Nomadic Bat Signals & Status Games: The New York Times on the "Epstein Class"

From Anand Giridharadas' 11-23-25 NEW YORK TIMES opinion-editorial piece entitled "How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails":

As journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name of one fawning luminary after another, there is a collective whisper of “How could they?” How could such eminent people, belonging to such prestigious institutions, succumb to this?

A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain.

At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.

The Epstein story is resonating with a broader swath of the public than most stories now do, and some in the establishment worry. When Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, speaks of an “Epstein class,” isn’t that dangerous? Isn’t that class warfare?

But the intuitions of the public are right. People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped [...].

What the Epstein class understands is that the more accessible information becomes, the more precious nonpublic information is. The more everybody insta-broadcasts opinions, the dearer is the closely held take. The emails are a private, bilateral social media for people who can’t or won’t post: an archipelago of single subscriber Substacks. And in the need to maintain relevance by offering edge, a reader detects thirst and swagger, desperateness and swanning [...].

Sometimes these people give the impression that their minds would be blown by a newspaper. Mr. Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein: “Love to get your sense of Trump’s administration, policies.” And while it may seem strange to rely on Mr. Epstein for political analysis when you can visit any number of websites, for this class, insight’s value varies inversely with the number of recipients. And the ultimate flex is getting insider intel and shrugging: “Nthg revolutionary really,” the French banker Ariane de Rothschild wrote during a meeting with Portugal’s prime minister.

Nomadic bat signals get things going, and edge keeps them flowing, while underneath a deeper exchange is at work. The smart need money; the rich want to seem smart; the staid seek adjacency to what Mr. Summers called “life among the lucrative and louche”; and Mr. Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who could be forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital — money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money [...].

This class has its status games. One is, when getting a tip, to block the blessing by saying you already know. Another is to apologize for busyness by invoking centrality — “trump related issues occupying my time.” When an intro is offered, the coldest reply is “no.” The ultimate power move is from Mohamed Waheed Hassan of the Maldives, whose emails ended: “Sent from President’s iPad.”

To read the entire article, click HERE.