TOM EATON | There’s draining, but the ‘swamp’ is not what we thought it was

Lawyers have spent the weekend anxiously insisting that appearing in the Epstein Files is not proof of misconduct, and they’re right: just because someone socialises with a known paedophile sex trafficker or consoles him that he’s being unjustly persecuted by the law, it doesn’t make them guilty of anything except, apparently, being the sort of person currently running the world.

No, there are all sorts of entirely sensible — and legal — reasons one might have spent time with the monstrous financier.

When Jacob Zuma, for example, had lunch with him just after Epstein pleaded guilty to trafficking an under-age girl, it is perfectly feasible that the conversation got no further than Zuma’s vision for Nkandla and the fact that those chicken coops weren’t going to gild themselves.

As for Elon Musk, reportedly asking Epstein in 2013 to tell him when the “wildest party on your island” was likely to be, I would remind you that, to Musk, a wild party is one in which a human woman laughs at one of his jokes without having to be paid to do so.

I’m being facetious, but this exculpatory tone isn’t just satirical. It’s also seeped into the air we’re breathing, this anaesthetising fog endlessly pumped out by spin-doctors and lawyers and bot farms, turning scandals into mere spectacle, numbing anger by making everything a screen-grab of meme of a current in-joke.

Many on the left, meanwhile, have expressed shock at yet more proof that Noam Chomsky was close with Epstein, as suggested by a 2019 email in which the famous intellectual sympathised with Epstein about “the horrible way you are being treated in the press and public”, and bemoaning “the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women”.

I mean, yes, OK, it’s a bit odd to see a linguist use “hysteria” — a condition invented by men to diminish or disregard the experiences of women — to diminish and disregard the experiences of women. But look: if you’re the author of Manufacturing Consent, do you just want to write about it or do you want to confirm your theories by seeing manufactured consent in action?

As for Norwegian crown princess Mette-Marit, who on the weekend told her future subjects that she should have done more research into Epstein before becoming pen-pals with him — despite emailing him in 2011 to tell him that she’d Googled him and that what she found “didn’t look too good” — there are also logical explanations, possibly that she’s decided to emulate the Nordic princess Elsa from Frozen by becoming two-dimensional, entirely unbelievable and endlessly telling everyone to let it go.

I’m being facetious, but this exculpatory tone isn’t just satirical. It’s also seeped into the air we’re breathing, this anaesthetising fog endlessly pumped out by spin-doctors and lawyers and bot farms, turning scandals into mere spectacle, numbing anger by making everything a screen-grab of meme of a current in-joke.

This paralysis of spirit has become almost absurd on the American right, where a tribe that has spent decades in a constant moral panic about its children, and the last 10 years fretting about the possible existence of a secret cabal of untouchable sex criminals, now reads allegations of appalling predation, much of it kept hidden by its government, and simply shrugs.

For others, some of the numbness might be sensible scepticism. We are now deep down the rabbit hole of intelligence services and kompromat, and it is sensible not to take everything at face value.

But I also wonder if this non-reaction is what happens when we are shown a glimpse of the masters of the universe: the frenzies of patronage; the intensity of their appetites, whether legal or not; and above all their impenetrable solidarity when it comes to keeping us in our place.

MAGA wanted to drain the swamp. But what happens when it’s all a swamp and the only things being drained are you and me?