For those who cannot or do not wish to read the entire text
More than a rapist of women and young girls and a
serial blackmailer, Jeffrey Epstein was an ideologue of racial superiority.
With his circle of interlocutors, he pursued a lucid eugenicist vision.
Tahar Lamri, Kritica.it, 25/2/2026
Translated by Tlaxcala
This is not just another scandal. The Epstein files –
the thousands of pages of emails, transcripts, and audio recordings released
between late 2025 and February 2026 – tell, yes, of power, money, and sexual
violence. But they also tell, and perhaps first and foremost, of a way of
thinking that circulated among the most celebrated minds of the academic and
political West: a thought about human hierarchy, about the quality of
biological material, about the possibility – indeed, the necessity – of selecting,
controlling, and improving the composition of populations. In a word:
eugenics. Only no one called it that.
The recording of the conversation between Ehud Barak,
former Prime Minister of Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, and former US Treasury
Secretary Larry Summers – three and a half hours, private, apparently from 2015
– has become the gateway into this universe.
The Epstein-Barak Recording: Ethnic Hierarchy in the
Form of Strategy
In the recording with Epstein and Summers, Barak
wastes no time on preliminaries. He speaks of what he calls "Israel’s
long-term demographic challenge," and his reasoning proceeds with the
naturalness of someone expressing opinions they have never had reason to hide.
The starting point is a numerical observation: Israel’s
Arab population has grown from about 16% forty years earlier to the current 20%
(at the time of the conversation). Added to this is the demographic growth of
ultra-Orthodox Jews (haredim), whom Barak considers – with his typical
secular-military frankness – another unproductive burden on the State. The
problem, as he sees it, is one of balance.
His solution is articulated along three axes. First:
selective immigration, particularly of Russian-speaking Jews from Russia.
Second: mass conversion to Judaism, following the dismantling of the Orthodox
rabbinate’s monopoly on conversion procedures. Third: an explicit hierarchy
within Arab-Israeli citizenship: Druze at the top ("totally Israeli in
their behavior"), Arab Christians second ("they have a better
educational system than ours"), Muslims implicitly at the bottom.
But the most revealing passage – the one that has
sparked the greatest scandal – concerns the history of Jewish immigration
itself. Referring to the post-1948 immigration wave from North Africa and the
Arab world, Barak says: "It was a sort of rescue wave from North Africa,
the Arab world, or whatever. They took whatever came; now we can be
selective."
And further: "We can control the quality much
more effectively, much more than the founders of Israel did."
The word quality applied to human specimens.
The term "selective" to describe an immigration policy towards one’s
own co-religionists. These statements have been reported and analyzed by Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera, Times of Israel, and Ynet News. And in the background, the implicit – and historical – assessment of Mizrahi
immigration (Jews from North Africa and the Middle East) as second-class
immigration, accepted out of necessity, not choice.
The Ashkenazi Question: A Foundational Eurocentrism
To understand the weight of such words, one must know
the underlying history. Israel has never been a homogeneous state. Since its
founding in 1948, its political, military, and cultural leadership was almost
entirely Ashkenazi – that is, of Eastern and Central European Jewish origin.
Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Begin, Peres, Rabin, Barak himself, are all part of
that tradition.
This elite carried with them the values, prejudices,
and sense of cultural superiority of Eastern European Jewry. Labor Zionism –
the political movement that built the state’s institutions – was profoundly
Eurocentric: it imagined Israel as a "villa in the jungle," an
outpost of Western civilization in a backward Middle East. The Eastern Jews –
the Mizrahim, the Sephardim from North Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Syria
– were viewed with ambivalence. They were brothers in faith, yes, but bearers
of a culture suspected of backwardness, contiguity with the Arab world, and
inadequacy for the modernist project.
Historical evidence of this discrimination is abundant
and documented. In the 1950s, tens of thousands of Yemenite and North African
children disappeared from Israeli hospitals: they died, the State said, of
illness. Decades later, investigative commissions established that many were
given up for adoption to Ashkenazim without the families’ consent,
within the framework of an ideology that considered Eastern children
"recoverable" only if removed from their culture of origin. It was
one of the most silenced foundational crimes in Israeli history.
The North African immigrants who arrived in the 1950s
were directed to the ma’abarot – transit camps – and then to
"development towns" in the desert peripheries, far from the country’s
center. Segregation was not formal – there was no legal apartheid between Jews
– but it was real, structural, and resulted in decades of political, economic,
and cultural underrepresentation for the Mizrahim.
When Barak says the founders "took whatever
came," he is unconsciously – or consciously – reproducing that same
narrative. Israeli journalist Rogel Alpher in Haaretz captured this with surgical precision: Barak spoke
"as if he were a member of an admissions committee for an Israeli
residential community."
The Idea of Mass Conversion as Ethnic Engineering
Even more elaborate is the proposal for mass
conversion. Barak wants Israel to open its doors to another million
Russian-speaking immigrants – many of whom are not Jewish according to halakha,
religious law – and integrate them through a simplified conversion process,
stripping the Orthodox rabbinate of its veto power.
The idea that a former Prime Minister proposed to
Putin to "send another million Russians" is extraordinary in itself.
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, former Chief Rabbi of Moscow, told the Forward that decades ago he received a similar proposal,
mediated by then-minister Haim Ramon, and rejected it: "Halakha
does not speak in numbers. There is no high number and no low number. Halakha
speaks of standards and conditions." Later, he discovered that the same
idea had been discussed with Epstein.
The most disturbing detail is the reference to the
"young girls" from the first Russian wave of the 1990s, uttered with
Epstein chuckling in the background. In a document concerning a convicted pedocriminal
and a serial trafficker of young women,
that detail is not innocent. It is the moment when the demographic conversation
reveals itself immersed in a context of the commodification of female bodies –
where Russian-speaking women are cited both as an ingredient in the demographic
plan and as an object of desire.
Jeffrey Epstein: The Eugenicist Who Bought Minds
To understand Epstein’s role in all this, one must
free oneself from the image of the simple rich pedocriminal. Epstein was that,
certainly – a serial criminal, a rapist of young girls – but he was also something
else: he was an ideologue. He had a worldview, and he used his money to finance
it, to spread it, and to attract the minds that could give it academic
legitimacy.
His central obsession was eugenics. According to the New York Times, Epstein aimed to "seed the human race"
with his DNA by impregnating women at his New Mexico ranch. He had spoken of
wanting to have his brain and penis frozen upon death, to be brought back to
life in the transhumanist era. He funded the work of George Church, a
Harvard geneticist who was developing an app to match partners based on genetic
compatibility. He discussed with evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists
the possibility of modifying genes responsible for "working memory."
He used the term "genetic altruism" to give a philanthropic veneer to
what was, in fact, classic eugenics.
Edge: The Salon Where Pseudoscience Became Mainstream
The main vector through which Epstein inserted himself
into the intellectual world was Edge, the salon founded by literary agent John
Brockman in the 1990s. As journalist Virginia Heffernan has
reconstructed – who was a member – Edge presented itself as the place where the world’s
brightest minds met to discuss the great questions of the time. Its members
included Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Marvin Minsky, Martin
Nowak, Robert Trivers. But the real host, the one who paid, financed, and
attracted the leading minds to him, was Epstein.
The files reveal emails in which the financier
discusses "racial hierarchy" with scientists in his circle. He
cultivated relationships with figures from the online alternative right. He
discussed the "utility of fascism" with his scientific interlocutors.
The largest investment – $9.1 million between 1998 and
2008, of which $6.5 million in a single tranche in 2003 – went to Harvard’s
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, directed by mathematician-biologist Martin
Nowak. As science historian Naomi Oreskes wrote in Scientific American: "Epstein was a modern-day eugenicist whose
obsession was tied to the delusional fantasy of seeding the human race with his
own DNA. What makes matters worse is that he concentrated his largesse on
research into the genetic basis of human behavior."
Transhumanism as Presentable Eugenics
There is a thread connecting Epstein’s thought to
contemporary Silicon Valley: to Elon Musk, to Peter Thiel, to the fantasies of
"human enhancement" circulating among tech billionaires. That thread
is transhumanism: the idea that technology can and should transcend the
biological limits of man, leading to a new superior species. As in the classic
version of 20th-century eugenics, there is the conviction that some are more
fit for survival and reproduction than others. Only instead of explicit
biological racism, they speak of "genetic optimization," "DNA
editing," or "evolutionary altruism."
The difference from Nazi or American eugenics of the
1930s is merely one of form. The substance is the same: the idea that there are
"higher quality" populations to reproduce and "problematic"
populations to manage, reduce, or exclude. Whether expressed in tech startup
language instead of German does not make it less dangerous.
The Chomsky Case: The Co-opted Dissident
Of all the revelations emerging from the Epstein
files, the one that has hit the intellectual left hardest concerns Noam
Chomsky. The MIT linguist, 97 years old, author of Understanding Power
and Manufacturing Consent, turns out to have had an extensive,
multifaceted relationship with Epstein – and despite denials, it is difficult
to reduce it to a simple misunderstanding. The full dossier has been
reconstructed by World Socialist Web Site, New Statesman, CounterPunch, and The Canary.
The Extent of the Relationship
The released emails and text messages document years
of association. Epstein transferred $270,000 to the accounts of Chomsky or his
family. He offered him the use of his Manhattan apartment. He invited him to
his island. He sent him DNA kits in 2017: a move that fits, as is now clear,
into his obsession with collecting genetic material from prominent intellectual
individuals.
In one of the most troubling exchanges, Epstein pushed
Chomsky on themes of cognitive differences between racial groups and the
possibility of genetic editing. Chomsky’s response was that of a man trying to
resist provocation: he attributed the measured disparities in cognitive tests
to the historical legacy of racism, not biological factors. But then he
conceded the ground Epstein wanted to lead him onto: he said that if genes
could be modified, the priority should be to reduce the "dedicated
ferocity" of those who seek power. Epstein had rebranded the whole thing
"genetic altruism." When in 2016 Epstein sent him a link to the
neo-Nazi podcast The Right Stuff – the same network that would later
actively participate in the 2017 Charlottesville rally – it does not appear
that Chomsky broke off the relationship.
Perhaps the most embarrassing detail concerns 2019:
when the Miami Herald published its investigation into Epstein’s abuses, Chomsky wrote to him advising him to ignore the
accusations, describing the treatment he received as the result of media hysteria.
"The best way to proceed is to ignore it," he wrote. Chomsky
expressed sympathy for Epstein over "the horrible way you are treated by
the press and the public."
Chomsky’s wife, Valeria, has issued a statement admitting "grave errors of judgment":
Epstein allegedly constructed "a manipulative narrative" about his
own innocence that Chomsky, in good faith, believed. But letters like the one
where Valeria described Epstein as "our best friend, I mean the only
one" – or where Noam concluded with "like a true friendship, deep and
sincere and eternal from both of us" – are difficult to reduce to
unilateral manipulation.
How to Explain It?
The most convincing explanation is structural, not
psychological. Chomsky always believed that change came not from the organized
working class, but from educational action on the elites. He always thought it
was more useful to influence those who hold power than to organize those who do
not. This vision naturally led him to seek access to the centers of power, not
to contain them from the outside.
In this sense, Chomsky and Barak are mirror images:
both move in a universe where the decisions that matter are made in
private – in Manhattan apartments, on Little St. James island, in the salons of
Edge, in confidential conversations with heads of state. Both accept, in
different forms, the elitist logic that Epstein embodied.
The Left’s Embarrassment
The reaction of the American intellectual left to this
affair has been revealing. Silence has been the dominant response. Jacobin,
which in June 2024 had celebrated Chomsky as an ‘intellectual and moral
champion,’ has not published a critical analysis worth mentioning. And the
asymmetry – the same that Barak claimed in his self-defense – is itself a
political problem. The critique of power applied only to opponents ceases to be
critique and becomes sectarian identity.
Who Else Was in the Circle?
Barak, Chomsky, and Epstein are the central figures in
this affair, but not the only ones. Around them moves a galaxy of names that
the files continue to reveal.
Lawrence Summers
The former Clinton Treasury Secretary, former Harvard
president, and one of the architects of 1990s financial deregulation was
present in the conversation with Barak. He was the one who introduced the
concept of terrible demography: the expression used in Israeli politics
to identify Palestinian demographic growth as an existential threat. Summers
and Epstein routinely exchanged emails for years, according to the New York Times. Summers was also at the 2004 Harvard dinner with
Epstein, Dershowitz, Trivers, and Pinker: the photo depicting them is worth more than a
thousand words.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, September
9, 2004: Jeffrey Epstein at a dinner he hosted at Harvard University with
professors Alan Dershowitz, Stephen Pinker, Robert Trivers (Princeton), Larry
Summers, E.O. Wilson, Marvin Minsky, Lisa Randall, Martin Nowak, and Alan Guth.
Photo by Rick Friedman.
The Scientific Circle
Martin Nowak, the mathematician funded by Epstein with
$6.5 million, is just the most striking case. There are also: theoretical
physicist Lawrence Krauss, president of Arizona State University’s Origins
Project, who sought advice from Epstein after his own sexual harassment
accusations; Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, who joked about Epstein’s arrest
in an affectionate tone. Elements widely reconstructed by Scientific American in November 2025.
The common denominator is not conscious adherence to
eugenics, at least not in all cases. It is something more subtle: accepting
funding, being willing to associate with the character, refraining from asking
questions about the source of the money and the intentions of the donor.
Co-optation rarely works through violence or explicit corruption. It works
through flattery, convenience, the feeling of belonging to a special circle.
The Body as Territory: Pedocriminality, Lineage, and
Domination
There is a dimension of the Epstein Files that public
debate has struggled to focus on, and that the UN Human Rights Council special
rapporteurs had the courage to name without euphemism. In the statement of February 17, 2026, the rapporteurs write that the evidence contained in
the files is such that it potentially constitutes crimes against humanity:
sexual slavery, reproductive violence, enforced disappearance, torture, femicide.
Their analysis adds something fundamental: these crimes were committed "in
a context of supremacist ideologies, racism and extreme misogyny." That
is: there was an ideological framework. There was a belief system that made
them thinkable, even rational, for those who planned them.
It is precisely this connection – between the
ideological and the criminal planes – that Australian political scientist
Melinda Cooper has helped to clarify. Cooper, whose work was highlighted in
Italy by Francesca Coin in il manifesto, proposes an analysis that goes against the current of the prevailing
narrative. The most widespread version of the Epstein affair sharply separates
two planes: that of sexual abuse and that of eugenic ideas. As if they were two
independent pathologies present in the same individual. Cooper instead argues
that this separation is analytically wrong: the two planes are different
manifestations of the same structure of thought.
The Patriarchal Horde and the Control of Bodies
To understand this profound unity, Cooper retrieves a
Freudian category: that of the primal horde. In Totem and Taboo, Freud
described the archaic fantasy underlying patriarchal forms of power
organization: the dominant male who appropriates female bodies to guarantee his
own biological continuity and build a lineage that extends his presence beyond
death. The horde, in this reading, responds to a project of immortality through
controlled reproduction.
This framework, applied to the Epstein affair, reveals
something that individual moralism fails to see. Epstein’s plan to impregnate
dozens of women at his New Mexico ranch, far from being the fantasy of an
eccentric rich man, represented the explicit, shameless version of a logic
running through his entire network. File EFTA02731395 – the diary of a minor
from whom her newborn child was taken – testifies that this logic was
translated into practice. A project of genealogical production, where the
bodies of girls were the means and Epstein’s lineage was the end.
This same logic, disguised as a technological vision
of the future, is recognizable in Elon Musk’s ambition to multiply his
offspring on an industrial scale and to use SpaceX as a vector for his genetic
inheritance to Mars. It is no coincidence that both Epstein and Musk gravitated
around the same intellectual environments: – transhumanism, the Edge network, the eugenicist Silicon Valley. In all these cases,
the fantasy of the horde re-presents itself in modern form: the exceptional
male who intends to perpetuate his genes, using women’s bodies as instruments
and science as legitimation.
It Is a System
The systemic understanding that Cooper proposes solves
an enigma that has perplexed many commentators: how could the same network
include a former Israeli Prime Minister discussing state demographic
engineering, Harvard academics designing genetic optimizations, a left-wing
intellectual like Chomsky seduced by access to the elite, and serial abusers of
young girls? These subjects seem to have little in common, yet they gravitated
around the same epicenter.
The answer is that they shared, in variously
elaborated forms and with different degrees of awareness, a social ontology in
which hierarchy among humans is natural and domination is its legitimate
exercise. In this worldview, bodies – particularly female bodies, and even more
so the bodies of poor, non-white women from subaltern countries – are not
subjects with their own rights and dignity: they are resources. As Cooper
summarized, quoted in an article by CounterPunch, the political project of this class is to
"govern an economy of masters and servants." The Epstein network was
the place where that project was exercised without filters.
The Intellectual Genealogy: From The Bell Curve to
Epstein’s Emails
This system of ideas has a history, and ignoring it
means not understanding the affair. In 1994, Charles Murray and Richard
Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, a volume arguing for the existence
of structural cognitive differences between racial groups. The implicit thesis
was eugenic in nature: the cognitive decline of the species is combated by
discouraging reproduction among the lower classes and groups considered less
gifted. The book was widely criticized by the scientific community, but not
ignored; it was rather received, discussed, and metabolized in that part of the
American establishment that recognized itself in so-called "hard
thinking," the kind capable of facing "uncomfortable truths."
Three decades later, this genealogy is directly
traceable in Epstein’s correspondence. In emails with Chomsky, Epstein cited
articles from The Right Stuff – the podcast linked to neo-Nazi circles
that would help organize the Charlottesville rally – as a vehicle for his
theses on "race science." In emails with Joscha Bach, a Silicon
Valley technologist, they openly discussed alleged cognitive inferiorities
linked to ethnicity. Epstein funded George Church to develop genetic selection
tools. He funded Nick Bostrom, a transhumanist philosopher with a documented
history of racist statements and ties to Musk, to develop an organization that
Epstein used as a presentable wrapper for his eugenic project. The thread is
continuous, and it is no coincidence.
The element that emerges forcefully from an integrated
analysis is this: the trafficked girls and minors, subjected to reproductive
violence within the Epstein network, were the most exposed part, the point
where ideology translated into bodily practice. But the same logic of
instrumentalization operated, in less visible and more socially accepted forms,
in Barak’s demographic debates, in Epstein’s genealogical ambitions, in the
genetic optimization theories of Harvard researchers. The contempt for the equal
dignity of human beings functioned on all these planes simultaneously, with
different registers but the same deep structure.
Eugenics as the Logic of Power
What does all this tell us about the historical moment
we live in? Much. Perhaps everything.
Eugenics never disappeared. It was driven underground
after Auschwitz: no one could speak of it explicitly anymore, after the Nazi
project had shown where it led. But ideas do not die; they disguise themselves.
They disguise themselves as "demographic realism" (as Barak says), as
"positive eugenics" and "genetic altruism" (as Epstein
says), as "genetic optimization" and "transhumanism" (as in
Silicon Valley). The structure of thought remains identical: there are
higher-quality populations and problematic populations; the future of humanity
requires amplifying the former and reducing or controlling the latter.
In the Israeli case, this thinking has a direct
geopolitical valence. The demographic question – who will have the numerical
majority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean – is real, and the answers
given to it structure concrete policies. Barak’s idea of importing a million
Russians, converting them pro forma, and using them as a counterweight to Arab
growth is not science fiction: it was a serious proposal, discussed with a head
of government (Putin) and the American economic establishment (Summers). If
implemented, it would have radically changed the composition of Israeli
society.
The Deception of ‘Hard Thinking’
In the jargon of the circles revolving around the Edge
network and reactionary Silicon Valley, an intellectual approach is widespread
under the name "dark enlightenment." An expression coined by British
philosopher Nick Land and blogger Curtis Yarvin to designate a thought that
claims to be free from all egalitarian and democratic constraints. Its logic is
recognizable: claiming the courage to "say what cannot be said,"
presenting any ethical objection as censorship.
Hard thinking is the intellectual trap into which many
of these characters have fallen. The trap of the idea that "uncomfortable
facts" must be confronted without taboo, at the risk of otherwise being
dominated by those who do. This rhetoric of intellectual courage serves to
discredit preemptively anyone who raises ethical objections. As Virginia
Heffernan analyzed in her article for The Nerve: "The salon [Edge] served as a conduit between
billionaire money and the minds of dominant males, and together, over the
decades, they arrived at a common philosophy: they were natural predators,
called upon to exploit and subjugate others."
The European Mirror: Renaud Camus, Sellner, and
Remigration as Negative Eugenics
There is a thread connecting the ideological
laboratory of the Epstein network to the European identitarian right, and it
passes through the same obsession: who has the right to inhabit a territory,
and who must be induced – or forced – to leave. It is the same question Barak
formulated in the positive (importing the "right" human material) and
that the European identitarian movement formulates in the negative: expelling
the "wrong" one. Two mirror-image responses to the same worldview, in
which the ethnic composition of the population is a technical problem to be
solved through demographic engineering.
The theoretical framework is that of the Grand
Remplacement, the theory developed by French writer Renaud Camus in 2011,
according to which European populations of Christian origin are undergoing a
progressive substitution by non-European immigrants. Camus provides the
diagnosis. The translation into an operational political program is the work of
the Austrian Martin Sellner, leader of the Austrian Identitarian Movement and
now a leading figure of the European identitarian international. With his book Remigration.
Ein Vorschlag (2024) – translated and published in Italy as Remigrazione.
Una proposta in 2025 by Passaggio al Bosco – Sellner transforms the slogan
into a legislative proposal: "incentivized" or forced repatriation
not only of irregulars, but of immigrants with regular residence permits,
naturalized citizens, people born and raised in Europe. As Annalisa Camilli
wrote in Internazionale, what is called "remigration" is, if called
by its name, deportation on an identitarian basis: the selective revocation of
belonging.
The intellectual genealogy of this movement shares
roots with that of the Epstein network, even if the paths are distinct. The
Pioneer Fund – the American foundation founded in 1937 with the explicit goal
of promoting "race science" and improving the "white race,"
classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center – has funded for
decades both the eugenics research that fueled books like The Bell Curve
and the publication networks that nourished the European identitarian right. As
an investigation by The Conversation reconstructed, the same foundations, the same donors,
and often the same researchers circulated between Anglo-Saxon race science
journals and European identitarian movements. Eugenics never ceased to exist:
it changed publisher and address.
On the Silicon Valley side, the connection is even
more explicit. Peter Thiel – libertarian billionaire present in Epstein’s
network, funder of transhumanist Nick Bostrom and a constellation of American
radical right think tanks – met in 2016 with representatives of the American
alt-right and white nationalist movement, as documented by BuzzFeed News.
Former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, the European politician closest to
Thiel’s environment, has just founded a new think tank called Global Shift
Institute. Sellner has announced the creation of an Institute for
Remigration with transnational ambitions, declaring he is in contact with
representatives of the League and Brothers of Italy. The network expands and
consolidates.
Italy as a Laboratory for Demographic Engineering
Policies
Italy has become a privileged laboratory for these
phenomena. The Remigration Summit in May 2025 was held in Gallarate, in
the province of Varese, in a theater made available by the League mayor Andrea
Cassani. Sellner chose it because Italy is considered "a safe country for
a far-right gathering," as the organizers reported. Among the speakers:
Jean-Yves Le Gallou (ex-Front National), Eva Vlaardingerbroek (Netherlands),
Afonso Gonçalves from the Portuguese neo-Nazi group Reconquista. In January
2026, the press conference at the Chamber of Deputies for the launch of the
signature collection on "Remigrazione e Riconquista" – organized by
League member Domenico Furgiuele with CasaPound, Veneto Fronte Skinheads, and
Rete dei Patrioti – was blocked by the opposition. But within twenty-four
hours, the petition had already reached the 50,000 signatures necessary for
parliamentary examination, as reported by il manifesto.
The proposed 24-article bill is a revealing document.
It provides for "voluntary or forced remigration," the abolition of
the immigration quota decree, the revision of family reunification, a Fund for
Italian Natality reserved for "true Italians," priority in public
housing and nurseries for Italian citizens only. It is, in its entirety, a
program of state demographic engineering – exactly what Barak discussed with
Epstein and Summers, but with the sign reversed, as mentioned. The logic
uniting them is identical: the ethnic composition of the population seen as a
technical problem to be solved with selection tools.
The difference between remigration and demographic
planning is one of method and sign, not principle. Both share the premise that
certain categories of human beings are elements of a demographic equation
rather than subjects possessing inalienable rights. It is the same premise that
made it thinkable, in Epstein’s eyes, to use the bodies of young girls as
incubators for his lineage. When one accepts that the human composition of a
society is a variable to be optimized, the consequences multiply in directions
that – as history has already shown – tend to converge on the same point.
The Epstein recordings gave us something rare: the
opportunity to listen to the powerful when they think they are speaking among
themselves. Without the mediations of public discourse, without the caution of
the politically presentable, without the need to account for the
"others." And what emerges is a world where human hierarchy is taken
for granted, where the selection of populations is discussed as one would
discuss optimizing a production chain, where money and power confer the right
not only to dominate others, but to decide who deserves to exist and in what
proportion, and whose bodies are available to be used.
Ehud Barak is the coherent product of a political
culture – Ashkenazi Labor Zionism – that built its state on systematic
exclusion and ethnic hierarchy, and that always found ways to justify it as
realism, necessity, foresight. Jeffrey Epstein was the embodiment of the logic
of the horde – in the Freudian sense Melinda Cooper exhumed – the patriarch who
uses the bodies of women and young girls to guarantee the immortality of his
lineage, while using the minds of intellectuals to legitimize the domination of
his class. Noam Chomsky is the paradigmatic example of how critical thought can
be co-opted when it loses contact with the perspective of the excluded and
seeks power instead of organizing those who lack it.
The Complicity of Institutions
In its entirety, the Epstein case is also – perhaps
above all – a story of institutional impunity. A man convicted in 2008 for
serious sexual crimes continued for a decade to associate with presidents,
academics, heads of state, former Prime Ministers. He continued to fund
university research. He continued to discuss eugenics with Nobel laureates and
ministers. And the institutions – Harvard, MIT, Arizona State University, the
American justice system, the Israeli and American governments – let it happen.
The UN Human Rights Council said what too many
commentators still hesitate to say: these are not stories of isolated
criminals. The crimes were committed in a precise ideological context –
supremacism, racism, extreme misogyny – that made impunity possible for
decades. The survivors who had the courage to speak out, and the protagonists
of #metoo who preceded them, recognized before anyone else the world that was
being reborn.
