Could Jeffrey Epstein Read?

For decades, Epstein controlled the American idea industry. But thinking wasn’t easy for him.

a mental object ie mobject.. action on mental objects.. ?

— Radical Breakthrough, by Jeffrey Epstein

The dreadful and disgraced bank CEO Jes Staley, then at JPMorgan; Lawrence Summers; Jeffrey Epstein; Bill Gates; Boris Nikolic of the Gates Foundation.

On January 18, 2018, at 2:19 p.m., Jeffrey Epstein made a list. It was written on his classiest cotton writing paper, meaning from his usual yahoo dot com address. He called the email “radical breakthrough.” It evidently contained his 25 most brilliant ideas.

The Yahoo address, of course, was the same one Epstein used to conduct his human-trafficking and circle-jerking operations. But this email is different: It’s from Epstein to Epstein. A revealing dialogue of Self and Soul, then.

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The list is, to my mind, the purest example of the bafflegab that passed for thought with Epstein. And not only was this kind of gibberish not dismissed outright as fraudulent garbage, it set the standard for what counted as thought for decades. Members of Epstein’s network didn’t just run America (the leches Trump and Clinton), they ran Harvard (the lech Larry Summers), won Nobel Prizes (the enabler Murray Gell-Man), and placed rightwingers on the Supreme Court (the lech Brett Kavanaugh).

They also spooled out a bleak eugenics program with waystations on elite campuses that they called “evolutionary psychology.” Everything that the manosphere and the disgraced Intellectual Dark Web are now known for—Epstein helped sponsor all of it, at the highest levels. (I wrote about this in “The Origins of the Elite Edgelords.”)

Epstein took the Lolita Express often to the TED conference—in 2002, 2011, and 2013. TED, of course, styles itself as the global mainstage for ideas and even enlightenment. (The New York Times reported on Epstein’s big-daddy role at TED, fawning over how “Jeffrey Epstein, a financial adviser to billionaires, … flew a bunch of Tedsters to Monterey in his Boeing 727, outfitted with mink and sable throws and a high-altitude lunch catered by Le Cirque 2000.”)

But even as Epstein played a genius, he surely knew in his hollow heart what’s clear in his emails: He was profoundly, bottomlessly illiterate. Or maybe, if he’s owed a courtesy, “early in his reading journey.”