From the New York Times, November 23:
How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails
By Anand GiridharadasMr. Giridharadas is the author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and publisher of The.Ink newsletter.
As journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name of one fawning luminary after another, there is a collective whisper of “How could they?” How could such eminent people, belonging to such prestigious institutions, succumb to this?
A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain.
At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.
The Epstein story is resonating with a broader swath of the public than most stories now do, and some in the establishment worry. When Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, speaks of an “Epstein class,” isn’t that dangerous? Isn’t that class warfare?
But the intuitions of the public are right. People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.
It is no accident that this was the social milieu that took Mr. Epstein in. His reinvention, after he pleaded guilty to prostitution-related charges in Florida in 2008, would never have been possible without this often anti-democratic, self-congratulatory elite, which, even when it didn’t traffic people, took the world for a ride.
The emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.
The idea of an Epstein class is helpful because one can be misled by the range of people to whom Mr. Epstein ingratiated himself. Republicans. Democrats. Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists. Healers. Professors. Royals. Superlawyers. A person he emailed at one moment was often at war with the ideas of another correspondent — a Lawrence Summers to a Steve Bannon, a Deepak Chopra to a scientist skeptical of all spirituality, a Peter Thiel to a Noam Chomsky. This diversity masked a deeper solidarity.
What his correspondents tended to share was membership in a distinctly modern elite: a ruling class in which 40,000-foot nomadism, world citizenship and having just landed back from Dubai lend the glow that deep roots once provided; in which academic intellect is prized the way pedigree once was; in which ancient caste boundaries have melted to allow rotation among, or simultaneous pursuit of, governing, profiting, thinking and giving back. Some members, like Mr. Summers, are embedded in all aspects of it; others, less so.
If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood, it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions. If it’s a jet set, it’s a carbon-offset-private-jet set. After all, flying commercial won’t get you from your Davos breakfast on empowering African girls with credit cards to your crypto-for-good dinner in Aspen.
Many of the Epstein emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the more I read, took on greater meaning: the whereabouts update and inquiry. In the Epstein class, emails often begin and end with pings of echolocation. “Just got to New York — love to meet, brainstorm,” the banker Robert Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein. “i’m in wed, fri. edelman?” Mr. Epstein wrote to the billionaire Thomas Pritzker (it is unclear if he meant a person, corporation or convening). To Lawrence Krauss, a physicist in Arizona: “noam is going to tucson on the 7th. will you be around.” Mr. Chopra wrote to say he would be in New York, first speaking, then going “for silence.” Gino Yu, a game developer, announced travel plans involving Tulum, Davos and the D.L.D. (Digital Life Design) conference — an Epstein-class hat trick.
Landings and takeoffs, comings and goings, speaking engagements and silent retreats — members of this group relentlessly track one another’s passages through J.F.K., L.H.R., N.R.T. and airports you’ve never even heard of. Whereabouts are the pheromones of this elite. They occasion the connection-making and information barter that are its lifeblood. If “Have you eaten?” was a traditional Chinese greeting, “Where are you today?” is the Epstein-class query.
Their loyalty, it appears, is less downward to people and communities than horizontal to fellow members of their borderless network. Back in 2016, Theresa May, then the prime minister of Britain, seemed to capture their essence: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” Epstein’s correspondents come alive far from home, freed from obligations, in the air, ready to connect.
And the payoff can be real. Maintain, as Mr. Epstein did, a grandmother-like radar of what a thousand people are doing tomorrow and where, and you can introduce a correspondent needing a lending partner to someone you’re seeing today. Or let Ehud Barak know a Rothschild has the flu. Or offer someone else a jet ride back to New York and reward the journalist who tipped you off by setting him up to meet a Saudi royal....
....MUCH MORE
