CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Disappearing Bodies: Epstein, ICE, and the Hidden Architecture of Gangster Capitalism

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Disappearance under neoliberal fascism does not operate through a single institutional or aesthetic form. Alongside the spectacular violence of ICE raids, militarized policing, and the public staging of racialized terror exists a quieter, long-standing mode of disappearance practiced by elites and insulated from democratic scrutiny. The case of Jeffrey Epstein exposes this hidden register with disturbing clarity. What unites these seemingly distinct regimes of disappearance is not only the violence they enact but the way they are consumed. ICE raids circulate as viral footage, cable news spectacle, and partisan theater. Epstein’s crimes reappear endlessly as podcasts, Netflix docuseries, continuous news alerts, and conspiratorial gossip. In both cases, atrocity is converted into content, stripped of historical depth and severed from the economic system that produces it. Gangster capitalism survives not simply by disappearing bodies, but by transforming disappearance into consumable spectacle.

Where contemporary fascist governance increasingly places violence on full display, externalized and dramatized as a public pedagogy of fear, Epstein’s operation depended on secrecy, misogynist terror, and the systematic annihilation of social conscience. This was the hidden violence of gangster capitalism, planned and executed in the exclusive spaces of the ruling class—billionaire townhouses, private islands, elite restaurants, and country clubs—where zombie politics thrives through greed, domination, and an anesthetizing language that renders cruelty banal and power obscene. At the core of this cultural and political cesspool is what Melinda Cooper calls a class of “billionaire........

© CounterPunch