B (17:41)

I think we're in the moment of this great reveal of not just moral decrepitude, but the heart of a high addiction by an elite class, by what a politician recently coined, which I thought was a really excellent and important coining, the Epstein class, which is really about a ruling class and the pollution of such a class, the pollution of such permission. But without boundaries, without regulations and rules, without limits, people become monstrous. Everybody knows this when we talk about kids, is raising a child without saying no. We know that this creates a tyrant out of a child. And we've all seen, or most of us, some little kid that's too young to be blamed for this, but nonetheless exposing tyrannical behaviors in the face of not being given boundaries or limits. Enough. Enough to prevent a sort of plunderous dimension. And what we're watching in this is plundering of the most vile and expansive varieties, stealing from little children's bodies, alleged serial murdering, raping, assaulting of every kind. And we're watching the most destructive pieces of humanity be emboldened and encouraged by a class that sometimes claims to have a lockdown on morality. So the hypocrisy is stifling. It is rather titillating in the way that watching a gruesome Train wreck is titillating and it is spiritually assaultive, I think, for a population.

A (19:23)

I wanted to ask you to go a little further because you've been interested in, you've spoken about, written about the whole gender relationship. All the problems that it brings to us in our current life and gender is wrapped up in this horror in obvious ways. But there's something about male and female relationships, or in particular how men seem to look at sexuality and females that is exposed here, like bad, like a terrible bad smell that forces us to ask what's going on, to create it.

B (20:09)

I'm so glad you asked that, and I'm so glad to hear it being called out, because I do think this culture, as you and I have discussed before on this program and outside, has a severe problem with understanding masculinity. I think that now we have such a desperate shortage of healthy, laudable emblems of masculinity, which I would say could be evidenced in like a Mamdani or this, even Bernie Sanders. To me and other people, there are many people that can embody a healthy, loving, psychologically sound masculinity. And then there's a sort of tawdry, low hanging notion of masculinity that involves predation, that involves bullying, that involves some kind of power search that's actually in itself a compensation for feelings of fragility and internal frailty. But I think that we also are not asking the excellent question that you just did as a society in which we say what is happening with, with the way that we raise a fair amount of men, so that preying on, particularly pre adolescents, adolescents, in this case much younger children, as is being revealed, which is horrifying, but especially sexualizing in some instances adolescents, whether it's gay men or straight men, you know, queer men or CIS men doing this, preying on adolescents, which does not seem to be equally experienced by women, this degree of predation, whether the women are queer or cis, it doesn't seem to mirror. Women don't seem to be as fixated on adolescence or pre adolescence in terms of fetishizing children as much. They just don't. And that begs the excellent question that you're asking. I think that we have to look at the way that we treat a lot of boys as they're being raised is with more and more coldness physically, in terms of affection, in terms of endearments, whether they're verbal or physical, whether it's resting your hand atop a child's head, patting a shoulder, hugging, linking arms and then stroking or caressing and Obviously, just affectionate manners. This is not romantic at all. These are children. But little boys, when they're around 8, start being treated differently by everybody. The emotional and the physical affection lessens more and more. Their intimate friendships, this is documented less and more and more they become like little islands, perhaps because they're brought into more of a culture of individuation and competition as opposed to coming together. Now, of course, there are many men who are better at coming together than women. There are women who individuate more. But as a general rule, the very toys children are given, boys and girls do speak to these things, as well as the removal of affection, which can leave male psyche to want affection without connection. And then we also bring in a sort of disturbed sexuality, which is a way of getting affection, yet you have to somehow not connect to it emotionally. And that can leave men in such a confused reactivity that dominating a person and maybe assaulting them can be a way of somehow sneaking and stealing that affection under the guise of this toxically masculine and allegedly masculine domination. Hope that makes sense. Maybe ran away a little bit with that one.

A (23:58)

No, it does. And for me, it's like listening to you is helping me understand the richness of the concept toxic masculinity, because you're explaining why it becomes toxic. What are the factors in your upbringing that that would end up having you as a man think of yourself in certain ways that might otherwise not have happened that way. I also want to push you a little bit because there's a toxic masculinity and then there's a toxic, for lack of a better term, a toxic economy, because these are over. The Epstein class are overwhelmingly very, very rich men who are taking advantage of very economically deprived women in the overwhelming majority of cases, at least a little. I've read these were young girls whose job prospects were poor, whose career prospects were poor, whose background, education, all of the usual problems. And they were now kind of lured by the possibility of some economic advantage they might get if they submitted more or less to whatever it is they imagined they were going to get from Mr. Epstein and his. But clearly there's rich on poor horror interwoven with toxic masculinity and gender relation. Horror, in a way. Well, let me put it this way. It would be the worst tragedy if all of this ends up being a discussion of how bad Mr. Epstein was, or Mr. Black was, or Mr. Trump, for that matter, was, and not to see the enormous social reality that produced these examples who happened to be the ones that got caught. And we all know how many are out there, not caught in court, or at least not yet.

B (26:08)

Yeah, I agree completely. I think it's a very important thing. I do think that supremacy is a hell of a drug. And if you get people hopped up on being better because they're whiter or because they're male or because they're CIS or because they have more money, it's a great distraction from pain. I also think that it enables senses of being superior to other people. And the second we start thinking that some lives matter more than lives, again, because of wealth, because of gender, because of orientation, because, and this is the least often mentioned and the most important one too, mentioned class, then we start thinking we can do whatever we want to the person. You're adding to that a very important point, which is that our culture is a predatory culture. Our economic system is a predatory system. It's about, why did these banks look away? Because there was child blood and maybe infant blood and definitely girl's blood spattered all over their stacks of cash. They did look away. They will look away. There are such frenzied wealth hoarders, power hoarders, cruising another hit of a little bit of extra money to these people who have more money than they'll ever know what to do with anyway. They don't care how ill gotten. It's just about hoarding. It's just this addiction. And I think in a system that rewards addiction and pedestalizes hoarders of wealth and power, we are dangling kind of rancid fruits in front of people. And this does not, by the way, I want to say, take away the responsibility of these people for crimes against humanity that deserve the utmost of punishment, in my view.

A (27:53)

You know, I'm tempted to ask you this kind of a question. Trump tries to dismiss all of this by referring to the Epstein case as, quote, unquote, a democratic hoax. Set aside for the moment the obvious politicking. He's trying to make, you know, blame somebody else when his name is in there, apparently more than anybody else's. But again, how do you react to this? An attempt basically, to erase it. In other words, there's no big issue here. None of the questions you've just related this issue to are relevant for Mr. Trump. For him, this is an unrealistic political ploy by his enemies. It is an extraordinary effort to erase an event which has obviously captured the imagination and the concern of millions of people.

B (29:00)

I mean, there are many ways to regard that. For me, this is not an administration that deals in reality. This is an administration that subsists on and deals in non reality surreality and denial of reality. And I think that's quite clear with optics and makeup and shows and impersonations and conspiracy theories. Everything is here to blur reality. Everything is here to wither away lines between reality and non reality so that a public is deadened into just giving up on reality truth altogether. I also think that Trump and this administration, but especially him, have a history of using the hoax defense over and over again and it's wrong each time. So we were, we were told by Mr. Trump in countless documented frames that Covid was a hoax. We were told this, never mind that we were told after that that he had it and then that it wasn't so bad and all these other things. We were also told that it was a hoax. We were also told that foreign interference that's been proven to some extent was a hoax. We've heard about other hoaxes too, that they've all been real. So to me, I get that it's a go to line of defense for Trump and administration. I just, I think it's another way of batting away inconvenient blood spattered truths.

A (30:20)

Yeah. And then it goes right to the heart of what Mr. Epstein did. In the little bit of time we have left, what do you think we ought to be doing? Is there something around this case that you wish were going on that isn't, that would deal with it better than you think we are doing?

B (30:43)

Oh, gosh, so many, so many. I think you're asking crucial questions about economic shadowing here and what I would call as the Epstein class, which is the plunderous class, invited to assault and rake through human lives, children's lives, perhaps babies, lives with the most grotesque immunity imaginable. It goes past the imagination, at least the pieces I've looked at. But I think we have to look at that and we have to understand that pedestalizing greed creates monstrosity. And refusing to allow men to be full creatures with emotional needs also creates toxicity. There is incredible power in naming these things. And also looking at why this culture and so many others make a kind of quiet practice out of doubting women, doubting women's accounts. So whether it's Cosby or Epstein or the countless other people that have sometimes Hundreds, sometimes almost 100 of credible, documented survivors of assaults over decades, this still remains somehow dismissible to a lot of people. I think we have to commit to curiosity and being willing to sort of swallow hard and look at the ugliness behind class supremacy.

A (32:04)

Above all, Tess Fraud Wolf, thank you very, very much for your time. I know it's gone very quickly, but I think you've given our audience, and certainly me, much to think about as we go through the endless headlines of this case. Thank you really very, very much.

B (32:22)

Thank you.

A (32:23)

And to my audience, as always, I, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.