One of the popular conspiracies of the right such as by QAnon is that the world is run by a secretive cabal of elites, a subset of whom traffic in girls and young women. What the Epstein files reveal is that while not on such a grand scale, there does seem to have been a cabal consisting of billionaires, tech bros, and intellectuals, almost all of whom are men, who used their dominance in the public sphere to propagate eugenics and master-race science. I want to highlight a link that commenter Dunc provided to an article by Virginia Heffernan titled “The billionaires’ eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science”. The article is well worth reading in full and names names.

Heffernan used to have John Brockman, literary agent to many major writers, as her own agent and for a while he included her in the mailing list for a group known as Edge that comprised these people and this gave her an insight into this group. She describes what she discovered.

It’s alarming to see your name in the Epstein files, but I was braced to see mine. Years ago, I was part of a salon for intellectuals and pseudointellectuals called Edge founded by John Brockman. His mass emails evidently copied in Epstein and a dozen such email blasts made their way to the latest dump of hazmat. 

Brockman, my former agent for tech writing, told me Edge was an intellectual salon. Edge.org is indeed intriguingly sprawling, jammed with scholarly idols whose bios have “Booker” and “Nobel” in them. Members of Edge participated in conferences and symposia, and promoted each other’s work. Who was I to say no? Among Edge’s prodigious ranks were Ian McEwan, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel Kahneman.

But if I’d read the member list more closely, I might have hesitated. Edge was overwhelmingly male, for one. It was said to be an intellectual salon, but in the club photos were tech bro billionaires, including Edge members Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Larry Page. And too many members were men now largely renowned for misconduct, professional or personal: Marc D Hauser, Jonah Lehrer, Lawrence Krauss, and Marvin Minsky. 

Turns out I didn’t have to worry about meeting these people. Brockman kept me at a distance. As the latest Epstein files reveal, the token female members of Edge were actively excluded from schmoozing and conferences, especially the glittering events known as the Billionaires’ Dinners. 

Good policy. Otherwise, we might have struck up conversations with the anxious-looking teenage girls kept out of the photos. We might have overheard the Edge men praising race science, rape culture and genetic engineering. We might even have asked where the money came from. Then we would have come face to face with the illiterate child rapist and passionate eugenicist who bankrolled the whole thing. Jeffrey Epstein.

It is clear that the pervert Epstein, in addition to craving young women and girls, also craved intellectual respect despite being, as Heffernan writes, someone who “could barely read and write” and had “manifest illiteracy”. He surrounded himself with intellectuals that he bought with his money, by flying them around in his jet, inviting them to his island, funding their research, and hosting them at lavish events where he could hobnob with them and other supposed intellectual heavyweights. And super-agent John Brockman, with all these famous writers as his clients, was a key player in that scheme.

It’s not clear when Epstein met Brockman, but by the late 90s he’d burrowed into Edge. With his cash infusions, Edge came to be known as home to far-right academics and the tech billionaires who love them. By 2000, Epstein was flying the Edge sausage party around on his planes, which served meals from Le Cirque and was appointed with mink throws.

Billionaires really like thinkers who see their exploitation of the weak as a good and natural thing. Epstein funnelled as much as $20m a year to academic men who shared his ideology. In exchange, Epstein himself, who could barely read and write, was empowered to hold forth in formal sessions at Harvard, condemning feeding and caring for the poor as if he were making a scholarly argument. 

The academics, in turn, liked the billionaire glitz. Middle-class rightwingers at Edge functions, including former New York Times columnist David Brooks and neuroscientist Sam Harris, now consorted with the likes of tech monopolists Jeff Bezos and Sergey Brin.
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Epstein also tells Bannon that he helped fund the Santa Fe Institute, a New Mexico research operation, in part to advance his interest in “genetic algorithms”, which he can hardly describe. “Complex systems are complex, by definition,” he says. Epstein justifies his own manifest illiteracy by saying that people who know how to write can’t think broadly, unlike Socrates, Jesus, and himself.
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With the Epstein files, we’re confronted with exactly what all the Edge men – from Pinker to Dawkins to Musk to Gates – did with the intellectual territory they seized. With their Ivy League posts, their billions, and their blue-ribbon DNA, the would-be intellectuals in Epstein’s circle converged on nothing less than the ideology of Mein Kampf. The Edge dinners have ceased and the site is now dormant, but generations of young men trained at Harvard, LSE and Oxford absorbed the lesson — and generations of young women learned that their place in intellectual history is sidelined, exploited, or prone.

Maybe you think that Heffernan was being unduly hash in describing Epstein as illiterate. But back in 2019, I stumbled across how Epstein was a contributor to a book with the title What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty. So what did Epstein have say? Here is his contribution in its entirety.

I believe that the mechanism for the human perception of time will be discovered. Almost another sense—the ability to distinguish past from present, in intervals long enough to convey a thought and create memories—will establish a new boundary of consciousness.

There will be found (in addition to entropy) a cost, or friction, for just moving through time. Steady states will be the classical limit. We will uncover the formula for time’s relationship to life, which will be as unique as time’s relationship to space.

As I commented then, “That’s it? What the hell does this even mean? It is Deepak Chopra-esque levels of pseudo-profound inanities.” But there it is, nestled among the contributions of other ‘leading thinkers on science’.

Back in 2019, Samantha Bee in her show Full Frontal (oh, how I miss that show!) shared some thoughts about Epstein and his supporters and enablers.

Many of the people named as Epstein’s buddies are now scrambling to say that they did not take part in the abuse of women nor, incredible though it may seem, did they see anything suspicious about the large number of young women and girls who were apparently always around in the background, like wallpaper. But even if that claim is taken at face value, they cannot dissociate themselves from the race science and eugenics that they helped promote. These are just awful people.