The Epstein Files and the Scientific Racism of the Elite

The partial release of the Epstein Files in 2025 and 2026 was called the biggest scandal of the century. Three million heavily redacted pages were released by the Department of Justice, with no indication of what the remaining three million contain. The headlines that followed were about pedophilia, a private island, and the moral depravity of the rich and powerful. The public was given a safe story about one man’s evil and his willing accomplices. But behind that story lies a dark shadow, and in that shadow moves something far more dangerous and consequential. The name Jeffrey Epstein should conjure more than an image of a sex trafficker surrounded by underage girls and an entourage of Nobel laureates. Epstein was a node in a transatlantic network through which flowed the ideology of white supremacy and the concept of a master race. Virginia Heffernan, a member of the Edge Foundation, the intellectual salon that Epstein funded more heavily than any other donor, wrote that the files reveal “a decades-long project that cloaked eugenics, race science and sexual misconduct in Ivy League respectability.” The media turned a systemic crisis into an individual scandal. That is not merely a failure of journalism but a betrayal of the people.

The Confession

The Epstein Files, in essence, are a confession. They reveal the moral architecture of an entire class. The names fill flight logs, donation records, and email chains: scientists, university presidents, foundation heads, and Nobel laureates alike. These people formed the core of America’s scientific elite, gathered under one roof to fortify the longstanding myth of whiteness with the latest tools of genetic determinism and evolutionary storytelling.

We can start with the men who spoke the language of eugenics directly. Joscha Bach, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, wrote to Epstein in 2016 that Black children are “optimized for hunting and running,” while European brains evolved for “long-term planning and delayed gratification.” He proposed genetic “switches” that could be “flipped” to “make blacks smarter.” Nick Bostrom, the Oxford philosopher of “existential risk,” wrote to Epstein in 1996 that white people are genetically more intelligent than Black people and lamented that the “wrong” people are having more children. He later apologized, calling himself young and stupid. But his academic work tells a different story. His 2003 founding paper on “longtermism” warns that the human species could “evolve into a less brainy but more fertile species” unless steps are taken to ensure the intelligent outbreed the unintelligent. 

The intelligent, in this framework, are unsurprisingly the rich, the white, and the well-educated. If intelligence is heritable and racial, then the political preferences of the poor and darker majority can be dismissed as a biological hindrance to the whole species. In the eugenic calculus, the possibility of the oppressed to express their full human potential — that is, democracy itself — becomes a threat, because it deviates from a future which upholds white civilization. Bostrom received $120,000 from Epstein between 2011 and 2014. His continued association with Epstein proves that his correspondence was not youthful folly but an investment in a long-held assumption about the birthright of the white race.

There were also men who gave Epstein access and legitimacy through the institutions they controlled. Martin Nowak, a Harvard professor of mathematics and biology, received $6.5 million from Epstein to create the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and in turn gave Epstein an office and phone line at Harvard. Larry Summers, then-president of Harvard, facilitated the relationship and maintained a close personal friendship with Epstein. Richard Axel, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist and former co-director of Columbia University’s Mind Brain Behavior Institute, acted as an intermediary between Epstein and Columbia officials, lending the prestige of his Nobel to Epstein’s web. Lawrence Krauss, the theoretical physicist, received $250,000 from Epstein to fund the ASU Origins Project and even consulted him when facing his own sexual misconduct allegations. Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist, flew on Epstein’s private jet and visited his island in 2014. Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Laureate who co-founded the Santa Fe Institute, attended Epstein’s Mindshift Conference on Little St. James and received at least $680,000 for his institute. There are many more names that fill out the roster, each one a door opened deeper into the American scientific establishment: Steven Pinker (Harvard psychologist, considered one of the most influential psychologists in the world), George Church (Harvard Medical School geneticist, pioneer of CRISPR and synthetic biology), David Gross (Nobel Laureate in Physics, Kavli Institute, UC Santa Barbara), Frank Wilczek (Nobel Laureate in Physics, MIT), Eric Lander (founding director of the Broad Institute, lead scientist of the Human Genome Project), and Kip Thorne (Nobel Laureate in Physics, Caltech, whose work confirmed the existence of gravitational waves). 

Men and women alike chose to keep associating with Epstein after his 2008 conviction. These are not marginal figures. They are the people who sit on hiring committees, grant panels, and editorial boards. They decide which young scientists get fellowships, which papers get published, and which questions count as serious. The graduate student who might want to study the history of eugenics or challenge the heritability assumptions of behavioral genetics must pass through their gates. The assistant professor who might argue, as James Baldwin argued, that whiteness is a moral choice and not a biological reality, must be approved by the men who have spent their careers implying the opposite. The wage of whiteness has seeped into the very architecture of the scientific method and has the power to determine the destiny of people and the choices they make. 

Epstein funneled as much as $20 million a year to these academic gatekeepers. In exchange, a man who could barely read or write was granted formal platforms at Harvard and Columbia, where he blamed Black and other darker peoples for their poverty as though he were making a scholarly argument. But Epstein was not the only architect of this project. The Edge Foundation, the salon through which this ideology flowed, was founded and run by the literary agent John Brockman, whose client list reads like a who’s who of New York Times bestsellers: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond, Daniel Kahneman. Its membership extended to Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Yuval Noah Harari. 

Bill Gates appears more than 2,500 times in the Epstein files. He used Epstein as an intermediary for a $2 million donation to the MIT Media Lab and met with him repeatedly after his 2008 conviction. The Gates Foundation’s legacy in Africa is shadowed by persistent accusations of population control, born of a history in which eugenicists believed that dark-skinned poor people reproduce too much and must be managed, and of a present in which billionaires fund genetic research that is always one step away from the old dream of breeding a better race.

At the center of this network, Epstein and his associates preached a master-race ideology with a specific ethnic dimension: those of European Ashkenazi Jewish descent, they argued, had been “biologically selected for high intelligence,” their whiteness not merely social but encoded in the genome itself. With the release of the Epstein Files, we can see clearly what these men did with the intellectual territory they had seized. They converged on nothing less than the ideology of Mein Kampf, dressed in the language of evolutionary biology and funded by billions of dollars. 

The Case of Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky has been called the conscience of the American Left. That is precisely what makes his betrayal so devastating. He represents something specific: the failure of the white Left to confront racism except as an abstraction, the brilliant critic of empire who could not bring himself to oppose a concrete evil sitting across from him at dinner.

In 2016, Chomsky exchanged a series of emails with Epstein about race, IQ, and genetic modification. Epstein pressed him on the possibility of racial differences in intelligence, referencing James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA who was ostracized for publicly stating that Black people were less intelligent than whites. Chomsky did not dismiss the premise. He did not say: this question is a moral obscenity and I will not dignify it with a technical answer. Instead he wrote that testing the hypothesis was “practically impossible,” a statement about feasibility, not about the racist framework that made the question thinkable in the first place. 

Chomsky then stated that Black people had “for 400 years had a chance for about 2 or 3 decades to enter mainstream society… but it’s not surprising under the circumstances that few did. And simply as a matter of biology, the capacities involved are so deeply embedded that it would be quite surprising if an evolutionarily brief period… would have affected them.” Chomsky accepted the eugenic framework and accepted the premise that genes determine complex social behavior and that genetic modification is a legitimate tool for social change.

This failure is structural to Chomsky’s politics. He has spent his life critiquing power in the abstract: American imperialism, corporate capitalism, the military-industrial complex. But he has been almost entirely silent on the most intimate and brutal form of American domination: the oppression of Black people. He once said he could not “stand to listen to Martin Luther King Jr. speeches.” King was trying to “arouse emotional support” and was too reliant on sentiment and not enough on reason. Chomsky preferred the cool analytical style of the white anti-war movement, its statistics, and policy papers. King’s voice came from a place Chomsky has never been willing to go: from behind the veil, from the irreducible knowledge of the oppressed. Chomsky, for all his brilliance, has been unable to hear that voice without flinching. 

Baldwin writes: “What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.” Chomsky’s identity as a dissident was built on such a myth: that pure reason, correctly applied, leads to justice, whereas the passionate rhetoric of the preacher, the wail of the blues, the truth that lives in the flesh had nothing to teach him. This is the pathology of the white Left in a nutshell. And Noam Chomsky is its most celebrated expression.

Reconstruction, the Cold War, and the Challenge of Black Freedom

The betrayal documented in the Epstein Files has a longer history than Jeffrey Epstein. Its roots reach into the unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction, the brief, blazing moment after the Civil War when four million people, most of them recently enslaved and legally barred from literacy, built public schools across the South, filled the pews of new colleges like Fisk and Howard, entered legislatures, wrote laws, and administered justice. As W.E.B. Du Bois writes in Black Reconstruction, Black people demonstrated with the fact of their governance and learning that they were capable of building a democratic future. The veil that had enforced white society’s ignorance of Black humanity was being torn away by the hands of the formerly enslaved, and the ruling class of the South watched with terror. A great need emerged to prove that what the world had witnessed in Reconstruction was an illusion, and that the natural order of white at the top and Black at the bottom was written in blood and could not be changed. 

In 1883, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not empower Congress to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals. Black citizenship became a matter of state discretion, and the states of the former Confederacy celebrated. That same year, across the Atlantic, a British scientist named Francis Galton — Charles Darwin’s cousin — published Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development and coined the term “eugenics”: the science of improving the human stock by encouraging the “fit” to breed and discouraging the “unfit.” The legal re-subordination of Black people in America required a scientific justification, and Galton supplied the thread. American eugenicists built an entire architecture of skull-measuring, intelligence-testing, and forced sterilization, funded by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, taught at Harvard, Yale, and the famed Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Adolf Hitler admired the American eugenicists and modeled the Nuremberg racial laws partly on their precedent. When the gas chambers were opened and the world recoiled in horror, eugenics was supposed to have died in the ruins of the Third Reich. 

But the believers did not disappear. They changed their language and kept their faith. The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor was shuttered, but its networks survived. The American Eugenics Society renamed itself the Society for the Study of Social Biology. The Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937 to support eugenic research, continued operating in the shadows, waiting for the right moment. That moment came with the Cold War. When the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko denounced Western genetics as fascist science and argued, as Du Bois had, that environment rather than genes determined human capacity, the West reacted with fury. Lysenko’s thought was delegitimized as communist pseudoscience. Questioning the assumptions of innate racial differences now carried the risk of being called a Soviet sympathizer and being excluded from the scientific community. 

Like Reconstruction, the Black Freedom Movement of the 20th century shook the foundations of white supremacy. Mobilized through institutions like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the descendants of the enslaved held up a mirror to the nation while exemplifying the highest values of humanity. Where the segregationists brought cowardice, hatred, and moral rot, they brought selfless love, iron discipline, and the unshakable claim of their own humanity. 

On multiple fronts, the Black Freedom Movement forced the nation to confront all assumptions of a superior master race. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized the growing infestation of eugenic thought and used his moral authority alongside social science to disarm the racist ideology that was being wielded as a political weapon. He cited the anthropological work of Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Melville Herskovits to dismantle the pseudoscientific arguments of segregationists, and preached, “Science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 challenged the legal edifice of scientific racism. They asserted, as a matter of law and public policy, that Black people were full citizens, entitled to the same opportunities as white people. 

In response, the ruling elite reached once more towards counter-revolution, carried out through academic authority and the propaganda of science. In 1969, Arthur Jensen published his article in the Harvard Educational Review arguing that compensatory education for Black children had failed because they were genetically less intelligent than whites. His arguments influenced policymakers with shocking speed, fueling an assault on welfare, poverty alleviation, and affirmative action. Simultaneously, the Nobel laureate William Shockley used his scientific prestige to advocate for sterilization programs for Black Americans, warning that rising Black birth rates would cause the nation’s genetic quality to decline. This eugenics of the 1960s and 1970s served as the scientific justification for turning back the gains of the Black Freedom Movement. 

Race science and eugenics adapted to the changing political and social climate of the 20th century and into the 21st. The persistence of mass intelligence testing demonstrates the longevity of race science. At the end of the 20th century, the neo-eugenic ideas of “human biodiversity” and Charles Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve returned to the tradition of white supremacists like Galton, Jensen, and Shockley. If innate biological differences split humanity into a natural underclass and a ruling class, then the ruling class is both justified in its dominance and also obligated to enforce it. The nature of that enforcement has also evolved: from the auction block, to the sterilization table, to the targeted elimination of those deemed unfit to survive. Epstein patronized — and was enmeshed within — this eugenicist network involving associates like Charles Murray and Steven Pinker. White supremacy had a longstanding home at institutions like Harvard, MIT, and Columbia; Epstein did not need to infiltrate them but simply walked through a door that had always been open.

The Zionist Capture of Science

The question that the media has most carefully avoided is the simplest one: who was Jeffrey Epstein? Not what he did, but what he believed in his worldview and whose interests he served. 

He was not a scientist and yet spent decades purchasing proximity to the most powerful knowledge-producing institutions in the world. A man might funnel $20 million a year into scientific research because he enjoyed the company of Nobel laureates and sought philanthropic cover to rehabilitate his reputation, but Epstein’s interests notably focused on evolutionary biology, genetic research, and race science.

In April 2006, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published a paper titled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” arguing that a loose coalition of pro-Israeli interest groups exerted a significant and often distorting influence on American foreign policy. The response was swift, coordinated, and fierce. The files show that Epstein received multiple early drafts of an attack article written by Alan Dershowitz, his lawyer and a Harvard law professor, titled “Debunking the Newest — and Oldest — Jewish Conspiracy.” Epstein simultaneously used his position as a major donor to the Harvard Kennedy School to coordinate with senior figures there to limit the institution’s endorsement of Mearsheimer and Walt’s study. Mearsheimer later described the attack as “the rapid mobilization of philanthropic leverage, legal firepower, and media amplification to police the boundaries of acceptable debate.”

Epstein’s connection to the Israeli state ran deep. A Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) document from 2020 cites a confidential source alleging that Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent, that he had trained as a spy under former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and that Dershowitz himself told a U.S. attorney that Epstein belonged to both American and allied intelligence services. After calls between Dershowitz and Epstein, the source claimed, Mossad would call Dershowitz to debrief. Epstein’s relationship with Barak spanned decades. He introduced Barak to Peter Thiel and helped facilitate partnerships between data-mining company Palantir and Israeli defense and intelligence agencies. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s closest associate and the architect of his trafficking operation, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, widely suspected of being a Mossad agent, with multiple Israeli prime ministers attending his funeral and Shimon Peres delivering the eulogy. Former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe has alleged that Robert Maxwell introduced both Ghislaine and Epstein to Mossad in the 1980s, and that the two subsequently ran a honeytrap operation which involved compromising royals, ambassadors, and businessmen to give Israel extraordinary leverage in diplomatic negotiations, trade deals, and security arrangements. The alleged operation gave Israel massive reach into financial and scientific institutions of the Western world, to be used as an instrument of ideological power.

The Zionist movement understood that in the modern world, nothing confers legitimacy like science. Chaim Weizmann, world-renowned chemist and the most prominent Zionist leader of his generation, set out to construct a “Jewish knowledge network” around the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, cultivating Jewish scientists within the American nuclear program for political leverage. After the war, that network became the foundation of Israeli science. 

The Zionist movement, enmeshed into the ruling elite, ultimately believes in biologically deterministic racial superiority of Ashkenazi Jews. Joscha Bach wrote to Epstein in 2018 claiming that recent evolutionary trends rarely provide the requisite “selection pressure towards higher intrinsic intelligence, with the exception of the Ashkenazi mutation.” The victims of one genocide adopted the same theories that had once justified their own extermination, now turned outward against the dark-skinned peoples of the world. Epstein becomes a visible node of a larger network that preaches white supremacy. 

This network made the suppression of student protests against Israel’s genocide in Palestine possible and comprehensible. The American university claims to be the home of free inquiry, the place where human capacity is unleashed and the next generation is prepared for democratic leadership. But democracy is incompatible with the ideology of white supremacy and Zionism, and universities have peddled this ideology for decades. The present-day university has morphed within this network, and exists not to educate youth in their responsibility to humanity, but rather to silence them in the name of an ideology that despises the human family. The academics whose names fill the Epstein files kept their tenure and their Nobel Prizes while the students were arrested, expelled, and stripped of their degrees. 

What explains this extraordinary disparity is the existence of several nodes within the Epstein network which have operated in the same way for decades. The Anti-Defamation League sits at the institutional core of this web, acting as the enforcement arm of Zionist power on American soil. Since the 1930s, it has surveilled Black critics of racism and collaborated with the FBI to neutralize them, a collaboration that became official in 1968. Around the same time, the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was deployed by the FBI against the Black Freedom Movement, its leaders, and organizations in a concerted effort to “neutralize” the struggle for Black liberation. The ADL ensured that Black leaders maintained “a blind spot on Palestine,” and whoever it could not control, it denounced as anti-semitic. We are now seeing that same strategy being used against student protesters. The Epstein network, the university, the ADL, and the American state form a single system, constructed over decades through philanthropy, lobbying, legal intimidation, and the weaponization of anti-semitism. 

This pattern of evidence compels us to ask questions about the nature of Epstein’s relationship with the Zionist state of Israel, the complicity of U.S. universities, and the science that he cultivated with the help of willing participants. It attempts to form a connection between the various nodes of Epstein’s network to reveal a structure which serves a gatekeeping mechanism that defines what constitutes legitimate discourse, establishes the criteria for knowledge production, and determines who is “gifted” enough to pursue the path of science.

Conclusion

The ideology that produced the Epstein files did not die with Epstein. It is still being funded, taught, published, and cited. The institutions that laundered his money are still standing. The scientists he funded chose their careers over their conscience. This is why the culture of elite science today is patronizing, secretive, and defensive. Its gatekeepers dismiss the historical experience of oppressed peoples as “unscientific,” “emotional,” and beneath serious inquiry, unable to surrender the white identity that imprisons them. They have become, as Baldwin said, “men who have forfeited their own humanity by trying to prove that others are not human.”

But every generation that was supposed to have been broken by the science of racial hierarchy instead produced new knowledge, new art, and new ways of being human. The great scientist W.E.B. Du Bois understood what science was truly for. He wrote, “Herein lies the tragedy of the age, not that men are poor… not that men are wicked… not that men are ignorant… Nay, but that men know so little of men.” The purpose of science, in its most emancipatory form, is to cure this ignorance; it is the organized effort for man to know man, a bridge across the chasms that race and class have carved between us. He envisioned a discipline that pulls “the ends of the earth nearer, and all men, black, yellow and white” into a single human project, and he understood that the choice of a question is, in itself, a moral act. The Epstein network chooses its questions in the service of power and calls the answers truth. Du Bois chose his questions in the service of humanity and called the answers a beginning.

That beginning must not be abandoned but rather fulfilled. Science is a tool that can be used to heal or to harm, to liberate or to enslave. The choice is not in the science, but rather in us. We must choose to build a science that serves humanity. The concrete humanity of the particular: the Black child who dreams of a sky. The work today is to recover what the eugenicists tried to bury; not the promise of pure reason, cold and untouched by history, but the promise that knowledge could be a bridge, that science could be a tool of liberation, that a future built on the truth of our shared humanity is not only possible but, in the hands of those who have always strived for the truth, already being built.