The Mandarins, Their Virtues and Vices

My guest on the show today is Ash Carter, writer and editor for Air Mail magazine and all around chronicler of the post-war cultural elite. I asked Ash to come on after reading the most recent in a series of profiles he’s written about great editors of the 20th century, some of whom, for reasons we discuss, were semi-cancelled in the last decade or two. He’s written about, for instance, former New Republic editor and owner Marty Peretz, Peretz’s longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier, Vintage Classics legend Gary Fisketjon, New York Review Classics visionary Edwin Frank, and Dick and Jeanette Seaver of Arcade Publishing.It’s a fun conversation that hits on a few of my abiding concerns: the legacy of the WASP elite on our culture and politics, the ways in which we should think about people who do bad things but have made great things, and graphic design, which Ash cares about more than the average magazine editor.I lead off the episode by saying something, perhaps against my better judgement, about Jeffrey Epstein (or Jeff Epstein, as we started calling him in my family for some reason).Here’s what I say. I am genuinely befuddled.I was listening to Jay Kang and Tyler Austin Harper’s podcast, Time to Say Goodbye, and they weren’t full conspiracy on Epstein, but I’d say 70% conspiracy.Here’s Harper, for instance, on a recent episode:it does appear to be true that …. There is an international network of very powerful pedophiles that have a not inconsiderable amount of leverage on various halls of power. It shouldn’t be lost. We’ve said this on the show before, but two out of the last four presidents were people who were very friendly with Epstein. But I think the real story here is that, yes, you have this hard kernel of like true blue elite pedophilesAnd then on the other side of things I was reading some posts by Michael Tracey and Matt Taibbi, and their perspective seems to be that Epstein was basically an immensely sleazy guy who paid for sex with young women and didn’t look too closely at whether they were over or under 18 but didn’t necessarily have a particular desire to have sex with underage women. Their paradigm is that a lot of this is Russiagate style hysteria/moral panic, fueled both by conspiracy theorists of all stripes and by various political and media actors who are cynically pumping up the story to drive clicks and gain electoral advantage,Claude AI comes in somewhere in the middle, telling me that “the evidence strongly supports that Epstein … Epstein deliberately and systematically sought out minors. The infrastructure he built—the recruitment network, the payments, the documentation—wasn’t consistent with someone who simply preferred young-looking women and occasionally made mistakes. It was consistent with someone whose preference was specifically for adolescent girls.”It also says that when it comes to the question of other men being involved, it’s murky: “The names that circulate publicly—Clinton, Trump, Dershowitz, various billionaires—appear in flight logs or visitor records, but presence at Epstein’s properties doesn’t establish participation in abuse. Epstein cultivated legitimacy by surrounding himself with prominent people, many of whom may have had no idea what else was happening.”I say all this not to offer my own two cents but just to articulate the opposite, which is that I have no clue. The evidence is too vast, and my time too limited, to feel as though I can have a direct interpretation of the evidence, and many of the people to whom I typically turn for a relatively sober account of reality, against conspiracy theory, or moderately conspiratorial. And then the people like Tracey and Taibbi complicate things too, because although their extreme skepticism of official narratives is so often distortionary, and therefore not a good guide to what’s actually going on, in some cases it can provide a very useful signal for when we should be skeptical of official narratives,They were more right than wrong about Russiagate, or at least right about certain things that most people got wrong. So is this Russiagate all over