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The emails show the “anti-woke” crusaders are afraid of accountability.
by
Elizabeth Lopatto
Feb 6, 2026, 8:00 AM EST
He might be dead, but it sure seems like Jeffrey Epstein won.
Sure, Epstein was arrested on charges of sex trafficking minors. Sure, he died in jail. (I am not going to wade into the debate about how.) But he subscribed to a racist, misogynist ideology that meant rich white men like him could do whatever they liked. And it seems he took measures to spread it.
The latest tranche of Epstein documents made it obvious. Consider all the “contrarians” and “anti-woke” warriors who show up in the latest dump: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, and of course, Donald Trump. With apologies to George Carlin: It’s a big club, and the worst people are in it — because their interests are all aligned. Pushing back on social justice, it turns out, was coordinated.
Being able to see their emails makes something very clear: The “anti-woke” movement was not a genteel intellectual inquiry, made by disinterested parties who cared deeply about free speech. It is a social circle of powerful people who feel threatened by #MeToo. Reading through the emails, it’s possible to see that Epstein himself coordinated pushback against #MeToo. Looking back, it seems obvious that sinking #MeToo also led to where we are now: a place where laws simply don’t apply if you have enough money and power. The same players are involved.
Recall the great many pronouncements about the limits and dangers of #MeToo — hilariously, Bari Weiss wrote an entire article in The New York Times about “iconoclastic” members of the “intellectual dark web” who “talk constantly about the regressive left but far less about the threat from the right.” Included in this group was a correspondent of Epstein’s: Sam Harris, to whom Epstein suggested he use “more charm and less argument” in debates. Several of the names mentioned in the article would later join Weiss’ abortive attempt at an “independent” school, the non-accredited University of Austin. Much like the group Weiss profiles itself, the University of Austin would become a tool of the far right.
It is more accurate to understand the “anti-woke” “iconoclasts” as a group of loosely affiliated people with the same goals. This isn’t an abstract intellectual movement about free speech — or we’d be hearing more from these people about the recent DHS actions to hunt down critics of Epstein’s old friend, Donald Trump. Besides Trump, there are two key ringleaders: Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. They both appear extensively in the Epstein files, and have good reason to want to remain untouchable.
How did all these people know each other? Epstein’s influence campaign started in the sciences in the early 2000s, with the help of John Brockman, a powerhouse literary agent, and his Edge Foundation, to which Epstein was the largest donor. “Foundations associated with Epstein provided $638,000 out of a total of almost $857,000 received by Edge” between 2001 and 2017, without which “the nonprofit’s full range of exclusive events would not have been possible,” according to BuzzFeed News.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/874721/epstein-thiel-musk-trump-metoo
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How the Epstein Cabal defeated #MeToo