Episode 87: The Epstein Files with Patrick Blanchfield

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Laura Donnegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrian, today we are joined by somebody I admire so much, Mr.

Patrick Blanchfield of our great sister show, Ordinary Unhappiness, the psychoanalysis podcast that has like totally changed the way I see the world.

Patrick, thank you so much for being here.

Oh, it's delightful to be here, and the feelings of affection are very mutual.

I've been looking forward to doing something like this for a long time.

The occasion notwithstanding, I mean, I'm always happy to talk to Epstein.

It's wonderful to spend time with you both.

I know.

It is kind of embarrassing because I did send Patrick this email that I was like, hey, you know what made me think of you?

Which is like the renewal of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, which is such a rich and fraught text and also something that revolves around, you know, violence against children, of which, you know, Patrick is, I think, one of our strongest and most compelling thinkers.

But I do think that is probably a good moment for us to pause and note that this is going to be kind of a heavy episode.

This is the kind of thing that we should probably provide a content note for because we are talking a lot about sexual violence, particularly by adult men against teenage girls and the various ways that fears about pedophilia, as well as actually existing pedophilia, are weaponized.

So it's going to be a rough one.

Yeah, we should say that we've talked about much more anodyne topics for your potential debut on Embed with the Right, and I'm sorry that this had to be it.

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?

I feel like a lot of people have said to me, like, wow, I didn't have this on my bingo card for 2025.

I didn't think this was going to come back.

And I was like, well, who's an expert for things coming back that you didn't expect to come back, but a trained psychoanalyst?

It's like, I don't know, doctor, I keep blurting out this word for no reason.

It's like, well, I think you might want to talk to a psychoanalyst.

And so it seems like it's the time for all of us to go on the couch.

And to sort of, as Mora is saying, like, figure out what this says about kind of masculinity politics on the right, but also what its its return says about how it was metabolized the first time around, how it wasn't metabolized, and

what in a moment in which the president appears to be granted with greater or greater impunity on all levels, suddenly this is weird little thing from his distant past that reaches out, which really does feel like...

you know, a Freud case study of maybe the least deep man ever to walk this planet.

I'm so glad that you're saying all this.

And I'm particularly grateful to be talking with you both about this because I've learned so much from you both about sort of the, let's call it like the libidinal economy of the right, but like the way in which like it's never just about propositional discourse when people on the right say things.

I 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.

So I'm really glad to be talking with you all about that.

The 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.

And 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?

There's something so over the top, so like vulgarly Freudian about it all.

And I think another corollary to that is that part of the way that I've been able to take some degree of sanity from, or at least 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, even as we are talking about things that are absolutely horrible.

And I'm not in any way trying to gainsay that.

And

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.

And 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 centuries, loneliness.

And

thus does he end?

And,

you know, and I'm here, I'm actually literally saying something that they said on NPR right after Jeffrey Steveno's demise.

But if you or someone else you know is considering,

well, find yourself in prison because of your involvement in what may be one of the

most sordid tales of money laundering and sex trafficking and arms dealing and whatever else in human history and are feeling some degree of pressure to possibly consider radical solutions to that, please, you know, you're valid, you're made of stars, and if someone you know is like this too, you should also reach out to them because we got it, you know, we're all in this together.

And even if you own an island, no single human being is just one.

So yeah, it's true.

I mean, the Jude de Ray is really the first victim of cancel culture, if you think about it.

Also, Little Lady Decoded.

I think we can give that to Jeffrey.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so.

Sorry, just so much.

Just this entire situation.

No, 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.

But let's just dive in

in case you were 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.

He died by suicide in prison in 2019 after being arrested in highly publicized sex trafficking charges.

And like Patrick said, the more you talk about this stuff, the more you start to seem insane.

Or if you're trying to like downplay

conspiracy theorizing about Epstein, you can sound like a real asshole, right?

Because there are some things about the Epstein case that are sincerely like quite weird, right?

Like for one thing, he was a lot richer or appeared to be much richer than similarly situated financial industry type of guys are.

And for another thing, he got a real sweetheart plea deal in 2006, the first time he was busted for these sex crimes.

And 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, right?

So, you know, you're talking about over-determined sort of conspiracy catnip on top of these very fishy circumstances.

There are the combination of the sexual nature of Epstein's crimes, the conspicuousness and sort of like indeterminate provenance of his wealth.

And 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?

So 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 like populist, anti-establishment strains of right-wing thought that are very, very suspicious of the elites.

Can I just offer something in supplement to that?

And due 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 really 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, but now I feel like that also, like the repressed is returning, at least on my own agenda.

But that entails a lot of research and reading some of these sort of documents.

And 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.

Well, all these accusations or this kind of labeling.

Well, just think about this as necessarily conspiratorial or you yourself 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.

I 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.

And 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.

And there's some very weird things that he said he was doing that.

still don't quite make sense.

The amount of money that he had has not been accounted for, like how he actually got that much is not accounted for at all.

And the case of his relationship with this incredibly sketchy, kind of deeply dark, horrifying monster billionaire is a case in point.

I mean, Les Wexner dropped like $14 million in the late 80s to buy him a house on the Upper East Side.

It's a full brownstone on 79th Street by Fifth Avenue.

Yeah, it's a really nice building.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

And then he spends the equivalent amount stocking it with art.

Maybe Epstein kind of pays him back for less than the purchase price, but the nature of this, you know, Epstein is simply his financial advisor.

Wexner gives him power of attorney

over and against wishes of his family and other people in his business.

And that's a position he held from the 90s until like, I think the late 2000s.

And again, like, I don't think there's anything conspiratorial or necessarily feverish to be like, well, under capitalism, people generally do things in exchange for goods and services.

And the idea that this guy whose like biggest quant credential was teaching at a high-end New York City prep school somehow is getting tens of millions of dollars in goods and services from Wes Wexner.

You're like, what the fuck is.

Yeah, the Victoria's Secret Guy.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of shit like that, right?

It's like, why does he have a plane?

Why does he have an island?

How did all of this accrue?

And the speculation, which is not substantiated, but I think you're right, Patrick, is almost begged by the circumstantial evidence that arose around Epstein is that he was,

you know, a procurer of sexual access to underage girls and or was dealing in blackmail among these rich people in order to, you know, secure continued funding for his incredibly lavish lifestyle and also for his like weird

projects.

Like, he had a pronatalist agenda about like his own DNA, which I think kind of got flash in the pan attention and then like fell by the wayside.

But he wanted to like seed his own DNA through the population because, of course, he thought he was genetically superior.

You know, all this like kind of weird, like the darkness of the narcissistic rich guy was sort of taken to a maximalist position in Epstein and everything that you sort of suspect in your most cynical moments that the rich are doing for the sake of their gratification unmoored by principle is something that like at least somebody has said that he's doing you know that that it seems somewhat plausible if not outright documented to think that that Epstein was doing and I think part of the deal with his with the initial prosecutions or his ability to not face the consequences until I guess he eventually did and people can go to the Times or other sources for this but persistent reports from within prosecutorial and other administration officials being like, well, he's protected by intelligence, right?

And again, this is not necessarily, I 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?

Much, I don't even know what the hell happened in this cell, right, in the last minutes of his life, but 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 famous arms dealers, but also Stephen Hawking and all he's endowing reason, like the overlapping intersection of like philanthropy, this revolving door of politicians, monarchy, and the rest, like it all seems to be,

he's a nexus for this.

And 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 a level of like Gingas Khan or something, right?

Truly epic stats there.

But he's also clearly symptomatic of something, right?

Or at least becomes a signifier for something, or 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.

The other way that he sort of is an odd signifier is that we sort of know the type, right?

Outer borough kid kind of becomes part, it seems, of the upper crust really by teaching it at the Dalton School.

Dalton, where so many of these terrible right-wing sexuality stories originate.

Like Dalton, a dark place.

That's right.

Sorry if anybody went to Dalton.

Yeah, I have friends who teach there, so I will find my comments.

But my point is, this is the kind of guy that these people use and then discard.

And for a long, long, long, long time, they seem to have used him, but not discarded him.

And that's sort of maybe the Marxist way of telling, like, that's odd, right?

We know this type of person.

They're lifted up by these rich people because these rich people need something from them.

And I think we're all saying we have a pretty good sense of what that might have been.

And 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.

And that didn't happen here.

That is interesting.

So 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 purian interest in his underlying conduct, right?

So 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 Jeoprey Epstein, right?

And 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.

It 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?

It was something that JD Vance has said that he wanted to do, right?

And 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?

Maura, can 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.

Like this, there's, as 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.

But this kind of fetish of the Epstein file It was a FOP to QAnon, basically, right?

Because it does seem to be a real live QAnon story.

And very clearly, they used it in a way to indicate that there was going to be mostly Democrats named in those, which is, of course, let's say the working theory of people who show up at, you know, pizza joints with sort of shotguns.

Is that true?

That basically this was a way to do a more genteel QAnon.

Yeah, it's been called the thinking man's QAnon.

Oh, why, thank you.

You 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

something like almost empirically provable, right?

And there was this fantasy specifically of an Epstein list.

And this is like kind of a weird little imaginary artifact, right?

Because 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, and also that he was writing down the names of everybody who was, you know, like taking notes on a criminal conspiracy.

But 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.

And 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?

Which, to be fair, I know because

it's not clear that this document exists, right?

But its psychic power is extremely strong.

That's so on point.

And I think it, it really is worth, I think, both pushing on this idea that there is one specific thing which contains everything, right?

That there's like some master signifier, I don't know, like some Dan Brown like novel.

Like this is the key that unlocks all the other kind of wheels within wheels of some Rube Goldberg, you know, conspiracy type situation.

And it's, on the one hand, involves a certain relation to things that have or haven't come out, right?

Like there is the famous black book, which is, you know, his butler made available before his untimely death.

And you can find PDFs of online.

You can, you know, look up your favorite characters from the broader Epstein universe and call them by their phone numbers, right?

And, you know, clearly, again, some people are listed in there more than once.

Epstein apparently a voracious collector of people's phone numbers.

But 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.

But like if you're in there more than once, there's probably something going on, right?

Or at least you might think that there's something going on.

But like, so that's one list, then there is the stuff that was or wasn't collected during the Florida prosecutions, right?

Then there's the stuff that may or may not have been accumulated under successive presidencies, including Donald Trump's, because he was absolutely president when Epstein met his end.

And also this thing that was hyped by so many people in the Trump world and then Pambandi initiated a release of earlier the year, in this year, which was like, quote unquote, the Epstein files or like the first tranche or installment, I think she called it, of the Epstein files, which was.

you know, exemplarily, quote unquote, a nothing burger.

But they had right-wing influencers at the White House to sort of celebrate this.

Holding binders that say Epstein files on them, which is like something that, you know, those guys wanted so badly to do it.

And then it it was just, you know, redacted documents that had been previously released, right?

And

it looked bad.

My thoughts was later saying, I have them on my desk, right?

I have these files on my desk.

I think she told Tucker or some other person like this.

And 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?

This 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.

He's got like a cool S.

And then he's like, this is what I saw Ehud Barak do, right?

And this is how Tony Blair likes it.

And 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 the fucking sort of Philistine he was, I don't think he was quite that stupid.

Or if there is such a thing, I don't think it survived any of the numerous evidence halls and captures thereof.

But that almost doesn't matter.

I should give credit where credit is due on this.

I 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.

I think Brayson Lizatruna has done a very good job in particularly sort of disambiguating between that, but also in tracking kind of these other networks.

And I think that the Acosta connection is so key here.

It's also worth saying that, and again, this gets this gap between what we do know or don't know, right?

Epstein ran a modeling business with his brother, right?

And 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.

And Steve Mnuchin of Trump V1 may or may not have been involved.

Like there's an overwhelming set of over-determined significances or suggestions of significance, which have become packaged for better or worse in this idea of a document or of a single revelation that, well, if that gets out, if we have that, then something, some sort of narrative entailment.

And I think that expectation is the thing that's the most interesting, even to broke.

What 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 because this does feel like a kind of repetition compulsion, right?

So the Epstein files are the

same nothing burger as the Twitter files after Elon Musk took over Twitter, right?

Like it was this supposed to kind of vindicate and vitiate these right-wing grievances in a way that like no object ever could, but there too they were like posing with like, papers, we have papers.

It's like, oh my God, like, this is like, that's your blankie, isn't it?

Right.

But it is this kind of comfort thing.

And then, I mean, we're going to talk about how pedophilia gets used and operationalized in this discourse.

But 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.

For me, this is such an important moment that I think people kind of forgot mostly about the Tam Luang cave rescue and Elon Musk's bizarre role in it.

For people who are not as obsessively into the right-wing fever swamps of Silicon Valley, right?

This is the Thai school children who get stranded in a cave.

There's a beautiful movie about it, I think by Ron Howard, weirdly enough.

And what happens is Elon Musk sort of steps in and wants to like make a robot.

And he's going to make a robot that's going to save these kids.

And then a bunch of experts show up, like the international cave divers who are like these daring dude, Australian dudes, who are just going to like, yeah, we're going to, we know how to do this, don't worry.

And the Thai Navy, who's like, oh, we have people trained for this.

And Elon Musk does not take it well that people don't want his dumbass robot.

And what does he famously do?

There's a British cave diver that like says like, well, I know these caves well.

I'll go in.

He's like, oh, it's a white guy living in Thailand, obviously.

And then he calls him pedo guy, right?

Like, and so like the moment he is sort of faced with like structures of expertise, institution,

and like

the state in some way, because it is the Thai Navy that's involved, right?

And coordinating all that stuff and like local responders.

He reaches for this word and it seems to him to just mean not legitimate, right?

It seems to mean like cabal, you know, who knows, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, he might have reached for a different kind of image.

And in fact, he has repeatedly also reached for different images, such as the Hitler salute.

But it has that kind of thing.

Like you're alleging conspiratorial dimension to something without ever having to say it, while making it just about kind of perversion.

That strikes me as also so important.

It 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.

But they've kind of forgotten that the word also has content and that there are people like Jeffrey Epstein out there for whom that label applies in a non-metaphoric way.

And there's this really interesting way where like their language game kind of catches up with them.

They're like, oh, no, oh, literally, oh, okay, interesting, right?

They were all participating in these kinds of fetish games, right?

They were like, the files, you have to release the file, right?

But it was all just saying, we don't trust experts, we don't trust the institution, we don't trust the government.

And now suddenly, he's like, oh, shit, you're actually going to give us information.

Well, that's, I hadn't planned on that.

Didn't know that was going to happen.

Yeah, 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.

Yeah.

And specifically, he is the guy who, you know, vindicates the innocent and the downtrodden against the nefarious, the elite, the expert class.

You 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?

He is supposed to vindicate vindicate that by like literalizing the thing to which those grievances have been sublimated into, right?

Which is like a fantasy of pedophilia.

It'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.

Like 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 plei deal prosecutor, a place in his cabinet?

And 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?

He was like secretly trying to draw our attention to it by giving this man more material power you know like um like it's just not how that guy works yeah i'm trying to imagine trump using a metaphor but we've got the most beautiful metaphors folks i just i love his idea too that like he's he's he's appointing a costa to like raise awareness right like this 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 like is because actually i was going to expose him 40 years from like

and i mean we could ask like what's the signal sense by him taking these these photos with Ivanka in his lap, right?

Or saying the things that he's on the record saying about it.

And just to kind of pull back for one second, and I think this is, I want to mirror back to you something you both have said in different ways.

There seems to be some sort of complicated set of collective expectations or like meta-narrative scripts about how or what this stuff knowledge is and how it's supposed to come out, right?

And this kind of sense that on the one hand, knowledge is this sort of abstract thing, but also it's like always knowledge on people.

It's very paranoic in this way.

Right.

And that it takes someone like Trump, who is, as you said, an outsider, who is sort of transgressive, who's plain speaking, who calls things what they are, that he will, by dint of sheer singular personality and the fact that he is so vulgar, actually be our vulgar sort of savior in this way.

And that once he gets into this position, he will simply reveal, right?

This is almost messianic kind of expectation that he's just going to do the revelation.

He's going to clean house.

It's going to be, you know, like day of the rope.

We're going to get the list.

Turns out Tom Hanks is on it.

We're going to hang them all in the town square, right?

This is like one QAnon variation of this, right?

It's so contrary to the obvious character of his type, but again, it also bespeaks this kind of belief that if only the truth comes out, then consequences.

Yeah.

Right.

It'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, but it also, I feel, has some mirrorings too in other ways that people have been thinking about the Trump phenomena, right?

If only this latest Russiagate hearing, right?

If only we confront people with the truth of what a piece of shit this guy is, if only, you know, people who are suffering from his policy decisions vis-a-vis healthcare 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.

They'll vote the way we want them to.

There'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, again, it is an erotics, right?

Of like fulfillment, expectation, right?

This incredible letdown.

Like Trump, you're supposed to take us to Carcosa.

Yeah.

It's like thinking about like True Detective again or something.

We're supposed to get to the final episode and be like, okay, finally, the bad guys, we're going to see them all get dealt with.

Yeah.

And, you know, if anything, like one thing that's happening right now is people like, oh, wow, actually, no, Donald Trump is just a rich person, too.

Right.

He's always been this.

Though, I mean, who knows what happened?

Again, I don't want to impose a metadata expectation there, too, about what necessarily is going to happen to him and the supporters, but we can get to that.

On the one hand, I think exactly this idea that like there's going to be a release through the release of information is so key here.

And it's oddly enough something that Democrats seem to be thinking about too.

It's like, oh, if only we could prove that Donald Trump sexually assaulted a woman.

It's like he admitted to sexually assaulting multiple women and did jack and shit.

So not sure why we're holding so much hope for this.

This idea that like, yeah, that the release of information will almost in the way that a Hollywood movie that kind of has to just is running out the clock and has to kind of wrap things up.

It's like, and then they all get arrested because of the revelations, you know?

But there is no theory of the case as to how that would possibly work.

The other thing I want to point out is that as the local moral panic guy, you said, like, the idea seems to be Donald Trump gets in power and uses that power to wait for it, raise awareness, right?

Which is like, that is the currency of the moral panic because the people who stoke the moral panic tend to pretend that they're not in power, right?

They're like, I'm just raising awareness.

Like, well, I mean, you're a sheriff.

Are you arresting people?

It's like, oh, I'm just raising awareness about this, right?

And I think revelation is part of that, right?

It's the currency of the moral panic.

But of course, Donald Trump is an increasingly imperial president, meaning he doesn't have to reveal shit.

You can 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 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 sort of can't grapple with the consequences of their own action.

Like, 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.

Yeah, 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 because 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?

What 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.

Yeah.

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.

I mean, you're the historian of Me Too.

Doesn't that kind of sound like a bizarre world version of Me Too, where it's like, oh, we found out that Harvey Weinstein was a serial rapist?

Like, no, there were jokes about that made at the red carpet at the Oscars.

Like, we were re-encountering that information.

That's true.

But the revelation part of Me Too, I think, has sometimes been overstated.

It really was often a re-encounter with the obvious.

It's like, well, yeah, he said it.

They all said it.

He got accused.

You all looked away.

Right.

So is this a remedialization of Me Too yet again?

I mean, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Louis C.K., R.

Kelly, like all of these guys who were quote-unquote Me Tooed had in fact been exposed and in some cases, like sued and or prosecuted for sexual misconduct in the past.

It 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.

And I think there's something of the hope, at least on the left, that that's what's happening with Donald Trump now.

Like Donald Trump, who nobody is confused about being a sexual predator, right?

More 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.

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.

There'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?

He's like, no, no, you don't have to, like those guys are corrupt.

They're dirty.

They look down on you.

They're snobby.

They've got blue hair or whatever it is.

They're pedo guys.

And like you don't have to accept their version of reality anymore, which is of course like an epistemic collapse that has been facilitated by the internet.

Right.

And he like clearly sort of thought that he could just put himself in that place, like rev up the Epstein thing thing when it served him during the 2024 election and now try and pour water on it, that it's like threatening to embarrass him, right?

And I think he's finding instead that that demand for like narrative resolution and the sort of indifference to like authoritative arbiters of reality is not actually his to command, right?

There's something very satisfying about it.

It's like, okay, your chicken came home to roost, right?

You ushered in this epistemic collapse, and now it's turned out to be much more unwieldy and much less like moldable to your own ends than you had assumed.

And I think part of the like liberal Schadenfreude about like Trump's Epstein scandal and its uncommon refusal to just like go away is this almost relief that the collapse of reality has finally not redounded to his benefit, like for once.

Yeah.

That absolutely tracks, I think.

And it makes me wonder, and I don't have an answer to this.

I'm actually curious what you both think, that it's like, perhaps the issue is that Trump gets to be the reality arbiter on everything except for this one thing.

I think it's a tight little zeigbar analysis connection we have to unpack.

But there's something about

pedophilia and the abuse of children on the gargantuan Jilda Race scale as the stand-in for like the ultimate secret behind the world.

That's the one thing Trump can't be like, oh, it's a hoax now.

That's somehow the one point at which maybe it's because people were on it for the ride going in.

They were so eroticized by it.

They were so curious by it.

They've been eating up all this sound of freedom coded media stuff that somehow when he says, no, no, no, that's not what's happening here, that that's somehow, because it was the engine of the thing or it was the exception that proved the rule, he can't do that.

I wonder if that's part of it.

By the same token, though, I keep thinking about how, and Andrea, I think of some of the things that you said about this, like.

From a certain sort of social psychology perspective, right, a social problem is only a social problem when it gets called a social problem.

Yeah.

Right.

And that's a dynamic, ongoing process, which is not to say like objectively that this isn't an evil thing that's happening, right?

But the problem of all these elite men, you know, Luis E.K.,

Cosby, all these fuckers, right?

The 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, okay, yes, this is, we're finally going to put a name on this, we're going to act on this in certain ways, we're going to levy certain expectations on these individuals, but also on shifts and broad, you know, media coverage and legal authority.

And there's something about this that, you know, who knows how it's going to go, but like we're seeing different quarters be 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 er social problem.

And we need it to be worked through.

And 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 the terms of reality, but also of like the desire for closure, the desire to get to see accountability happen, right?

Whatever the fuck that means.

They want to see it.

And we know that this isn't it.

And that, in other words, I think maps on like the collective social body to these different kind of

structures of knowing, right?

And 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.

But like people kind of know, but they don't want to know.

Or we all knew, but we didn't integrate that knowledge into other things.

In other words, like that reality itself is marked by these weird disjunctions and it's ongoingly contested.

Yeah, 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.

It's that like it hadn't really occurred to them to object until there was this other like change in social conditions and 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 who it should be said have been like objecting like fairly, fairly consistently, just, you know, without much effect.

That is a really interesting process.

And I just, 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.

Well, 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?

I mean, there's the woo anon to QAnon pipeline.

There's all this stuff where, you know, people could start with seemingly good-hearted and obvious kind of things like children should not be trafficked.

It's like, well, yeah, that does seem like a thing that we all can agree on.

And then, you know, three clicks later, you're in some insane QAnon conspiracy video.

And I know that a lot of sort of disinformation and misinformation researchers have been like tearing their hair out over that, being like, it's so easy to onboard this.

I'm wondering what we're seeing now is the boomerang effect of that, which is that there are people who genuinely came to these batshit, insane opinions from very understandable and very

deeply felt reasons and who are not quite as ready to let go of them as Donald Trump and his fellow grifters, right?

This is about a process by which, you know, sexual violence became abstracted into a rhetorical container, but it was so attractive because it was about genuine grievances, right?

It was about a real sense that something was wrong in the world.

And you don't get to flip that switch just off, I think they're finding now.

Like you've onboarded people using this very highly moral language and now you're abandoning it because it's no longer convenient to you.

It's like, well, you might have dragged in some true believers there, my friend, and they might be upset about people doing this not as an abstracted container but as the actual act and whoops yeah

the two things that leap out to me are one

if i were donald trump right i'd be terrified right now not necessarily about actual institutional accountability because maybe what the real principle here is that particularly when it comes to abuse of women and girls you know and young children in general like you can't accountability is is is antithetical like that and we can argue maybe there's been a bad bipartisan consensus about that for a long time there's a collective structural investment in protecting certain people or even the principle over and against individual people, right?

But all the same, there are a lot of fucking crazy people in this country with a lot of fucking guns.

And I would be scared about the possibility that people might become

the moral crusader or the moral vigilante, right?

And do something other than raising awareness, right?

By the same token, though, and this is the second thing, and I think this speaks to like what you're both are saying about like the power of packaging or of like this kind of stringing people along with the clues.

i have to marvel at the fact that they didn't do that this time like why the fuck not do another press conference in which they had all the dime a dozen halfpint right-wing influencers get a giant binder of paper and be like look right these are the epstein files and maybe they have chatbot gpt do it maybe they just put together stuff that's completely bullshit maybe they recycle stuff again but like there could have been some opportunity here to just you know, help, we've been primed for so many years to worry about deep fakes and about the capacity of AI to generate pseudo-realities.

why not just actually lead into that?

And the fact that Trump didn't, I think this speaks directly to the question that I think you're very rightly posing, Moira, is like, did he think that on this thing it would be more expeditious or he was so incredibly lazy that he'd be like, no, no, no, we're just going to not pay attention to this stuff anymore.

We're going to move on.

Or was it this kind of, and this might be the first time he's actually done something that feels like symptomatically legible.

Maybe he actually does worry about the stuff that's in these documents.

Not that there's a list that has him on it, but maybe he actually on some level is concerned about what might come out via Bondi Bondi and otherwise.

I'm interested in your point, Patrick, that like

this

fantasy of pedophilia, as distinct from like actually existing pedophilia as a series of violent actions carried out on the bodies of real people, but like the fantasy of pedophilia is very, very potent for energizing people and moving them

to like drastic action, right?

Like it is kind of shocking to me that like more people have not tried to shoot at Donald Trump.

Like a shockingly low number of people have tried to shoot at Donald Trump when you consider how many guns there are around.

This is not an instruction, it's an observation.

But I wanted to get you to tease out for us a little, because I think you think about this so beautifully, the role of like fantasies of violence against children in motivating violence, right?

Like, I think this is like very potent in

right-wing like sort of social media conspiracy theorizing from Epstein to QAnon to Pizzagate.

Or the Scrametti decision.

Yeah, you know, but like there is a thread that I can't quite follow, but I think you can, that takes us all the way back to like medieval blood libel,

even further back than, you know, like late 80s satanic panic.

Like, what is it about the fantasy of violence against children that motivates this kind of intense response?

And why is that so distinct from the responses to actual violence?

against children.

Thanks for asking.

I appreciate the kind words.

I can think of a bunch of things.

And I think in order to do this, we have to kind of describe how other people think or like paraphrase certain like normative logics without endorsing them as being like good moral logics.

But like we're trying to describe processes of norming and rather than ratify them as being righteous.

But it does seem like offhand, like we could say, like there's a whole social psychology, you know, sociological angle for this that would point back to, you know, the idea of like folk temples or moral panics, which are quintessentially targeting the supposedly innocent, above all, in a Judeo-Christian framework, but specifically a Christian framework.

These are these children, they're exemplarily, you know, like unformed and vulnerable, and they are charged and all this shit.

And somehow that's the ultimate sign of like a cosmological battle, right?

And this is, I get one sort of 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.

And 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.

And of course, our kids first and foremost.

And I think that's another kind of rider to put in here.

It's always

us as children, hypothetically, or the kids who look like us or the kids within the social unit.

Our views vis-a-vis other children may be rather more contradictory.

I think that's one framework.

Right.

And I think we could probably even think that other frameworks for either moral panics or for mass hysterias, depending on your language, would be partaking of that kind of cosmological good versus evil kind of there are irreconcilably evil people out there, there are irreconcilably good people out there, and they need to be vindicated through our actions.

Other discourses are 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 modern framework for this, which would pathologize or at least create categories.

Again, I'm not saying that harm doesn't happen.

I'm saying that 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 you mean?

You're supposed to not spare the rod, right?

The idea here is child abuse as a category emerges, you know, for legal and popular moral purposes through processes of deliberation, right?

But that even those pathological models where we have a figure like the supposedly unredeemable, prone to pathological recidivism child abuser is, that's also a demonic figure in some ways, right?

These older frameworks don't really go away.

And there's, of course, other sort of theological notions about this that we could unpack.

And 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.

And so the Christian, let's call it appropriation of the blood libel as 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.

So it does run sort of eternally.

And I think, you know, I don't want to fall back on like naive evolutionary psych to be like, well, it's our kids.

You're right.

It's the little us.

It's our sort of logics of, you know, individual immortality being harmed.

And that's, I think, is there.

But 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 like what we might call like, you know, racial capitalism, but also like 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?

I mean, the stats about child mortality are what they are.

We, you know, can watch, whether we like it or not, children being incinerated in Gaza.

We have these, hell, even Trump appealed to this as a sort of like, be clearly how desperate he was to like all those kids, all those young girls drowning in Texas, right?

Where you could almost smell the fear coming off him where people are like, where he's like, what you're still asking about, Epstein after that thing in Texas, even as he's stumbling to name it, he's like clearly being like, look at these kids.

And of course, he doesn't want to follow that due as a consequence either.

Or hell, even like this stuff that we know must be happening in this ICE CBP stuff, right?

I 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.

And we also know that capitalist or otherwise, whether you have like a chattel slavery system or, you know, a debt PNH system, whatever the fuck you want to call it, one way that elites have historically bonded is through the abuse and trafficking of women and children, right?

And yet, somehow the actual ramifications of that in terms of how we might intervene at the place where where like the most abuse of children actually does happen, like the home, right?

The people who are most likely to abuse children, namely relatives, like all these types of things are, that's too much of a lift.

Or rather, that might seem to, I just, again, I'm just thinking aloud here, and I'm not saying like this is how it should be, but that that's somehow, that's a revelation of horror in the quittidian, which would require some sort of work of collective and individual transformation and, you know, consciousness raising, but also, again, accountability that is

either non-negotiable for the system of capitalism and patriarchy as we have it currently configured, or just too much to tolerate as even like an ask, like psychically.

And thus, we would much rather have a revelation we can witness.

Again, we get to consume this, too.

And I think that's another thing.

We get to see Donald Trump, you know, I don't know, like sentence Tom Hanks to death for being part of the Hollywood star whackers.

I'm not sure why I think Tom Hanks is involved in this, but I'm going to keep going for him because he's too nice.

He is.

He's a QAnon character.

I learned from Moira because of COVID.

He got COVID, poor guy.

And so obviously part of the ring.

Oh, that's right.

He got COVID in Australia.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he was like the first celebrity COVID case.

Yeah.

That made him part of it.

I mean, it's an interesting dynamic.

I'd never thought about this this way, Patrick, but like there's a kind of imminence versus transcendence here.

Part 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?

But 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.

Well, 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?

Like I told my mom about what my dad was doing and she took his side.

But when we tell the world about what Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton and the pedophile elites are doing, finally there will be justice, right?

It's a displacement.

Well, and that's what I mean by transcendence, right?

The other choice you have is to move something into that transcendent realm.

And like you look away from Uncle So-and-so and you talk about the man in the white van.

You talk about the groomers.

You talk about...

Clinton and Epstein or something like that, right?

Like it's a way of externalizing all that, rendering it 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.

Right.

Like this 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.

Yeah.

And it's almost like if we can't fix this,

right?

Then what the fuck is the sociist good for?

And I'm thinking here of a connection to the work, two things actually.

The first, the connection to the work of Paul Amar, right, the security studies scholar, and who's written a lovely book called The Security Archipelago.

I want to plug that for people.

And 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.

Brazil is the most approximately useful for our purposes, where essentially you have the police above all, because they're the remaining branch of the state that exists in these austerity circumstances, like where the repressive apparatus is facing legitimacy crisis.

They will

benefit from and be dynamically related to like grassroots movements of moral renewal, but that are all about an outsider threat of all to the family and to children, right?

And the example Amar takes through in his Brazil case study is of these police in Rio and elsewhere are doing death squad shit and flavels, but 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 the World Cup or the carnival or whatever.

And of course, what this then produces is a doubling down on the security state, a sort of like vision, like, well, the only people who can protect the family are these people, namely the police and our sort of like assistance to them.

And then what that actually, you know, structurally speaking is more abuse

by the police specifically, right?

So there's a whole sort of account for that that I think we could probe there.

But 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?

Again, it's, it's hard to subject the rhetoric of belief in our contemporary moment to a critical consciousness, but like think about like, you know, like the rhetoric, like, we believe in science or in this house, we believe in this, but also like, you know, you have to believe women.

And I think we should, right?

But if part of how our institutions work is that belief doesn't fucking matter, right?

I think about the Diddy trial here.

Like, I don't disbelieve those women.

Many of the jurors did believe in those women.

And yet.

The dark thing is, what if we do believe in them?

And even so, right?

And there's testimony from the Epstein victim, people who were trafficked by him who were like, I couldn't believe this was happening.

Even 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 or disassociate, 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, and 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.

That 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.

And please, I'm not in any way gainsaying the specificity of the harm of sexual abuse or sexual violence, right?

But 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 a discursive, but also like political mode of like reality maintenance, where it's like, well, no, of course, what Jeffrey Epstein did was really terrible, but school lunch debt for kids, like that, whatever.

You know, like that's just, that's one way they're going to learn some lessons, right?

Or kids in cages, really bad when this is happening 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.

Right.

Right.

And 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 Paris Priest, right?

Or it's someone else we know, or it could even be me under some circumstances.

Like this kind of like that type of thinking.

On 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.

And again, I'm not counseling despair here, but that 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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

It'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?

Do we say, oh, this is the system being abused or not working as intended?

Or, like, as you say, like with a child modeling pageant, you're like, I'm sorry, is that not the system as it is intended?

Like, how do we recognize deviance in that?

Or do we just say that the norm is horrifying and is a problem, right?

Right.

This is something that I got into a a light debate with, with like a guy I want to emphasize, I don't think is a bad person, but he was trying to convince me that you actually can't call what Jeffrey Epstein did pathological

because

within the normative spectrum of male heterosexuality,

attraction and or pursuit of underage girls is actually the norm, right?

And, you know, every woman you know spent her adolescence resisting rape,

sometimes as acute horror and sometimes as, you know, low-level nuisance.

But the other dark side of Epstein's narrative power and his command over the imagination is not just moral horror, but actually like, you know, kind of disavowed envy, right?

Yeah.

There's an offense not just that this is happening, but that somebody else is allowed to get away with it.

You know, one of the grievances expressed in the Epstein controversy is that there's a perception that elite men have a permission that non-elite men do not have but would use, right?

There's the other reason this can't - you know, one of many reasons why the Epstein scandal is actually a very bad vehicle, I think, for trying to repoliticize sexual abuse in a me-too kind of way is

because what he is doing is so normalized for everything except like the scale and the money and the avowedness, but sort of like more benign versions of the same thing, in fact, do exist everywhere.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's so telling, right?

Like, 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 epibophilia, really, right?

And knows exactly what the age of consent laws are for a state.

And you're like, and it's become a joke.

It's like, that's the kind of person this is.

And like, I make those jokes and it's like, that's a fucking horrifying.

Like, this is, that's also a form of normalization.

And 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.

Well, I 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.

Because 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?

Because you are forced to reckon with a disjoint between the professed values and the lived values

in a way that is maddening, right?

And 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.

Yeah, 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 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 or 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 and care and maybe even accountability from those others, right?

And, you know, confusions between those, I think, abound, but that set of expectations is is not in and of itself in any way wrong.

And get it every term we see nothing, get it, right?

Or we get these kind of bizarre fantasies, which again, I think are not contemptible in their own right, but like, I would love to see justice done around me.

Right.

I would love to know that like I could go to my grave being like, okay,

Tony Blair is in prison.

I don't know.

Like we could, we could, we get to see this kind of, again, it's, it's, this is a higher thing of like Tertullian or some church father where like you go in heaven and part of the joy is that that you get to see the people in hell who belong there.

Like you look out your window, right?

Don't even care what it's for.

Just as long as Tony's in the bad place.

Yeah, fuck him.

But it's so hard to be like, oh, we don't necessarily get to have that,

right?

And I don't mean that just in the sense that like these institutions are fucked and misbegotten and that they couldn't get better or be revolutionarily overthrown.

But like on some existential level, like we're not going to get the satisfaction we want.

Or at least it's hard to envision and maybe structurally impossible to imagine what like care and being put back together again and feeling healed would look like where that might be as total and redemptive an experience as the harm was undoing and objectifying and destructive.

And I don't, that's a fundamental mismatch.

Again, like existentially, I think, but clearly what we're dealing with here too is a whole set of systems that impose these disavowals of harm that, I mean, I'll have to listen to Trump, like he's the biggest victim of the Epstein situation, right?

Or that are these kind of perverse, morbid symptom style transmutations of that energy and then capital, attempting to capitalize on that energy and foment it, but then also to dial it back when it gets too spicy for the people doing it.

It is maddening.

And just to think about the example you gave Mark, which is really, I think, sitting with me, like, what's the point of having a rhetoric of what is pathological or not?

And again, I'm not being normative in my own right, but like just thinking about like the descriptive work of norming that goes into that, right?

What's the point of that if we can't, on the one hand, recognize certain things as being a difference in degree because they're difference in kind, or like, or a difference in kind that becomes a difference in degree, whatever, right?

But also just to like maybe fold that back and ask, well, wow, if Jeffrey Epstein is not pathological, then what's going on with this thing that we call the normal and the non-pathological as perhaps a malignant thing in its own right?

Yeah, I mean, I think we've kind of harped on the repetition thing.

This is blood libel all over again.

It's QAnon all over again.

It's the Twitter files all over again.

It really feels like a repetition compulsion all the way down.

But in some way, that pays its own kind of effective dividends, I think, as you're pointing out, Patrick, which is that it suggests cyclicality and it suggests that really what we're naming are just downstream effects from patriarchy.

And that like, that's going to be with us.

And like our elite men will want to do this and they will be the people enabling this.

A lot of non-elite men also do it and get enabled.

Right.

But I think what the epstein story teaches i guess i'm not i'm not saying like this is not a description of the world i'm saying this is what what it brings forward for people it's like oh this is not going to stop right and like that is a that's a systemic kind of indictment that a lot of people aren't ready for and aren't happy about and uh so i think it's easier to fixate on this one dude and his little black book.

A man, also, we haven't even mentioned that yet, conveniently named Epstein.

I do think if his name was Smith, we'd be having a slightly different conversation.

I'll just say that.

Right.

But it is about the fact that like the systemic dimensions of this, and this may be something that me too really was able to effectuate, that the echoes and the repetitions are registering to people on whatever level of awareness.

And they're having to work far more furiously to displace it is sort of my impression and my suspicion.

That might be a good place for us to wrap up.

Perfect.

Patrick Blanchfield.

Thank you so much.

I always feel like I learn a lot from you.

And you're such a delight to have on the podcast, even when we're talking about this kind of like maximally despairing subject matter.

So I hope we get to have you back again.

And I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in Maine.

Send my love to Abby, please.

I will.

It's so great.

It was so good to be here.

Thank you all for listening to In Bed with the Right.

It's been a pleasure to have you.

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Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

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