To the Ruling Class - Jeffrey Epstein is Your Last Chance July 8, 2019 | culture

Jeffrey Epstein was arrested today on renewed charges of child-sex trafficking dating all the way back to the 90s. Lurid stories of sex parties on private islands attended by global elites such as Prince Andrew and the Clintons underscore a carefully orchestrated lifestyle in which Epstein entrapped underage girls for sex. Some of these girls were as young as fourteen and in addition to serving at Epstein's pleasure, they were shared among his guests. There are more than a few very rich, powerful men right now who are having an interesting weekend. Because Epstein also partook in these extracurricular activities in New York, he was arrested in his Upper East Side apartment and will be arraigned in lower Manhattan Federal Court on Monday, July 8th.

We live under the pretense of a meritocracy but underneath the surface, most adults acknowledge an uneven playing field which confers various privileges for the elite: access to top colleges, favoritism in the job market, greater opportunity in high profile industries such as entertainment and fashion, and so on. We tend not to begrudge the upper crust such spoils so long as there is at least a semblance of meritocracy. Sure, Horace from Phillips Exeter gets the job at Goldman Sachs because his father is the head of global credit-derivatives but as long as Burt from White Plains can also get his foot in the door through hard work, then people will accept both. One area where this is not the case is subjectivity to the law. Getting into Harvard is one thing, staying OUT of Rikers is quite another. If the elites can also leverage their influence to completely evade the rule of law, this social contract is fundamentally broken and will not be honored.

Since the Great Recession starting in 2007, this unspoken agreement has been showing some cracks. From the Wall Street bailouts to Hillary Clinton's egregious email coverups (the Clintons alone can fill up an entire post - stay tuned) to Bob Kraft's total and complete evasion of legal consequence for even solicitation, it appears that the privileged class now also enjoy exemption from legal consequences. So far, the first half of 2019 has not offered reason to believe otherwise as Jussie Smollett clearly demonstrated. There are now two overarching storylines remaining (barring further acts of brazen disregard for the law) which will further stain the litmus paper in one direction or the other: the college admissions scandal and Jeffrey Epstein.

The college admissions scandal is a post for another day (seriously, stay tuned) but we should not overlook that both of these scenarios involve our most precious resource - children. If the rule of law is the contract upon which our social agreement is written, children are the collateral on which that agreement is honored. The college admission scandal and Jeffrey Epstein are now breaching that boundary which is a clear and decisive line of demarcation. As Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno learned, no amount of privilege will shield wrongdoers from the wrath of the masses. And like Jerry Sandusky, Jeffrey Epstein has perpetrated the most heinous forms of abuse upon dozens of unwitting children for many years. It is not a stretch at all to say Mr. Epstein's sins are every bit as vile and repugnant as Sandusky's. Not to be overlooked, Epstein also facilitated his friends' sexually deviant desires by forcing his underage stable of girls to satisfy their depraved appetites. One of his most outspoken victims, Virginia Giuffre, clearly recounts Mr. Epstein's coercive methods in this video.

As a society, we now have a second crack at Jeffrey Epstein - he deftly eluded serious consequences the first time back in 2008. This time, if he is not held to account, the social contract will be broken and it will not be pretty. We are already seeing early warning signs of unrest from Charlottesville to violent Antifa rallies but things can, and have gotten much worse than this. The Democratic Convention of 1968 in Chicago is a distant memory but most people today over the age of 35 remember the L.A. Riots. And almost everyone in high school and older remembers the Baltimore Protests during April of 2015. The Jeffrey Epstein case on its own may or may not evoke those levels of outrage but if justice is not meted out fairly this time, it will add another nail in the coffin of the agreement.