‘Epstein’ is the language of America’s unheard. The elites still don’t listen.

When rage becomes the dominant force in American politics, the results are never rational. In the mid-1960s, when a rising tide of expectations for Black Americans around civil rights crashed into walls such as police brutality or housing discrimination, cities from Los Angeles to Detroit to Newark exploded with violent uprisings.

The televised scenes of burning neighborhoods, sniper fire and rampant looting did, at times, grab the attention of lawmakers — the federal fair-housing law was passed while cities still smoldered after 1968’s assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — but the violence put civil rights leaders on the defensive.

In a famous 1966 interview, CBS’ Mike Wallace pressed King to explain urban unrest. “A riot is the language of the unheard,” the civil rights icon responded. MLK explained that what white America was not hearing was that “the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years,“ even as he went on to concede that the uprisings were ”self-defeating and socially destructive."

This may sound odd, but in 2025 I think often about King’s comments as I turn on the TV news every night to see that most of the hour is consumed by the churning scandal that centers on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier and teen sex-abuser who died in a jail cell nearly six years ago.

What’s most fascinating is that this frantic push for new details about the long-dead Epstein’s crimes and his connections — most critically with President Donald Trump, but also with other top pols and CEOs — takes place with little effort to understand the roots of Epstein mania, or why this is happening right now.

Much like the riots of the 1960s, the in-some-ways-valid conspiracy theories about Epstein’s money-and-sex-fueled crime spree are an irrational and potentially burn-it-all-down response to real-world problems faced by a very different chunk of the American working class. To the bitter survivors of a stagnant U.S. middle-class economy, whose understandable fury at billionaire oligarchs has been warped by a toxic media environment, “Epstein” is now the language of the unheard, a one-word catchall to funnel anger about an unequal society.

The deep-rooted fantasy among millions of right-wing voters that Trump was their secret agent to expose this billionaire cabal — despite a mass of public evidence that Trump, for a time, may have been Epstein’s closest friend — is now the ammonium nitrate causing this bomb to explode.

America ought to be having a conversation about the true meaning of the Epstein scandal, so that we can tackle the reality-based issues that are actually driving this story, instead of leaving a burned-out political landscape that looks like Detroit in the 1990s.

The idea that Epstein’s sex trafficking of girls as young as 14 —subject of a 2008 sweetheart deal and 2019’s more serious federal indictment — is central to a massive elite conspiracy has taken root on right-wing podcasts over the years. So has the idea that his death in a jail cell was a murder and not suicide. It’s become a driving force in the rise of MAGA.

Yet promises by the incoming Trump regime to expose the truth about Epstein instead led to a half-baked release of mostly old information this spring, followed by its botched effort to bury a bombshell announcement that there’s no Epstein “client list” and that his death was a suicide by releasing it on the Sunday of July Fourth weekend.

The unprecedented anger and public outcry from key members of Trump’s own MAGA base seemed to signal that an otherwise cowed news media and timid Democratic leaders could run with this story in a different way than other outrages by an authoritarian regime — kidnappings by masked secret police spring to mind — have not. We’re now in a Watergate-inspired “what did the president know and when did he know it?” media frenzy, and yet it all seems rather odd.

It’s not just that footage of Trump and Epstein palling around, and even leering at young women at a 1992 Mar-a-Lago event, and reciprocal comments from the two men about their friendship, which have been in the public domain for years. It’s also the knowledge that voters elected Trump in 2016 amid credible allegations of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, and with the Access Hollywood tape where he bragged about grabbing women’s private parts. He was returned to office in 2024 after a Manhattan jury found that Trump sexually abused the writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room.

So now you’re going five-alarm “breaking news” with a report that a president who not only seemingly confessed to sex crimes on a videotape but who was later found by a jury to have committed such a vile offense also sent Epstein a bawdy letter where his signature looked like a woman’s pubic hair?

Well blow me down!

This is why it’s important to understand what the Epstein scandal is — and isn’t — about. A MAGA movement marked by the rank misogyny of its “Lock her up!” chants against Hillary Clinton isn’t going to care much, or at all, about Carroll or Trump’s other female victims. That’s also why you rarely hear from the right about the actual victims of Epstein’s sex crimes, or whether releasing new info might be traumatic for them.

They don’t care much about the women, but the late Epstein has become very much a figure like Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell’s 1984 (and yes, the Jewish names, in a world where antisemitism is the original conspiracy theory, is a thing), the object of a nightly Two Minutes Hate. The target is not just Epstein but his powerful (non-Trump) friends — especially Bill Clinton who (like Trump!) flew on the financier’s private jet, although he has not been accused of specific wrongdoing.

» READ MORE: MAGA cares more about Jeffrey Epstein than dying without Medicaid, which explains everything

It feels revealing that Clinton was also the 1990s president who imposed a neoliberal regime of free trade and Wall Street deregulation in an era when America bled manufacturing jobs and Rust Belt cities like Youngstown and Flint became hollowed-out shells. The reality that Middle America was getting screwed over by Washington and Big Business morphed into beliefs that a secret cabal not only looked down on the working class but laughed at them with orgies of shocking sexual misconduct.

Polls have shown since the late 2010s that as many as one-third of Trump supporters have steadfastly believed in QAnon, a murky belief system built around theories of widespread sex trafficking by wealthy liberal elites and politicians, and the notion that Trump’s real purpose is to expose this supposed ring and destroy it.

Almost all of QAnon and its adjacent theories like “Pizzagate” — a fraudulent story about a sex ring operating in the basement of a D.C. restaurant — are bat-guano-crazy nonsense, but Epstein, in death, has become the intersection of fantasy and reality. It’s no wonder then that the Trump regime’s inept effort to burst the Epstein bubble has instead blown up in their own faces.

It’s important to note that the Epstein scandal isn’t the only example of the masses’ rage against a powerful oligarchy breaking free of elite containment in ways that the powerful don’t see as civil or proper. In December, the alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson by young gunman Luigi Mangione unleashed pent-up anger over the cruelty of America’s healthcare system that transcended the immorality of killing a human being. It was more proof that decades of often misdirected middle-class resentments are desperately seeking to break free.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. From 1979 to 2019, wages after inflation rose just 3% for those on the bottom, a paltry 13.7% for those in the true middle, but 160% for the top 1% of earners and 345% for the top 0.1%. Real-world solutions like a higher minimum wage or increased taxes on the wealthy are blocked by big money in politics and creeping corporate journalism, so the tsunami of rage flows into conspiracy theories, most imagined and some real. The media can’t fully grasp the real meaning of Epstein because, in the words of left-wing novelist and pol Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

It’s unclear where this is heading. The most optimistic replacement for Trumpism — which funnels legitimate rage over inequality into ancient and immoral hierarchies around gender, race, or immigration — is on display in New York City. There, Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has seized on the wild idea of tackling inequality with actual policies — like childcare, a rent freeze, and free buses.

In Washington, the current reality looks more grim. Trump seems ready to wildly abuse the power of the presidency to investigate his enemies like Barack Obama or improperly wield his pardon pen to work with Epstein associate and convicted perjurer Ghislaine Maxwell to craft a fake narrative that implicates Democrats and spares Trump.

That’s throwing a “burn baby burn” match onto the pyre of U.S. democracy. In a wildly unequal and unfair America, we must decide whether we want to keep exploiting the language of the unheard, or finally start listening.