The hobbled and piecemeal release of the Epstein files has been an exercise in slow-motion agony and impotent fury. Agony in beginning to understand the depths of the depravity on record and fury at how many people knew enough to have just cause to stop it and did not.
Even without my own experiences to draw on, I would feel this way. That I do have my past as a reference only allows me to function in the face of the onslaught with no trace of doubt that people are capable of everything being alleged and worse.
It’s understandable that people don’t dwell on these matters unless forced by some accident of fate or personal injury. It is haunting in the depths, and no one should inhabit such darkness if they need not. But each of us are obliged to face the implications of such horrors when brought to light. To acknowledge how systems of oppression and wealth-worship have conspired to make them possible, likely, and stunningly common.
Racist, patriarchal, and capitalist ideology have colluded in plain sight; they conspire to convince us that people belong in a particular strata of value with rich white men at the apex. They forcefully impose the doctrine of injustice through religion, white nationalist tropes, and by manipulating the narrative of brutality to grant an illusory virtue to accompany compliance.
Never is this so manifestly apparent as when – as in this moment – the corruption and decay these systems uphold are exposed in ways that cannot be dismissed or denied.
Our nation is founded on violence and exploitation. In every advance toward “greatness” enormous harm has been done to indigenous, black, and vulnerable peoples. Women, children, and those with physical or behavioral challenges have all suffered direct and egregious abuses from those with the slightest power or authority over them. The system has been sustained by recruiting people to the idea that while such treatment is inevitable, it’s better to strive toward the position of the oppressor than the oppressed.
Thus can women reject the idea that they are equal and instead embrace misogyny. People within marginalized groups internalizing the racism they suffer under. Those being stripped of dignity and entitlements supported by their own contributions align themselves against their own interests to pursue a fantasy of negotiable superiority.
Freedom and plenty are characterized as a zero sum proposition; if you are free, then I am not. If someone has enough, someone else must go without. The necessary condition for racist patriarchal capitalism to succeed is to ensure enough people agree with this framing and then set them against each other.
All of this matters because under no other banner could what happened in the Epstein/Trump cabal be possible. It required a massive concentration of wealth, the dehumanization of women and children, and a system that will abet the actions of those who have leveraged their sociopathy for enormous profit.
So now we stand on a precipice.
It feels urgent nigh on impending calamity that we reckon with this moment. That we acknowledge both the sins of our past and the moral imperative to dismantle the tyrannical and corrupt authority of racist patriarchal capitalism. It is neither impossible nor without precedent. It merely requires that those who have long benefitted from the conferred privileges of the system be held to account and forced to relinquish them.
If we refuse to do so in the face of such overwhelming depravity, we deserve no less than to lose everything it has built as it burns down around us. Millions of pages of kindling ought to do the trick.
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