Sexual Sectarianism Stemming from Epstein-Chomsky Revelations

Predictable, necessary, or mistaken?

The deeper I plowed into the correspondence between academic Left superstar Noam Chomsky and sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, the more heartbroken I became.

But this meme, counter-posing Chomsky with the recently-deceased Communist historian Michael Parenti, actually provides the good example of when someone can say that, regardless of political inclination, sorry, not all criticisms are valid and you need something more substantive than this.

For those who are unaware of such matters owing to possession of this funny thing known as “a life,” Facebook and other social media platforms have become funhouse venues for certain marginalized political personalities. The tenor and tone of the discourse has moved to the point where Stalin apologists have gained some standing, which is simply wild. The Epstein scandal has nothing to do with this online debate society.

At a certain level, when we live in such a sexualized media ecosphere, desensitization becomes a real phenomenon. Ever since the Gulf War did not happen, television news media broadcasting, on an international level, has embraced the normality of mass-slaughter. Globalization and the Internet Revolution enabled wire services to go digital and bloggers to become the stringers for the hyper-politicized venues. This began with Ted Turner’s distinctively cosmopolitan liberalism at CNN that in turn shaped the contours of MSNBC, CNBC, and, in an inverted manner, Fox News. The instantaneous availability of e-mail with photo or video attachments broke down journalism barriers and contributed to the birth of viral video-inspired movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #Occupy. But along with that has been a great revelation of humanity’s brutality. The Gaza Genocide has been not just an abomination in terms of the humanitarian loss, its decrepitude is compounded by the fact it was LiveStreamed for all humanity to watch, resulting in zero meaningful response from the United Nations.

Ending this Culture of Misogyny

This is likewise applicable to sexual media content, something that was expanded exponentially with the advent of explicit internet content.

But here the data and statistics get interesting.

In 2006, economist Todd Kendall at Clemson University brought together datasets regarding internet access availability and incidence of violent sexual assault. Interrogating the data revealed, contra centuries of religious and civic prejudice, that wider access directly correlates with a drop in violent crimes. The advent of the internet had granted millions of men a healthy outlet in a manner that dramatically reduced sex crime rates.

We can find a demonstrable parallel phenomena in Europe. The European countries with the more liberal sex work and publishing laws have the lower rates of sexual violence, suggesting that antisocial behavior correlates with the higher rates of censorship and the underlying pathos of repression on a social level. This is not simply counterintuitive, entire schools of “anti-porn” feminist theory have made a coherent argument about notions of female degradation.

And so our conversation about Epstein, if it can deliver anything positive at all in terms of public discourse, needs to grasp for a higher level regarding something both terrible and contradictory, meaning it requires accepting counterintuitive conclusions. If we want to dismantle this blatantly-obvious rape culture, we need to understand human sexuality and psychology do not conform with our wildly antiquated biases and prejudices.

These are not easy facts. They are counterintuitive and they do cause certain discomfort for those raised with traditional sexual prejudices and attitudes. But they also point the way to a world with less sexual violence, and if we truly desire the latter then we must contemplate the former maturely. If wider publication availability reduces violence rates, what do you prefer?

Sexuality is extremely complicated and extremely mammalian; we exert tremendous mental energy and anxiety over it and we can simultaneously recognize its practicality in extremely simple biological function and processing terms. From here descend tremendously jarring moments where we find medicine and sociology contravening inherited wisdom about vice and virtue.

A Limited Hangout

What in the name of God does Michael Parenti have to do with this discussion? Nothing.

And that, of course, is the point. This tranche of documents is blatantly, publicly known in terms of Watergate Transcripts-level scandal. Just as President Richard Nixon infamously redacted the transcripts of his audio recording system, the Trump Justice Department released these documents in a manner that is the absolute definition of “limited hangout,” the deliberate disclosure of a controlled amount of classified material so as to (hopefully) placate demands for public accountability.

While we can and should recognize Noam Chomsky’s profound lapse of judgment and disregard for the unforgivable, we should likewise understand that the Trump administration very intentionally wanted activists worldwide to experience a profound moral crisis. We are expending more mental energy on Chomsky than the major hubs of power in this despicable vice ring precisely because the censorship of the emails was designed to create this situation. This defines the intent of a limited hangout, guiding the reader to declassified materials in a way so that they reach a predetermined conclusion desired by the government.

As a parallel example, the famous Church Committee, praised for reporting on the disreputable history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), issued a report that itself was in fact censored so as to protect certain aspects of the federal government’s ongoing operations, a classic limited hangout success story.

The larger matter to recognize is that this limited hangout has in some sense successfully impacted the considerations and concentrations of various thinkers who otherwise might serve as public intellectuals criticizing Epstein alone as opposed to Chomsky and Epstein.

We still are waiting to see the rest of the system exposed and the true perpetrators brought to justice. Between censorship and the remaining ambiguity created by lack of access to the full breadth of digital evidence, it may take years for the country to actually grasp the totality of what happened here.

For instance, there is a tremendous ambiguity in this basic question: What was the relationship between Epstein’s Wall Street legal enterprise as a financier, his charitable giving work, his interactions with NGOs like the Clinton Foundation, and the vice operation? How did each connect and which had interests subordinated to the other, if at all? This thought itself is rather frightening, for it compels one to contemplate the idea of the grotesque vice operation being a functional utility of Epstein’s extraordinarily successful Wall Street financial firm. What sort of accountant requires such a monstrous dungeon? Is it not obvious that this needs further inquisition regarding the imperial manifestations in this matter? Is that the point of contradiction where Epstein’s Wall Street and foreign policy interests overlap?

In other words, being guided by Trump’s limited hangout of the Epstein files into the sectarian cul-de-sac is not just a moral abomination, it does a certain kind of favor for the state. It fails to focus on accountability from actual suspects, like Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor or Larry Summers, and instead focuses on the public relations advice of a morally-dubious MIT linguist who is permanently incapacitated for the rest of his short life in Brazil due to a stroke.