Obviously, the notion of “Please Don’t Eat Your Children” is applicable to the Epstein Scandal.

The correlation between pro-fascist authoritarianism and the degradation of women and children, along with minorities and gays, is a factor in the cultural history of the last 150 years that doesn’t get enough attention.   

It relates to the appetite for cruelty and domination that fuels the passions of authoritarians, which can be seen reflected in the behavior and attitude of schoolground bullies. Yes, it is true that someone severely bullied himself might internalize the mindset of a bully, and that could explain the personality types of a Donald Trump or Stephen Miller.

The adopted mentality takes delight in pure cruelty with the caveat that it is exercised against perceived weaker or less capable objects, from household pets to a wife, child or queer.

We learn from our schoolground days that, while many are victimized or avoid direct victimization by either extreme avoidance or servile compliance, the only way a bully is deterred is ultimately by an aggressive rising up of others to take him on.

Trump and Epstein arose in the decade of the 1970s, perhaps the worst decade in modern American history for its abandonment of democracy-related ideals and turn toward the precursors of what plague the whole nation today.

The Martin Luther King, Jr.-inspired ideals which drove the civil rights movement of the previous decade were trampled on in the so-called “Me Decade,” which gave way to the politicization of previously marginalized aggressively anti-rational Christian fundamentalists, the Reagan Revolution, the elevation of “Greed Is Good” over “I Have a Dream,” the Gingrich Contract On America, the George W. invasion of Iraq, the rise of the Tea Party and the stolen election of 2016 that led to Trumpism in the White House on the notion that outright lying is a viable political strategy.

Collateral events through this era of descent toward the abyss included the detente-driven Russian mafia invasion into the U.S., the decimation of the feminist movement and its replacement with an explosion of exploitative pornography and diminishment of women,  the AIDS epidemic, and the cultivation through mass cult formation of mindless tools of exploitation. Dominant popular music shifted away from the soft love and human rights themes of the 1960s to either an introverted psychedelia or pounding, shouted anger.

Trump and Epstein became buddies in this 1970s-driven world and carried out their crimes in that context, when it was OK as long as it was moderately hidden from public view. It was in that decade when elites reaching down onto the mean streets of New York and other big cities for sexual gratification was a standard modus operandi.

A model for Trump was his personal attorney, Roy Cohn, who was notorious for cruising the streets of Manhattan for young men and boys on a daily basis. So Trump was exposed to that kind of behavior, which accounts for why he enjoyed the company of Epstein, whose operation made it easy for him. It did not rely on direct procurement of homeless inner city runaways. 

Child victims of this process, of course, were treated like dirt and unceremoniously dumped when elite overlords exercised their cruelest ways with them and then were done with them. (Actually, none of this should be in the past tense).

The culture that was permitted and encouraged in the 1970s was, to be sure, reinforced by the philosophies of the counterculture (“Just do it! 100 years from now, who will know the difference?”), with the anti-science and anti-truth excesses of postmodern thought and license, as given permission through the reification of philosopher Michael Foucault and others.

The so-called counterculture and its cults that were the backdrop for so much of this included a strong pro-Nazi component, evidenced in the published views of Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey and others whose ideas were so heavily promoted in that era.

Meanwhile, the average standards of living of Americans also began a long descent, making homebuying, for example, possible only by the outrageous conditions that led to the Great Recession of 2008. Things have only gotten worse since.

We’ve a lot of cleaning up to do.