Techno-financial fascism is at the depraved heart of the Epstein files

In the first 48 hours of the revelations, I’ve tried to process the scandal through several cognitive layers.

First, the sheer depravity of the paedophile ring Epstein was running. We knew about Ghislaine; we knew about Andrew; we knew about who was on the aircraft passenger manifests. What’s shocking is the testimony of victims – like in the 16-year old’s diary where she’s reporting truly disgusting behaviour and is clearly traumatised.

And though some of the tip-offs and human intelligence may be spurious, they offer a glimpse into a world where this stuff is plausible enough for the police and FBI to record it. 

The thought haunts me that not much of it is spurious, and that deep evil was being perpetrated in every venue associated with Epstein and his circle.

Though the crimes perpetrated on Epstein’s island, and in his plane and mansion, were extreme, the unfortunate fact is that the liminal edges of that behavioural extend into, and are tacitly accepted in, the leisure venues of the super-rich – though mainly involving the exploitation of young adult men and women, not children.

The second cognitive layer concerns what I think will become the main story: Epstein was running a paedophile ring while simultaneously maintaining connections to key Russian intelligence figures, and trying to communicate with – and indeed bargain with – Putin.

Vladimir Putin is a veteran KGB officer and the KGB’s modus operandi is to run honey traps against powerful people. It is a reasonable line of inquiry that the whole network Epstein and Maxwell created was made to influence the behaviour of key Western political and business figures – one which the Mail, for example, is running with.

Though the most damaging stuff is from earlier, the more Russia emerges as a hostile force during the 2010s, the more compromised the network participants become.

The third cognitive layer is the story of how Epstein interfaced, via Steve Bannon, with the far right takeover of politics, the promotion of “race science” and hacking – and how overtly this is linked to the promotion of cryptocurrencies, and asset-stripping.

“Brexit, just the beginning,” Epstein told Peter Thiel in 2016. After it comes: “Return to tribalism. Counter to globalization. Amazing new alliances. You and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as I said in your office. Finding things on their way to collapse was much easier than finding the next bargain.”

The plan is that, out of the collapse of the West into racial civil war, engineered through the cyberwarfare, comes a new order where the far right supplants liberal democracy, allowing men like Epstein to hoover up profits from unregulated financial markets.

That’s what we are living through right now.

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In this context Nigel Farage appears more of a puppet than a player. His rise is a product of the cognitive warfare waged on Western democracy by men like Epstein, Thiel and Bannon – and the fingerprints of Russia (and as Epstein suggests in one email China) on the entire process are plain to see.

A fourth cognitive layer of the nightmare is populated by the former prince Andrew, peering into a camera (a camera!) while he lowers over a prostrate young woman. The reputational effects on the British monarchy may end up being limited by the guy’s sheer dullness, but they are probably bigger than we expect.

Finally there is Peter Mandelson. His alleged misdemeanours are clear: he appears to have taken money from Epstein while passing privileged – and in some cases financial market sensitive – information from inside the British government, and on one occasion advising an investment bank how to push back against UK laws.

We knew, in our hearts, that this is how the neoliberal elite behave. As an economics editor reporting on the banking crisis of the late 2000s, it was obvious to me there was an inside information merry-go-round between banks, government insiders and regulators in all countries. And several of the politicians I remember interviewing/questioning between 2007 and 2015 have ended up in jail – most notably Nicolas Sarkozy.

But the transactionality of the Mandelson-Epstein relationship is startling.

You can see Labour’s logic in appointing Mandelson – who claimed to have cleaned up his act after leaving politics – as ambassador to the USA. Trump is a sleazeball: let’s send someone who knows that world inside out and use it to mitigate the impact on British interests. 

The government’s defence is that Mandelson lied about the extent and nature of his relationship with Epstein. But something in the system clearly failed.

Since Mandelson was a creature of the Labour Party, it behoves everyone within it, including me, to ask: what didn’t we see?

I’ve met Peter Mandelson three times – once around 2008 to do a brief interview clip; then in 2011 when Newsnight spent a day on the road with him in Hartlepool following Labour’s defeat; the third time on a panel in 2021.

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If you watch the political mea culpa I got out of him on the train to Hartlepool, over New Labour’s abandonment of British industrial workers, you can understand why people might find it hard to square the character in the film with the one in the emails.

Manipulative, scheming, duplicitous – these were brand values that followed Mandelson through every door he entered. But he appeared to be a politician who was playing by the – albeit dirty – rules of British politics: “shaft or be shafted”.

What I think we must take away from the Epstein files – and this is before we’ve even seen the worst of it – is that we are still missing a theory of evil.

I made this point in my book How To Stop Fascism: it’s a deficit that seems ingrained into the DNA of every generation of social democracy.

My grandfather’s generation could imagine war, dictatorship, colonialism – but they could not imagine fascism until it sprang up and hit them in the face.

Today we’re not only seeing the return of fascism in the form of the classic, drunken racist mob that marched for Tommy Robinson; we’re seeing it among the super-rich people who form the dramatis personae of Epstein-world. People who knowingly and systematically raped children.

What Hannah Arendt called “radical evil” – evil perpetrated by people who not only dehumanise their victims but also themselves – is present in every redacted video clip and photograph of the Epstein files.

In this time of monsters we have to redouble our efforts to ensure that, as we fight them, their avatars do not walk amongst us.