Tuesday, February 17, 2026

The Epstein Class

As much as this has been news, I don't think "we're" really mad enough that there is a vast network of rich people trafficking in children to rape, and vaster network of bootlickers who were perfectly fine with - and in fact groveling and deferential to - those people.
On June 5, 2015, Kathy Ruemmler, then a corporate lawyer for Latham & Watkins but just one year removed from her stint as White House counsel for Barack Obama, emailed her good friend Jeffrey Epstein. Ruemmler, who was once under consideration to become Obama’s attorney general, wrote, “I am working on a PR strategy for MJ White v. Elizabeth Warren.” Epstein responded, “Good[.] mj is good.” And Ruemmler followed on in a response, “Yes, and EW is the worst.”

This is the perfect Jeffrey Epstein email, with as much explanatory power about this man, and more important the world he associated with and cultivated, than anything to do with child sex abuse. It shows that there is in fact an Epstein class, which not only believes in their own personal impunity, but seeks to protect their fellow travelers as well. And that ultimately lines up with a political and economic vision that favors corporate domination over the public interest.

But you have to unravel all the backstory to best understand it.

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This is the Epstein class in all its glory. It’s an elite that schemes to remain as unaccountable for sexual crimes as it does for corporate crimes. It has its own hierarchy of friends and foes, and it will defend those friends no matter what they do, while the spoils of privilege flow. Its instinct is to protect and preserve money and power, with the concerns of anybody without a corporate jet tangential at best. And once you set those ground rules, once you build a wall around a certain class so they don’t have to pay any price for their actions, it’s inevitable that the actions will get darker and darker.

Click through and read the rest