The United States of Epstein

“Is it just me, or are things getting crazier out there?” So opens the film Joker, charting a broken man’s descent into a sort of cathartic, redemptive madness. Joker, though not set in 2019, quite accurately captures the undercurrent of rage that palpably saturates our society. We cannot pinpoint the moment that we broke, the moment we strayed from the path and followed the will-o’-the-wisp that Richard Taylor warned us of 140 years ago: “Traditions are mighty influences in restraining peoples. The light that reaches us from above takes countless ages to traverse the awful chasm separating us from its parent star; yet it comes straight and true to our eyes, because each tender wavelet is linked to the other, receiving and transmitting the luminous rays. Once break the continuity of the stream, and men will deny its heavenly origin, and seek its source in the feeble glimmer of earthly corruption.” The film Vox Lux uses a school shooting and the September 11th attacks to mirror the corruption of a young woman into a pop star, a carnival house image of our drug-addled and hypersexual culture. As America lost her innocence, the film seems to say, so did the girl. We do not need to know the moment we broke, however; we reap the consequences of the severance every day. Simply turning on the television reveals a world ready to explode, a Falling Down Michael Douglas ready to abandon his car.

Billionaire pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was almost certainly murdered, no matter what our betters in the media may proclaim. Perhaps the truth does not matter, as the public believes that it was a homicide; and how could they not? Every single safeguard in place failed. Any thinking man must find claims of rote bureaucratic incompetence ludicrous. Epstein was the procurer to and perhaps extortionist of some of the most powerful people on the planet. We will most likely never know his secrets now, the full depths of his and his friends’ depravity. This certainly adds grist for the conspiracy mill, as dark rumors have swirled for years of pedophilia and Moloch worship in the corridors of political and media power. The fact that these murmurings persist and appear to be acquiring purchase among even skeptical observers demonstrates Americans’ deep distrust of our institutions, our unshakably insidious feeling that perhaps our self-appointed elites might in fact be evil, their deracinated Weimar degeneracy seemingly boundless. What must it signify that the idea of our nihilist and hedonist leaders engaging in satanic rituals seems plausible? Healthy societies are not driven to these conclusions.

The minutiae are almost insignificant compared to the awful portent that this is. The death of Jeffrey Epstein is much more than a black eye for the Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice; indeed, it is a sign not merely of the times, but of what is to come. The failed state on our southern border has effectively surrendered to the apocalyptic chaos of narco-terror; is Mexico the future? The cynicism and corruption of our elites seems to have reached new heights of brazenness, as the emperor sheds his cloak. Are we really to believe that the government of the United States cannot keep a man in federal custody, let alone a man of Epstein’s potential value, alive until his trial? Of course not. Our government is the most powerful in the history of the earth, with almost limitless mortal capability. What must this mean? We allowed this to happen.

Just as we have stood by as a tiny lunatic fringe minority of homosexual and transgender activists have taken control of our domestic policy, campaigning to normalizing pedophilia and eradicate sexual innocence. Just as we have stood by as both parties accede to the private equity disembowelment of our once-thriving small towns, to the opening of prisons, to the destruction of the First and Second Amendments, and to the eradication of our borders. Just as we have stood by as Leftist-controlled cities collapse into failed Third World states, overrun by filth and violence, as authorities stand by while Democrat brownshirts enforce mob rule on the streets. Just as we have stood by as the Constitution is ‘interpreted’ so penetratingly by unaccountable ideologues that it has become nothing more than a mockery of itself. Just as we have stood by as the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have been reduced to political weaponry, as high officials commit treason and walk away with media adulation, as incidents like the Las Vegas massacre are barely investigated and then forgotten. Just as we have stood by as terrorists have completely assumed the education of our children; for what else should we call those that hate everything about us and wish to see us and our way of life exterminated? Just as we have stood by and allowed the culture of death to permeate society, from our ongoing holocaust of infanticide to the promotion of suicide to the reign of opioid drugs across the land, the descendants of the pioneers plummeting like Icarus into addiction. Just as we have stood by as the news media have transformed themselves into political propaganda machines, thereby ruining the idea of truth for growing millions who live in manufactured ‘realities’. Just as we have stood by as atheists and Islamists wage a largely successful jihad against Christianity, graciously assisted by the ‘Christian’ Left. Just as we have stood by as hatred of law enforcement soars, patriotism withers, and the military becomes one more frontier for social engineering.

As our rights are lost day by day, as the term ‘American’ becomes a meaningless and contentless geographic designation, as our cities are transformed into unrecognizable outposts of the open society, as our political institutions appear more and more to be a grotesque farce, and as it becomes increasingly evident that it doesn’t matter who holds elected office, more and more Americans believe we approach ever nearer the precipice of civil war. In Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘America’, can we be blamed if we ask why we pay taxes, why we participate in the façade?

​We, who are capable of so much, have done so little to arrest the motion of our dispossession, the machinery of which gains traction and speed minute by minute. We have allowed all of this to happen with only token resistance from the Republican sheep costumed as our representatives in Washington, the Delectos, Flakes, Grahams, McCains, and Sasses of the party. None of this was even the slightest bit necessary, let alone inevitable. Have we lost the will to live? Are we afraid of being called ‘haters’? Hatred may certainly exist without love, but love cannot exist in the absence of hatred. For if we truly love something, we must necessarily abhor those fighting tooth and claw to tear it asunder. We may only be ridden while our backs are bent.