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Hierarchy, Gender, Violence -- Release the Epstein Files [1]

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Date: 2025-09-11

I once read that in a hierarchical society, violence typically flows down the hierarchy. Moreover, violence by a higher status person or group towards a lower status person or group can be invisible, or seen as not-violence, because it follows the accepted order.

Sad as it is to say, schoolchildren, concert-goers, movie-goers, churchgoers, people going out for a night dancing — they are all of lower status, and lower public importance, than someone who has been on tv a lot. The people who are on tv a lot are very clear about this. Because how dare the violence they tacitly allow, or openly foment, ricochet back to one of their own?

How dare Democrats remind us of the murder of Melissa Hortman (D) and her husband Mark when a prominent Republican is murdered? Don’t they know that Republican was a white man? And she was not? And her husband, also murdered, might have been a white man, but his manhood was suspect because his wife was a Democrat? Because he was probably a Democrat too? Because he, presumably, supported her political career? How unmanly. (Do I need to put "/s" here?)

Someone said on Bluesky that there was no reaction by Democrats that could have prevented whatever the Republicans (try to) use Charlie Kirk’s murder as an excuse for. They were always going to find an excuse. This is also correct.

Governor Jared Polis (D) ordered flags in the state lowered to half-mast because a man who openly said school shootings were an acceptable price to pay for keeping our freedoms was shot and killed at a school.

Kirk’s supporters didn’t mean it was acceptable for him to be shot, of course. He’s higher status than a random second-grader; his life had more value than an anonymous child’s. As for those freedoms he and his fans held so dear, they didn’t include bodily or social autonomy for women, trans people, gay people. They (the white cishet men) are only free if they can oppress their chosen targets, you see.

I believe gun violence is a scourge in our country, no matter whom it is aimed at. I believe political violence, in our current situation, only benefits fascists. I also believe that that Charlie Kirk’s life was no more valuable than the lives of the either of the two college students who also lost their lives in a school shooting yesterday. I believe part of our national problem is the unexamined belief that some people are just more valuable than others.

Which leads us back to Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.

There are many reasons and theories as to why Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse of women and girls for the pleasure of rich and famous men was allowed to go on for so long. Why even when Epstein was caught, he was given a sweetheart deal and welcomed back into “society” with open arms afterward. But, fundamentally, the answer is that Epstein and his clients were wealthy, powerful, well-connected, men.

Famous or anonymous, each Epstein client was near the top of our country’s social hierarchy: a man (not a woman or girl like his victims); wealthy (not working class like his victims); a grown adult (not a child, teenager, or barely-adult like his victims); furnished with powerful friends, including in the government, business, media, and law enforcement (unlike his victims who had no such friends); endowed with the “right” to commit violence (unlike his victims, who struggled to report, let alone fight back).

The refusal of the corporate media to make nearly as big a stink about the mass sex trafficking and rape of girls and women for literal decades as they made about a black man’s mustard preferences, or a white woman’s email server, is a powerful indicator of whose lives are seen to have value in our culture. The prioritization of the murder of one person because he was white, well-connected, and well-known (in political circles) over all the other senseless acts of gun violence in this country is another.

The Epstein survivors’ lives have value, and always did. The violence committed against them was always wrong. The willingness of the press and political class, until recently, to abide and ignore the crimes of men like Epstein is stain upon our national character.

Release the Trump-Epstein files.

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