The Epstein Class, the War on Accountability, and the War on Woke
The recently released Epstein files reveal something more chilling than the crimes of one man. They expose the communicative infrastructure of a class formation—what Ro Khanna has termed the "Epstein Class"—and document in real time how this formation mobilized to defend itself against the greatest threat it had faced in decades: the MeToo movement. These aren't just the private musings of a disgraced financier. They're a window into how power protects power, how sexual violence gets defended through coordinated media strategy, and how the "war on woke" emerged as counter-insurgency against accountability, with star academics and intellectuals providing its intellectual architecture.
In August 2018, as MeToo transformed from hashtag to institutional reckoning, publicist Peggy Siegal wrote to Epstein from a sailboat in Greece. A Page Six story had referred to Epstein as a "reviled billionaire pedophile," and he'd forwarded it to her, puzzled at the hostility. Her response crystallizes the formation's worldview: "the Me Too crazies want blood and death" and the movement represented "a barbaric over reaction to behavior that just ran it's course." This wasn't simply one ally's opinion. It was strategic assessment. She suggested Epstein donate to women's causes to "bolster his public image"—reduce accountability to public relations, violence to image management.
The files document an entire network tracking MeToo's progress with the attention others might give to stock prices or election results. Epstein sent links to news articles and swapped messages about which powerful men "went down," were "up to bat" and had been "whacked." He monitored cases against Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, Brett Ratner, Charlie Rose, Louis C.K., Matt Lauer, and CBS CEO Les Moonves. In October 2018, Epstein texted a group including Woody Allen's contact suggesting they form "the pariahs club" with "moonves, lauer rose louis ck, etc." The joke reveals the reality—these weren't isolated incidents but a class under siege, recognizing their shared vulnerability.
Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen's wife, forwarded Epstein articles tracking MeToo's spread. In 2016, when Anthony Weiner was caught sexting a teenage girl, Previn called the fifteen-year-old victim "a despicable and disgusting person who preys on the weak" while Epstein simply replied "Wow." As MeToo gained momentum, Previn sent Epstein an email titled "Just as the Me Too movement has gone too far so has Botox," equating survivor testimony with cosmetic excess. She celebrated negative reviews for films starring actors who had distanced themselves from Allen, calling Timothée Chalamet a "prick" for donating his salary from Allen's film to charity and citing MeToo as his reason. Her brother Ronan Farrow's Pulitzer Prize for exposing Weinstein drew her contempt—she forwarded articles suggesting he received "too much prestige. More than he deserves."
This wasn't passive observation. It was active strategizing, and the strategic network extended deep into academia. The files reveal Lawrence Krauss, the theoretical physicist who founded Arizona State University's Origins Project, seeking Epstein's counsel when facing his own sexual misconduct allegations. In December 2017, Krauss asked Epstein how to handle questions from BuzzFeed News. Epstein's response was methodical: provide a defense in a "short concise cover letter" to be published in its entirety, with an attachment offering more details. After BuzzFeed published its investigation in February 2018, Krauss reported back to Epstein with play-by-play updates of the fallout. "I wonder if I will ever really recover," Krauss wrote. "I wish they would indict Trump or something right now."
Epstein coached Krauss on response strategy: discredit accusers by depicting them as irrational and opportunistic, position Krauss as the rational renowned scientist. "Concentrate on your point-by-point refutation," Epstein advised. "[An] article on women agreeing on seeing flyer saucers does not make the claim real. Break the charges into ludicrous, ogling, jokes, etc." The comparison to UFO sightings was calculated—frame testimony as mass delusion, collective irrationality, hysteria. Former Baylor president Kenneth Starr weighed in with his own advice: "Consult a lawyer beforehand, if possible, but be cooperative/nice at this stage. But this sounds like an internal discipline matter rather than Title IX."
The Krauss-Epstein connection wasn't incidental. Krauss organized a 2006 gravity conference on Epstein's private island attended by Stephen Hawking and other luminaries. After Epstein's 2008 conviction, Krauss took his money—at least $250,000, possibly much more through connections with billionaire Leon Black—to bankroll the Origins Project. Krauss defended Epstein publicly even after his conviction: "If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge. Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they're not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people."
The financial architecture reveals the scale of Epstein's investment in building intellectual infrastructure for what would become anti-accountability discourse. Between 2001 and 2015, Epstein's foundations provided $638,000 to John Brockman's Edge Foundation—fully 74% of the organization's total revenue during this period. In many years, Epstein was Edge's sole donor, essentially owning the intellectual salon that connected Pinker, Dawkins, Krauss, Harris, and hundreds of other scientists who would form the nucleus of the Intellectual Dark Web. Beyond Edge, Epstein directed at least $850,000 to MIT between 2002 and 2017, with another $1.25 million going to Media Lab director Joi Ito's personal investment funds and an additional $7.5 million that Epstein facilitated from other donors. Harvard received at least $6.5 million, with evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak—who received $5 million in Epstein's will—as a primary beneficiary. Lawrence Krauss's Origins Project at Arizona State received a documented $250,000, likely more when accounting for donations from Leon Black, who later acknowledged paying Epstein $158 million for dubious "tax advice." In total, Epstein invested a minimum of $17.5 million, possibly over $25 million, in building and sustaining the academic networks that provided intellectual legitimacy for dismissing feminist analysis of sexual violence and attacking accountability movements like MeToo. This wasn't incidental patronage—it was systematic infrastructure development for a class formation defending its right to operate with impunity.
This appeal to scientific rationality as defense of a convicted sex offender exemplifies how intellectual authority gets weaponized to protect the Epstein Class. Krauss's Origins Project became a node connecting Epstein to the broader intellectual networks that would fuel anti-woke discourse. A 2014 gala featured Krauss photographed between Epstein and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. In 2017, Epstein attended an Origins Project workshop on artificial intelligence, arriving with "two young East European–looking women" according to attendees.
Pinker's connections to Epstein extended beyond photographs. In 2007, Pinker provided linguistic analysis for Epstein's legal defense, helping his attorney Alan Dershowitz argue that Epstein hadn't violated federal law against using the internet to lure minors across state lines. "To confirm our view of the 'plain meaning' of the words, we asked" Pinker, "a noted linguist, to analyze the statute," Dershowitz's letter stated. Pinker later claimed he didn't know the analysis was for Epstein's defense and regretted providing it. But this assistance came within a broader context of Pinker's work minimizing sexual violence and attacking feminist analysis.
In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker argued that rape is "not exactly a normal part of male sexuality" but suggested "the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate." He dismissed rape crisis centers' analysis that sexual assault is about aggression and power, not sex. He called the idea that the 2014 Isla Vista murders—where Elliot Rodger killed six people after posting a manifesto about punishing women for rejecting him—were about a larger pattern of hatred against women "statistically obtuse." When philosopher Kate Manne documented these positions in her 2017 book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny and posted excerpts on Twitter after Pinker's Epstein connections surfaced, defenders rushed to attack her as embodying "toxic femininity" and a "soulless bitch."
These weren't isolated academic disagreements. They were fundamental battles over who gets to define the nature of gendered violence, fought by academics whose authority derived partly from networks Epstein helped build and fund. Pinker's connections ran through literary agent John Brockman, who operated Edge.org—an atheist organization bankrolled by Epstein that held "billionaires dinners" bringing together scientists, tech titans, and Wall Street wealth. Edge functioned as intellectual infrastructure for what would become the anti-woke movement, connecting figures like Pinker, Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and others who would form the nucleus of the "Intellectual Dark Web."
When Bari Weiss coined the term "Intellectual Dark Web" in her 2018 New York Times article, she was naming a formation whose origins traced directly through Epstein's networks. The IDW—including Peterson, Shapiro, Rubin, Harris, the Weinstein brothers—positioned themselves as martyrs to political correctness, brave truth-tellers pushed out of institutions captured by woke ideology. Their shared opposition to "identity politics" and concerns about "free speech under siege" masked their core function: providing intellectual legitimacy for backlash against movements like MeToo that threatened patriarchal impunity.
Jordan Peterson built his celebrity by opposing Canadian legislation protecting transgender people, framing it as compelled speech. He parlayed this into bestselling books arguing that hierarchies are natural, that postmodern neo-Marxism threatens Western civilization, and that people should "set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world." This last injunction—focus on individual self-improvement rather than structural critique—directly countered MeToo's insistence that structural analysis of gendered violence was essential. Sam Harris defended genetic explanations for IQ differences between racial groups and conducted "thought experiments" on torture. Ben Shapiro dismissed transgender identities as delusions. All framed their positions as rational, scientific, evidence-based—in contrast to the emotional, ideological excesses of social justice movements.
The pattern is consistent: deploy scientific authority and rational discourse as weapons against movements centering marginalized voices. When Dawkins alerted Brockman about feminist blogger Rebecca Watson's criticism of Krauss's defense of Epstein, he called Watson a "rather nasty young woman" running "some kind of witch-hunt." The witch-hunt framing is telling—it inverts victim and perpetrator, casting powerful men as hunted and their critics as irrational persecutors. This inversion became central to anti-woke rhetoric.
Bari Weiss herself, who named the IDW, has connections running through these networks. Her wife Nellie Bowles visited Epstein for a private meeting in 2018, shortly before his meeting with Leon Black. Bowles claimed the visit was for reporting purposes. But the meeting occurred precisely when Epstein was most concerned about MeToo's impact, when he was strategizing with Steve Bannon about media rehabilitation, when the formation was mobilizing its resources for defense. Whether Bowles's intentions were journalistic or not, her access came through the same networks connecting Epstein to intellectuals, media figures, and political operatives.
The most illuminating connections involve Steve Bannon himself. The files document hundreds of exchanges between Epstein and Bannon from early 2018 through Epstein's arrest in July 2019. Michael Wolff, who introduced them, reported that Bannon told Epstein he was "the one person I was truly afraid of coming forward during the campaign," given Trump and Epstein's history. By early 2018, Epstein told associates he and Bannon "had become friends."
The friendship wasn't merely social. In April 2019, as media scrutiny intensified, Bannon arranged "media training" at Epstein's residence that would be "totally confidential." The next day, Epstein reported his representatives were using the "script" Bannon provided when interacting with The New Yorker. Bannon filmed over fifteen hours coaching Epstein for a planned "60 Minutes" interview that never materialized. "You're engaging, you're not threatening, you're natural, you're friendly, you don't look at all creepy, you're a sympathetic figure," Bannon told Epstein during these sessions.
In text messages, Bannon laid out the rehabilitation strategy: "first we need to push back on the lies; then crush the pedo/trafficking narrative; then rebuild your image as philanthropist." This sequence is instructive—deny, discredit the framing, reconstruct reputation through strategic giving. After filming, Bannon texted that his camera crew was "blown away" and "mesmerized because they have been sold you are a 'monster.'" The implication was clear: perception was the problem, not conduct. Media narrative, not material violence.
These exchanges occurred while Bannon was building what he called a global populist movement. The files show him discussing with Epstein his plans for "reverse Alabama" politics—"Populist/Nationalist first; Conservative Christians (catholic/evangelical) next." Epstein offered connections, strategic advice, and funding. They discussed European elections, celebrated Theresa May's resignation, praised Germany's far-right AfD party, and mocked Angela Merkel. When Bannon traveled, Epstein provided assistance and contacts. He joked about being "the highest-paid guide in history" for Bannon's political projects.
The correspondence reveals Epstein and Bannon's shared contempt for women. They discussed sex and ogled women together via text. When Epstein mentioned women, Bannon replied "women are a total distraction." This wasn't incidental banter between friends. It was ideological alignment—women as objects, distractions, problems to be managed rather than people with legitimate claims to safety and dignity.
Here we see how the Epstein Class operates across domains. Academic networks built through Epstein's funding and Brockman's Edge Foundation connected scientists and intellectuals who would provide theoretical justifications for dismissing feminist analysis of sexual violence. These same figures became nodes in the Intellectual Dark Web, positioning themselves as rational alternatives to woke excess. Bannon connected this intellectual apparatus to political strategy, building a populist movement that attacked the accountability mechanisms MeToo created. Media figures like Bari Weiss gave the formation its brand, framing anti-woke intellectuals as heroic dissidents rather than defenders of patriarchal privilege.
The timing demands attention. Bannon left the White House in August 2017, weeks before the Weinstein revelations that sparked MeToo. His friendship with Epstein intensified precisely as MeToo reached its peak institutional impact—as universities implemented new harassment policies, as companies created reporting mechanisms, as industries grappled with accountability. The "war on woke" that Bannon helped orchestrate emerged simultaneously with his effort to rehabilitate Epstein's image and with academic networks' production of intellectual ammunition against feminist analysis.
This wasn't coincidence. When journalist Michael Wolff asked in December 2018 how to help Epstein manage the Miami Herald's renewed investigation, Wolff replied: "I would look for some reporter to do a more nuanced post-morten on the case– with Trump overtones, legal joustings, #metoo-isms, and profit-motives." Note the framing—MeToo becomes "metoo-isms," a political position rather than testimony about violence. Profit motives get suggested as the real story, deflecting from abuse to financial incentives of accusers or journalists. This reframing required intellectual infrastructure to seem credible.
Pinker provided it by arguing rape is partly about sex, not purely about power—contradicting feminist analysis and rape crisis centers. Krauss provided it by appealing to scientific rationality as justification for believing Epstein over his victims. Peterson provided it by arguing that people should focus on individual self-improvement before criticizing structural problems. Harris provided it by framing discussions of violence through evolutionary psychology that naturalized male aggression. Shapiro provided it by dismissing identity-based analysis as victimhood culture. Together they created an intellectual edifice that made attacking MeToo seem rational, scientific, evidence-based—not defensive reaction by threatened men but brave dissent from ideological orthodoxy.
The Epstein files document MeToo as existential threat to this entire apparatus. The movement centered survivor voice as epistemological authority, fundamentally disrupting who gets to define reality in situations of sexual violence. For decades, these situations had been defined by institutional gatekeepers, legal processes privileging perpetrator testimony, and academic theories naturalizing male violence. MeToo created alternative infrastructures for truth-telling that bypassed traditional arbiters. The hashtag, the collective witnessing, the avalanche of stories—these made undeniable the systematic nature of what had been consistently framed as isolated incidents.
Individual bad apples became recognizable as products of orchards specifically cultivated to produce such fruit. Particular industries, particular institutional cultures, particular configurations of power—including academic networks built on Epstein's money—consistently generated sexual violence. This visibility threatened the plausible deniability essential to the Epstein Class's reproduction. If patterns were visible, if enablers could be identified, if intellectual justifications could be exposed as serving power rather than truth, then the entire formation became vulnerable.
The files show them recognizing this. When they track who "went down" and who's "up to bat," they're monitoring the effectiveness of accountability infrastructures they don't control. When Siegal calls MeToo "barbaric," she's describing mechanisms operating outside elite-controlled channels. When Bannon offers to "crush the pedo/trafficking narrative," he's attempting to reassert definitional control through media strategy. When Krauss appeals to scientific method to defend Epstein, he's weaponizing academic authority against survivor testimony. When Pinker dismisses feminist analysis of rape, he's using his Harvard credentials to delegitimize structural critique.
Most fundamentally, MeToo threatened the material basis of power for men whose access to women's bodies was integral to their self-conception and social performance. Sexual access wasn't incidental to their power but constitutive of it. The ability to objectify, to take, to operate without consent wasn't personal failing separate from intellectual brilliance—it was the same expression of entitlement characterizing their exercise of power across domains. The files capture this. When Epstein and Bannon discuss women as distractions, when they track which men faced consequences for sexual violence, when they strategize image rehabilitation for a convicted sex offender, when academics provide intellectual cover for minimizing gendered violence, they're defending a structure of domination that underwrites their entire worldview.
This is why the files matter beyond Epstein's individual crimes. They document the communicative infrastructure through which sexual violence gets protected—the private channels, the academic theories, the strategic coordination, the media manipulation, the political organization. They show the Epstein Class wasn't passive observers of MeToo but active strategists against it. And they reveal the "war on woke" as precisely what survivors claimed: coordinated backlash designed to restore conditions for continued violence, backed by intellectual authorities whose networks and funding traced directly through Epstein.
The alliance structure becomes comprehensible through this lens. Tech executives whose corporate cultures enabled harassment found common cause with academics whose authority included sexual access to students and whose theories naturalized male violence, with politicians whose operations treated women as available, with media figures whose platforms depended on provocative violation, with intellectuals whose celebrity derived from dismissing structural critique. They shared investment in patriarchal impunity even while disagreeing about other matters. Epstein provided the node connecting tech, academia, politics, and media. Brockman's Edge Foundation provided the intellectual salon. Krauss's Origins Project provided academic legitimacy. Pinker and others provided theoretical justifications. Bannon provided political strategy. Weiss provided the brand. Together they architected resistance to accountability that continues today.
Consider the rhetorical moves documented across these networks. Teenage victims become "despicable" predators. MeToo becomes "barbaric overreaction." Accountability becomes "cancel culture." Survivor testimony becomes "profit-motive" or "mass delusion like UFO sightings." Sexual violence becomes "narrative" to be crushed. Feminist analysis becomes "woke ideology." Structural critique becomes "identity politics." Each reframing shifts terrain from material conditions of violence to questions about discourse, from justice to civility, from power to speech, from testimony to theory.
These moves weren't invented in Epstein's mansion or Krauss's office or Pinker's study. They drew from decades of backlash scholarship, men's rights discourse, and academic debates. But the files show how coordinated deployment happened—who crafted language, who provided theories, who funded platforms, who built movements, who offered strategic counsel, who gave media access. The "war on woke" wasn't organic grassroots resistance. It was well-resourced counter-insurgency with Epstein-class backing and intellectual elite participation.
If this analysis holds, resistance requires strategic clarity. We must maintain survivor voice infrastructures despite attempts to delegitimize them through appeals to scientific rationality or free speech. We must expose material connections within the Epstein Class formation—not just financial ties but intellectual networks, shared platforms, coordinated messaging. We must connect anti-woke politics to sexual violence explicitly, showing how intellectual authorities who dismiss feminist analysis are defending not abstract principles but concrete structures enabling abuse.
We must contest the weaponization of scientific authority. When academics appeal to evolution or biology or rationality to naturalize male violence or dismiss structural analysis, we must reveal how such appeals serve power. Not all scientific inquiry threatens accountability, but inquiry funded by men like Epstein, conducted in networks he built, deployed to defend men he counseled, deserves profound skepticism.
We must build accountability mechanisms outside institutions captured by this class formation. Academic networks, media platforms, political organizations—many remain controlled by formations invested in impunity. Community-based processes, independent media, alternative intellectual spaces provide options when traditional channels fail or actively obstruct justice.
Finally, we must theorize the culture of sexual violence as central to contemporary configurations of power, not peripheral. The Epstein files don't just document one man's crimes or even one network's defense of him. They document how sexual violence gets protected through coordinated action by a class formation spanning tech, media, politics, and academia. They show this formation recognizing MeToo as existential threat and mobilizing resources—financial, intellectual, strategic—to neutralize it. They reveal the "war on woke" as the Epstein Class and its intellectual architects defending themselves.
The question now is whether these revelations shift the terrain. The files provide evidence that what survivors experienced as coordinated backlash actually was coordinated backlash, with intellectual elites providing its theoretical foundation. They document the infrastructure. They name the strategists. They expose the material connections. They reveal how academic authority gets weaponized to defend power. Whether this evidence translates into renewed momentum for accountability depends on whether we use it to rebuild what MeToo created—infrastructures centering survivor voice, mechanisms operating outside captured institutions, intellectual frameworks that refuse to let science or rationality serve as cover for violence, and movements powerful enough to threaten the formations that protect abuse.
The war on woke is the Epstein Class defending itself, with star academics providing the intellectual ammunition. The Epstein files prove it. Our task is ensuring that defense fails.