Hot take: You know how increased transparency and the crackdown on earmarks in congressional legislation have been blamed for...
Hot take: You know how increased transparency and the crackdown on earmarks in congressional legislation have been blamed for increasing ideological polarization, since they can’t buy each other off as easily? What if the destruction of Epstein’s island is having the same effect? It was the ultimate smoke-filled back room where they had the mutually binding experience of engaging in taboo. And now that it’s gone, we see escalated culture war with all the BLM and cancel culture stuff, all because it’s harder for the ruling elites to talk to each other and make deals they can depend on.
We are reaching levels of spiciness that shouldn’t even be possible
I mean cross what we’ve learned about Epstein, all we already knew from all the media stuff and what’s been openly known of the foundation and dalliances of Mr. Neoliberalism himself, Bill Clinton.
In the 90s, there was a network including jet-owning moneybags, Hollywood producers and broadcast heads, celebrities, urban propertyholders, DLC-type officials at the federal and urban level, prominent public intellectuals, Silicon Valley types, futurists, and science fiction types.
And they promoted that they were the same thing, that rock star cool was tech startup cool was indie movie cool was rich urban gay men cool was sci fi cool was big money cool was Bill Clinton cool
Boomer cool, really
Appeared at each other’s events and donated to their fundraisers and campaigns with which to enhance their stature, endowed each other’s sinecures (compare royal pensions), legitimated each other.
Overlooked each others’ blemishes, especially the stuff like smoking pot or free access to teenagers where the weirdo right was still pretending the 60s hadn’t happened. (Though for all that, how many building permits got fixed?!) Remember how much of Bonfire of the Vanities was the prosecutors resenting the pressure to hunt rich whites to build a coalition rather than be left to the necessary “garbage collection” in some idiom of honor?
Basically locked the 80s-gentrifying yuppie class in place as owner of the culture, and the cities, white urban professionals with a Boomer sense of being cool but not radical, the next step in the system balancing itself out.
Like, that is a totally imaginable model of so much of the 90s as Third Way boomer yuppie elite conspiracy, isn’t it?