Among many others, there are three themes that run through the Jeffrey Epstein disclosures released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) recently: that the rich and powerful people who denied having any connection to the billionaire pedophile were often a lot friendlier with him than they let on; that these members of the elite are, it turns out, far from the geniuses we’re told they are, calling into question why we let them hoard impossible amounts of wealth and make far-reaching decisions affecting our lives; and that Epstein had a knack for ingratiating himself with, and securing influence over, these individuals partly by impressing them with his own supposed brilliance.

You can see all three of these in the emails that surround a secretive August 2, 2015, dinner featuring Epstein and a host of Big Tech oligarchs, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The dinner, first revealed by Vanity Fair back in 2019, has become one of the biggest Epstein-related stories of the past week, after a photo of the gathering and several emails related to it were unearthed, revealing that a who’s who of the tech sector — a number of whom have become major Donald Trump backers, as the entire industry has lurched far to the right — was there, including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Zuckerberg.

The DOJ’s three-million-document Epstein trove lets us piece together more details about the little-known dinner. But for anyone who is hoping they shed light on malevolent world-takeover plans or unspeakable crimes, it turns out what they reveal is something much more banal but no less concerning: a Big Tech elite that is more “oblivious rich guy” than “evil genius,” and that was easily impressed and charmed by a prolific sex criminal because he was able to project the illusion of brilliance.

We only have a few copies of our double issue left. Subscribe today to make sure you don’t miss out on this must-read issue.

The first half of the double issue tackles what could be called the crisis of liberalism — the political economy of the Supreme Court, literature and the ecological crisis, Germany and the Palestinian genocide, and the British Labour left.

Stemming from this diagnosis, we outline possible routes out of neoliberalism by defining key constraints on social democracy, weighing the possibility of a new popular front to help transform the Left back into a genuine mass movement, and exploring and clarifying key dynamics of market socialism.

Subscribe today to get the new issue plus three more, including full access to our entire backlist.

To opt out of emails like this one and other promotions, manage your email preferences. To stop receiving all email communications, unsubscribe.