Splinter: It’s Not ‘the Epstein Class’, It’s the Capitalist Class

Democrats like Jon Ossoff and Ro Khanna as well as a Republican in Thomas Massie have begun to speak about “the Epstein Class,” a group of powerful people defined by their proximity to the globe’s most notorious child sex trafficker. While I applaud the advancement of attacks from the left into a realm where enemies are finally named, an amorphous concern about how politicians will treat the Epstein scandal has been rattling around in my head ever since last July 4th weekend when Trump decided to voluntarily shoot his political dick off. I hadn’t quite been able to put my finger on my trepidatious feelings, until journalist Marlon Ettinger gave voice to them on this past week’s episode of Chapo Trap House. If we are truly to learn from these horrors and adapt our society accordingly, Epstein cannot be a scapegoat for the people and the system that enabled his crimes and even participated in them.

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” famously wrote 19th century British historian and Catholic thinker John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton. “Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.” We have centuries of history in this country alone proving that maxim true, and (some of) our founders tried to set up a government with the fact in mind that power cannot be trusted.

It is because of this fact that I fear “the Epstein Class” could be used as a dodge by the capitalist class in this era where we are sold a story of perpetual bad apples amidst myriad systemic crises. To portray America’s foundation of power as good and some specific actors as bad, instead of the reality that over a quarter millennium, elite U.S. capital has largely proven itself incapable of living alongside labor in a civil society. Exploitation is all it has ever known in this slave colony that began as a compromise between slave owners and slave financiers. I can already hear the Democratic consultant talking points about how the only problems with capitalism are the Epstein-adjacent Republican power brokers, and all those Clinton associates and donors knew nothing and deserve to keep their spot in the pecking order for a machine that delivered us to an era where a game show host is demolishing centuries of constitutional infrastructure overnight. 

So long as America keeps looking at quite obviously collective problems through our egocentric individualist lens, we will continue to trail our peers in health and happiness metrics while we outpace them in GDP growth. The only way there will not be another Epstein Class is if the governance system that emerges from the rubble of this era seeks to abolish the conditions that created it. It really should not be controversial to say that $999,999,999 is more than enough money and no one needs any more than that, but it is still a verboten thought in mainstream politics because this country is poisoned by an extremist capitalist ideology.

Epstein is a story about power, and because it is the ruling system of our time, a story about capitalism. About how it works in garbled emails. How its inherent opacity creates a smokescreen for elites to scheme away from prying eyes in their safe space filled with private jets, faceless LLCs and real estate trusts. About how the system consolidates immense power at the top by its very design. How its rulers plot in the shadows to rule forever. Or to defraud the entire country like in 2008. Or to rape children. Or fuel a genocide and then call Jewish people like me antisemitic for opposing it. The people in power have proven these last few years that basic human values like morality are of no consideration in their insatiable quest to go to bed with more power than they woke up possessing. Then they all wonder why seemingly half the nation cheered when a healthcare CEO was murdered in cold blood. Everything that afflicts America is an outgrowth of how capitalism has created a class of people unmoored from society, trying to subjugate it under their boot. 

Many modern-day capitalists would take umbrage with my characterization of it as a system for elites that is opposed to competition and freedom, but that just demonstrates how rabidly ideological the defenders of an economic system that rose in tandem with chattel slavery have become. Actual capitalists, not monopolists, but the people who helped build the ideological structures of the 20th century, accepted the fatal flaw in this system. They did not portray capitalism as a universal panacea you can institute and forget about, or just tweak around the edges from time to time. They addressed it head on. They understood that capitalism is specifically designed to be managed by policymakers, and in wildly unequal times like these, depraved capitalists require it to be aggressively managed.

Henry Simons, a professor at the raging socialist hotbed of, uh, the University of Chicago economics department, was a self-proclaimed classical liberal, and as the University of Chicago Law School writes, he “described monopoly in all its forms—including large corporations—as ‘the great enemy of democracy.’” Before Robert Bork and Richard Posner decided that antitrust laws were woke in the 1970s and 80s, the University of Chicago was actually a champion of anti-monopolist thought. Former corporate lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is another pro-capitalist thinker who would be decried as a Bernie Bro in our childish modern discourse, but he fought hard for a vision of small business-centric capitalism that was extremely hostile to monopoly. In 1941, he said “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” In 1912, around the height of the anger at Standard Oil’s monopoly, he issued a warning to the 20th century that went unheeded right around the so-called End of History that was followed by the birth of greedflation. “We have learned that unless there be regulation of competition,” Brandeis said, “its excesses will lead to the destruction of competition, and monopoly will take its place.”

Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps seen as the most classically American president ever (he would famously disappear for days at a time as president to venture in the wilderness) was not a liberal at all by our modern standards, yet gained the nickname the Trust-Buster because of the fervent glee with which he broke up monopolies. If Teddy was alive today, Marc Andreessen would ask ChatGPT to write a script to call Roosevelt a weak, woke commie.

Monopolies and oligopolies define the modern American economy that everyone with a net worth under seven figures despises. The Magnificent Seven that drive the stock market are monopolies (or were, in Tesla’s case, although it does still have a monopoly on cults). Monopoly is what drives America’s consumer spending and most of our GDP. Monopoly is the Epstein Class. Monopoly is the logical outcome of capitalism, and it’s why so many pro-capitalist thinkers of the past firmly believed in antitrust laws.

As much as I am using the more reasonable capitalist thinkers of the past as an example of how far off the deep end we have gone today, “this system works great just so long as you constantly set up safeguards to stop it from doing the bad things it wants to do” is not the compelling argument ’ol Teddy thought it was while he was off in a cave at Yellowstone plotting his war on what would come to be called the Epstein Class. America is a deeply corrupt land build on the backs of slaves and the graves of the natives, and it proved in 2025 that our choices truly do seem to be socialism or barbarism.

Capitalists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt twice in the last century that if left to their own devices, they will create unimaginable wealth concentration and a class of people who effectively opt out of civil society and treat the world as a feudal dominion to be raped and pillaged until it finally breaks under the weight of their bottomless greed. Epstein is a monster, but the avalanche of emails from his estate prove he is simply a monstrous cog in the wheel of the machine that global power uses to maintain their ironlike grip over society. The story of Epstein is so much bigger than any one person. It is a story of how the world really works, and it’s hideous.

Co-founder of Bath & Body Works Leslie Wexner, Epstein’s only publicly identified client, is worth $8 billion. Leon Black, who stepped down from Apollo Global Management in 2021 after a review found he paid Epstein $158 million for apparently the greatest tax and estate planning advice in human history, is worth $10 billion. Glenn Dubin, who was named by Virginia Giuffre as one of the men that Ghislane Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein forced her to have sex with, is worth $2 billion. Bill Gates, creator of the last monopoly the American government cared about, is worth $107 billion and his wife has publicly said part of why she divorced him were his dealings with Epstein.

Peter Thiel, free speech’s nemesis and a self-appointed antichrist expert who is all over the Epstein calendars and files, is worth $9 billion. Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman, who the richest man in the world is desperately trying to portray as the only tech titan with many emails that raise concerning questions about his relationship with a child sex trafficker, is worth $2.5 billion—a drop in the bucket compared to Elon Musk’s financially engineered $300 billion net worth he leveraged as he practically begged to be invited to Epstein’s “wildest” parties on Little St. James.

Between Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, 16 years of U.S. presidencies are all over the Epstein files. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak visited Epstein 30 times from 2013 to 2017, including 11 consecutive monthly meetings starting in December 2015. Now former UK Trade Minister, EU Trade Commissioner, UK Ambassador to the U.S., and man who believed Epstein was his “best pal,” Peter Mandelson, was arrested last month. UK Prime Minister Keir Stamer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney subsequently resigned over recommending Mandelson’s appointment. Prince Andrew is no longer a Prince, stripped of his title, and he is now known as the first senior British royal to be arrested in 400 years. While a lifetime of being Britain’s most embarrassing human was no doubt at the base of the British royal family finally cutting earth’s court jester loose, Andrew’s myriad Epstein ties and the “misconduct” he was arrested for is what pushed him past the point of no return.

Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Director of Barack Obama’s first National Economic Council, former Harvard President and former OpenAI board member Larry Summers had to resign from all his recent Harvard positions in the wake of the latest batch of Epstein files. Kathryn Ruemmler’s exchanges with Epstein are uncomfortably flirty (she called him “Uncle Jeffrey” and “sweetie”), and she resigned as Goldman Sachs’ Chief Legal Officer in February in light of these emails. Others clearly showed Epstein trying to push her to become Barack Obama’s new Attorney General when she was in the running for it in 2014 while she was serving as his White House Counsel. Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is in these emails too and has longtime ties to Epstein, and he is worth $7.2 billion.  

Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, Chair and CEO of Dubai logistics empire DP World, was removed last month after being found over 4,700 times in the Epstein files. Former Prime Minister of Norway and the Former Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Thorbjørn Jagland, was charged with “gross corruption” last month over suspicious he may have received gifts and loans from Epstein. French financial crimes prosecutors opened an investigation into French Culture Minister and former Director of the Arab World Institute Jack Lang over suspected laundering of proceeds linked to tax fraud, and Lang stepped down as head of the Arab World Institute after being summoned by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.

What’s missing from that list of arrests and federal investigations above are American names, and one cannot help but wonder what people like Larry Summers might be going through if he lived in the same country that Peter Mandelson does. Just focusing on the handful of names that we can confidently say are close to Epstein returns presidents and advisors from presidencies that have defined practically my entire 39-year-old lifetime, as well as the capital that has donated to both parties’ political agendas. It’s all one system, and it boils down to money and power overruling democracy around the world from its seat of power in America.

Luckily for Summers, he lives in the elite impunity capital(ism) of planet earth. When no senior executive faced any prosecution for their role in bringing the global economy down under an avalanche of mortgage-related fraud in 2008, that was the signal to the Jeff Bezos’ of the world that they have a license from the most powerful country on earth to indulge their worst impulses. Not to mention that Summers, one of the architects of the 1990s deregulatory spree that set the table for 2008, was immediately rewarded with a top presidential appointment in the wake of his work bearing fruit. Capitalism by design concentrates wealth in the hands of a very few, who then turn around and use it to purchase a lifetime of unaccountability for themselves and their cronies. It doesn’t matter if it’s the 1920s or the 2020s, Western capitalists have proven that they will abuse their power until society breaks.

The story of Epstein is the story of the people around him, and the people around him are or are around the most powerful people in the world. Bad people will always do bad things, but when you imbue any group of people with a sense of power that truly does make them demigods among all of mankind, well, look around you. This is the world that capitalism has chosen.