We Are All Guilty
We rape and abduct the world by proxy. We just don’t want to look at it.
We are all Epstein’s clients.
Not literally. But the distance between us and the men in those flight logs is shorter than anyone wants to admit.
Three and a half million pages released by the Department of Justice. The guts of a sex trafficking operation that serviced the most powerful people on earth. Girls recruited from vulnerable backgrounds, turned into a supply chain. Flight logs, financial records, emails connecting private islands to global capitals.
Epstein was a pimp. A sophisticated one, but a pimp. I don’t condemn prostitution between consenting adults. That’s not the crime here. The crime is coercion. The crime is age. The crime is power wielded over people who cannot say no.
The demand came from the top. The protection came from the institutions. The whole thing worked because powerful people needed it to work.
And everyone is shocked.
I’m not.
The outrage stops at the island
Every one of Epstein’s victims deserves justice. But who will give justice to the 165 schoolgirls of Minab?
On February 28, 2026, the first day of the war on Iran, a missile hit a girls’ elementary school during class hours. Triple-tapped. The roof collapsed on children. Most of the dead were between seven and twelve. Multiple investigations concluded the United States was responsible.
One hundred and sixty-five little girls. In a classroom. With our bombs.
Where are the 3.5 million pages for them?
Girls trafficked in Palm Beach. Girls buried in Minab. Different crimes, same impunity. The powerful take what they want and the world looks away. The only difference is that Epstein's operation required secrecy. Ours doesn't even bother.
We starve 11 million people in Cuba and call it foreign policy. We deny 29 million Venezuelans their right to self-determination through sanctions and interference, and we call it democracy promotion. We watch 2 million people in Gaza get obliterated and call it self-defense.
No files. No transparency act. No outrage. Because those aren’t Epstein’s crimes. Those are ours.
The supply chain
We fill our tanks with cheap gas that flows through pipelines laid over broken countries. We wear clothes stitched in buildings that collapse because safety costs money. We eat food picked by people we’d call trafficked if they looked like us. We carry phones assembled in factories with suicide nets outside the windows.
The supply chain of our comfort runs through the same logic as Epstein’s operation.
Exploitation is tolerable as long as the victims are far enough away that we don’t have to watch.
We are all Epstein’s clients. We just don’t fly private to get our fix.
We get it delivered.
The 405
For weeks I drove the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. Giant letters above the highway: WAR. A billboard for the latest Planet of the Apes. Millions of commuters driving under it every day. Nobody said a word.
Three different letters — SEX — and the city would have burned.
We sell war to children as entertainment. We name military operations “Shock and Awe” and cheer from our living rooms. But a naked body? That’s where we draw the line.
The Epstein files shock people because sex is involved. If he’d been an arms dealer who funneled weapons to conflicts that killed hundreds of thousands of children, he’d have a foundation and a seat at the UN.
Our society isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed.
It knows what it finds acceptable and what it finds obscene. And it has those two things backwards.
What I know
I write this from Los Angeles. I spent thirty years in the places this system chews up — conflict zones, refugee camps, countries on the receiving end of our foreign policy. Now I live inside the machine that does the chewing. I’ve seen it from both ends. The view is the same.
The Epstein files are not a revelation to me. They are a confirmation. The only people shocked are the ones who still believed the system was something other than what it is.
People’s memory is short. Within months, the Epstein files will be a Netflix documentary and the names in the flight logs will have new PR teams. The architecture will remain untouched.
If this system collapses, it will reinvent itself with better branding.
If it survives, it will reproduce exactly this.
That’s not cynicism. That’s pattern recognition from three decades of watching it happen.
So now what
There is no clean position from which to read this. There is no ethical distance. You are inside the system that produced Epstein, that protected his clients, that bombed a classroom full of seven-year-olds and then accused their country of doing it to themselves.
You paid for it. I paid for it. Every tank of gas, every tax return, every election we voted in or didn’t. Every morning we woke up and went about our lives while the machinery ran.
The Epstein files didn’t change reality. They made it harder to pretend. It’s not justice. Justice would require looking at the whole ledger, not just the pages with sex on them. And nobody wants to open that book.
There is no action item at the end of this piece. No petition to sign. No call to your representative. Those things exist inside the system, and the system is what produced the problem. I’m not going to pretend a toolkit exists for this.
What I will say is that the discomfort you may feel right now is not a problem to solve. It’s not something to process, reframe, or move past. It is the appropriate response to what is actually happening in the world we participate in.
Let’s sit with it.
Pain is inevitable. Growth is optional.
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Because the stories we tell are the reality we live.
Substack needs more options beyond "like." I cannot "like" this post, only stand in shame and awe at your courage to say out loud what no one wants to hear. Would that more of us could speak the truth and be heard.
Silence.