Journeys in the Mirror-World
Introduction: Rape, Power, and the Epstein Files
What has been evidenced in the latest dump of Epstein files is so multifaceted and far-reaching it is hard to begin formulating a response. The political fallout is already spreading across the globe, bringing down politicians and advisers in the UK and Europe (though notably not in the States), while also expanding our understanding of the links between multiple malign networks that have been wreaking havoc on our democracies. There has been some characteristically excellent reporting at Byline Times, unpacking the threads linking Epstein, Silicon Valley, Putin, Steve Bannon, and the rise of the European Far Right (see here and here). As Carole Cadwalladr summed up in a recent interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman:
I’ve spent a decade now looking at Silicon Valley companies…around their relationship with power [and] how…they’ve had total impunity in terms of regulation and accountability. I’ve also looked really closely at Russia’s influence across the West, it’s deliberate strategies to interfere in our politics and elections…Israeli defence and intelligence firms have also being part of this beat, as has Steve Bannon and the far right across Europe…and what the files show in absolute clarity, in black and white, is that those worlds are all connected and the thing which blew my mind is that they’re connected through Jeffrey Epstein.
There have also been some powerful reflections by female journalists on the way that, as Helen Rumbelow put it in The Times, the files “show a hidden world oiled by porn-saturated misogyny.” Some women have admirably underlined that the files expose not just an elite hidden world but our cultural attitudes to women and girls more broadly. Amelia Gentlemen notes the files “reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and…[w]omen exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.” For Milli Hill, in a widely circulated piece that drew howls of routine male defensiveness, what “the files expose once and for all just how men loathe us and see us as nothing more than commodities to be f***ed when we’re young, and waste products to be derided and despised when we’re old.”
Similarly, Cadwalladr, at her politically vital Substack on How to Survive the Broligarchy, wrote that she realised that her “first piece on Epstein…has to tackle…the overwhelming revelation of the files…It’s not just the rampant misogyny that oozes from the pages of these documents…It’s darker than that…What Epstein shows us is that we live in a paedophiliac culture.” Over at The Guardian, Marina Hyde also demanded that the political fallout not be allowed to eclipse the sexual abuse at the heart of the scandal, arguing that the UK press focus on Mandelson had become “a mass displacement activity, driven subconsciously or consciously by men so we don’t have to reckon with the fact that we now have searchable records of the way some of the most powerful guys in the world, who have huge sway over our lives, talk and think about women. And about girls.”
While I don’t disagree with Hyde, the way the response to the files seems to be bifurcating into two sets of stories, one about politics and power (coded male), and the other about sexual abuse (coded female), is itself troubling. Indeed, I have heard Whitney Webb—whose knowledge of Epstein’s conspiratorial connections is so extensive that it’s hard to determine if she’s legit or that gif of the guy with the string—argue that Epstein’s sex trafficking network was just a ‘side hustle.’ But Epstein’s political manipulations and power plays, and his sexual manipulation and power plays, were not taking place in two parallel universes but in one and the same world.
It is important at this moment, as we draw together the threads linking the tech-fascists, the MAGA-fascists, the European and British far right, and Russian interest in undermining Western democracy, to remember that this is all steeped in misogyny and resentment about women’s exercise of their humanity. Much as our culture is committed to defensive disavowal, projecting our shadow exclusively onto perverted immigrant others, the facts are that the rape of women and girls—the desire to turn them into degraded objects for use—is not external to the structure and operation of political power in this society.
Cadwalladr, in her interview with Goodman, rightly observes that the two sets of stories are linked by the arrogant “impunity” that shielded Epstein and his abuse (and is still shielding the perpetrators), as well as the political and economic activity of the billionaire class. The desire for domination without constraint or accountability is also the drive behind the current “collapse of the rules-based order” at the hands of authoritarian “strong men” (although if you ask over at UnHerd you will get some mirror-world Marxism about American imperialism as if the answer is ‘therefore fascism’1). There are many critiques we can make about how law actually works in a capitalist patriarchal democracy, but the point remains that the rule of law provides at least some constraint on the exercise of unlimited power, and some mechanism for the vulnerable to seek redress when they are harmed.
The crumbling of that system is the outcome of a long, concerted effort by networks of powerful men who are genuinely convinced of their own inherent superiority, their entitlement to whatever they please, and their right to use other human beings as if they were property. When Peter Thiel wrote in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he didn’t, evidently, mean everybody’s freedom, given that he owns the most powerful surveillance company on the face of the planet. What he meant was ‘democratic norms are preventing me, and other superior men like me, from doing whatever the fuck we want to everyone and everything.’
This desire to do whatever the fuck they want in pursuit of profit, power, status, control or gratification is the thread that binds together the Epstein class’s political manipulations and the evident obsession with degrading and dehumanising women and girls. As materialist feminists have long maintained, the exploitation of women—the conversion of people into exploitable resources—is foundational to a system of economic extraction driven by the infinite, and apparently insatiable, desire for accumulation and status. At the heart of these phenomena is the black hole of narcissistic entitlement, something we may imagine as an aberrant state-of-mind, but which is deeply embedded in our gendered, political, economic and even theological narratives and norms.
Our culture is fixated by a gendered ideal of manhood as a form of absolute transcendence, a God-like sovereignty or invulnerability that is dependent on, and beholden to, nothing and no one.2 [ Given that no human being is entirely independent of either its environment or other human beings, the narcissistic ideal of absolute sovereignty can only be maintained by constant efforts to disavow, deride, or desubjectify everything on which it depends, and anything that challenges its illusion of absolute authority. As Cadwallader’s reference to ‘impunity’ suggests, the ‘sovereign individual’3 is inherently unable to treat others with the requisite respect, recognition, or accountability. Everyone outside itself is a ‘Non-Player Character’ devoid of subjectivity or interests of its own. Its environment is just an empty terra nullus there for the taking.
‘Impunity’ is a word feminists will recognise well from our discussions of the parlous state of justice for the survivors of men’s sexual violence—a rate of offence to conviction that represents the effective decriminalisation of rape in our society. I have previously argued that misogynist sexual violence is driven by narcissistic rage, the state of ‘aggrieved entitlement’4 that the supposedly sovereign self experiences when confronted by the fact that his sexual gratification ethically depends on the desires and interests of another human subject. The same sense of ‘aggrieved entitlement’ is also animating much of the populist right’s pushback against the norms of liberal democratic equality, and their challenge to the absolute narcissistic authority of white male power.
Sexual violence functions through the deliberate—and often sadistic—erasure of female humanity, while at the same time appropriating her as an object of use, a description that would fit Epstein’s activities precisely. And the same doubled gesture of erasure and exploitation is legible in the techfeudal fantasies of our broligarchical overlords, in the Gilead-esque Project 2025, and indeed, in the efforts by Epstein, Bannon, Thiel and their cohort to free themselves from any remaining democratic constraints so they can rampantly exploit at the expense of everyone else. Which given how rampantly they were already allowed to exploit, is fucking terrifying.
Read within this context, Donald Trump is not any kind of aberration, but an apotheosis, an axiomatic unconcealment of the core of our cultural pathology. His malignant narcissism may, in fact, be clinical, but what his existence and political power has irrefutably exposed is the continuum between ‘Daddy’s Home!’ ideals of manhood, narcissism and domination, wanton avarice and corruption, sexual abusiveness, the rage at any woman who so much as asks a question, and the authoritarian strong man instinct towards lawlessness, tyranny, and absolute impunity. He is nothing if not an avatar of domination in all its forms, and that, when it comes down to it, is why some people love him, and most of us are thoroughly repelled.
Watching Trump is like watching the malignant shadow at the core of our culture play itself out on the world stage, and preen with self-satisfaction, resplendent in the horror on so many other faces. He is a 24/7 crash-course in narcissistic-domination-in-action and its terrifying power to warp reality around itself. Trump’s lies, his wanton disregard for facts, his deriding of ‘fake news,’ his inexhaustible deflection and projection, his capacity to summon epic enemies and splinter people and the nation, his facility, in short, as a demagogue, all this is also the skillset of the narcissist. A self for whom nothing and nobody outside itself has any reality or value, except as resource or supply. A self that will delight in annihilating any fact or being who stands in its way and then dare you to challenge its power to flagrantly get away with it.
This replacement of ethical relation with a politics of pure domination, and the splitting of reality and any shared sense or norms, are part and parcel of an age in which truth, justice and accountability are being trampled by the logic of narcissism, unfettered after decades of groundwork by the ‘Masters of the Universe.’ There is a deep connection here between a politics in thrall to narcissistic domination, accumulation, and self-aggrandisement, the eruption of impunity, othering, and fascistic violence, and the way the manipulations of the narcissistic abuser—projection, gaslighting, disavowal, DARVO—are currently structuring our political landscape.
I have spoken many times here about the mirror-image mechanisms of the culture war, a confrontation between two cult-like tribes trapped in their own reality distortion fields, concerned only with their own interests, greeting all dissent or challenge as an all-out attack by an evil ‘other.’ We have long discussed how the excesses of left identitarianism were driven by narcissistic entitlement, accompanied, of course, by an unerring interest in burning witches. The same is now true of the mechanisms of right identitarianism, right down to the hatred for ‘privileged white women’ fully on display following the murder of Renee Good.
What I want to think through in this series of essays is how these mirror-image mechanisms are playing out in the identitarian right, and how that relates to the patriarchal narcissism at its core. Like left identitarianism, the populist right is structured by visceral tribal identification, psychological splitting, and projection onto ‘the other,’ but, as Naomi Klein examines in Doppelganger, its narratives are also marked by a series of uncanny doublings, as if looking at the real world through an inverting funhouse mirror. Many concerns these narratives address—tech authoritarianism, widespread sexual abuse, the economic injustices of capitalism, the domination of the ‘globalist elite’—are very real, but the stories flip and distort reality in a manner that often conceals the real perpetrators (like the Epstein redactions) and misdirects ‘the people’s’ anger at politically approved targets.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the gap between the populist projection of ‘the globalist elite,’ and what the Epstein story reveals about who the global elite really are, what they have really been up to, and why. This gulf explains the yawning silence, or pathetic attempts at hand-waving, from much of the online populist right. We have spent years being subjected to an increasingly wild narrative about the Satanic-paedophile-cabal-cum-WEF-globalist-elite-cum-tech-authoritarian-woke-far-left-Antifa-terrorist-scum, and now we have pages and pages of evidence that the globalist-elite-tech-authoritarian-paedophile-cabal are exactly the same people who have been going out of their way to ply us all with this story.
‘Every accusation is a confession’ goes the popular adage about the psychology of narcissists.
Well, isn’t that the truth.
Coming soon—The first part of this series will explore the uncanny doubling between the QAnon conspiracy and the reality of the activities of Epstein and his associates.
Or maybe a breezy reflection on the campery of Melania (just accidentally directed by an Epstein associate accused of several rapes!), which Mark Kermode described as “like watching a documentary in which Eva Braun feels sad about war while Hitler invades Poland.”
For people unfamiliar with my work this may seem like a sweeping statement. I have discussed the critique of patriarchal masculinity as sovereign invulnerability throughout my writing. The philosophical groundwork for the critique is presented in Chapter 1 and 2 of my PhD ‘Figuring Sovereign Integrity’ and ‘The Imperative of Sovereign Invulnerability.’
The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State is a 1997 book by William Rees-Mogg (father of Jacob) and James Dale Davidson, described by Quinn Slobodian as the “urtext of twenty-first-century tech libertarianism” (Crack-Up Capitalism, p. 205). It’s a work of futurist prediction, outlining the way that the transition to the digital world will free ‘sovereign individuals’ from the constraints of nation state democracies, regulated currencies, and the burden of paying taxes to fund welfare provision and infrastructure, whilst providing many profitable opportunities for those with the resources to seize them (and frankly, fuck the rest of you). It’s not hard to see why The Sovereign Individual would become something of a DIY manual for the tech-libertarian effort to destroy democratic accountability and chimes perfectly with Thiel’s belief that the “great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’”
Notably, The Sovereign Individual also makes an appearance in Episode 2 of The Coming Storm, Gabriel Gatehouse’s excellent radio documentary on QAnon. He first encounters the book because in the mid-nineties, Rees-Mogg and Davidson were running a financial newsletter called Strategic Investment that just happened to play a role in disseminating conspiracy theories about the Clintons, a major narrative plank in what would become QAnon. Which is to say, the connections between the those who business is financial profit, tech-libertarianism, and conspiracy theory aimed at those who they consider inimical to their interests, has deep historical roots. Given how flagrantly neoliberal and establishment the Clintons are (yes, of course Bill is in the files!), this gives us some idea of how intolerant the billionaire-tech-libertarian class are of any government that demands the remotest respect for the social contract.
‘Aggrieved entitlement’ is a phrase from Michael Kimmel’s 2013 book Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era. Kimmel uses it to describe the then growing phenomena of white men’s anger about their loss of dominance in a society in which increasing opportunities were being given to women and other minoritized groups. Notably, the book was republished in 2017 with a new preface by Kimmel discussing the work’s relevance to the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA-phenomenon. In my analysis of the narcissistic mechanisms of patriarchal masculinity, and how narcissistic rage contributes to male violence against women, the term ‘aggrieved entitlement’ worked perfectly to describe the mechanism. Which is to say, to underline the point of this introduction, that the narcissistic mechanisms that generate the sexual degradation and abuse of women, and the narcissistic mechanisms fuelling the populist pushback against the entire project of liberal democratic equality, are, at base, one and the same.
Brilliant as ever. Thank you 🙏