The End Of Epstein's Ring Being Protected w/ Evan Osnos
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Fast Politics w/ Molly Jong-Fast on YouTube
Fast Politics w/ Molly Jong-Fast
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Fast Politics w/ Molly Jong-Fast
69.4K subscribers
Transcript
Speaker 1: Welcome, welcome, Evan.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Molly.
Speaker 2: Great to be back.
Speaker 1: And I both actually write about rich people.
Speaker 1: That's sort of our...
Speaker 2: This is true.
Speaker 1: It's a hobby.
Speaker 1: I actually think these Epstein files are, in some ways, the biggest story about wealth
Speaker 1: and power, the use and misuse of it.
Speaker 1: And I think the idea that there are a wealthy cabal of people who consider themselves to
Speaker 1: be beyond the law is entirely what this story is about.
Speaker 2: Absolutely right.
Speaker 2: In some strange way, this is like now the master document that lays bare an entire systemic
Speaker 2: moral collapse.
Speaker 2: This is the point.
Speaker 2: It's not about a few individuals, though we are much better off knowing the names of these
Speaker 2: individuals.
Speaker 2: And I think we need to continue to get as much information about the people in these files.
Speaker
2: But in fact, it's about a culture. It's about a whole set of moral
beliefs, about a collapse of the idea of shame, about a collapse of the
idea that you should have boundaries and standards, that there's a kind
of ostentation, a kind of privilege, a kind of obscenity that is beyond
the pill.
Speaker
2: And, you know, it's easy to sort of say, oh, well, you know, are you
really telling us anything that we didn't already know?
Speaker 2: Throughout the ages, there's always been rich and powerful people taking advantage of the weak.
Speaker 2: Except that doesn't mean that you then say we're going to shrug.
Speaker
2: No, what you say is that when you have an opportunity like this to
lay it bare and to make it as clear and as crisp and as unbelievably
frank as these emails are,
Speaker 2: It's incumbent on us as a society to say, OK, let's talk about it.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about exactly this problem.
Speaker 1: I also think that what has happened here is the cover up.
Speaker 1: So it is not just, you know, we've long suspected that wealthy people were doing bad stuff broadly.
Speaker
1: And with Epstein, you know, I remember years and years ago looking
at the sex offender map because there was a sex offender map app.
Speaker 1: and seeing that in Central Park was Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 1: And I thought, how weird is it that all of us know this guy is a scary sex predator,
Speaker 1: and yet he is still living in his fancy Manhattan townhouse?
Speaker 1: I remember like literally having that thought.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know him, but I just read reporting about him,
Speaker 1: and I knew that he had done evil, evil things.
Speaker 1: And what I think is so interesting about these redactions is a lot.
Speaker
1: So much of this story is about the FBI covering for itself and
covering for its agents and covering their complete disinterest with
holding powerful people to account.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Accountability.
Speaker
2: That is the key word here, because in some ways the greatest luxury
good in American life is the idea that you can escape the consequences
for your own actions, for your own absolute, in this case, debased
criminal activity.
Speaker
2: But it's also about escaping accountability when your business fails
and you have the right friends who can bail you out of trouble in a way
that you don't get if you're running a small business in your town.
Speaker
2: This idea that you could somehow just slip the surly bonds of the
normal physics of the world, which is to say that you screw up and you
are paying the price for that.
Speaker
2: Jeffrey Epstein's life and the people who surrounded him are
examples of how if you had enough money and you have enough money in
this country, you can simply buy your way out of those physics.
Speaker 2: And you do it at the expense of people without your power.
Speaker
2: And here's the piece that I think is really important to drive home
to that feels almost like we don't capture it enough in our in our
conversations, usually in this country, which is the idea that somehow
shunning people like Epstein or the many people now who are found to
have done bad behavior in his orbit by staying in contact with him, that
shunning them was somehow considered a kind of weak minded thing to do.
Speaker 2: It was a kind of sort of, you know, really, you're going to get so caught up in that sort of ethical boundary.
Speaker 2: No, no. Sorry. There are some people who have done things that are simply beyond the pale.
Speaker 1: Are you trolling Barry Weiss? How dare you?
Speaker
1: She's keeping that CBS contributor because she is against cancel
culture, except if you do something really bad, like say something she
doesn't like.
Speaker
2: I actually think Peter Atiyah is a prime, fascinating example here.
Because you know what's amazing in his language and in the way that he
tried to explain his way out of this absolutely ludicrous and
indefensible behavior was that he said that at that point in his life,
he'd never seen that kind of excess before.
Speaker
2: That's such a telling word, right, Molly? What he's saying is, I
didn't realize that was possible and that I could actually cross the
blood brain barrier into a world of excess like that. That is like such a
tell. And, you know, look, he has no business continuing on as an
advisor to Americans on health and good living. That's ridiculous. But
that's a decision for others to make.
Speaker 1: I also think that it's a decision that we should not allow them to get away with.
Speaker 1: And I think like the job.
Speaker
1: So what we're seeing here is that if you are at all placid and if
you at all believe that things will sort of turn out the way they're
meant to, you're probably in the wrong.
Speaker
1: And you probably need, you know, like, for example, I think so much
about Julie K. Brown, who was just I just interviewed.
Speaker 1: Like that story is basically dead.
Speaker 1: It happened.
Speaker 1: He had gotten the sweetheart deal.
Speaker 1: They were victims.
Speaker 1: But, you know, it sort of settled.
Speaker 1: And here is Julie.
Speaker 1: And she goes out and she starts talking to these victims.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that there are not 10 victims.
Speaker 1: There are not 15 victims.
Speaker 1: There are more than 1,000 victims.
Speaker 1: And they have spanned for decades and decades and decades.
Speaker 1: And so that is a story that would have never, you know, Jeffrey Epstein would have gotten away with it.
Speaker
1: And I just want to say one last thing in this very long winded
question, which is yesterday I was on Nicole Wiles, the show, and I met
one of the victims and she said she had been victimized from 20 2004 to
2005.
Speaker 1: So you realize like the first allegations we saw were like in the 90s.
Speaker 1: So here are women who this is just absolutely preventable.
Speaker
2: Absolutely. And in a way, this is a prime demonstration of the thing
people want most of all these days, which is a reminder that we are
not, in fact, powerless in the face of this kind of abuse.
Speaker 2: and of this kind of political and social and ethical abuse,
Speaker 2: which is exactly what we're talking about here.
Speaker 2: That as a society, one of the things we've learned
Speaker 2: is that unless you have nudnik reporters, bless us all,
Speaker 2: who are willing to just honestly keep driving home
Speaker 2: and keep driving home the fact that these questions
Speaker 2: haven't been answered, this story hasn't gone away.
Speaker 2: I mean, Julie Brown, in the best way,
Speaker 2: is in the tradition of investigative reporting that goes back to like Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair.
Speaker 2: And the reason I mentioned folks from the Gilded Age is this is what we're talking about.
Speaker
2: We're talking about now the investigative reporting that is bursting
open the mechanics of our Gilded Age at the moment.
Speaker
2: And she is showing us, oh, OK, in this day and age, these are the
ways in which our most abusive tycoons are taking advantage of people.
Speaker
1: Yeah. No, that's really good. Upton Sinclair. I'm thinking about I'm
writing this thing about my grandfather. So Upton Sinclair has come
into my foreground. But I wonder it is true. And that is it's funny
because it's like Epstein is such a metaphor for the moment we're in
right now.
Speaker
2: A hundred percent. Yeah, he's our ultimate creature of this age. I
mean, my colleague, John Cassidy at The New Yorker had such a great way
of putting it. He just said in the last couple of days, I'll get this
mostly right, but he wrote basically that Epstein is the ultimate
creature of an age in which wealth and ostentation and unaccountability
are associated with social status.
Speaker
2: Think about it. In a way, that's an astonishing thing that the idea
of being able to get away with something becomes a status symbol.
Speaker
2: That's one of the things that Epstein was was living out by then
continuing to have all of these dealings with the most powerful people.
Speaker 2: So now we have somebody like Howard Lutnick, right?
Speaker
2: I mean, Howard Lutnick, who it turns out has been lying to the
American public, lying to everybody about his contacts with Jeffrey
Epstein.
Speaker 2: And are we supposed to just kind of shrug and say, oh, that was just a scheduling confusion?
Speaker 2: Give me a break.
Speaker 2: I mean, at a certain point, why is this person serving in our name in the cabinet?
Speaker 2: I just don't understand how this can go on much longer.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, so that's the question.
Speaker
1: And then you think about Hart Lutnick and then you think about John
Phelan, the undersecretary for the Navy who flew on Epstein's jet.
Speaker
1: And then you think about and who got that job, not because he had a
long career of Navy service, but because he was a Donald Trump donor and
a friend from Palm Beach.
Speaker 1: And then you think about, you know, there are just like at every point is John Phelan guilty.
Speaker 1: Who knows? He flew on a plane. He said he only flew once.
Speaker
1: Who knows? But the point is, even the like larger corruption of like
donors getting real government jobs versus, you know, for years, donors
got ambassadorships.
Speaker
1: And in some ways, a door was opened to this level of corruption. And
it may have been opened during a Republican presidency, but it may have
also been open during a Democratic presidency.
Speaker
1: Like there's certainly the road to the to the place we are now, the
terrible, corrupt place we are now is is really paved.
Speaker 1: Yes. With quite a lot of, you know, inches.
Speaker
2: I totally agree. I totally agree. Look, I believe for a long time
and I've written essentially my last two books are on the fact that
Donald Trump is a symptom of the disease.
Speaker
2: Yes, he is a source of all kinds of incredible toxic effects on
America, but he is a symptom of a much deeper disease.
Speaker
2: And that deeper disease is about what happens when you get so much
money and power that you simply detach from the realm that the rest of
us inhabit.
Speaker 2: You're able to seclude yourself almost literally and physically and geographically on your island or on your yacht.
Speaker
2: But then you're also able to seclude yourself in a world of people
who have taken a kind of moral holiday where they've suddenly decided
these rules don't matter for us.
Speaker
2: These are for the little people. You know, I remember Leona
Helmsley, you know, who is like the, you know, the original, the OG
tycoon of the 80s.
Speaker
2: And she at one point, it was in her tax evasion case where somebody
remembered her saying, you know, we don't pay taxes. Taxes are for the
little people.
Speaker 1: Only the little people pay taxes.
Speaker 2: And that right there was like a preview.
Speaker 2: That was positively decorous and small ball compared to what we're dealing with now.
Speaker 2: But honestly, I see a connection in the way that if we allowed that kind of world to flourish,
Speaker 2: and that, of course, was the world that Donald Trump grew up in.
Speaker 2: New York City real estate people.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 2: That's now the world that he seeks to thrust upon the rest of us every day of every year.
Speaker 1: It's funny because I think so much about I'm exactly that age.
Speaker 1: I'm exactly the Leona Helmsley taxisor for the little people on the cover of The New York Post.
Speaker 1: It comes back to this idea that there was a certain class of New Yorkers.
Speaker 1: And I'm thinking, you know, it really does come back to Roy Cohn, Roy Cohn, the consiculary.
Speaker 1: He was really the advisor of McCarthy, Joe McCarthy.
Speaker 1: And then he comes, you know, that's sort of his rise to fame.
Speaker
1: And then he creates a world of corruption where he's able to get
both mafia figures who really did run the city during the 70s and 80s.
Speaker 1: And also and then eventually these sort of real estate families that kind of took over that mantle a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: In the 90s and 2000s.
Speaker
2: And in a way, what Roy Cohn represented and the tutelage which he
then delivered to Donald Trump was this combination of things.
Speaker 2: It was that politics is not about what actually is the morally correct thing to do.
Speaker 2: It's about power and submission.
Speaker 2: It's about that the strong will do what they will and the weak will do what they must.
Speaker
2: And it was also about the idea that there are worlds of secrecy and
interior power that you keep shielded from the public, that you never
allow the regular people to get a visibility on, that somehow that like
that's the way the world should be organized.
Speaker
2: And I think that part of what's so important about this moment with
the revelation of what's in these emails is that it is actually prying
open the doors of a world that is the most closed.
Speaker 2: I'm not talking about a very specific world around one financier.
Speaker
2: I'm talking about an entire world of people who are favor trading
and letting themselves off the hook for mistakes that they're making at
the public's expense year after year after year.
Speaker 2: That's really what we're seeing.
Speaker 1: And buying Woody Allen $10,000 worth of underwear.
Speaker 1: I think it's like, you know, I liked Woody Allen.
Speaker 1: I knew Woody Allen.
Speaker 1: And I think that we should all be done with Woody Allen now because it is that there's no coming back from from.
Speaker 1: And Son Yee, like there is no coming back from that.
Speaker
2: There are people in here that I just I have to ask myself, you know,
I sometimes had this moment in interviews when I'm particularly writing
about very rich people who get into big trouble, which is a pattern
that I write about a lot.
Speaker
2: And the single most important question in these moments is always
the same, which is what in God's name possessed you?
Speaker 2: Like in what conceivable world did you think this was OK?
Speaker 2: And I kind of feel like that's the question being posed to an entire class of Americans right now.
Speaker
2: And honestly, to be more precise about it, the Brits are asking that
question much more effectively of their own ruling class than we are in
ours.
Speaker 2: And I'd like to see a little more.
Speaker
1: The king and the king, right? The king of England is now saying that
he would like to see accountability for his brother. Donald Trump
refuses to even look at Howard Lutnick. But the king of England is
saying he would like to see accountability for his brother, whatever
that looks like.
Speaker
2: This is a pattern that I have to say does not usually end
particularly well for the oligarchs. One of the things that you see in
history is what's known as autocratic backfire, which is there is like a
point. It's like a tripwire with the public where at a certain point,
the amount of abuse and of entrenchment of their own money and power and
privilege just passes some point that the public can't bear.
Speaker 2: I think we're seeing it in political terms in our country right now with the collapse of Donald Trump's support.
Speaker 2: This is autocratic backfire in action right now.
Speaker 1: Evan, I am, you know, I know it's a good interview because I have a bunch of notes.
Speaker 2: I love chatting with you, Molly.
Speaker 2: We should do it whenever the nation is collapsing, which.
Speaker 1: Yes, which luckily will probably be for at least another year.
Speaker 1: Alas.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Evan.
Speaker 2: My pleasure, Greg, to chat with you.
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