The New Dark Age

Friday, 6 February 2026 — Vijay Prashad

I have tried my best to stay away from the Epstein files (except the emails between Epstein and Chomsky), away from the emails and the text messages, the ugly code language about child rape (hot dogs and chickens), and the cavalier jokes from celebrities about ‘cute girls’ and about trips to Caribbean islands. But clips from these emails keep appearing in the feeds of social media and they are often sent by friends who find interesting titbits from the vast trove of a dead man’s gmail account.

It is all utterly casual. ‘Ice cream boarding – my version of torture’. ‘What is icecream boarding? Waterboarding with icecream’. This makes no sense unless you know that ice cream is code for trafficked young boys (chickens) in the land of paedophilia. So ugly.

Some of the emails interested me. Years ago, I wrote a book called Karma of Brown Folk that had a chapter called ‘Sly Babas’ that eviscerated Deepak Chopra. Then, I was more interested in his prosperity gospel, which was bogus, adulterated Hinduism for a new New Age crowd – more interested in therapy and yoga than in the rigours of faith. The emails from Deepak Chopra to Epstein are simply disgusting, difficult to read and even more difficult to digest after his ridiculous denial. How do you deny this:

Beneath all this is the crude fact that the ruling class in the United States is truly decadent. The word aristocracy comes from the Greek aristoi (Ἄριστοι), meaning the ‘best ones’. Hard to characterise Bill Gates (Microsoft), Elon Musk (X), Howard Lutnick (Secretary of Commerce), Kathryn Ruemmler (Goldman Sachs), and Peter Thiel (Palantiar) as the best ones. Sewers are filled with better creatures than these men and women. But these are the ‘power elite’, as C. Wright Mills called them, the people who control the levers of power. They believe that they can do anything to anyone who is not in their circle, use and abuse, use and discard. This is not aberration; it is the cultural logic of a class that has outlived its legitimacy.

Richard Branson’s comment, ‘as long as you bring your harem’ is an interesting moment in the emails. The word ‘harem’ comes from the Arabic ḥarīm (حريم), related to haram (حرام), which means forbidden, and was used to mean the sacred place, the segregated quarters of women where the gaze of men was not permitted. Over time, Europeans began to use the word to refer to the place of concubines, such as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), where he describes the Sultan’s harem as a ‘place of slaves and beauties’. A century later, the French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres turned the harem from a social institution to a pornographic category in European art (The Turkish Bath, 1862):

Not sure that Branson has read Montesquieu, but he would have certainly seen these paintings. Classically Orientalist and brutal in the rape language.

The denial from Branson is even more classic: the correspondence took place a long time ago, their meetings were only in public, and that too at charity tennis events. Philanthropy is the perfume sprayed over rot. Their denials are as formulaic as their investments. They all knew Epstein. They all wrote racy emails to him about children and girls and rape. Yet, they are all innocent. And they all distance themselves from him. So convenient.

This power elite must think we are really stupid.

Perhaps we are.