Anand Giridharadas

And I'm kind of a language person.

I'm trying to understand what are the words people are using?

Like, what is happening here?

What is going on here?

Like an anthropologist of these emails.

Because it is a culture, right?

And the first thing very rich people do when they have a little wealth and power is to make it impossible to see their private communications.

They don't use Gmail the way you and I do.

They got private servers.

They got IT people coming to their house, rigging things up for them.

So this kind of glimpse into not just how one monster in Jeffrey Epstein behaved, but how this entire social elite, Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Summers, former treasury secretary, Bill Gates, people from Harvard, people from MIT, people from the philanthropy world, people from the business world, Obama's White House counsel, this woman, Catherine Rumler, on and on and on.

You don't normally get glimpses.

into how these people operate.

So I started reading.

And I started with the question of how could all these eminent people from prestigious institutions lower themselves to consort with a guy like Jeffrey Epstein, convicted sex offender.

And the more I read, I actually realized how misguided my question was.

The idea that these high people had somehow lowered themselves to the standards of this man, when actually what the emails showed

if you connect with the dots of who these people are, how they have operated, how they've operated in our society over the last generation, these are people who obviously, of course, had no problem looking away at what Jeffrey Epstein did because looking away was their superpower.

And they trained up to looking away from his pedophilia by looking away at all other manner of pains.

They looked away at rising inequality, sometimes that they helped cause.