I hadn’t appreciated that Jeffrey Epstein, a man who committed and facilitated some of the most horrendous crimes possible against women and girls - so bad that they made Qanon on occasion seem like they were in large part right in vibe if not in detail or target - was also a wannabe political manipulator outside of any cover-up of his own unimaginable crimes. Of course in a terrible way. In ideological alliance with none other than Peter Thiel, naturally.
The Garbage Day newsletter dug into many of the details. The full article is well worth a read, but here’s a couple of snippets.
Based off the newest tranche of emails and texts released by the Justice Department this weekend, Epstein, at the very least, believed that he was orchestrating the downfall of the global order in the 2010s. In June 2016, he emailed venture capitalist, early Facebook investor, and Palantir founder Peter Thiel, writing, “Brexit, just the beginning.” He then laid out the most succinct mission statement we currently have for what Epstein was trying to accomplish. “Return to tribalism,” he wrote. “Counter to globalization. Amazing new alliances. You and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as I said in your office. Finding things on their way to collapse was much easier than finding the next bargain.”
Epstein’s messages give us a glimpse, one we were never meant to see, of a shadowy world of international espionage, deregulated finance, far-right politics, eugenicist race science, information warfare, and unfathomably intricate human trafficking networks. Epstein wanted to break the internet and, eventually, democracy, to cover his tracks and cash in on the chaos.
The whole thing sounds like an outlandish conspiracy theory, sure. But apparently it is hard to read his emails, in the knowledge that the crimes he definitely did commit were until recent years also somewhat imaginable only as an outlandish conspiracy theory, and not see that he was at least trying to reshape the political and economic world according to his despicable preferences.
Epstein, possibly the most prolific sex trafficker in human history, spent the last decade of his life investing in technology that would help Russia, as he wrote in a 2013 email, “leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21st century.” He was fascinated by websites like 4chan and technology like Bitcoin and was personally invested in the success of far-right politicians in the US and Europe. He believed he was months away from ushering in a new world order that would allow him to continue with his monstrous passion projects, like creating a super-race of children with his own DNA and building fascist nation states to manage overpopulation and climate collapse. And he wined and dined the world’s most powerful men (none of whom seemed to have an issue with these ideas), inviting them to his island and his ranch, and made sure they were surrounded by an endless supply of young girls.