00:00:42.660It is kind of embarrassing because I did send Patrick this email.
00:00:46.280I was like, hey, you know what made me think of you?
00:00:50.240which is like the renewal of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal which is such a rich and fraught text and
00:00:59.600also something that revolves around you know violence against children of which you know
00:01:05.260Patrick is I think one of our strongest and most compelling thinkers but I do think that is probably
00:01:11.580a good moment for us to pause and note that this is going to be kind of a heavy episode this is
00:01:17.340the kind of thing that we should probably provide a content note for, because we are talking a lot
00:01:21.900about sexual violence, particularly by adult men against teenage girls and the various ways that
00:01:30.100fears about pedophilia, as well as actually existing pedophilia, are weaponized. So it's
00:01:36.080going to be a rough one. Yeah, we should say that we've talked about much more anodyne topics
00:01:41.680for your potential debut on In Bed With The Right, and I'm sorry that this had to be it.
00:01:46.220And at the same time, I also immediately thought I want to hear Patrick explain this to me, not just because you've written very movingly on these very issues that are concerned here, but also as more as alluding to the mode of return, right?
00:02:00.280I feel like a lot of people have said to me, like, wow, I didn't have this on my bingo card for 2025.
00:02:04.520I didn't think this was going to come back.
00:02:06.380And I was like, well, who's an expert for things coming back that you didn't expect to come back but a trained psychoanalyst?
00:02:12.280psychoanalyst. It's like, I don't know, doctor, I keep blurting out this word for no reason. It's
00:02:16.600like, well, I think you might want to talk to a psychoanalyst. And so it seems like it's the time
00:02:20.580for all of us to go on the couch and just sort of, as Moira was saying, like, figure out what this
00:02:25.560says about kind of masculinity politics on the right, but also what its return says about how
00:02:31.720it was metabolized the first time around, how it wasn't metabolized, and what in a moment in which
00:02:38.700the president appears to be granted with greater and greater impunity on all levels,
00:02:44.880suddenly there's this weird little thing from his distant past that reaches out,
00:02:50.320which really does feel like, you know, a Freud case study
00:02:53.760of maybe the least deep man ever to walk this planet.
00:02:59.200I'm so glad that you're saying all this.
00:03:00.820And I'm particularly grateful to be talking with you both about this
00:03:03.600because I've learned so much from you both about sort of the,
00:03:06.300let's call it like the libidinal economy of the right,
00:03:08.140But like the way in which like it's never just about propositional discourse when people on the right say things.
00:03:13.060I mean, it's never just about that when anyone says anything, but specifically kind of the systems of power and the narrative tropes and like the way these structures kind of transit and are efficacious in right-wing discourse, particularly when it comes to something as dripping with meaning, so to speak, as sexuality and so contentious as identity and our relationships to one another in that space.
00:03:33.280So I'm really glad to be talking with you all about that.
00:03:34.880The thing I kind of wanted to say also, though, even before we started, is that it's almost impossible to talk about this without, at some point, sounding like you're completely unhinged, particularly as we talk about, you know, some of the more institutional, out in the open, there are receipts for these things, transactions and historical precedents for this stuff, even before you get into what is or isn't attested in court filings or media reports or just common public knowledge.
00:03:58.020And at that point, I think we should consider that kind of a feature rather than a bug of this discourse or just like of these problems, right?
00:04:04.520There's something so over the top, so like vulgarly Freudian about it all.
00:04:09.520And I think another corollary to that is that part of the way that I've been able to take some degree of sanity from the early try and maintain some kind of even keel thinking about all this stuff is by a kind of gallows or extremely dark humor through it.
00:04:21.040Even as we are talking about things that are absolutely horrible, I'm not in any way trying to get and say that.
00:04:23.940And I was thinking at that point about how I'm really glad to be talking with you both about one of our age's great victims of cancel culture, who was really, you know, just a tremendous philanthropist whose only real problem was solving the male friendship crisis through one neat trick.
00:04:39.800And then not only is he hounded, he's confined, he's incarcerated and driven in a bitter irony to, you know, the thing that's been the greatest killer of men in the 20th and 21st century is loneliness.
00:05:46.820This entire situation is beyond fucked up.0.99
00:05:48.100Well, you just like delivered the dark humor of something that I was going to try and dive into is that one of the things this is is a story of male friendship and how it actually happens in a non-trivial number of cases, which is, you know, rape as a bonding exercise.0.99
00:06:03.940But let's just dive in. In case you are living under a rock, Jeffrey Epstein was a well-connected financier with homes in Manhattan and South Beach who had a well-documented and seemingly like incredibly prolific habit of trafficking and molesting underage teenage girls.
00:06:27.400He died by suicide in prison in 2019 after being arrested in highly publicized sex trafficking charges.
00:06:36.280And like Patrick said, the more you talk about this stuff, the more you start to seem insane.0.99
00:06:41.380Or if you're trying to, like, downplay conspiracy theorizing about Epstein, you can sound like a real asshole, right?0.98
00:06:49.320Because there are some things about the Epstein case that are sincerely, like, quite weird, right?0.94
00:06:55.300For one thing, he was a lot richer or appeared to be much richer than similarly situated financial industry type of guys are.
00:07:03.020And for another thing, he got a real sweetheart plea deal in 2006, the first time he was busted for these sex crimes.
00:07:12.180And that plea deal was administered to him by a DA named Alex Acosta, who later went on to serve as Trump's labor secretary in the first Trump administration and was approved by Pam Bondi, who was at the time the attorney general of Florida and is now the attorney general of the United States in the second Trump administration.
00:07:33.080So, you know, you're talking about overdetermined sort of conspiracy catnip on top of these very fishy circumstances.
00:07:43.300There are the combination of the sexual nature of Epstein's crimes, the conspicuousness and sort of like indeterminate provenance of his wealth.
00:07:52.360And then there's like the density of his connections to powerful people across the political spectrum, among whom there's a lot of real scumbags, you know, Alan Dershowitz, Steven Pinker, Bill Clinton, and of course, his long and now sort of re-scrutinized, apparently quite close friendship with Donald Trump throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, right?
00:08:14.500So this has led to a lot of speculation and conspiracy theorizing about Epstein that is not exclusive to the political right but has had a particular hold on these kinds of populist, anti-establishment strains of right-wing thought that are very, very suspicious of the elites.
00:08:32.640Can I just offer something in supplement to that and do disclosure? Part of the reason I'm so like thoroughly Epstein-pilled as it were in terms of knowing all this stuff is following this for well before his arrest, but also now I realize I should finish this. I've been working on this kind of novel as he was finally being processed and then, you know, set it aside.
00:08:49.420But I feel like that also, like the repressed, is returning at least on my own agenda.
00:08:52.600But that entailed a lot of research and reading some of these sort of documents.
00:08:55.000And I'll just – for the sake of listeners who may not be as keyed into all this but like want some kind of point of entry into precisely the scale of how bizarre this shit is or rather how it kind of runs up against this – all these accusations or this kind of labeling.
00:09:10.540Well, to think about this is necessarily conspiratorial or you yourself have a conspiracy theory or this doesn't follow some sort of parsimonious logic of Occam's razor or how quote-unquote power is supposed to actually work.
00:09:19.000I mean, I would just encourage people to look into Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with Les Wexner, right, the billionaire and for a long time owner of the Victoria Secrets brand.
00:09:28.800And I mentioned this particularly in light of what you just said, Moira, about Epstein's wealth and connections to the extent to which, like, let's just say, I mean, even if we don't understand how high finance works, right, or like what exactly margin trades are or whatever the hell Epstein, you know, said he was doing.
00:09:46.500And there's some very weird things that he said he was doing that still don't quite make sense.
00:09:50.180The amount of money that he had has not been – like how he actually got that much is not accounted for at all.
00:09:55.660And the case of his relationship with this incredibly sketchy, kind of deeply dark, horrifying monster billionaire is a case in point.
00:10:03.860I mean, Les Wexner dropped like $14 million in the late 80s to buy him a house on the Upper East Side.
00:10:10.420It's a full brownstone on 79th Street by Fifth Avenue.
00:11:04.140And the speculation, which is not substantiated, but I think you're right, Patrick, is almost
00:11:08.600begged by the circumstantial evidence that arose around Epstein is that he was, you know, a
00:11:15.060procurer of sexual access to underage girls and or was dealing in blackmail among these rich people
00:11:23.080in order to, you know, secure continued funding for his incredibly lavish lifestyle and also for
00:11:31.140his like weird projects. Like he had a pronatalist agenda about like his own DNA, which I think kind
00:11:38.520of got flash in the pan attention and then like fell by the wayside but he wanted to like seed his
00:11:43.440own DNA through the population because of course he thought he was genetically superior you know
00:11:47.780all this like kind of weird like the darkness of the the narcissistic rich guy was sort of taken
00:11:54.260to a maximalist position in Epstein and everything that you sort of suspect in your most cynical
00:12:00.500moments that the rich are doing for the sake of their you know gratification unmoored by principle
00:12:07.640is something that, like, at least somebody has said that he's doing, you know, that it seems
00:12:11.880somewhat plausible, if not outright documented, to think that Epstein was doing.
00:12:17.660And I think part of the deal with the initial prosecutions or his ability to not face the
00:12:22.300consequences until, I guess, he eventually did, and people can go to the Times or other sources
00:12:27.460for this, but persistent reports from within prosecutorial and other administration officials
00:12:32.580being like, well, he's protected by intelligence, right? And again, this is not necessarily,
00:12:36.820I think what I kind of want to disambiguate between, for us, is like having certainty about what actually happened to the guy or what the guy was doing or what even his primary income stream was, right?
00:12:47.000I don't even know what the hell happened in this cell, right, in the last minutes of his life.
00:12:50.000But distinguishing between like having positive certainty about that versus just an awareness that vast sums of money are transacting through this guy, that he's rubbing shoulders with, you know, famous arms dealers, but also Stephen Hawking and all these endowing reasons.
00:13:04.980Like, the overlapping intersection of, like, philanthropy, this revolving door of politicians, monarchy, and the rest.
00:13:12.840Like, it all seems to be he's a nexus for this.
00:13:16.660And whether or not he is singularly malevolent, and I think we probably agree he has a, you know, if people are keeping track, he's like a rapist on the level of, like, Genghis Khan or something, right?
00:13:26.920But he's also clearly symptomatic of something, right?
00:13:31.080Or at least becomes a signifier for something.
00:13:33.360Or we can read him as maybe emerging from a whole set of competing structures or overlapping structures, and that that, even if what he did or didn't do is undecidable, remains sort of why it abides.
00:13:43.220The other way that he sort of is an odd signifier is that we sort of know the type, right?
00:13:48.280Outer Borough Kid kind of becomes part, it seems, of the upper crust really by teaching it at the Dalton school.
00:13:58.040Dalton, where so many of these terrible right-wing sexuality stories originate.
00:14:31.640And we have a pretty good sense of what that might have been.
00:14:34.140And then they failed to do the thing that they always do, which is to make the guy the lightning rod and like creep up and off into their particular, you know, pleasure islands or whatever.
00:14:46.280So after his death, which coincides, you know, it's just a few months before the onset of COVID and the lockdowns that make all of us collectively much more online for a while, there, you know, becomes interest in Epstein that is fueled by but sort of outside of or like beyond the purient interest in his underlying conduct, right?
00:15:15.200So there's a sort of network of, I think, especially podcasts, but a lot of like online theorizing and speculation about this guy, wherein a lot of different grievances against the elite can get sort of channeled into the symbol of Jeffrey Epstein, right?
00:15:36.160And one of the things that the Donald Trump 2024 campaign really emphasized was, okay, when we are in power, we will release the Epstein files.
00:15:46.860It should be said this is not something that Donald Trump personally was very engaged in or gung-ho about, but it was something that sort of the world of, you know, young white male presenting or adjacent influencers and sort of the right-wing media ecosystem, the alternative media ecosystem that has really championed Trump was incredibly gung-ho about, right?
00:16:11.240It was something that J.D. Vance has said that he wanted to do, right?
00:16:16.620And when they actually got into power, they really screwed the pooch on this in some ways that just drew further attention to the Epstein scandal, right?
00:16:29.620Maura, can I ask you real quickly, am I right to think that the promises about disclosures of the quote-unquote Epstein files, which I always think is an interesting parse pro-toto.
00:16:37.440As we're finding out now, as they're hemming and hawing, it's like, well, there are a bunch of different things that you could release from a trial, which presumably contain very different information if you know your way around legal proceedings.
00:16:49.660But this kind of fetish of the Epstein file, it was a fop to QAnon, basically, right?
00:16:55.220Because it does seem to be a real-life QAnon story.
00:16:58.580And very clearly, they used it in a way to indicate that there was going to be mostly Democrats named in those,
00:17:04.100which is, of course, let's say the working theory of people who show up at, you know, pizza joints with sort of shotguns.
00:17:11.680Is that true, that basically this was a way to do a more genteel QAnon?
00:17:16.520Yeah, it's been called the thinking man's QAnon.
00:17:22.760You know, it's a way of sort of trying to hook this, like, broad trend of conspiracizing, specifically around pedophilia and specifically around pedophilia and the Democrats, although I think that we can trace that back much further, and I hope we will, to, you know, something, like, almost empirically provable, right?
00:17:43.000And there was this fantasy specifically of an Epstein list.
00:17:49.180And this is like kind of a weird little imaginary artifact, right?
00:17:52.840Because the theory of Jeffrey Epstein that sort of arose around him is both that he was part of this vast conspiracy of trafficking, abuse and concealment that managed to hide itself from the public for decades.
00:18:06.260And also that he was writing down the names of everybody who was, you know, like taking notes on a criminal conspiracy.
00:18:12.500But there's this notion that Epstein kept a list or that a list had somehow been compiled of all of the people who in this world were paying him in some fashion for sexual access to teenagers, right?
00:18:29.800And the fantasy was that that was going to be a numbered sheet of paper with like Bill Clinton in big bold letters at the top, right?
00:19:23.320You can, you know, look up your favorite characters from the broader Epstein universe and call them by their phone numbers, right?
00:19:27.440And, you know, clearly, again, some people are listed in there more than once.
00:19:30.500Epstein apparently a voracious collector of people's phone numbers.
00:19:32.460But, like, if you're in there four or five times, as my understanding certain prominent legal scholars might be, you know, they've changed their numbers so you can't call Alan anymore.
00:19:39.900But, like, if you're in there more than once, there's probably something going on, right?
00:19:42.100Or at least you might think that there's something going on.
00:19:43.600But, like, if that's one list, then there is the stuff that was or wasn't collected during the Florida prosecutions, right?
00:19:50.460Then there's the stuff that may or may not have been accumulated under successive presidencies, including, right, Donald Trump, because he was absolutely president when Epstein met his end.
00:20:00.140and also this thing that was hyped by so many people in the Trump world.
00:20:05.580And then Pan Bondi initiated a release of earlier in this year,
00:20:09.800which was like, quote, unquote, the Epstein files
00:20:11.380or like the first tranche or installment, I think she called it,
00:20:14.200of the Epstein files, which was exemplarily, quote, unquote, a nothing burger.
00:20:18.640But they had right-wing influencers at the White House to sort of celebrate this.
00:20:22.900Holding binders that say Epstein files on them,
00:20:26.120which is like something that, you know, those guys wanted so badly to do it.
00:20:29.660And then it was just, you know, redacted documents that had been previously released, right?
00:20:42.360I think she told Tucker or some other person like this.
00:20:44.300And then now, well, without even getting to, like, whether or not this file does or doesn't exist, and I think it is a fantasy, right?
00:20:49.360This idea that he was keeping, like, a simple, like, I'm imagining, like, some notebook in which he's practicing his signature over and over again.
00:20:56.260And then he's like, this is what I saw Ehud Barak do, right?
00:20:58.900And this is how Tony Blair likes it.0.99
00:21:00.400And, like, even though the guy clearly wasn't exactly a titanic mind, and you can read some of his, like, table talk to get a sense of exactly what type of a fucking sort of Philistine he was, I don't think he was quite that stupid.0.97
00:21:11.440Or if there is such a thing, I don't think it survived any of the numerous evidence halls and captures thereof.0.95
00:21:18.540I should give credit where credit is due on this.
00:21:20.020I think there are people who have done a very good job of sort of tracking the distinctions between these things being promised and being offered.
00:21:25.680I think Brayson was a true nod, done a very good job in particularly sort of disambiguating between that, but also in tracking kind of these other networks.
00:21:33.120And I think the Acosta connection is so key here.
00:21:35.840It's also worth saying that, and again, this gets at this gap between what we do know or don't know, right, Epstein?
00:21:41.140Ran a modeling business with his brother, right?
00:21:43.780And was, so whether or not there's like illicit quote unquote trafficking happening with, you know, like women in containers on ships like season two of The Wire style, there's definitely that type of creepiness happening.
00:21:54.660and Steve Mnuchin of Trump v. One may or may not have been involved.
00:21:57.860There's an overwhelming set of overdetermined significances or suggestions of significance
00:22:03.260which have become packaged, for better or worse, in this idea of a document or of a single revelation
00:22:09.840that, well, if that gets out, if we have that, then something, some sort of narrative entailment.
00:22:15.820And I think that expectation is the thing that's most interesting even to Probe.
00:22:18.580What you're getting at is also so much of this, and again, I'm so glad that we have you to talk to about this
00:22:24.420because this does feel like a kind of repetition compulsion, right?
00:22:26.980So the Epstein files are the same nothing burger
00:22:32.260as the Twitter files after Elon Musk took over Twitter, right?
00:22:35.720Like it was this supposed to kind of vindicate
00:22:38.400and vitiate these right-wing grievances
00:22:41.280in a way that like no object ever could,
00:22:45.300but there too, they were like posing with like papers,
00:22:54.420And then, I mean, we're going to talk about how pedophilia gets used and operationalized in this discourse.
00:22:58.700But like, you know, the obvious thing that everyone thinks back to is QAnon, but it's also the way Elon Musk has sort of used that, where it's often a description of kind of the uncanny side of elites or experts.
00:23:10.760For me, this is such an important moment that I think people kind of forgot mostly about, the Tom Luang cave rescue and Elon Musk's bizarre role in it.
00:23:18.840For people who are not as obsessively into the right-wing fever swamps of Silicon Valley,
00:23:25.520this is the Thai schoolchildren who get stranded in a cave.
00:23:28.860There's a beautiful movie about it, I think by Ron Howard, weirdly enough.
00:23:31.620And what happens is Elon Musk sort of steps in and wants to make a robot.
00:23:36.000And he's going to make a robot that's going to save these kids.
00:23:38.260And then a bunch of experts show up, like the international cave divers,
00:23:42.180who are like these daring Australian dudes who are just going to like,
00:23:44.960yeah, we know how to do this, don't worry.
00:23:46.620to worry and the thai navy who's like we have people trained for this and elon musk does not0.98
00:23:51.640take it well that people don't want his dumb ass robot and what does he famously do there's a british0.97
00:23:56.800cave diver that like says like well i know these caves well i'll go in he's like oh it's a white0.99
00:24:01.700guy living in thailand obviously and then he calls him pedo guy right like and so like the moment he
00:24:07.080is sort of faced with like structures of expertise institution and like the state in some way because
00:24:14.980It's the Thai Navy that's involved, right?
00:24:17.180And coordinating all that stuff and like local responders.
00:24:21.020He reaches for this word and it seems to him to just mean not legitimate, right?
00:24:51.000It is a way that they've learned how to describe institutions and experts, et cetera, et cetera, they don't like and discrediting and delegitimating them.
00:25:03.740but they've kind of forgotten that the word also has content
00:25:07.820and that there are people like Jeffrey Epstein out there
00:25:09.740for whom that label applies in a non-metaphoric way
00:25:33.120We don't trust the government. And now suddenly they're like, oh, shit, you're actually going to give us information. Well, that's I hadn't planned on that. I didn't know that was going to happen.0.99
00:25:42.200Yeah, there's something here about, like, the recurring role of Trump in the sort of, like, Trump supporter fantasy in which Trump is the person who, like, can make metaphors literal.
00:25:57.480And specifically, he is the guy who, you know, vindicates the innocent and the downtrodden against the nefarious, the elite, the expert class.
00:26:10.520You know, he makes these various grievances, like grievances about inequality, grievances about declining health, climate collapse, various ways that lives of ordinary Americans are indeed circumscribed and, like, immiserated by elite malfeasance, right?
00:26:28.220He is supposed to vindicate that by, like, literalizing the thing to which those grievances have been sublimated into, right, which is like a fantasy of pedophilia.
00:26:37.160It's also like a weird, like the Epstein conspiracy as part of like the broader QAnon extended universe also imagines Trump who is like, as you said, Adrian, like the world's most literal guy as somebody who's like communicating in these like secret symbolic gestures to the public.
00:26:57.400Like, I heard one account where they're like, okay, well, if Trump is out to take down the pedophile network led by and symbolized by Jeffrey Epstein, why did he give Alex Acosta, Epstein's, like, sweetheart plea deal prosecutor, a place in his cabinet?
00:27:14.760And the, like, Epstein conspiracy, like, QAnon pro-Trump version of this was like, oh, well, that was supposed to draw attention to how badly Alex Acosta behaved in the Epstein case, right?
00:27:25.340He was, like, secretly trying to draw our attention to it by giving this man more material power, you know?
00:27:31.780Like, it's just not how that guy works.
00:27:35.680Yeah, I'm trying to imagine Trump using a metaphor.
00:27:38.020Like, we've got the most beautiful metaphors, folks.
00:27:41.220I love his idea, like, he's appointing Acosta to, like, raise awareness, right?0.83
00:27:47.000Like, I'm doing a social experiment here, and I'm actually – part of the reason why I had Jeffrey Epstein at my wedding or one of my weddings, God fucking knows,
00:27:53.600like, is because actually I was going to expose him 40 years from, like, and I mean, we could
00:27:58.680ask, like, what's the signal sent by him taking these photos with Ivanka in his lap, right? Or
00:28:02.120saying the things that he's on the record saying about, and just to kind of pull back for one
00:28:05.600second, and I think this is, I want to mirror back to you something you both have said in different
00:28:09.880ways. There seems to be some sort of complicated set of collective expectations or like metanarrative
00:28:18.960scripts about how or what this stuff knowledge is and how it's supposed to come out, right?
00:28:25.820And this kind of sense that on the one hand, knowledge is this sort of abstract thing,
00:28:32.760but also it's like knowledge, knowledge on people.
00:28:34.420It's very paranoiac in this way, right?
00:28:36.120And that it takes someone like Trump, who is, as you said, an outsider who is sort of
00:28:40.180transgressive, who's plain speaking, who calls things what they are, that he will,
00:28:44.480by dint of sheer singular personality0.91
00:29:19.580It's a whole logic of how expectation and belief gets verified, but then how institutional processes and, like, justice-making is supposed to happen thereafter that is seductive.
00:29:31.340But it also, I feel, has some mirrorings, too, in other ways that people have been thinking about the Trump phenomena, right?
00:29:35.480If only this latest Russiagate hearing, right?
00:29:38.540If only we confront people with the truth of what a piece of shit this guy is.0.99
00:29:41.100If only, you know, people who are suffering from his policy decisions vis-a-vis health care or the environment, et cetera, if only they can draw this connection, if the truth can be revealed to them, then suddenly they will behave righteously.1.00
00:29:55.280There's this kind of gap between both, like, this abstract sense of how consensus-based reality is supposed to elevate political change, but also this kind of – it is an erotics, right, of, like, fulfillment, expectation.
00:30:21.440And, you know, if anything, like, one thing that's happening right now is people are like, oh, wow, actually, no, Donald Trump is just a rich person, too.
00:30:27.660Though, I mean, who knows what that, again, I don't want to impose a metanaritif expectation there, too, about what necessarily is going to happen to him and his supporters.
00:31:46.560is an increasingly imperial president,1.00
00:31:48.880meaning he doesn't have to reveal shit.0.99
00:31:50.920You could just arrest. I mean, he is just arresting. It turns out if you're a hairdresser from Venezuela, he'll just arrest you, right? You'll make it up as he goes along. But it's still like he's out of power when he's even in power, right? The same way that Elon Musk is sort of always a witness to his own power, right? The same way that like congressional Republicans appear to be witnesses to their own power, the way ICE sort of can't grapple with the consequences of their own action.0.99
00:32:15.120Like, that's the ultimate promise here is a guy who gets into power and all he does is reveal, reveal, reveal. Right. And then the revelation will take care of everything almost by itself.
00:32:24.340Yeah, there's something about this disjoint between, like, the expectation of revelation and its actual function in reality, right? Like, how the narrative release is not happening that is, like, really uncanny for me in the return of the Epstein story, right?
00:32:39.160Because something that is happening is that, like, not a ton of new information has actually been reported on Epstein's conduct or Trump's conduct with Epstein in the weeks since this scandal, like, sort of was brought back to the fore, right?
00:32:56.720What you get instead is that the frustration of the narrative expectations is leading to, like, a re-encountering of old information as if it is new.
00:33:06.900Yeah. Like almost like they're trying to turn the computer off and turn it on again. It's like, did you know he gave this quote to New York magazine that like many of the women Epstein dates are on the younger side? It's like, well, yes, like that's actually been public record for like over a decade, you know, and this like sense of like turning the computer on and turning it off again is something that you almost see this like frustrated hope in.
00:33:30.140I mean, you're the historian of Me Too. Doesn't that kind of sound like a bizarro world version of Me Too, where it's like, oh, we found out that Harvey Weinstein was a serial rapist?
00:33:40.120It's like, no, there were jokes about that made at the red carpet at the Oscars.
00:33:43.700Like, we were re-encountering that information. That's true.
00:33:46.800But the revelation part of Me Too, I think, has sometimes been overstated.
00:33:50.620It really was often a re-encounter with the obvious.
00:33:53.500It's like, well, yeah, he said it. They all said it.
00:33:58.540Right. So is this a re-metabolization of Me Too yet again?
00:34:02.820I mean, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Louis C.K., R. Kelly, like all of these guys who were quote unquote Me Too'd had in fact been exposed and in some cases like sued and or prosecuted for sexual misconduct in the past.
00:34:19.080It was that like a narrative circumstance had changed such that that was able to have a degree of impact on an audience or like audiences were able to change their minds about that information.
00:34:29.520And I think there's something of the hope, at least on the left, that that's what's happening with Donald Trump now.0.95
00:34:34.400Donald Trump, who nobody is confused about being a sexual predator, right?0.89
00:34:38.780More than two dozen accusers, abjudicated guilty of rape in a civil trial in New York, avowed and bragged about attraction to underage girls and indifference to consent.0.62
00:34:52.220And, you know, there's nothing really there that's new, and yet this old information is being treated as new because there's something about the slippage or his failure to deliver on this promise of revelation and release and catharsis and resolve that is, like, repositioning him narratively in the minds of some of these conspiracy-minded people who were, until recently at least, his supporters.
00:35:18.600There's also something here about Trump trying to, like, reappoint himself as the new arbiter of reality for his base that has been alienated from these, like, traditional sources of epistemic authority, like universities, journalists, like, public health authorities, right?
00:35:35.580He's like, no, no, you don't have to.0.75
00:37:44.800By the same token, though, I keep thinking about how, and I think of some of the things
00:37:48.520you've said about this, like, from a certain sort of social psychology perspective, right,
00:37:52.660a social problem is only a social problem when it gets called a social problem, right?
00:37:56.380And that's a dynamic, ongoing process, which is not to say, like, objectively that this
00:38:00.340isn't an evil thing that's happening, right?0.99
00:38:01.740But the problem of all these elite men, you know, Louis C.K., Cosby, all these fuckers, right?0.96
00:38:07.840The problem of there being monsters isn't constellated as a problem until it is named as a problem and there's some sort of collective determination.0.99
00:38:15.400Okay, yes, this is, we're finally going to put a name on this.
00:38:17.520We're going to act on this in certain ways.
00:38:18.880We're going to levy certain expectations on these individuals, but also on shifts and brought, you know, media coverage and legal authority.
00:38:24.760And there's something about this that, you know, who knows how it's going to go.
00:38:28.460But, like, we're seeing different quarters, like, no, I get to determine that this is a social problem, right? Or, like, no, please, we're not ready to move on to the next social problem. Or this is, like, the ur-social problem, and we need it to be worked through.
00:38:41.920And in other words, I think we're seeing all these people kind of, like, struggle with in real time these gaps, and I think that may be the word, between, like, expectation of fulfillment and actual, like, how am I going to deal with this in terms of reality, but also of, like, the desire for closure, the desire to get to see accountability happen, right?
00:39:01.080Whatever the fuck that means, whether they want to see it, and we know that this isn't it.
00:39:05.280And that, in other words, I think maps on the collective social body to these different kind of structures of knowing, right?0.97
00:39:12.400And again, I'm not using the sociological language for this in terms of, but I think you probably read it into the labeling of social problems stuff, you know, via like social interactionist theory or something else like that.
00:39:19.600But like people kind of know, but they don't want to know.
00:39:22.480Or we all knew, but we didn't integrate that knowledge into other things.
00:39:26.040In other words, like, that reality itself is marked by these weird disjunctions, and it's ongoingly contested.
00:39:32.360Yeah, I mean, like, one explanation for Epstein that is kind of the more banal one that would put him, I think, pretty much exactly in line with these other, like, Me Too guys is that it's not actually that people didn't know that he was doing what he was doing to these teenage girls.
00:39:47.980It's that, like, it hadn't really occurred to them to object until there was this other, like, change in social conditions.
00:39:55.140And what that is, like what allowed people to look at something and suddenly name it as a problem beyond, you know, a problem for the women and girls, which should be said have been like objecting like fairly consistently just, you know, without much effect.
00:40:10.560That is a really interesting process. And I don't know what the ingredients are exactly that go into people suddenly re-encountering something that was long tolerated or ignored as newly deserving of outrage attention and demanding this kind of change.
00:40:26.220Well, there's this thing that I think people who study kind of social media radicalization have been saying, which is that like, especially the sort of save the children hashtag on Instagram and TikTok really made QAnon extremely easy to onboard people into, right?
00:40:42.940I mean, there's the WooAnon to QAnon pipeline.
00:40:46.080There's all this stuff where, you know,
00:40:47.800people could start with seemingly good-hearted
00:45:48.720like we could say like there's a whole social psychology,
00:45:50.820you know sociological angle for this that would point back to you know the idea of like folk
00:45:55.720devils or moral panics which are quintessentially targeting the supposedly innocent above all in a
00:46:00.860judeo-christian framework but specifically a christian framework like these are these children
00:46:04.240they're they're exemplarily you know like unformed and vulnerable and they're are charged and all0.80
00:46:10.520this shit and somehow that's the ultimate sign of like a a cosmological battle right and this is
00:46:16.960This is, again, one sort of the framework of thinking about this might be almost a demonological kind of way of looking at the world, is that there's this eternal battle between good versus evil.0.99
00:46:24.640And evil is exemplarily, eternally present in terms of how it harms the most vulnerable or whom we perceive to be the most vulnerable or who symbolize the future and all these different sort of senses, namely the kids.
00:46:36.260And, of course, our kids first and foremost.
00:46:38.460And I think that's another kind of rider to put in here.
00:46:40.420It's always us as children, hypothetically, or the kids who look like us or the kids within the social unit.
00:46:46.240Our views vis-a-vis other children may be rather more contradictory.
00:46:51.980And I think we could probably even think that other frameworks for either moral panics or for mass hysteria, depending on your language, would be partaking of that kind of cosmological good versus evil kind of there are irreconcilably evil people out there.
00:47:05.280There are irreconcilably good people out there, and they need to be vindicated through our actions.
00:47:10.420And other discourses or frameworks for understanding social problems and thinking about, like, the violence against children, whether they be, like, a pathological model, right, which is a more, you know, modern framework for this, which would pathologize or at least, you know, create categories.
00:47:23.460Again, I'm not saying that harm doesn't happen.
00:47:25.420I'm saying that, like, if you were to talk to a jurist in the end of the 19th century and use the phrase child abuse, they'd be like, what do you mean?
00:47:30.200You're supposed to not spare the rod, right?
00:47:32.080The idea here is child abuse as a category emerges, you know, for legal and popular moral purposes through processes of deliberation, right?
00:47:38.300But that even those pathological models where we have a figure like the supposedly unredeemable, prone to pathological recidivism, child abuser, that's also a demonic figure in some ways.
00:47:49.640These older frameworks don't really go away.
00:47:52.420And there's, of course, other sort of theological notions about this that we could unpack.
00:47:56.240And I should say it recently came to my attention reading some classic stuff that actually apparently part of the Roman Empire's argument against Christians was that they were doing blood sacrifice.0.52
00:48:05.060And so the Christian, let's call it appropriation of the blood libel is a thing that the Jews supposedly do is actually a, well, like a remixing of this imperial Roman claim about what the bad Christians are doing to kids, right?0.57
00:48:31.120But on another level, and I think this is getting at the present stuff more, there's something that happens under our contemporary conditions and probably conditions of what we might call racial capitalism, but also of a particular type of patriarchy and social reproduction as we know it now, where even as we profess the innocence of children, functionally speaking, we don't seem to give a shit about it, right?
00:48:55.300I mean, the stats about child mortality are what they are.0.57
00:48:58.380We, you know, can watch, whether we like it or not, children being incinerated in Gaza.
00:49:03.720We have these, hell, even Trump appealed to this as a sort of like, clearly how desperate he was to like all those kids, all those young girls drowning in Texas, right?
00:49:12.860Where you could almost smell the fear coming off him.
00:49:15.100Where people are like, he's like, well, you're still asking about Epstein?
00:49:17.660After that thing in Texas, even as he's stumbling to name it, he's like clearly being like, look at these kids.
00:49:21.800And of course, he doesn't want to follow that to his consequence either.
00:49:23.680But – or hell, even like this stuff that we know must be happening in this ICE-CBP stuff, right?
00:49:29.380I mean there were tons of – hell, I remember under Biden there were more than a few quote-unquote revelations about abuse happening of children in those – like so we know this stuff is happening on let's call it like a grassroots level.0.76
00:49:39.560And we also know that capitalist or otherwise, whether you have like a chattel slavery system or, you know, a debt peonage system or whatever the fuck you want to call it, one way the elites have historically bonded is through the abuse and trafficking of women and children, right?
00:49:52.020and yet somehow the actual ramifications of that in terms of how we might intervene at the place
00:49:59.800where like most abusive children actually does happen like the home right uh the people who are
00:50:05.160most likely to abuse children namely relatives like all these types of things are that's too
00:50:11.020much of a lift or rather that might seem to i just again i'm just thinking aloud here i'm not
00:50:15.920saying like this is how it should be but that that's somehow that's a revelation of horror in
00:50:20.640the quotidian, which would require some sort of work of collective and individual transformation
00:50:25.820and, you know, consciousness raising, but also, again, accountability that is either
00:50:32.180non-negotiable for the system of capitalism and patriarchy as we have it currently configured
00:50:35.560or just too much to tolerate as even like an ask, like psychically.
00:50:39.780And thus, we would much rather have a revelation we can witness.
00:51:18.620Part of why Me Too couldn't take hold, it seems to me, among certain parts of the American society was that if you said, oh, what Harvey Weinstein did was terrible and here's what it looked like to the outside, you had to say, oh, what Uncle so-and-so does is actually kind of similar and I don't want to ask that question, so I'm going to stop asking questions about Harvey Weinstein, right?
00:51:40.380But I think Me Too was marked by a moment when people did make those connections, right? We have here in the building a lot of letters that famous Me Too public figures receive from people and a bunch of them say, you're very brave. And then they always launch into their own stories, right? Like it reshaped the way they saw their lives.
00:51:58.820Well, this is also a feature of conspiracy theorizing. Like, I'm sorry, like, one of the things that adherents of QAnon will say with heartbreaking regularity is I know about how serious and how widespread child abuse is because I was, in fact, molested as a child, right? It's one way also to cope with the failure of revelation in our own lives to lead to change is to sort of transfer that hope into this, like, broader, like, media phenomenon, right?
00:52:28.240Like I told my mom about what my dad was doing and she took his side.
00:52:31.620But when we tell the world about what Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton and the pedophile elites are doing, finally there will be justice, right?
00:52:51.900You talk about Clinton and Epstein or something like that, right?
00:52:55.240It's a way of externalizing all that or rendering a transcendent and kind of refusing, as you say, to reopen the wounds that child abuse leaves in people's biographies, even those who don't experience it themselves, because they might have experienced having looked away from it or having made choices they regret.
00:53:12.720This is the attraction, right? To have it kind of play out somewhere over there, somewhere out there, involving people who are very much not part of my life, and yet shining the light of revelation back onto my life and sort of having a kind of low messianic power.
00:53:27.240Yeah, and it's almost like if we can't fix this, right, then what the fuck is the socius good for?
00:53:35.400And I'm thinking here of a connection to the work – two things, actually.0.78
00:53:38.840The first, the connection to the work of Paul Amar, right, the security studies scholar who's written a lovely book called The Security Archipelago.
00:53:46.380And part of his analysis, and I think it's prescient, this is like 2013, 2014, is that in conditions of what he calls sort of crises of legitimacy in like neoliberal security states, he's got a bunch of examples here.
00:53:57.820Brazil is the most proximately useful for our purposes, where essentially you have the police above all, because like they're the remaining branch of the state that exists in these austerity circumstances, like where the repressive apparatus is facing legitimacy crisis.
00:54:09.720They will benefit from and be dynamically related to, like, grassroots movements of moral renewal, but that are all about an outsider threat above all to the family and to children, right?0.70
00:54:19.860And the example Amar takes through in his Brazil case study is of, you know, these police in Rio and elsewhere doing, you know, death squad shit in favelas.0.72
00:54:27.500But through, again, there's always a religious component to this frequently, right? But through the works of these Brazilian evangelicals and these sort of renew the family movements, they're going to now finally be the only people who could crack down on sex tourists coming from the outside to take advantage of little Brazilian children during, you know, the World Cup or the Carnival or whatever.0.95
00:54:44.960And, of course, what this then produces is a doubling down on the security state, a sort of, like, vision.0.68
00:54:49.260Like, well, the only people who can protect the family are these people, namely the police and our sort of, like, assistance to them.
00:54:54.880And then what that actually yields, you know, structurally speaking, is more abuse by the police specifically, right?
00:54:59.920So there's a whole sort of account for that that I think we could probe there.
00:55:02.860But the other thing I think that is, it's really hard to talk about because it's, like, so painful in some ways is first, like, this gap between, like, belief or, like, holding or acknowledging someone else's being victimized and, again, this desire to do something about it or desire to see something be done about it, right?
00:55:22.760Again, it's hard to subject the rhetoric of belief at our contemporary moment to a critical consciousness.
00:55:28.800But, like, think about, like, we believe in science, or in this house we believe in this, but also, like, you know, we have to believe women.
00:55:44.260Many of the jurors did believe in those women.
00:55:46.100And yet the dark thing is what if we do believe in them, and even so, right?
00:55:50.620And there's testimony from the Epstein victim.
00:55:52.540And people who were trafficked by him were like, I couldn't believe this was happening, right?
00:55:55.840Even they themselves, in this process of being abused in this way, are registering not just like, this isn't real, I'm going to defend myself for disassociating, but literally they're like, I am perfectly lucid, I'm not on drugs, I'm with this person, and I still can't believe this is happening.
00:56:09.840And that this person is still allowed to show their face in public because they're a prince or, you know, some other, like, philanthropist or financier.
00:56:15.960That gap between like belief and reparation or some sort of righteous intervention is, well, I'll go back to the idea about like this interfacing with other things.
00:56:26.900And please, I'm not in any way gainsaying the specificity of the harm of sexual abuse or sexual violence, right?
00:56:32.600But there are so many gaps between our perception of harm and our recognition of, like, human disposability as a matter of non-negotiable reality that run aground against discursive but also, like, political mode of, like, reality maintenance where it's like, well, no, of course, but Jeffrey Epstein, it was really terrible, but school lunch debt for kids, like, whatever, you know, like, that's just, that's one way they're going to learn some lessons, right?
00:56:56.160Or kids in cages, really bad when this is, when so-and-so's in the White House, but not when someone else is. We're supposed to continually work through these gaps. And I think, again, like, considering, and Epstein gives us tons of examples of this, right? Like, what he was doing in the modeling sphere, right? And what his brother was probably involved in, don't sue me. Like, that was fucking abusive and horrible, even if he wasn't fucking raping these women and girls.
00:57:18.600And so, like, the continuity between specifically sexual violence and other types of oppression and immiseration, and also the way in which those two things kind of mutually reinforce one another, that's another thing that's equally hard to sort of, like, possibly metabolize as, like, well, the predator isn't just the guy in the white van or the sex tourist, it's my parish priest, right?
00:57:40.980Or it's someone else we know, or it could even be me under some type of events.
00:57:43.380It's kind of like that type of thinking.0.79
00:57:45.940On the one hand, we can't deny the structures, but on the other hand, what the fuck are we supposed to do about structures, right?
00:57:50.800And again, I'm not counseling despair here, but that's a problem that individuals in a particularly balkanized frame of individuality that we have in this moment, I don't know how people are supposed to reconcile it.
00:58:01.260It's a question of, okay, we want to recognize what happened to this person, but can we recognize, can we really recognize what happened to that person?
00:58:07.820do we say oh this is the system being abused or not working as intended or like as you say like
00:58:14.500with a child modeling pageant you're like i'm sorry is that not the system as it is intended
00:58:19.260like how do we recognize deviance in that or do we just say that the norm is horrifying and and
00:58:26.660is a problem right right this is something that i got into a light debate with with like a guy i
00:58:32.140want to emphasize I don't think is a bad person, but he was trying to convince me that you actually
00:58:37.980can't call what Jeffrey Epstein did pathological because within the normative spectrum of male
00:58:47.240heterosexuality, attraction and or pursuit of underage girls is actually the norm, right? And
00:58:54.360you know, every woman you know spent her adolescence resisting rape, sometimes as acute
00:59:00.200horror and sometimes as, you know, low-level nuisance. But the other dark side of Epstein's
00:59:06.160narrative power and his command over the imagination is not just moral horror, but actually
00:59:11.120like, you know, kind of disavowed envy, right? There's an offense not just that this is happening,
00:59:16.400but that somebody else is allowed to get away with it. You know, one of the grievances expressed
00:59:20.100in the Epstein controversy is that there's a perception that elite men have a permission that
00:59:24.940that non-elite men do not have but would use, right?
00:59:29.160There's the other reason this can't, you know,
00:59:31.400one of many reasons why the Epstein scandal
00:59:33.220is actually a very bad vehicle, I think,
00:59:35.400for trying to repoliticize sexual abuse
00:59:50.220Yeah, I mean, I think it's so telling, right?
00:59:52.480Like we're debating the meaning of Epstein on, well, I'm no longer on X, thank goodness, but like on platforms where it has become a common joke that a certain kind of guy is like all about how it's epiphilia really, right?
01:00:07.760And knows exactly what the age of consent laws are by state.
01:00:10.940And you're like, and it's become a joke.
01:00:12.640It's like, that's the kind of person this is.0.99
01:00:14.240And like, I make those jokes and it's like, that's a fucking horrifying.0.98
01:00:17.660Like this is, that's also a form of normalization.0.95
01:00:19.760And yeah, I mean, like the age at which especially girls are catcalled, it, you know, shocks parents of younger children, right, or men who haven't lived through that.
01:00:29.300Well, I think this speaks to, Patrick, your point about encountering structures and sexual violence as being, you know, for all its particularity, I think like a very kind of instructive example or one way that a lot of people encounter this disjoint.
01:00:42.980Because when you are a victim of sexual violence trying to get recognition or accountability for what you have suffered, that does indeed feel like encountering a conspiracy, right?
01:00:54.340Because you are forced to reckon with a disjoint between the professed values and the lived values in a way that is maddening, right?
01:01:04.440And I think part of what the appeal of the like Epstein or QAnon style explanation for sexual abuse and other kinds of violence as a conspiracy of people who know that what they're doing is nefarious and are trying to conceal it is because that would make a lot more sense in a lot of ways than what we actually have.
01:01:22.500Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And it's so hard to kind of sit with it because like, I don't think there's anything wrong in wanting there to be whatever the hell this thing is that we call accountability, but like to see some sort of like consequences, right?
01:01:38.840Or to expect correctly that recognizing a harm that's done to you, bringing it to others would then involve some combination of recognition, reparation, and care, and maybe even accountability from those others, right?
01:01:57.300You know, confusions between those, I think, abound.
01:01:59.000But that set of expectations is not in and of itself in any way wrong.
01:02:02.600And get it every turn we seem not to get it, right?
01:02:05.800Or we get these kind of bizarre fantasies, which, again, I think are not contemptible in their own right.
01:02:11.960But, like, I would love to see justice done around me, right?
01:02:16.140I would love to know that, like, I could go to my grave being like, okay, Tony Blair is in prison.
01:02:22.060Like, we get to see this kind of, again, it's this desire.
01:02:26.400Think of, like, Tertullian or some church father where, like, you go to heaven and part of the joy is that you get to see the people in hell who belong there.
01:02:31.520Like, you look out your window, right?