The Perverted Face of Elite America

Managing editor of The American Conservative:

It is wrong, of course, to publicly speculate that Epstein was whacked, given that all available evidence points to gross negligence on the part of the jail.

But can you really blame people? Twenty-five years ago, if you’d said that a roll call of America’s elites, everyone from a former president to the most famous lawyer in the country, would be implicated in a sex trafficking ring masterminded by an enigmatic Wall Street financier who was also a member of the Trilateral Commission, you would have been laughed into the darkest corner of the local subway platform (next to the guy holding the “Vatican Hides Pedophiles” sign, presumably).Today, you’d be reading AP copy.

Validate an improbable conspiracy theory, and you grant license to all the related improbable conspiracy theories: Bill Clinton flew dozens of times on the Lolita Express; was it really beyond him to order a hit?

What naive stuff from the once Buchanite TAC magazine. Is plain negligence on the part of the jail really the simplest and least mind-offending explanation here? 

Federal Prisons like many other Federal institutions can be notoriously negligent and if we were talking about the death of a random prisoner that would be the Occam’s Razor explanation. But we’re talking about a prisoner upon whom were the eyes of the nation, and about whom the entire nation believed there was a very good chance he would die in suspicious circumstances.

In such a situation any semi-sane prison manager would take extraordinary measures to make sure the prisoner remain alive, up to the point of personally supervising his care yet that isn’t what happened here.

We are to believe that albeit they knew they would be subject to extraordinary media attention the prison management still allowed itself gross negligence? That’s already not convincing.

Now add to the mix that numerous extremely influential people had a lot to lose if Epstein went to trial and a far simpler, and convincing explanation offers itself ⁠— that prison management was convinced with a combination of carrot and stick it was in their best interest to be “grossly negligent” and allow the suicidal Epstein to kill himself.

Of course when you’re talking people as important as stood to go down with Epstein it’s not impossible they also had the power to similarly convince Epstein that he was better off taking one for the team and killing himself, than sticking around for what they could cook up for him if he didn’t.