It’s a Big Club: Epstein and the Ruling Class

The Epstein files offer a raw glimpse into how the U.S. rulers and the entire global capitalist class run society: through sexual and geopolitical violence, criminal exploitation, and legal impunity. The buying and selling of young women, the decadence, and the denigration of all who are not part of their club – this is the “morality” of those in power. 

In this episode, we discuss how the Epstein scandal isn’t just about a corrupt sex trafficker, his victims, and a mysterious “suicide.” The real story is the entire financial and political infrastructure around Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, made up of billionaires, shell companies, “philanthropic” foundations, and a world of espionage and blackmail. From the gutter media to the highest echelons of government, they’re all behind a massive Epstein cover-up. The rest of us are told to move along.

We talk about the insights of a handful of journalists who followed the money. Whitney Webb and Nick Bryant point to something far bigger than a trafficking ring: a system of dark money and surveillance linking Wall Street, organized crime, and intelligence. Epstein was a cog in the machine, set up as a fall guy.

We’ve seen only a tiny fraction of what the ruling class does in secret, but what it gets away with in the open is far more sinister: marauding the globe, war against Iran, genocide in Gaza, eviscerating rights at home. The crimes and horrors in the Epstein files are not aberrations, but the very nature of a rotting capitalist system. 

Clips included in this episode: 

George Carlin: "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

⁠CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou on The Diary of a CEO⁠

⁠Nick Bryant on The Chris Hedges Report⁠

⁠Whitney Webb on The Nick Bryant Podcast⁠  

“To the man of the bourgeois class, the woman of the working class is not a human being. She is either a beast of burden or a source of cheap pleasure.” – Alexandra Kollontai, 1909