Holy confirmation bias. These people are so lost.
Edge was overwhelmingly male, for one. It was said to be an intellectual salon, but in the club photos were tech bro billionaires, including Edge members Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Larry Page. And too many members were men now largely renowned for misconduct, professional or personal: Marc D Hauser, Jonah Lehrer, Lawrence Krauss, and Marvin Minsky.
We might have overheard the Edge men praising race science, rape culture and genetic engineering. We might even have asked where the money came from. Then we would have come face to face with the illiterate child rapist and passionate eugenicist who bankrolled the whole thing. Jeffrey Epstein.
they all converged on a master philosophy: they were apex predators ordained by nature to exploit and subjugate others. This creed allowed the Edge set to steer intellectual history into its current fascist dead-end.
With its contempt for the humanities, Edge offered intellectually insecure reactionaries a pass. Without even opening a book, they could dismiss all of feminism, postcolonial theory and queer studies. They could continue to ignore giants like Edward Said, Judith Butler, and David Graeber, and devote their brains instead to the race science and rape apologetics that now pass for scholarship on edgelord podcasts.
Billionaires really like thinkers who see their exploitation of the weak as a good and natural thing
Epstein funnelled as much as $20m a year to academic men who shared his ideology.
the anarchist Noam Chomsky, described this ethos: “The cool observers – meaning us smart guys – it’s our task to impose necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications to keep these poor simpletons on course.”
The intellectual groundwork was laid for Epstein to spring his world-domination plan on his kept Edge scholars. The big reveal: he hoped to seed the human race with his superior DNA by impregnating women at his ranch in New Mexico.
[Epstein] told at least one fellow eugenicist that he hoped to freeze his peerless brain and penis at his death, so his organs could be revived for future use in “transhumanism”.
With the Epstein files, we’re confronted with exactly what all the Edge men – from Pinker to Dawkins to Musk to Gates – did with the intellectual territory they seized.