The Epstein files are the trees for which we are missing the woods

Another huge tranche of ‘the Epstein files’1 (i.e. Jeffrey Epstein’s emails) were released on January 30th, and it has felt like yet another cultural tipping point, even after there seem to have been cultural tipping points at a rate of about one a year for the last five years or so. Before most people had had a chance to look through the files for themselves, mainstream rags like The Telegraph were throwing out absurd stories about how Epstein might have been a Russian agent because Putin is mentioned over 1000 times. The Independent conceded a couple of days later that that was because Epstein was desperately (and apparently unsuccessfully) trying to ‘court’ Putin, but the Telegraph headline no doubt had its intended effect on many readers nonetheless. Epstein had far more significant links to Israel, but saying so already feels superfluous by now. He and his associates also made numerous references to “the goyim”, but it’s antisemitic to notice such things.

The files have so far put an end to the career of Peter Mandelson (founder of New Labour and the UK ambassador to the US until his resignation) by showing that he passed confidential information about decisions being made about UK tax law to Epstein, apparently almost immediately. As well as being highly illegal, it’s also very strange that Mandelson would be passing this information to a convicted sex offender who told Peter Thiel that “I represent the Rothschilds”, just as it’s strange that The Arsehole Formerly Known as Prince Andrew (who was also passing confidential information to Epstein) stayed at Epstein’s London pad soon after his conviction. Jeffrey Epstein was clearly not just any old convicted sex offender, but since he died in absurdly unexplained circumstances in 2019 that no one in power wanted to investigate, just as he was about to give evidence that might have incriminated lots of powerful people, his story died with him.

The latest bunch of files came after months of Twitter liberals screaming performatively and histrionically for their release; women and girls had suffered, they opined, at the hands of this monster (meaning Epstein). Why aren’t you more angry?, people like Leigh McGowan demanded of people like Scott Jennings:

Acyn@Acyn

Jennings: Let's not get our knickers in a twist here McGowan: Why are you talking like that? It's insane. Your attitude is just horrifying….Everything that is in these files—it could bring an entire house down. And if it has to, it has to. If it brings down Democrats, bring

3:59 AM · Jan 20, 2026 · 3.96M Views

2.14K Replies · 17.4K Reposts · 95.4K Likes

Of course those expressing such outrage weren’t wrong about the suffering wrought by the network of which Jeffrey Epstein seems to have been an important part, but their reactions to the files have been telling. The emails feature high-profile figures from both sides of the political aisle and from other realms of culture, yet most of those (like McGowan) who had been calling for the Trump White House to Release The Files! are instead continuing to focus on the names they were already primed to hate, especially Trump.

McGowan is justifiably angry now that those files have been released, but she is still focusing on the fact that, as she puts it, “our president’s name appears in the 3.5m files released so far, more than Harry Potter’s name appears in all seven Harry Potter books”:

PoliticsGirl@IAmPoliticsGirl

We are never letting this go.

12:00 AM · Feb 6, 2026 · 164K Views

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Firstly, that’s an odd yardstick by which to compare the files (since they weren’t titled Donald Trump and the Chamber of Perverts), but more importantly: why is she angry with Trump and his White House in particular? There are thousands of names in those files, from both sides of the political spectrum and in many high-profile fields, so if an objective observer were to take anything at all from the release, it should be that what all these high-profile individuals have in common is their contact with a convicted paedophile and human trafficker. Instead, commenters like McGowan do what Substack author The Cosmic Onion aptly called “oscillating between outrage and amnesia”, depending on who has been shown to be communicating with Epstein; this selective outrage was also evident amongst even respected left-wing journalists like Aaron Maté with regard to Noam Chomsky.

Without meaning to pick on McGowan in particular (but she is typical of a certain type of media talking head), she has a book out called A Return to Common Sense: How to Fix America Before We Really Blow It, which judging by the blurb offers all the same kind of milquetoast appeals to decency and “our beautiful/fragile/sacred American democracy” that we’ve come to expect from the same media ecosystem that promotes people like Stevens Pinker and Hawking, who do appear in the emails and apparently visited the island. Her book, like theirs, is the sort of thing that educated, sensible centrists would feel comfortable displaying on their bookshelf: intellectual but not challenging, forthright but without a serious call to arms beyond voting properly, which in practice means for the Democrats - they know the Dems aren’t perfect dammit, but anything to keep the evil Republicans out.

And therein lies the rub, the banal reality that ties all of mainstream media together, not necessarily to Epstein directly, but to the world that he ‘represented’: it’s not unreasonable to assume that the people who were desperate to party with Epstein were either being blackmailed, or at least controlled insofar as they would know that Epstein had the power to destroy their reputations if they stepped out of line, and many of these people had successful careers in cultural production. The kind of culture that they produce is bland, predictable and unthreatening to power, and a book like McGowan’s fits right in with theirs; she’s not about to suggest that the whole democratic system is corrupt by design, or point out how US foreign policy remains basically the same regardless of which party is in power, or suggest that maybe China and Russia aren’t threats and we don’t need to constantly provoke them militarily. It suits those of her ilk very well for a voting, book-buying and TV-watching public to believe in the United States as the shining city on a hill, and in the power of the office of president. Otherwise, why care about Trump?

This is the mundane function that the ‘culture industry’ and the ‘theory industry’ (as the excellent Gabriel Rockhill calls it) perform for the ruling class that owns the means of both industrial and cultural production: setting the boundaries for acceptable debate, both in academia and broader culture. You don’t have to be blackmailed to toe the line on Russia, Israel or China - you just need to know that if you stray from acceptable opinion then your funding, book deals and invitations to appear on TV debates could stop immediately. Blackmail is only necessary for those successful enough to enjoy enough financial independence to be able to withstand cancellation.

Academics like the great and recently deceased Michael Parenti refused to betray their revolutionary convictions and struggled to get teaching jobs because of it, whereas Noam Chomsky made a career out of exposing how the media manufactures consent, while constantly repeating imperialist propaganda to do just that. Seeing the wood for the trees means seeing that mainstream culture (better called ‘bourgeois culture’) is carefully curated, and not taking any of it at face value without appreciating the role it plays in reinforcing the values of the elite creating that culture.

The significance of Epstein and his emails lies in the tension between what they suggest might have happened, and the lack of enthusiasm in the US Department of Justice to investigate or prosecute anyone over those possibilities. Epstein seems very likely to have been the fixer who put the rich and famous in contact with young, vulnerable, probably trafficked women and girls, but he didn’t do this for fun and he certainly wasn’t at the top of the pyramid. He can’t have been the only person with such a role, either. A lot of content in the files is redacted, which is legitimate for protecting the identities of victims, but clearly many of the redacted names are not victims so the entire release is also by definition a kind of limited hangout.

By the accounts of the victims who came forward, Epstein himself engaged in the kind of sexual depravity that he offered to others, but he was just a well-remunerated employee in the system of elite control. To focus on him personally as evil incarnate is to ignore the much bigger forces behind him, which chose to elevate a mediocre maths teacher who flirted with his students to the status of international financier and Cosmopolitan July 1980 Bachelor of the Month.

Perhaps the biggest achievement of the release of the Epstein files has been to change the connotation of the name ‘Epstein’ from ‘unexplained suicide’ to ‘incriminating emails’. The speed with which stories like this progress can leave one with the sense that things in the past were resolved merely because the news has stopped talking about them, but his implausible suicide in a high-security jail in 2019 should still be the most important thing about him. It’s frustrating (and intentionally so) to know that we will probably never know what his real role was, because all the circumstantial evidence points towards him being an open wound from which some truth was beginning to bleed, one that had to be unceremoniously cauterised. The question we are all acutely aware of is: What can we do about it? We can stop believing what the compromised corporate media tells us, but then what? These elites don’t fuck around when it comes to defending their position of power and if they want us to know anything, it’s that even high-fliers like Epstein and his associate Jean-Luc Brunel can wind up dead in a jail cell if they become a liability.

It’s become a cliché to reference Eyes Wide Shut in the context of Epstein, but the official story around him really does share the dreamlike and dangerous tone of that movie. “Life goes on, it always does. Until it doesn’t. But you know that, don’t you?”