None of the Epstein revelations should shock anyone who has studied colonialism with open eyes.
What the world calls a “scandal” is better understood as an unbroken historical through-line: the systematic sexual barbarism that has always been structural to white supremacist empire-building. The depravity on display in Epstein’s mansions, private islands, and private jets is not a modern aberration.
It is the same depravity that saturated the slave quarters, the frontier forts, the colonial barracks, and the plantation big houses. It is older than the United States. It is foundational to it.
White supremacy has never been only about skin color or alleged intellectual hierarchy. At its violent heart, it has always been an ideology of entitled access—the unquestioned right of the “superior” man to take, use, degrade, and discard the bodies of those he has already classified as less-than-human.
When European men first stepped onto this continent, they did not limit conquest to land and gold. They conquered women’s bodies as proof of dominion. Rape was military doctrine: a weapon to shatter Indigenous societies, erase bloodlines, terrorize resistance, and mark territory through violation. The same logic governed the transatlantic slave system. Enslaved African women were not merely laborers; they were breeding stock. Their rape by enslavers was not a crime—it was capital accumulation.
Forced reproduction after 1808 turned Black wombs into the new Middle Passage. Enslaved men were sexually humiliated and violated to crush dignity and remind every Black person of total ownership. White men’s sexual impunity was the daily performance of supremacy.
This was never hidden. It was boasted about in diaries, court records, travelogues, and plantation ledgers. The ability to rape without consequence was not a bug in the colonial-imperial machine; it was a feature. Sexual depravity became the visceral language of power: “I can do this to you because you are nothing.”
Jeffrey Epstein did not invent anything new. He simply replicated—in 21st-century luxury—what enslavers, conquistadors, colonial governors, and imperial officers had done for centuries: he turned access to vulnerable, racialized, and economically disposable female bodies into a currency of elite male bonding. The guest lists, the flights, the “massages,” the blackmail material—the entire operation mirrored the way powerful men have long used trafficked and coerced women to cement alliances, display status, and enforce silence. The only real differences are the Gulfstream jets, the hidden cameras, and the veneer of Palm Beach civility.
The victims remain overwhelmingly young, poor, often girls from working class families or from broken homes—the same demographic profile colonialism and slavery designated as “available” for violation.
The perpetrators remain shielded by wealth, political connections, intelligence ties, and a lingering cultural reflex that still whispers: powerful white men are entitled to certain kinds of bodies.
Calling Epstein a “monster” lets the system off the hook. He was not a glitch. He was continuity.
A reflection of the monstrosity that is white patriarchy, dressed up as colonial desire.
The empire was erected on raped Indigenous women, on raped enslaved Black women, on raped colonized women across continents. That architecture never collapsed—it simply modernized.
Today it operates through private islands instead of plantations, through NDAs instead of slave codes, through offshore accounts instead of overseer whips. But the organizing logic is identical: white supremacist power structures still fuse racial domination with sexual entitlement. The ability to sexually exploit with near-impunity remains one of the last unapologetic expressions of imperial masculinity.
Until we name white supremacy as the through-line—until we admit that sexual barbarism was never incidental but constitutive—we will keep being “shocked” by the same crime wearing different suits.
Epstein is dead. The machine that produced him is not.
It is time to stop pretending surprise and start dismantling the tradition.