Obviously, Epstein was scum of the lowest order; a blackmailer, a pimp, a pedophile, and a traitor. (Working with Mossad to blackmail American politicians was surely treason. And given that Israel is a genocidal, religious ethno-state, possibly the most evil country in the world, well…)
But like many effective evil people, Epstein had his virtues. I found this mix of documents from Noam Chomsky particularly interesting:
Here’s some kind of letter of recommendation that Noam Chomsky wrote for his “highly valued friend,” Jeffrey Epstein. pic.twitter.com/t73oxMcXte
— Jacob Silverman (@SilvermanJacob) November 14, 2025
And, as Glenn points out:
And that’s to say nothing of the financial entanglements. pic.twitter.com/dAfVVx1j7J
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 14, 2025
For what it’s worth, I very much doubt that Chomsky had sex with underage girls. And that’s the thing, Epstein was not a one-note pimp and blackmailer, he was a charismatic social chameleon. What Chomsky wanted was intellectual conversation, inside information on politics, and to meet and converse with interesting scientists and scholars (and money, everyone wants money).
So that’s what Epstein gave him. Among scholars, Epstein was scholarly. Among artists, an aesthete. And yet, he was best friends with Donald Trump, who is the philistine’s philistine, a man who is not just without culture, but whose taste can only be described as tacky. A man who thinks a golden shitter is classy and who has probably never read a book.
People of great evil have virtues. Those virtues are morally neutral but real. Epstein was extremely smart and charismatic, and he was able to read people like a book and give them what they wanted. They all thought he was their friend, even as he used them. (And who knows? He may well have actually felt friendly towards a few of them. Certainly, his relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell appears to have been genuinely affectionate.)
Hitler was extremely brave and, until he burnt out on amphetamines, intelligent. Genghis Khan was brave, a military and organizational genius, and routinely made his former enemies into his most important subordinates (Subotai, for example), and none of them ever betrayed him. He inspired an insane level of loyalty.
Bravery, intelligence, loyalty, energy, and even certain types of honor are all virtues, but they are morally neutral virtues; they amplify whatever you are, making you more effective. Without bravery and energy, being good or evil doesn’t matter: the person is ineffective. With them, they become saints or monsters.
Epstein appears to have had genuine charm and social ability, as well as a surfeit of brains. That’s what made him so effectively evil. The wealth and generosity with it didn’t hurt, of course, but he was so valuable to Mossad, and many others, exactly because of his gifts.
This lesson, that evil is often comes wrapped in an attractive and impressive package is one we regularly forget. Fair enough, in the Age of Trump — a dribbling idiot who was voted for despite his known leering at teenage girls, his “grab them by the pussy” comment, rape, and his long record of stiffing people who worked for him is the opposite. Any idiot should have known he was self-serving scum who would betray his followers repeatedly.
But we’ve also had plenty of attractive evil. Reagan. Bill Clinton (not his wife, she has the charisma of dead flounder), Obama — the purveyor of hopium. Clinton and Obama were energetic, smart, and charismatic. Reagan was stupid, but charismatic, with a folksy charm that made people think he cared about them, when all he wanted to do (other than an admirable hatred of nukes) was hurt everyone who wasn’t rich. (And then there’s Tony Blair, who now looks like Satan after a debauch, but once seemed so shiny.)
Evil is often attractive. Seductive. We are warned about that often in myth, but again, and again, we forget. Let Epstein remind us.
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Dan Lynch
Psychologists have long known that psychopaths can be charming & can use that charm to manipulate people. Yet people — including psychologists — get suckered by psychopaths time after time.
As for Chomsky, he seems to have been authentic back in the 60’s and maybe 70’s, but in recent years he devolved into just another “vote blue no matter who” Democrat who lost my respect. Either Chomsky participated in Epstein’s sexcapades — I believe so — or else Chomsky was incredibly stupid and foolish to have associated with Epstein for a long time and yet somehow be totally unaware of what Epstein was up to. Either way, it is a very poor reflection on Chomsky.
Feral Finster
A popular theme in alt-media is that the the sociopaths who rule us are stupid. They are not (or if they are not “smart” in an IQ test sense, they at least are cunning).
For if they were not cunning, they would quickly be shunted aside.
spud
sunlight is the best disinfectant. to expose them to sunlight is the best way to regain our civil society.
my sister sent this piece to me yesterday,
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/larry-summers-and-the-blast-radius
Stoller used to blame the policies, but not expose to sunlight who were the psychopaths that initiated said policies.
lately he names names, and good for him. in actuality its how trump got full control of the GOP, and ousted the country club republicans.
his second term has been one massive blunder after another. his offensive against the american people and the constitution was of course, paved by clinton, biden, and obama’s unconstitutional polices like the so-called patriot act.
one wonders if he will become cognizant of what he is doing, i doubt it.
look at how deep down this goes in america. he was exposing sexual assaults in schools.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_Ib3W15iJ8
COP FAKES INJURY SO HE CAN ARREST JOURNALIST! First Amendment Audit!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbJTWzbeecc
Purple Library Guy
No, lots of the sociopaths who rule us are stupid. Not all, but on average they seem as least as dumb as everyone else. If they need smart, they hire people for that. Sometimes the hired smart people take advantage of the situation to join the oligarchy. Obama was really more the hired talent.
With the ones who inherited their wealth, it’s obvious they’re going to average exactly as smart as everyone else. But they’re functionally dumber because they’ve never had to try, and the ones actively in the business of trying to run everyone’s lives average a little dumber than that because most of the ones with the chutzpah to do that, have that confidence because of Dunning-Krueger.
But the ones who started with just some wealth and parlayed it into a bunch don’t seem to average that smart either. Intelligence is probably a decent if not amazing predictor of avoiding poverty and gaining enough wealth to be in the upper middle class. But a career in wealth acquisition is all about what you want–usually, you have to want money more than you want anything else, including self-respect. You have to be willing to lie, cheat, steal and grift. Now there are tons of little grifters out there who never make a big score, but that’s mostly about luck and social pushiness, not intelligence. That doesn’t mean there aren’t ANY smart ones . . . and the smart ones may be able to use their brains to their advantage to some extent. But it’s not a big factor.
Look at not just Trump, but the people he surrounds himself with–most of them are dumb. About the smartest is Vought, who is smart enough to figure out that if you want to change the way a government operates, you have to change the bureaucracy that operates it. That’s not exactly a world-shattering insight, and it’s the only one he has. Or, look at the techbros: Bill Gates is the elder statesman smart one, but he was never much good at computers, and he’s been wrong about pretty much every policy issue he’s weighed in on, often in ways that aren’t even self-serving. Peter Thiel and a couple of those guys have political philosophies that if they weren’t rich you would assume were being spouted by some crazy guy on a street corner. So OK, I’m willing to believe Epstein was smart, but he was an outlier.
The wealthy don’t win political battles because they are smart. They win political battles because money is a massive force multiplier. The non-wealthy only win when the stakes become too obvious to obfuscate; sometimes they also win when they have brilliant leadership that multiplies force just as much as money. Hugo Chavez was a case of brilliant leadership forcing a breakthrough, but the conditions were also fairly ripe. The left need to remember that in order to win, they can’t be just as good as the right, they can’t be a little bit better, they have to be A LOT better, A LOT smarter. And if they do win, they have to SYSTEMATICALLY DESTROY the firepower advantages of the wealthy if they want it to stick for more than five minutes.
Thermobarbaric
Re Spud: The USA Patriot Act aka Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) was passed in 2001 during the administration of George W Bush and VP Dick Cheney. Obama first entered office some 8 years later.
spud
i have always said, the rich are cunning, clever and manipulative, but they are not very smart.
mago
I see no evidence that the Epstein was a high powered intellect.
Barr senior hired him to teach math and physics at the tony Dalton high school, a position he was unqualified for.
He was a conman and a schmoozer par excellent with chutzpah and monied connections to back him up.
Clever, cunning and connected doesn’t necessarily mean outsized intelligence. But okay, he had the skill set to pull off his mission and enjoy the sybaritic high life.
I was always surprised when he got busted, and I’ve been following this drama for years.
I’ve got a bridge for sale to anyone who thinks he hung him self in that jail cell. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter one way or the other and the world stage perps count on that.
And to Mr Purple Library Guy, sadly enough it’s not going to happen like that—not a moth in the flames chance of it.
spud
Thermobarbaric:
https://jacobin.com/2020/07/portland-military-policing-blm-protests
“bill clinton created the federal Gestapo when he crushed the youth rebelling against free trade in 1999
bill clinton created the as “snatch squads,” abducting protesters right off the street, and working in tandem with local law enforcement to corral the anti–corporate globalization protests ”
———-
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/09/the-uncomfortable-truth-are-we-hating-donald-trump-for-the-wrong-reasons/
“Muslims were mainly the target of the ‘Secret Evidence law’ in 1996, and ‘suspected’ Muslims were either jailed indefinitely or deported without their lawyers being informed of their charges.
It was then called the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, later expanded to give immigration authorities the right to deport even green card holding permanent residents.
Few protested the undemocratic, no due-process law – and the media barely covered it – as most of those held were Palestinian activists, intellectuals and university professors.
The 1996 Act morphed into the Patriot Act, following the attacks of September 11, 2001. The new Act undermined the very US Constitution, giving the government unprecedented domestic authority to arrest, detain people, and spy on whoever they wished, with no legal consequences. ”
—————
https://listverse.com/2014/02/05/10-reasons-bill-clinton-was-secretly-a-terrible-president/
“Extraordinary rendition” is when shady government operatives stuff a bag over your head and fly you off to some foreign country where they can legally torture you. It sounds like something Alex Jones might dream up in a paranoid frenzy, but it’s a well-documented phenomenon under both Bush, Jr. and Obama—and Bill Clinton was the guy who started it all.
Clinton and Gore signed off on the first rendition back in the ’90s, despite being aware that it breached international law. Until recently, rendered people frequently wound up in the prison cells of places like Mubarak’s Egypt or Gaddafi’s Libya, where they were tortured with electric shocks, rape, beatings, and even crucifixion. It can sometimes go hideously wrong: In 2003, the CIA snatched a terrorist off the streets and beat, tortured, and sodomized him, only to discover they’d accidentally grabbed the wrong man. The victim just happened to share a name with a wanted criminal. His suffering came care of the Clinton/Gore dream team.”
as Chris Hedges has said, it was all bill clinton.
spud
oh forgot, obama used those snatch squads also on OWS.
Purple Library Guy
@mago You mean it’s not going to happen like that IN THE USA. I’ve pretty much written off the USA. Positive change that happens will happen in other places and only reach the US if it pretty much takes over the rest of the world first.
mago
True that PLG.
Jan Wiklund
It’s not about intelligence, whatever that is, it’s about emotional energy. See Randall Collins: Charisma, https://www.routledge.com/Charisma-Micro-sociology-of-Power-and-Influence/Collins/p/book/9780367373580. I succeeded in downloading it free from somewhere, but I can’t find the site now.
Emotional energy simply hooks into you and take you with it. We are made that way. Collins analyses people like Jobs, Hitler, Jesus, Eleanor Roosevelt…. and details what they had that made people following them wherever they went.
People don’t want power, they don’t want money, they want emotional energy (which may give them power and money as a secondary effect). And whoever gives them emotional energy can make the others dance around them.
Ian Welsh
I’ve read that book Jan, along with most of Collins ouvre. There is skill involved in getting the social interactions which build charisma in that model: a lot of it. Skill at interaction ritual is very real and so is the strategy involved in getting charisma building interactions.
You might find “Napoleon Never Slept” the popularized version, interesting for the case studies. Note the specific tactics and strategies Steve Jobs and other case studies used.