Johan Friedrich fecit-my stuff

I have read that the boy in the video for the REM song “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)” is searching through the wreckage of his house after it was destroyed by a tornado.

Over the last two days I have followed live, as they came out, two podcasts of Kyle Kulinski breaking down many of the new files in the last release from Trump’s clown car Department of Justice and it has nearly made my heart die inside me. Now I think I have some idea of what it feels like to stand in the wreckage after a cataclysm.

Kyle is lively, and in his casts he waxed incandescent on the revelations in the files and what they mean. As they say in the proper newspapers, here are some ‘takeaways’ from it all. 

It turns out that:

1. There really was a cabal of billionaires and other rich people who liked to have sex with children and otherwise assault them. These activities were centered on properties owned by Jeffrey Epstein, but also in other places to which he trafficked these child victims.
2. Epstein may have been a Mossad agent and trained by them, although he probably also worked for other intelligence agencies and anyone who would pay him lots of money and give him the opportunity to amass kompromat and make even more money.
3. Also on the Epstein scene were the cool young tech bros, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk (hilariously, panting to take part in “the wildest party” on Jeff’s island) and Peter Thiel. However, the list of billionaires and rich people involved with Epstein covers the whole gamut of industry, commerce, showbiz and mainstream press.
4. The extent of Epstein’s reach was global. There does not seem to be any corner of politics or other field of activity where his writ did not run. He could compromise any prominent person in the world once they fell into his net.

From this Mr Kulinski drew two corollaries: first, that wealth in the billionaire category seems to corrupt some of its possessors beyond any possibility of redemption and second, that all who used it to assault and prey on children and the vulnerable should be brought low and made to face justice. He is right but, can it ever be made to happen?

In the first revelations from the Epstein Estate and the DOJ many of the attention-grabbing items were unsubstantiated allegations to the FBI from victims who hoped that it would investigate them, with lurid and frightening details of what had befallen them. The headline items in the latest release are different: they are mainly emails between Epstein and his wealthy friends in which someone (usually the friend) has been astonishingly and arrogantly candid about something that probably involves a sexual or other serious offence against a child. Certainly, either category of revelation, while proving nothing, often provides the starting point for a successful police investigation.

The emails are unforced errors; these people are not trying to cover anything up. For the smirking Addams family escapee lawyer Todd Blanche to say yesterday in a TV interview that unfortunately, “partying with Mr Epstein isn’t an offence” is the bit that could make your heart die. A few decades ago, any one of these emails would probably have been enough to finish the person involved. They could still be made to do it, but only if there is a fiery zeal on the part of some prosecuting authority to make that happen.

Another – and this broke the heart of Mr Kulinski, to whom he had once been a great hero – was the strange tendresse between Noam Chomsky, once an intellectual ornament of the political and intellectual left, and the foul Mr Epstein. In a longish letter from Noam to Jeff, Noam unburdened himself of a shocking sentiment, strongly held, about the travails awaiting any man daring to counter or deny an allegation of rape by a woman. Strange bedfellows indeed. 

I agree with Kyle: these people must be rooted out and brought down, mainly for what they have done to innocents, but also for the damage they have caused, and continue to cause, to what we used to refer to as the body politic. If we do not do this, there is nothing left of our system of moral philosophy or of any notion of collective honour, in the west.

It is the end of the world as we know it, and I do not feel fine.