Molly Jong-Fast, in my opinion, is one of the better political writers in the business. Along with a regular reader of hers, I am an avid listener to her podcast, Fast Politics.
The format of Jong-Fast’s podcast is simple. She opens the show with “news that the media is ignoring” with her producer Jesse Cannon, then two interviews, and then ends with “Your Moment of Fuckery” where they highlight an especially crappy thing that Republicans have done recently. I highly recommend it.
When Evan Osnos, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Have and the Have Yachts, sat down with Jong-Fast this week to talk about Jeffrey Epstein and the culture that enabled him, the vibe was less “political talk” and more “moral alarm bell with Wi-Fi.”
The headline takeaway? Epstein isn’t just a monster. He’s a mirror.
Osnos argues that the Epstein saga, especially the newly revealed emails and connections, is not merely about a handful of grotesque individuals behaving grotesquely. It’s about a system. A culture. An entire ecosystem of wealth and power that quietly decided the rules were for “the little people.”
Yes, that phrase may seem familiar and even jog a memory.
If you’re old enough to remember hotel magnate Leona Helmsley declaring that “only the little people pay taxes,” congratulations, you’ve been pre-gaslit for this moment. That line, Osnos suggests, was practically quaint compared to what we’re seeing now. At least Helmsley had the decency to say the quiet part out loud.
Epstein, in Osnos’s telling, was the “ultimate creature” of an age in which wealth, ostentation, and unaccountability became status symbols. Not just being rich, but being able to get away with things, became a flex. The private jets. The island. The Manhattan townhouse. The social rehabilitation tour after a sex crime conviction. All of it functioned as proof of concept: billionaires have so much power they can literally do anything, no matter how terrible.
The most luxurious commodity in America has sadly become accountability avoidance.
Osnos put it bluntly: the greatest luxury good in American life may be the ability to escape consequences. Business implodes? There’s a bailout. Criminal behavior? There’s a sweetheart deal. Moral rot? There’s a rebrand.
The rot, he argues, is cultural. It’s not just about whether one financier did monstrous things. It’s about why so many powerful people stayed in his orbit after they knew. It’s about why shunning someone for egregious abuse was treated as gauche, or worse, “cancel culture.” It’s about why proximity to excess was aspirational.
One particularly telling example discussed was longevity influencer Peter Attia, who tried to explain his association with Epstein by claiming he had never seen that “kind of excess” before. As Osnos pointed out, that word, excess, is doing a lot of work. It’s not, “I didn’t realize this was predatory.” It’s, “I didn’t realize this level of opulence was available.” That’s not a defense. That’s a Yelp review.
They had plenty of help. Bari Weiss, for example, made this type of accountability avoidance for a particular class of people her life mission.
Epstein, Osnos argued, was the epitome of this concept. Just look at the institutions that enabled all this. The FBI’s early handling of Epstein’s case, the cover-ups, the incurious shrugging. The idea that once a case is “settled,” we all politely move on. Even if there is no accountability.
However, unfortunately for Epstein, there was investigative reporter Julie K. Brown, who refused to move on. Her reporting exposed the scale of Epstein’s abuse, revealing that there weren’t a dozen victims, but hundreds, even potentially over a thousand, spanning decades. It was old-school journalism in the tradition of Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair, prying open gilded doors and letting in some extremely overdue sunlight.
And that’s where Osnos got almost optimistic. Almost.
He talks about something called “autocratic backfire,” the historical phenomenon where oligarchic excess hits a public tripwire. Eventually, the brazenness becomes too much. The yacht photos stop being aspirational and start being infuriating. The lies stop being shrugged off and start being remembered.
In his view, figures like Donald Trump are not the disease but the symptom, a product of decades of normalized corruption, donor favoritism, and moral holidays among the elite. Roy Cohn-style politics, secrecy as strategy, power as domination, consequences as optional. The long arc from Roy Cohn to Mar-a-Lago is not accidental.
It’s not just the culture that applauded them, platformed them, invested with them, and yes, partied with them.
If there is a silver lining here, it’s this: we are not powerless. Investigative reporters still exist. Receipts still surface. Public patience still has limits. I’m hoping this holds up as the inevitable backlash starts coming from the same people who brought you the blowback to BLM and the Me Too movement.
But one thing is clear. Sunlight may not disinfect everything, but it sure makes the island parties less comfortable. Here’s to making them even more uncomfortable, in a jail cell.
The last word goes to The King.