We are at war with Iran, and in the coming weeks and months, it will be all we talk about. The Strait of Hormuz is the new Greenland. Tomahawk cruise missiles are the new AI. And for good reason: This conflict is set to impact the lives of millions around the world.
Yet while war rages on, so does everything else. Our tariff policy is still in limbo. ICE killings are still unaccounted for. AI advancement plows ahead. The significance of our new problem threatens to cut short what little progress we made on our old problems. (Some would argue this was by design.) But there’s no problem that wants to be forgotten more desperately than the one I’m about to dissect.
We’ll talk about Iran another time. Today, I want to give you my full and honest perspective on Jeffrey Epstein — a problem far larger than many care to admit, the solution for which too many choose to ignore.
Across The Pond
Two weeks ago, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested at his home on the royal Sandringham Estate over his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. It was the first time a senior British royal had been arrested in nearly four hundred years. (The last was Charles I in 1647.) He was released eleven hours later, but not before reporters captured what will go down as one of the most important images in British history.
The image is important for three reasons.
1) It represents a new era of justice in the U.K. — one where wealth and royalty do not make you immune to the rule of law. (For a nation whose rulers have long exempted themselves from the bounds of any earthly authority, that’s a big deal.)
2) It is humiliating. This may seem a trivial point. But when you consider what little justice has been served to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, the mere look of panic in the eyes of one of his closest associates (a look he likely witnessed in many women over the years) is no small triumph.
And 3) Sometimes all it takes to inspire justice is an image. Indeed, this is the entire point of a perp walk. Images of Ivan Boesky entering a courtroom were what led to the 1980s Wall Street crackdown. Images of Harvey Weinstein in handcuffs helped spur on the #MeToo movement. An image may not seem like much, but it can often be the catalyst that leads to change.
That’s why I was pleased to see that just four days after the image was taken, the chain reaction began. Lord Mandelson, the former British envoy to Washington, was arrested at his London home in connection to Epstein. Also last month, former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland was charged with “gross corruption” over his ties to Epstein. Justice is making its way across Europe, and it appears no amount of royal blood will be enough to stop it.
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