The Paranoid Style of Jeffrey Epstein Has Come for Us All

There’s a pattern to Epstein’s consumption of ideas and to the kinds of people he found compatible. It wasn’t a wish to brush shoulders with the famous and well-regarded—generic star-fucking. Epstein didn’t collect people for status; he identified and aligned himself with the intellectual machinery now justifying our current dystopia, including the academic rationalizations and motivated reasoning that hover behind the most terrible excesses of the Trump administration: glorified phrenology, violent misogyny, genetic determinism, and elite impunity.

It is not a coincidence that Epstein was also interested in crypto, in AI, in right-wing populism, in trad Cath extremists, and anti-trans ideology, in addition to creepy experiments in pain tolerance, psychopathology, and advantageous genetics. Epstein gravitated toward fields and figures that rank humans, explain away cruelty, or biologize inequality. He did not forge connections with these people: He saw they were already in alignment. And with each one of them, the question “Why them?” is almost as important as, “Did they know?” I don’t believe everyone who was in Epstein’s orbit is secretly and knowingly rushing us toward a patriarchal eugenicist regime. One of them, Elon Musk, certainly is. The rest simply have ideas that are useful to that project.

Epstein is less the thread that connects the rich and powerful than a lens through which all of those existing connections snap into place: the common denominator for the cursed ideas—white supremacy and patriarchy, a cheapening of human life and human values and human choice—propelling the apocalypse forward.