The Epstein class, as my guest today talks about it, the group of people that are now being exposed as the Epstein files are being scrutinized. From the Norwegian royal family to high finance to the Slovakian national security apparatus and more. We see now what the international elite is all about. And Anand Giridharadas, who is a writer, a broadcaster, and the publisher of The Ink over on Substack. He is one of the smartest people I know on this phenomenon. Take a listen now to what he has to say about the Epstein class, how they got away with it, what it tells us about power in our country and around the world. And then we also talked about some of the big CEOs who have been bending the knee to Donald Trump. What happened to them? Did they not believe any of the DEI and all the other liberal ideas that they promoted for a decade? And finally, we end this on a rare optimistic note. Anand has a great view of what's happening really beyond the political battles in our culture. Men, all kinds of people are turning down the invitation that Trumpism offers. While he has a lot of men who support him, young men in particular, there are a lot of young men and men who don't. And while he has a lot of the majority of white people in this country, there are a lot of white people who are saying, "No, that is not the America we want." And in the end, Anand believes the great good common sense of America is going to win out. Let me know what you think about that and about what our conversation is all about. And if you like what you see here, hit the like button and subscribe here and on Real Patriotism. That's my site on substack.com. Now on Anand Giridharadas, great to see you, my friend. How are you?
Great to see you as always.
You're a busy man as always and an interesting man, one of the most interesting writers that I know. And I wanted to talk to you because we are speaking in the wake of a few days ago the release of this giant tranche of Epstein documents. I think you wrote the most interesting thing about the entire Epstein scandal, its ramifications deep into our culture and the culture of a certain class of people around the world. And I thought of you, of course, as these names came out. It shouldn't stagger me, but it does. The Norwegian royal family, the former president of Barclays, right? The former UK ambassador to the UN giving market-sensitive information to Epstein, the net, the spiderweb of his influence, former White House counsel to Obama giggling about the expensive purse he gave her or bag, what do they call it? It shouldn't shock me, but it does. Help me understand what it was, what it is, because it's an abiding problem about these kinds of people who find their way into the web of this darkness.
As someone who's written about the billionaire class and these kind of ultra-elites for some years now, let me tell you something. I think for the average person who has not thought a lot about this, when you think about people like that, you think, you know, when they come into that kind of money, the first thing they would buy would be a yacht or a plane or a fancy Birkin bag. No. Let me tell you the first thing people in that world buy when they can afford it. Very high-ass privacy.
They buy themselves email servers of a kind you've never even heard of. They buy themselves, you know, IT advisers. They buy themselves private security. The first thing, if they have any sense, people in that kind of world do, they get publicists, so on and so forth. They protect themselves from you having a glimpse of what they don't want you to see. So, they may put out their well-curated social media feed that they want you to see. They may come on a show on TV and put out what they want you to hear that's been vetted by a PR firm, but they work really hard to make sure you don't see the authentic glimpses of how they think, how they think about you, what they're really after. And I say all that to say what these Epstein files have really revealed, among all the depravity they've revealed and just the sadness of what they've revealed. They are an unprecedented glimpse into how the super elite that governs your politics privately out of view, that employs you, that runs your economy, that decides whether or not your kids have healthcare. It is an unprecedented glimpse behind the curtain at how they actually think, what they actually think of you, what their actual goals are, what their actual morality is. Maya Angelou is right. When people show you who they are, believe them. You're not going to get a glimpse like this very often. And so what I decided to do, you know, back in November when we had the first group of these emails, was that it was a little more manageable than 3 million files now, it was in the thousands of emails. And I basically read all of them as best I could. And I did that because I recognized what an unprecedented glimpse this was. And I was also following the lead of so many of these survivors who in their press conferences and interviews that they've given, these incredibly brave women have been the first to say, "Don't let this just be a story about sex crimes. It is absolutely a story about sex crimes." But what so many of them have said is what happened to me, what happened to us couldn't have happened without a certain kind of power structure and with a much larger number of people who may not themselves have committed sex crimes, but for whom depravity of the kind that Jeffrey Epstein engaged in was not a deal-breaker, was not a problem. And if you want to really understand how this kind of trafficking can occur, you have to understand that this group of people, philanthropists, education leaders, billionaires, high finance people, movie people, academics, scientists, people converging around the TED conference, those kinds of things, Republicans, Democrats, people who are bold-faced names, people you've never heard of, they form this kind of what Congressman Rokita has called the Epstein class that has a huge influence over your life, but they're fundamentally amoral. They're fundamentally in it for their own survival. They don't care about you. They don't think about you at all except to figure out more ways to extract profit from you and to keep your voice locked out so they can have the kind of society they want. And these emails show two kind of interwoven indifferences. First and most obviously, the indifference to a pedophile who was trafficking women and about whom there were more and more stories in the press. Some of the highest and most powerful people, former presidents and businesspersons and educational leaders, the person who runs Harvard University, that was not a problem for them. But more than that, it shows a group of people who, of course, if you think about it for two seconds, were able to look away from all this pain because they've been looking away from your pain for a generation. They've been looking away from the economic pain in an age of rising inequality. They've been looking away from the pain of a housing market where so many people just like literally can't find affordable places to live. They've been looking away from the pain of all the soldiers sent to Iraq earnestly fighting a war that was a lie. They've been able to look away from, you know, the pain of making choices to bring in technologies that make people obsolescent and cost people their jobs and livelihoods. So the Epstein class is a group of people whose superpower is sort of plugging their ears and going la when people cry. The louder they cry, the less they hear. The louder you cry, the less they hear. And so, of course, they were able to look away at these women's pain. They're looking away at pain. That's their jam.
Yeah, it's a brilliant formulation and it does help explain. If you want to read Anand's article about his traveling through these emails to discover these insights into the Epstein class, it's on now. I saw you put it up for free on The Ink, your Substack publication there. It was published in The New York Times in November and it is well worth a read. Everything on The Ink is, but this in particular. And I want to bring it up to something that struck me the other day as my wife and I do a little podcast ourselves on Substack. It's called Table Talk. I'll give it a little plug. But the other day we were talking about the CEOs, right? About how they can look away. And it struck me in particular, having worked for Disney for more than a quarter century and having covered some of that, not Disney but other corporate power. Did they not mean a word of it for the 10 years and more since Barack Obama was elected and into this second Trump term where they embraced a philosophy of justice, of equality, of using the great power that they were entrusted with as CEOs of our biggest companies to make the country more equal and more just? It was labeled woke. I was in Disney at the time working for ABC News. There were lots of policies and I got to tell you one thing that happened. Hiring changed and as a result the editorial conversation at ABC News I thought got better and richer. We hadn't heard voices before. All of a sudden people were talking about that and then on a dime, they turned on a dime. All of that has been erased. Democracy dies in darkness, which Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, slapped down on The Washington Post. That's gone. They didn't believe a word of it. These poses in the Epstein class posing as the distinguished president of Harvard, the national security adviser for the Slovakian government, the prince of England, whatever. All of these people, they were posing as the great and the good, as the responsible, who would lead us to a better and just society. As soon as things got tough, they're out. And behind the scenes, they don't really mean it. It's just like a different tie you wear to one event or another.
That is exactly right. And it's such an important point. The Epstein class is defined by amorality, you know, and Terry, in my practice as a writer, I try to triangulate between the kinds of things you can learn from documents, the kinds of things you can learn from pulling back and looking at, you know, a story like this in its full giant sweep. But I also, it's really important, as you know, to know people at a human level, to just understand things. And I know lots of people as you do and I try to know people in lots of worlds and I try to know them beyond just an interview or having a notebook open. It's important to me. You know, I write about finance and I write about Silicon Valley. I try not to do that just by like stone-throwing from the outside. That may be what it feels like at the end of the process, but I really, I talk to people. I engage with them. I try to understand what they're about in life. I knew one guy in particular who is really kind of caught up in this list and my suspicion of this guy, it's purely like a business kind of relationship with Epstein. I saw in The Wall Street Journal a couple years ago that this guy had been very close to Epstein and had met him more times than almost anybody else. And I was really shocked, you know, but then as I thought about it, this person that I knew, if I think of anything that defined him, he was maybe the most amoral person. He was like a corporate kind of guy. And it's a belief in the absence of beliefs. It's a belief in the inconvenience of beliefs. And I often would reflect on how different this person was because we were sort of similar in some ways. We were both journalists at a certain time. Then he became like a corporate kind of guy. But I remember the kind of chasm between us was like, for me, certain fundamental beliefs are everything. Like, what are you without those? And for him, if I'm just trying to be empathetic about it, it's like, I don't know, a belief is like a 100-pound backpack. Like, how many 100-pound backpacks can you carry, you know? So this understanding of this one person, I think, helped me a little bit understanding this group. We're exactly as you say. When the thing we're doing is DEI, then everybody in this Epstein class, these kinds of people, they're all going to be so proudly capitalizing the B in Black and they're going to be doing, you know, Exxon land acknowledgments at the ExxonMobil, you know, oil convention and they're going to do it harder than the activists are doing it when that's the thing that is being done. And then when someone else wins an election and the tide turns and we're now like hunting down Black people instead of capitalizing the B and taking healthcare away from indigenous people instead of honoring what was done to them, they will be as enthusiastic that way. And here's the important point that was revealed by these emails. They will find a way to profit from whichever direction we're going and they will make sure they are the leaders of whichever way we're going. So if we're going in the DEI way, they'll benefit from it, but they will be the ones shaping how that goes. And then when we're doing the other thing and we're taking, you know, any books about race away, they will be the leaders of that and they will benefit from that, right? Their foundations, like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, is like, we'll do all these things this way in the Obama years and then when that's not convenient, they'll go the other way. This is a group of people who are permanent survivors. You're just trying to survive out there and these are permanent survivors who in many ways are the reason you're merely trying to survive.
Yeah. I mean, it's such a rich area of conversation. One of the things that you said that I thought is the consequences don't attach to them, right? I have a friend who left ABC News back in 2016 and went to work for the Hillary Clinton campaign, believed in the cause, also felt there was going to be history being made if Hillary Clinton won, obviously. And when Trump won that election, she was quite devastated. And she said to me something I never forgot. She said that she believed that if one of the Wall Streeters who destroyed the American economy, plunging people into privation that we still haven't escaped, right? The consequences of the crash of 2008, 2009, we still, a lot of families, a lot of people never made it back. If just one of those fraudsters, because they were, whether it was in a strictly criminal sense or not, but some of them, there's no question, if one of them had been put on trial and paid the price of what they did to America, Hillary Clinton would have won. That it was the impunity of that class. Okay. And the way they got away with it.
Okay. But to your friend, your friend worked for her, right?
How much money did Bill and Hillary Clinton make in the decade and a half after leaving office?
I mean, it's nine figures, right?
It's hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that money came from anybody watching this now or was this money, a lot of it, from the kinds of institutions we can imagine might have that kind of money for speeches and other things, a lot of financial institutions?
We certainly know it's on the record that both of them have spoken at very... So, I mean, with all respect to your friend, that's a great thesis. I mean, I think that's true, but Hillary Clinton is a moral agent who had choices. If she felt that way, if she felt like that was an industry that got away with impunity and therefore put the... which I agree with, that it could have been a really interesting social experiment to refrain from making millions and millions of dollars talking to that industry. It could have been a fascinating social experiment to not raise money from those very same institutions. So it's all fine and good to say someone should have gone to jail. But I know the people around Hillary Clinton. I'm friends with many of the people around Hillary. Like, that is a social network of people who are very much connected to Wall Street. The people around Elizabeth Warren are not connected to Wall Street. That, I mean, people are responsible for their choices. Hillary Clinton has never been someone who said, I am going to have no relationship to high finance. She absolutely had a relationship to high finance. It's been very important to her, been very important to her husband. People are their choices. That's so... so you have to have a coherent theory of the world. And now we're living with the reality, as I say at the end of this piece, that Donald Trump... two crazily opposite things are true here. Donald Trump won because the public correctly perceived this condescension from super elites, people who don't care about you, don't think about you at all, except when to despise you and scheme behind your back about how to grab more wealth and power from you. That is true. He won because of that. And your friend's comment gets at that. It is also the case that having won because of that, he became the single greatest avatar of that elite condescension ever seen in American history. He's now running the country with that kind of condescension, that kind of sneering indifference as the governing philosophy of the nation. Both of those things are true. He won as a reaction against that phenomenon and now he is the poster child of it.
Well, let's get to politics. That brings us to politics. So he is the beneficiary, no question, of the failure of elite liberal governance, who suffer sort of the consequences of cleverness, right? You can always clever your way out of your beliefs, as you pointed out. Well, there's a reason I'm going to go to Epstein Island or his party in New York or whatever, and you can clever your way out of trouble. None of them really felt the consequences of the... none of the people we're talking about of the financial crisis the way so many millions of Americans did. And you can clever your way out of being put in the box that you're too woke. Now you're not. But I do think it's also a problem of politics because Donald Trump connects. He won the working class. The working class turned away from the clever people and they went to this authoritarian personality who doesn't know much of any consequence in terms of formal learning. He's got tremendous political instincts and willpower. He's a ferocious personality. I do not underestimate him. Was not what you'd call learned. And was that why the Democrats lost the working class? And Trump has a pretty good hold on it.
Here's my most empathetic read of it in a way. If I had to frame a vote for Trump once, twice, or three times in the most rational terms that I could find. And you know, for those of you who've never seen me before, you have to understand this is an intellectual exercise for me. This is not where I naturally am. But if I had to, let's say I was working on making a novel, right? And I wanted to create a character. You would have to artistically find a way in which this made sense and was reasonable to this person. Here's what that looks like to me. If you look around and you're not dialed into every policy thing. You're like a normal person, not like you and me who reads all these things and cares. You're like a normal person who has a normal amount of politics in your life, which is like, I don't know, 1 to 5 percent of your conscious awareness, right? Which may be even high, but let's just say that. Then I think you're making kind of very, what Malcolm Gladwell called, kind of thin-slice judgments about who's got your back. That's my, after all these years writing about politics, I think that is often what voters are doing. They're making kind of, they're kind of making like proxy decisions for, like they're using the issues that are available to them, a speech that's available to them, a controversy that's available to them to essentially try to make a judgment about who will really have their back, right? And there's an assumption of, there's a lot of surfaces, there's a lot of slickness, there's a lot of nice videos, right? But when it gets dark, who's really going to be there, right? Which is, by the way, what we're looking for in a mate, what we're looking for in a friend, you know, like this is, I think, a human skill people have even if they don't understand tax policy. And I think if you were to tell yourself that you have been failed repeatedly in every realm and phase of your life by an establishment and a system that is in some ways a specific interwoven set of institutions and communities, right? People going from the Obama administration to Disney and Disney to Goldman Sachs and Goldman Sachs to Harvard and Harvard to the Gates Foundation, right? We know basically all the names in the Epstein files, right? But there's this kind of specific, like the University of Oklahoma is not coming up a lot in these conversations, right? Community colleges are not coming up, labor unions are not coming up a lot. This is a specific group of institutions. And if you were to say, look, that is basically, as far as I understand, the group of people, the way they dress, the way they talk, that came around and did layoffs in my town, that thought offshoring would be a great idea and somehow it would make us whole in all these other ways, that thought like any amount of trade with China would be great, that thought globalization would be great because the world is one, like if you sort of generally associated that complex of people, institutions with all the indifference that you've lived downstream of for a generation. I think in that sense, what you might rationally seek is whoever is least in that complex. And while Trump is rich, Trump is actually not in that complex. Like Trump wanted to be in that complex. Trump is not smart. Like this is a very intelligent, data-driven, credentialed, fact-based group of people, meritocratic in a certain way, group of people. Trump is actually not a part of that. Trump is rich, but like you got to understand, rich is not the same as Goldman Sachs. Rich is not the same as Harvard. This is a certain kind of set of institutions. And I think Harvard Business Review in 2016 made this point that he kind of reminds a lot of working people of the guy who created a company that gave them a job and Hillary Clinton reminded them of the people who came around to inform them about layoffs.
That's great. That's exactly it. That's the consultant class and he's the boss. Now you can argue and you can say like, and we can all argue and say actually she would have led to you having more jobs, like all of that I agree with. All I am saying to you is these are social worlds.
Yeah.
And the reality, it is not untrue to feel like the social world that actually Donald Trump was not in, this kind of elite spreadsheet-driven, private-public, Goldman Sachs, Harvard, you know, Gates Foundation kind of world, that world just like looked down on you and didn't really help you and in fact presided over, you know, one of the greatest expansions of inequality in history. And so it might not be irrational to like try another thing now. Having tried it once and then it really was terrible, like personally I can't understand why, you know, you'd want to try a second time and a third time, but here we are.
Yeah, it's the Chris Arnade, the photographer and writer in 2016, drove around the country watching the Trump phenomenon happening and he said that that election was divided between the front row kids, the kids with their arms up and, oh, teacher, I know the answer, and everybody else. And the front row kids kind of won everything in a knowledge, information-driven economy and pulled the drawbridge up and looked down their nose at everybody else. That's the cartoon version. I would also say that there's a sense of place with Trump. You know, you know who he is. I remember thinking at one point that, you know, the banker in Greenwich has more in common with the banker in Hong Kong or Frankfurt than he does with the fellow one a mile away, right? Who's living in the downtown of wherever he is. So, I think that happened a lot. But I want to get to one other thing that you wrote recently because it's close to my heart and that's about what has happened, for temporarily I fear, with the determination of the Trump administration to end the temporary protected status for the 300,000-plus Haitians in this country. Haitians are scattered throughout the country. They were in particular numbers in Springfield, Ohio, where about 15 to 20,000 of them settled, helped lift up a Rust Belt town with their hard work and their starting businesses. Trump and Vance both said that they were eating cats and dogs, is how they became. I've been there a couple of times. I was thinking about going back to watch essentially because the temporary protected status ends on February 4th. And ICE was already announcing they're going to come pull them out and at the 11th hour we got a judge to halt that for a moment. But once again, what you made of the effort to get these people out and what this probably temporary respite means? Because as I say, you know, I was there and you could sense, well, it's true no matter where you are. If you want to talk to someone who is truly patriotic about the United States, still talk to somebody who's come to this country recently and wants to stay.
Yeah. I mean, that first of all is deeply true. And as someone who like you has gotten to live around the world and travel around the world, I know not everyone has the way I have and I will tell you a sight I have seen, as I'm sure you have seen, Terry, around the world, even in this era of great difficulty in America in the last 10 years, there are lines around the block at the American consulate or the American embassy in dozens of cities around the world every day. America, whatever we may think of ourselves, we are like a nightclub that everybody is still trying to get into. Maybe they're crazy.
