Western elites have spent two years actively colluding in mass slaughter in Gaza - widely identified by experts as a genocide - and then labelling any opposition to it as antisemitism or terrorism.

Those same elites twiddle their thumbs as the planet burns, refusing to give up their enriching addiction to fossil fuels, even as survey after survey shows global temperatures relentlessly climbing to the point where climate breakdown is inevitable.

…

The Epstein files proffer an answer. What feels like a conspiracy, they suggest, is indeed a conspiracy - one driven by greed. What was always staring us in the face might actually be correct: there is a steep entry price for being accepted into the West’s tiny power elite, and it involves putting to one side any sense of morality. It requires discarding empathy for anyone outside the in-group.

Maybe a soulless, flesh-eating elite in charge of our societies is less of a caricature than it appears. Maybe the Epstein files have such purchase on our imaginations because they teach us a lesson we already knew, confirming a cautionary tale that predates even the West’s literary canon.