The Epstein Class -- Tom Sullivan

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2026/02/02/giridharadas-distills-it/

"Look away" at the suffering in their wake

Anand Giridharadas sees the Epstein sex trafficking saga as part of a larger cultural milieu. An "Epstein class," as Rep. Ro Khanna (D) of California puts it. It is not a new concept even for Girdharadas. He studied the global elite in "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World." But Giridharadas revisits the first tranche of Epstein files at The Ink this morning and adds fresh perspective. (His commentary is from a New York Times essay published in November, but newly unpaywalled. I thought it important to revisit.)

The documents reveal a privileged network of the well-connected that floats -- like cream, do they think? -- above and outside the society the rest of us inhabit. Epstein is but one node of an elite insulated from and numb to the consequences others suffer from their self-aggrandizing actions:

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.

They may resent being outed, their secrets revealed, but what Epstein emails reveal, insofar as they are unredacted, validates what the plebs knew all along: "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 may resent being outed, their secrets revealed, but what Epstein emails reveal, insofar as they are unredacted, validates what the plebs knew all along: "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."

. . .