Transgressive But Stupid.

Epstein the Fixer and his un-magic circle.

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In the summer of 1963, when Britain was just learning to live with the Beatles, and the first tentative signs of the social and political revolutions of the decade were becoming apparent, the country was convulsed by the so-called Profumo Affair. The story of that scandal is long, complicated and on the whole rather unedifying, but if you are feeling interested and sufficiently robust the Wikipedia entry does a decent job of trying to bring it all together. Its wider importance is that it helped to bring down the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan, and to propel Labour to power the following year.

Of the main actors, John Profumo was a promising, mid-ranking Conservative politician, then Minister for War (ie the Army) before the 1964 establishment of the Ministry of Defence. Like many Tory MPs of the time he was intensely socially ambitious, at a point where the old aristocracy had retained much of its money and mystique. That his wife was a former film actress did these social ambitions little harm.

Stephen Ward was a “society osteopath,” with a wealthy clientèle and a practice in a fashionable part of London. He was also a skilled amateur portrait artist (his models included members of the Royal Family) with a charming and ingratiating manner, all of which provided him with lots of wealthy and artistic friends and an entrée into what were then considered the “highest” social circles. In 1960, Ward met Christine Keeler, a “dancer” with modelling ambitions and the two became lovers. Ward took her to some of the parties and weekends at country houses that constituted the collective Establishment social entertainment at the time. At one of these parties she met Profumo, who was smitten with her, and she added him to what seems to have been an impressive circle of lovers.

Ward, a curious and complex individual, conceived the idea of going to the Soviet Union to make portraits of its leadership. Through one of his patients, a distinguished journalist, he was introduced to the Naval Attaché at the Soviet Embassy, with whom he became good friends. (This was highly bizarre: all military attachés at Soviet, now Russian, Embassies, are GRU and known to be so. Why he couldn’t have been introduced to someone more suitable remains one of those mysteries.) In any event, Ward reported this friendship to the Security Service (which suggests he must have had an entrée into that Service, whose existence was then not formally acknowledged) and was told to carry on, in the hope that the Service could turn the relationship to its advantage. The last twist in the story was that Keeler also became a lover of the attaché, Ivanov.

Rumours started circulating, and as Keeler began to try to make money out of the story, the government became worried. Profumo made a statement to the House of Commons in which he denied any “impropriety” in his relationship with Keeler and said he hardly knew Ivanov. However, he was eventually forced to admit that he had lied to the Commons, and resigned both his Ministerial job (which was inevitable) and his seat in the Commons, which he could probably have kept. Ward himself was subsequently charged with “living off immoral earnings:” it isn’t disputed that he “introduced” charming young ladies to interested contacts, but it’s unclear whether he was actually paid for it. He committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping tablets, though some were quick to allege that he’d been murdered.

If there’s a word that sums up the episode, it’s probably “sleaze.” It was a very British scandal, involving titled idiots, naked dips in swimming pools, soft drugs, West Indian gangsters, Russian spies and even apparently members of the Royal Family. Apart from the security angle, which was bad enough, it convinced many people that the whole Establishment was rotten to the core, and that things in Britain had to change. Macmillan, a popular but now-tiring Prime Minister, resigned, and Sir Alec Douglas-Hume, an aristocrat of no fixed abilities, took over the party to lead it to its inevitable defeat in the 1964 elections. The crisis, which not only dominated the newspapers that parents tried to hide from their children, but also featured in the late-night TV satire boom then just starting, was for many people a kind of epitaph for the British social system as it then was.

Well, history doesn’t repeat, they say, but it does rhyme. Anyone alive then will immediately have thought of the Profumo affair when the latest Epstein revelations came out. I’ll go on in a minute to talk a little about a couple of rather neglected aspects of that massive subject, but I want first to point to the quite striking differences. Profumo resigned from Parliament, which he did not necessarily have to do. He turned to voluntary charitable work, and eventually made a career in Charity administration. He never sought to defend his actions, and never wrote a book or gave TV interviews. By the end of his long life (he died in 2006) he had probably redeemed himself as thoroughly as was really possible. Harold Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister too, which was the nature of politics in those days. (Mind you, the depravities that so shocked the generation of my parents would have been routine at the birthday parties of rock stars a decade later.)

We lived then in a world of hypocrisy, which is to say that in general people didn’t mind that much what you did, so long as you kept it quiet. We live now in a world of total visibility, where it is necessary not just to have all the right thoughts and do all the right things, but where you are surveyed twenty-four hours a day to make sure that is the case. But we also live in a world, if the samples of Epstein’s communications so far made public are to be trusted, where people doing immoral, illegal or even evil things scarcely bother to conceal what they are up to any more. I’m not sure that we have necessarily advanced very much.

But the biggest change in sixty years is less the social environment—important as that is—than the nature of the ruling class whose iniquities have been laid bare in each case. The first obvious difference is that the Profumo affair was parochially English, whereas the Epstein Affair, though notionally based in the US, is effectively a story of a transnational, deracinated ruling class, identifying only with each other, speaking English, hardly interacting at all with the world you and I know, and criss-crossing the globe on an apparent whim.

And it is a ruling class of a previously unmatched mediocrity, stupidity and banality, a ruling class of animated cardboard cutouts, whose only qualification for ruling is money (or at least the perception of money) and whose conversation seems to consist of boasting about how clever they are. Just imagine, for a moment: if the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein appeared at your elbow and invited you to dinner that night with, say, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, would you accept? Well, unless you needed their support or their money (assuming Elon Musk has that much money, which not entirely certain), and which is to say for purely transactional reasons, the answer is probably no. Indeed, being stuck with those people for three hours must be a reasonable definition of Hell. And this ruling class as it appears in the Epstein documents seems to consist, indeed, of little more than networks of transactional political, financial and personal relationships, from which anything resembling moral principles or genuine warmth has been surgically excised.

The Profumo Affair took place in a society where most men and women had served in the War: some in two. The political class had been heavily involved, not just in the War, but in the rebuilding of Britain afterwards, and the introduction of the Welfare State, which the Tories at first opposed, but rapidly learned to live with. It contained a lot of dross, but it also contained a lot of people who had Done Things. And for the first time in British history, scientists enjoyed a high social status in that class, mainly as a result of the War. Even among the traditional rich, there was an inherited feeling that one should “do something,” to justify one’s existence. Serve in government or diplomacy for example, become a patron of the arts, manage a charity. Now I’m the last person to defend the British class system of the day (I suffered its iniquities very personally) but I don’t think any of us at the time who looked forward to some future “classless society” would ever have imagined, in our worst nightmares, what was going to replace it.

Since almost all the names mentioned in connection with Epstein so far are Anglo-Saxon, let me toss in a name you probably won’t have heard of, but is making waves in France because of his many and various links with Epstein: Jack Lang. Now Lang is your stereotypical undistinguished French politician. A notional Socialist, he was a long-serving Culture Minister under Mitterrand, where he famously claimed that rap music could be as culturally valuable as Mozart, and briefly Minister of Education. He carried on after 1995 drawing a salary as an elected PS member at various levels of representation, and profited from the little jobs that French political parties reserve for those who have fallen on hard times. He was appointed Director of the Institut du Monde arabe in Paris by the incoming Socialist President François Hollande in 2013 (the patronage system again) although he had no experience of running Institutes and no particular knowledge of the Arab world. He’s been there ever since (he’s now 86) and his tenure has been punctuated by persistent accusations of mismanagement and corruption, as well as a fondness for expensive presents and a patrician disinclination to actually pay his restaurant and hotel bills. Oh, and in case you were wondering, he was one of the 70 signatories of the infamous Le Monde petition of 1977 effectively demanding the decriminalisation of pedophilia. His name has consistently been linked ever since with accusations of pedophiliac behaviour with under-age boys in different countries, but no charges have ever been brought. So there you are: a representative member of our international ruling class, and an apparent good mate of Epstein.

Lang is not the only French name in the Epstein documents, but as a number of commentators in France have pointed out, much of this kind of bad behaviour was known, or at least suspected, already. Epstein turns out to be primarily a mechanism, a device by which evidence becomes available for things which were widely assumed, but could not until now be proved. Lang is being investigated for financial crimes linked to Epstein, of which there were apparently many, but he’s just an example of the widespread moral and political corruption among the so-called French élites, which has been proverbial for years now. Lang is a graduate of the prestigious Institut d’études politiques in Paris, then an intellectual preparation for the servants of the Republic, now increasingly a scandal-ridden international business school. This status was largely a result of the personal and financial ambitions of one of its past Directors, Richard Descoings, found dead in a hotel room in New York in 2012; probably because of his immoderate fondness for alcohol and cocaine, although this was not widely spoken of at the time. Oh, and he worked for Lang at one point. What did you expect?

Nearly a decade later, it turned out that Olivier Duhamel, distinguished Constitutional lawyer and Chair of the Governing Board of the IEP, was a known pedophile, who had abused (at least) his son and daughter-in law, the children of Bernard Kouchner the Socialist politician and Foreign Minister under Sarkozy, who is widely assumed to have known about it. Like a lot of people at the time, I couldn’t bring myself to slog through the sordid details, but it’s clear now that for some years in the 80s and 90s, Duhamel enthusiastically promoted the extreme libertarian mindset of the 1970s, and his summer residence was apparently a kind of free-fire zone for pedophiles, with reports of teenage boys and girls being passed around freely between adults. But it was cool, and anyway we don’t need none of your stinking bourgeois morality.

The shocking thing, though, was that “everybody knew,” but nobody said anything. The Director of the IEP, Fréderic Mion, another Lang protégé, claimed to be “shocked,” but it later emerged that he had been privately warned years before, but had done nothing. He resigned too. What to do? Well, how about an in-depth investigation into the private lives of those most involved with university-aged young people? You must be joking. Think of the damage that might do. No, a working group decided to set up a campaign against “sexist and sexual violence” in the Institution and encourage students to report each other. That way, no doubt a scandal like Duhamel could never … no, I can’t even be bothered to finish the sentence. He was succeeded by Mathias Vicherat, who lasted two years before both he and his ex-partner were charged with violence against each other, and sentenced to prison terms, hers suspended. Apparently, Vicherat came to work a number of times with bruises on his face and arms. Everybody knew, but nobody said anything.

I’ve gone into this sordid business a little (and believe me there’s a lot more), because the IEP (or “Sciences Po” as it is informally known) is at the absolute dead centre of the French establishment. French Presidents and Ministers (including Macron) have studied there and the President has the final say over top appointments. And people wonder why the French establishment is in such trouble, and why the Rassemblement national is so popular.

It would be easier if all this had not been happening in a atmosphere of increasing popular bitterness and despair. By way of comparison, it’s quite striking to recall that the Profumo Affair took place at a time of national optimism, of full employment and the apparent conquest of poverty. Britain was a world leader in the technologies of the future, like aerospace, computers and nuclear power, and remained a major industrial power. The Empire was fast disappearing, and the reorientation towards the Atlantic and Europe, consummated in the late 1960s, was already under way. (France, interestingly, was undergoing much the same process under De Gaulle at much the same time.) So the Profumo affair was seen as a kind of farewell to the stuffy, conformist Britain of the 1950s, and the opening of a new and more exciting era. There could have been few political transitions more symbolic than the replacement of the grouse-shooting Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister with the economist Harold Wilson, who talked animatedly of the “technological revolution.”

These days, of course, the revelations of the Epstein documents come at a time when western populations can scarcely even be bothered to muster contempt for their ruling class, and when it is universally assumed that daily life can only get worse. There is no new class ready to take over, no new political forces with innovative ideas, no capable politicians who have been waiting their chance. Rather, every new batch of politicians emerging from the factory seems worse than the last. The machinery is old and doesn’t function well, the supply of components from China is irregular and the idea that we could do the whole thing with AI turns out to have been nothing but a fantasy. For that reason, I think the short-term reaction among western publics to the Epstein revelations will be one of numb resignation. The revelations will, at least initially, portray a ruling class that is just as corrupt and immoral as we had always supposed. The longer-term consequences may be more extensive, as we’ll see, and could involve some fairly spectacular, if short-lived, political developments.

I said above that todays’s ruling class is stupid, superficial and banal. I don’t think many will disagree, nor indeed do we need the Epstein papers to demonstrate it. Yet it hasn’t always been so. When I was young the ruling class had glamour, and the newspapers, not to mention the specialist magazines, followed the doings of what was then the “jet set” excitedly, complete with scandals and breathless anticipation of marriages and divorces. These people were interesting, or at least seemed to be so, and did exotic things and stayed in exotic places. In one of my first visits to Beirut, many years ago, someone pointed out the St George’s Hotel, on the Corniche but right on the sea, where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had a permanent suite. They would often be there at the same time as Brigitte Bardot or Marlon Brando, but also the Shah of Iran and King Hussein of Jordan, as well as famous western politicians. The Bar was a recognised place for spies of different nations to wheel and deal: Kim Philby was often to be found there. But just to be rich was not enough to be accepted in such circles.

Indeed, the delusion that being rich by itself means you must also be intelligent and interesting is actually very recent. Now it’s true that at one point if your name was Carnegie, Krupp, Ferrari or Ford you probably had above-average abilities in certain fields. And if you were an aristocrat you had probably been to the best schools and knew a little Greek and Latin and Shakespeare or Molière. Mostly, this was a superficial gloss, but, like endowing museums and art galleries and foundations, it was a way of marking yourself out from those who were only vulgarly rich. (A great deal of pre-1945 western literature involves this distinction.) Today, we listen to the rich simply because they are rich. Who would read the books of Bill Gates or listen to the turgid pronouncements of Elon Musk if they didn’t have money? The only reason people do so is to try to anticipate the potential damage that their ideas might cause.

I said these people were stupid, and I’ll explain this a little further, taking the opportunity to try to bring a bit of common sense and discipline to the current feverish speculation about intelligence agencies, blackmail, mysterious cabals and unnamed foreign powers. Put simply, the beneficiaries of Epstein’s largesse seemed to have taken no effective steps to ensure that their links with him remained private or even minimally secure. Although apparently some euphemisms were employed by some contacts in some cases, for the most part his contacts prattled on about their links with, and friendship for, a convicted sex offender with little or no attempt to conceal what they were doing.

For instance, so far as I can discover, Epstein had only one Gmail account, which he used for all purposes. (He may have had others, but there is no record of them.) The least you can say is that for someone who led such a complicated life involving so many dubious activities, this was highly unprofessional, potentially dangerous and very insecure. The most likely explanation is that he craved recognition and contacts, and wanted important people to be able to reach him as easily as possible, without imposing any security procedures on them, and even at the price of advertising what he was doing. It may well turn out that what he really wanted was love and recognition and that, like wealthy people since Timon of Athens, he thought he could buy them. In any event, it goes without saying that the major intelligence agencies of the world cracked Google and Gmail a long time ago, and that Epstein’s life was an open book, at least insofar as his correspondence was concerned. We do not know what Calendar software he used (though there are examples of Google Calendar in the documents) but that was very probably cracked as well.

Now, let’s be clear first of all what this does not mean. It doesn’t mean that this or that intelligence agency “knew everything” about Epstein, except in the most abstract of senses. Agencies have limited human resources, and the overwhelming majority of information potentially available, especially these days, is never analysed, let alone used. Unless Epstein or one of his contacts (I suppose Ehud Barak could be one such) was a subject of interest anyway, then it’s highly improbable that anybody ever bothered to read his mails, among millions of other potential targets, especially if they contained no key words that might trigger an enquiry. However, this is a bit like driving consistently much too fast down a country road while having had too much to drink. The chances that on any one specific occasion you will be stopped by the Police are minimal, but that doesn’t make it sensible behaviour. And so here.

Of course, it could be argued that quite a lot of Epstein’s contacts would not have realised how they were exposing themselves, and indeed in my experience there is a terrifying lack of understanding even among educated and intelligent people about the risks they run. We don’t want to think about it and so we push it away. We don’t actually take those precautions we read about. (“You mean the agencies have access to my phone conversations and texts?” asked a shocked journalist in a Middle Eastern country a few years ago. “You have no idea,” I replied.) Because we need and want to mail and text so freely, in the end we don’t take the precautions we know we should because it’s too much of a nuisance. (And even encrypted communication only works if it is encrypted at both ends.) There’s no indication that the rich and powerful are any more intelligent about such things than the rest of us; maybe less so, because they tend to feel more entitled.

For some of Epstein’s associates there is no excuse at all. Peter Mandelson, for example, was a government Minister, who would have received security briefings. Admittedly, he didn’t work in the most sensitive of areas, but he would nonetheless have been subject to security protocols. I haven’t seen this emphasised, but it’s fairly obvious that he broke the law on a number of occasions, by passing official information to someone with no right to see it including, if his mails are to be believed, a note that was being sent to the Prime Minister. They bang you up in prison for that. He messages Epstein from his mobile phone, and then proposes to call him later, presumably from the same phone. This is about equivalent to standing on Westminster Bridge holding a placard saying I AM LEAKING GOVERNMENT SECRETS. It reveals an amateurishness which is only bettered (worsted?) by the shambolic circumstances of his appointment as Ambassador to Washington, which must be in line for an international award of some kind for sheer stupidity and ineptitude.

For this and other reasons, I don’t see any evidence that Epstein was a master-spy, at the centre of an organised international web of espionage, human trafficking and corruption, or indeed that such a web existed. Now fair warning, pundits have already started to fantasise about such things, and to build Epstein up as some kind of super-spy. But bear in mind that Lao-Tzu’s admonition, “those who know do not speak/those who speak do not know” applies more in the Intelligence area than almost anywhere else. “Those who speak,” like to scatter their productions with phrases like “agent,” “asset” “spook-adjacent” or “intelligence-linked,” giving the impression of access to secrets and knowledge they generally don’t have. The truth is much more banal, I suspect. No sane intelligence agency would have employed Epstein for anything important. Someone with such a massive ego, zero sense of security, who travelled constantly and publicly, and seems to have accepted approaches from just about anyone, would have been useless and probably dangerous. And Epstein seems to have been incapable of managing anything very much, or even keeping his own worst impulses under control. We have seen no sign of any Epstein organisation, but if there was one it was certainly not like SPECTRE, but more like the Keystone Cops. When James Bond came crashing through the door, he would have found, not Blofeld and his minions, but a little boy guiltily surfing the darker corners of the Web.

What Epstein was, I suspect, is a mixture of two types of intermediary, both common in certain rather shady international circles. In the first case, it’s quite likely he was in touch with a number of different intelligence services. He may well not have known who he was working for on any one occasion, however, or the importance (if any) of what he was doing. No doubt he was a useful contact, and since there is no indication that he felt any loyalty even to those he described as friends, he would have passed on material that various governments might have found useful. However, it’s a rule in such circumstances that information is never used in a way that might identify the source, so whatever he provided probably served just to confirm what agencies thought they already knew. And it’s quite possible that he inadvertently “talent-spotted” more minor figures, whose financial or personal circumstances might have opened them to recruitment. Intelligence agencies have always known that people work for ego as much as for money, and how to feed and nurture someone’s sense of their own importance, even perhaps showing them a few exciting-looking documents. It’s not impossible that Epstein lived a fantasy life in which he was an international master-spy, and that more than one government encouraged this delusion.

The second type of intermediary is for business deals, usually involving very large amounts of money. Assume you are chasing after a major construction contract in a certain country where decisions are taken personally by members of the regime. You have no way of reaching the people who will make the decisions. Fortunately, your friend knows Jeffrey, who has a three-decker address book, and Jeffrey puts you in touch with people who have contacts in that country at the right level, and of course money changes hands. And Jeffrey might also be able to arrange a pleasant time on an island for one of the decision-makers, who was hesitating about signing. This kind of thing is extremely common: indeed it effectively formed the basis of the recent criminal charges against Nicolas Sarkozy, whose minions sought out the services of such intermediaries for prospective sales to Libya. It makes much more sense to see Epstein as a general middleman, a Fixer, perhaps with delusions of grandeur, than some kind of international super-spy. After all, we know that he was paid $25M by Ariane de Rothschild, the banking heiress, to sort out a few problems with the US government. This is the kind of thing that Fixers fix, by knowing who to talk to. And for that matter, these two intermediary functions can often be combined. Imagine you are the Russian SVR and you want to cultivate new sources in Israel. Well, you arrange for one of your people, posing as a Ukrainian businessman, to meet Epstein, and through him Barak, to talk about importing Israeli military technology, and you’re off.

But if Epstein was a conduit as much as anything else, why did so many pass through it? Many, of course, simply used his services to make money, but there’s obviously more than that. I think the short answer is that in any modern society there are always transgressive tendencies, people who just want to kick against the moral restrictions that they feel encumber them. In Europe, it seems to have started in a serious way in the late eighteenth century with people like De Sade, and reached maturity in the Romantic era: imagine calling your book of poetry Flowers of Evil as Baudelaire did. (Let’s leave Nietzsche out of this.) This isn’t the place for a history, but I’ll just touch on two things.

The first is that Transgression requires accepted codes to transgress, and that depends on the nature of your society. In the case of Profumo, the transgressions were very minor: you’d probably use the word “naughty” to describe the behaviour. By the time of Duhamel, transgression was seen as a political act and a means of personal liberation: if “It is forbidden to forbid” was a summary rather than a proven slogan of 1968, it was nonetheless an accurate one. Mental patients were “freed” from hospitals and sent onto the streets. Many popular thinkers of the time idealised the criminal as the ultimate transgressive figure, at least until they were personally the victims of a crime. But with the legalisation of homosexuality, the increased tolerance for the use of drugs and various other social changes, transgression was harder work than it had once been. And I suspect that there are a lot of people in the world today with too much money and not enough intelligence, looking for diversions from their boring lives, for whom the kind of transgressions Epstein seems to have facilitated might at least have passed the time and given them a quick thrill. (A tendency that JG Ballard, with his usual perspicacity, first spotted fifty years ago.)

Secondly, it’s worth reminding ourselves that, since the days of De Sade, Transgressives have always thought of themselves as either a literal aristocracy (like the eighteenth century Hellfire Club) or an artistic or intellectual elite, superior beings not constrained by the tedious legal and moral norms of society. Garbled ideas from Nietzsche, and from Alastair Crowley, the self-styled “wickedest man in the world,” whose demon-worship launched a hundred bad hard-rock groups, duly found their way into popular culture, along with Charles Manson, HP Lovecraft, RD Laing, Ken Kesey, the mythologising of Bonnie and Clyde in Arthur Penn’s film, and much, much else, to create transgressive dreams which have haunted western culture ever since, and appealed specially to those who thought themselves somehow superior to the rest of us. If Crowley’s injunction, “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” doesn’t feature somewhere in Epstein’s collected works, I’d be surprised.

But there’s one other final factor worth mentioning. There’s a significant overlap between some of the weirder and more mystical ideas in this cultural soup, and extreme-Right and clearly Fascist ideology (See Julius Evola, for example.) Now if you think Donald Trump is a fascist, well, fair enough. See you next week. But Fascism, notably as conceived by thinkers like Marinetti, was from the start an explicitly modernist, transgressive philosophy, that wanted to do away with the past, destroying works of art and even buildings, revolting against bourgeois norms, abolishing religion and traditional beliefs, obsessed with the future, and with action, technology, speed and violence. “Move fast and break things “ was its effective motto. If it was organisationally a mass movement, a nationalist-based, rather than class-based, response to the arrival of mass politics, its leaders were supposed from the beginning to be exceptional people: tougher, more ruthless, charismatic and visionary demigods, much as our ruling class today would like to imagine themselves. Indeed, much of Silicon Valley and its ideological suburbs, with its cult of arrogance, modernism, and power, its obsession with wildly speculative technology and its dreams of living forever and reducing most of humanity to slaves, would have fitted nicely into Italy in the 1920s.

What we have, I think, is less a conspiracy than a techno-fascist cult, with concentric circles of would-be leaders and would-be followers, with Epstein as a kind of major domo bringing them together, flattering their egos and having his own flattered in turn, probably himself the object of games he didn’t fully understand. I say less a conspiracy partly because there’s no sign of any real organisation, but mostly because the people involved are mostly not very bright nor even very competent. Mr Musk can’t make decent cars. Mr Gates, well, enough said. And all the men and women hustling “artificial intelligence” probably couldn’t organise the proverbial piss-up in brewery between them. The ill-intentioned will no doubt try to arrange things for their collective benefit as they always have, but, on this showing at least they aren’t very good at it.

Nevertheless that isn’t necessarily how pubic opinion will see it, and every third owner of a conspiracy site is already crowing that they were right all along, even if all the sites contradict each other. And we haven’t yet, so far as I know, seen AI constructed fake documents, which should be trivially easy to produce. In any event, actually making sense of these files is going to be almost impossible, even if they are all genuine, and everyone will find what they are looking for, or what they expect to find. And any number of people who were once at a diner for a hundred people that Epstein also attended are going to have their lives ruined.

The result will not be a change of regimes, because there’s nothing to change to. Rather, we’ll see a continued massive weakening of traditional parties (fewer than a quarter of French people think their political system is working properly, for example.) This means many people not voting, and many more voting in protest for any group that doesn’t seem to be contaminated, but in reality is itself unlikely to be able to govern. It may well be that some countries—Britain and France are the two most obvious— will soon be without an effective government of any kind. So this would-be élite, credentialed but uneducated, with notional fortunes but no culture, with egos the size of their yachts and morals that would have had them thrown out of Al Capone’s gang, that besmirches and perverts everything it touches, may well have the western political system as their last meal.