Undated photograph from collection of Jeffrey Epstein. Photo: House Oversight Committee.

The liberal professoriate

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy professors are alike; all unhappy professors are unhappy in their own way. One resents his colleagues’ success, another their obliviousness to his own. One wants a prestigious, endowed chair, another an appointment as dean. One laments lower standards for admission, another higher standards for promotion. One says she deserves a bigger raise – well, all professors say they deserve bigger raises.

When Jeffrey Epstein began harvesting professors for his dinners masked as seminars, he was drawing from a bountiful crop. It’s the rare professor who can’t be compromised by money. Add celebrity, fine food, first class travel and the whiff of decadence–irresistible. So what if the person offering these things is a convicted sex offender? Epstein served his time, says the liberal professor; he paid his debt to society and it’s right to move on. Those young women with Slavic accents serving canapes and massaging Epstein’s neck are probably in college, or at least seniors in high school–aren’t they?

The Epstein Affair

I confess to knowing less about Jeffrey Epstein than most people who write about him. Until recently, I didn’t follow the scandal closely, and my only real interest was whether it might bring down the president. I was disturbed of course, to hear some two dozen women – at press conferences last Fall – discuss the devastating, long-term impact upon them of Epstein’s predatory behavior. But the abuse appeared tangential to the main trajectory of recent U.S. history: The lurch toward fascism. The Epstein case was about a rich bastard (and friend of Trump) who used his wealth and connections to escape serious punishment for his crimes, but when re-arrested later, killed himself rather than accept more severe consequences. End of story.

But recent revelations concerning the potential number of victims (possibly more than a thousand), and the breadth of Epstein’s contacts and influence, suggest a wider significance. Just as the Dreyfus Affair in late 19th C. France was about more than false charges of treason against a Jewish military officer, the Epstein Affair is about more than the dozens of documented (and hundreds of less verified) cases of sexual abuse against girls and young women. It’s about a culture of privilege and arrogance that arose from a political economy that empties the pockets of the many to pad the wallets of the few. The latter operate, in large part, outside of law; the former (the suckers) within it.

What stands out among the details of the case – apart from the gross misogyny –is the huge amount of cash Epstein swindled from other billionaires, who themselves grifted it through predatory mergers and acquisitions, tax dodges, and stock, currency and commodities trades supported by insider information. If there’s a deep state in the U.S., it isn’t found in the office cubicles of government agencies; it’s in the yachts, living rooms, patios, clubs, private jets, guest cottages, poolside cabanas, saunas, dining rooms, and massage parlors of America’s unspeakable class. Women and children were for Epstein and Trump, commodities no different than any others, to be used, traded, discarded, and replaced by more.

Only such a rapacious system could have produced a man so singularly lacking in knowledge or skills and yet possessed of such wealth and license. Epstein was arrested in 2008 and again in 2019 only because of the scale, blatancy and duration of his criminality. Had he been marginally more discrete, he’d still be active. Some of his pals – financiers, tech moguls, and politicians like Trump, Leon Black, Leslie Wexner, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Peter Mandelson, Peter Thiel, and Bill Clinton – were partners in sex and others in money. Though Epstein did big-money deals with only a few of them – Thiel was one. Grifters generally avoid business with other grifters; it’s the rest of us who are the marks. Dozens more men and women, including professors (especially scientists) and public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Oliver Sacks, Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Frank Wilczek, Steven Pinker, and Stephen Hawking, were........

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