toni morrison is not in the epstein files

     This is an excerpt from the Substack by the journalist Virginia Heffernan. You can read the full version on her site, Magic & Loss, here.

      It’s striking who’s not in the Epstein files.

      If you’ve confronted the latest hazmat released by the DOJ, you got an eyeful of some revolting exchanges between Epstein and Deepak Chopra, Epstein and Elon Musk, Epstein and Bill Gates. You can see that the Epstein circle explicitly advanced illiberal views, including eugenics.

      But you’ll also see that a considerable number of artists, politicians and intellectuals—Black ones, women, liberals, leftists, and people with actual intelligence—didn’t get flown on the Lolita Express or feted on Pedophile Island. They didn’t yuk it up over dumb-dumb stoner “ideas” in email, like Chopra did, as he sent heart-eyes emoji to the illiterate child rapist.

      The Trump-Epstein class considers genuine artists, intellectuals and democratic politicians killjoys and whistleblowers. They call them woke. Or racially inferior. Or just women. Anyway, they were not invited.

      In the end, it’s striking how many careers had setbacks because they wouldn’t go along with the Trump-Epstein class. It’s also striking how much was lost from American intellectual life because the most interesting minds of our time never got the TED or Davos stage, a Joe Rogan appearance or the landing page of Amazon.

      Young Americans had Deepak Chopra and Andrew Huberman shoved in their faces while books by belle hooks, Edward Said, Richard Rorty, Toni Morrison, John Rawls, D.A. Miller and Helene Cixous were remaindered.