ESSAY: My deep dive into the Epstein emails
An essay in The New York Times today
Happy Sunday!
I wanted to share a new piece of writing from me, in today’s New York Times. I spent days reading through the entire mountain of Epstein emails, and I tried to distill what I believe they show: how the elite behaves when no one’s watching.
This is a piece of writing to take your time with when you have a few moments.
Here is the introduction, and then the full piece is up now at The New York Times:
How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails
As journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name of one fawning luminary after another, there is a collective whisper of “How could they?” How could such eminent people, belonging to such prestigious institutions, succumb to this?
A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain.
At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.
The Epstein story is resonating with a broader swath of the public than most stories now do, and some in the establishment worry. When Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, speaksof an “Epstein class,” isn’t that dangerous? Isn’t that class warfare?
But the intuitions of the public are right. People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.
It is no accident that this was the social milieu that took Mr. Epstein in. His reinvention, after he pleaded guilty to prostitution-related charges in Florida in 2008, would never have been possible without this often anti-democratic, self-congratulatory elite, which, even when it didn’t traffic people, took the world for a ride.
The emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.
Read the full essay here at The New York Times.
An insightful and important essay. At issue is what the eminent Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura called "moral disengagement," which explains how people can persuade themselves they're doing good when in fact their conduct is bad or evil. Your essay thoroughly debunks David Brooks's recent NY Times column "The Epstein Scandal? Count Me Out." Brooks claims we have much more important things to talk about than Epstein. But Brooks overlooks the fact that the Epstein Class is a major contributor to the very problems that Brooks says are more important.
This is one of the best pieces ever written by Anand. Clarifies so much about our society and why we feel these impenetrable walls.