheap his former bridge girl and toy lives on a friends sofa.”

And there there’s another impossible-to-ignore conclusion: Zionism, Israel and Jewish identity are the connective tissue between all those in Epstein’s orbit. Epstein appeared not to have an ideological preference politically. In his quest to cultivate power, he was friendly with Bush Republicans, Trump Republicans and Obama Democrats. He drew the line elsewhere. And that line was Israel. Epstein associated exclusively with Zionists, the majority of whom were Jewish, and was particularly friendly with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. Barak is likely the former prime minister Virginia Giuffre is referring to in her posthumous memoir as the person who beat and raped her on Epstein’s island.

And here, Jewish supremacy or exceptionalism, call it what you want, pops up on more than one occasion in the emails. In one of his many exchanges with Steve Bannon during Trump’s first term, and when discussing some medical tests Bannon needed, Epstein advised Bannon to see his friend, the head of Florida’s Mayo Clinic, saying “Reminder: Money, medicine, law. JEWS only.” Bannon responded, “I’ve only had Jewish doctors and lawyers since leaving the Navy.” Earlier in the exchange Epstein offered Bannon his personal doctor, an extremely creepy looking guy named Bernie Kruger whose medical start-up was glowingly profiled in the New York Times that same year.

In a separate text, Bannon said he’d “have to drop the Christian in Christian Zionist,” and Epstein said he would anoint him “an honorary Jew.” Which is all very funny given that at this time traditional media was insisting Bannon was an antisemite. This confusion comes from the inability or unwillingness of liberal media to admit or understand that many Jews today ascribe to eliminationist Zionism and therefore actually have far more in common with neo-Nazis than anti-fascists.

Epstein was also obsessed with race science and genetics, and gathered like -minded racists around him. One of those was Joscha Bach, a German neuroscientist professor and AI researcher at the University of Cambridge. Not only did Bach tell Epstein his ideas for how you could “make blacks smarter” but said Jewish genetics makes Jews “intelligent and anti-authoritarian, creative and inventive” in a way Chinese people are not. A few years ago, Bach said German fascism was driven not by hate, “but by love, a very selective love.” This is a leading academic in his field, a man advising AI companies right now on how to develop AI models.

Just another racist and eugenicist directing this thing we call technological western civilisation.

Other Zionists, racists and Islamophobes who pop up in Epstein’s emails include the author Bill Siegal. Siegal’s book, The Control Factor, argues the main danger to western societies is Islam and we’re all going to be jihaded if we don’t kick Muslims out of the west. His book is published by major publisher Bloomsbury.

More racist banter comes from the big Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal (no relation to Bill). In 2010 she emails Epstein that she is unwell after flying from the island of Lamu in Kenya to Nairobi and then to Amsterdam and that she got sick because of “all those terrorists breathing on me in economy class.” She then asks Epstein if he has seen Avatar, “a film about white American marines being wiped out by black people painted blue. Going to be the highest grossing film in the world….”

James Watson, the geneticist and Epstein confidant, was infamously racist, saying in 2007 he was “inherently gloomy about Africa because all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours whereas all the testing says not really.”

Then there’s the way they communicate, a shorthand vernacular designed to elide more than it states, a style of implicit rather than explicit acknowledgment and agreement. Linguistic nudges and winks, something close to a secret code.

The legacy of the Epstein emails should be to sketch out even more clearly the battle lines. The super-rich versus everyone else. Their legacy should be to elucidate the existence of what Ernst Fraenkel called a dual state: two states within one, a prerogative state embedded within, but operating outside the laws and rules of the normative umbrella state. A separate state for people with the money, power, access and influence to do whatever they want, including rape and traffic children.

The impact of the Epstein emails should be to re-invigorate class politics, which is why the context and interpretation of them cannot be left up to the tabloid media or the liberal media.

To put it in the simplest terms possible, Epstein, and the people in his circle, had, and have, too much money, power and impunity. They can buy private jets and they can buy private islands and they can fly on their private jets to their private islands and do whatever they want. And all this needs to be taken off them.

Through formal and informal financial and societal architectures, from off-shore accounts to Zionist networks, establishment elites have built themselves a shadow state insulating them from the rules applicable to the majority in our normative states. While operating in the shadow state, however, they seek to shape the rules and exert influence on the normative state because it is out of this state that the privileges for their shadow state flows.

For so long the sanctioned narrative was that Epstein was just a bad apple associating with other bad apples.

He wasn’t.

Epstein and his friends are the grotesque fruit of a poisoned orchard.

And we need to uproot every single tree.