with power comes irresponsibility — and the loathsome webspinner

Reporting by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain in a succession of Drop Site News articles over a number of weeks since September is background to a new podcast conversation between Jewish Currents editorial head Arielle Angel, Grim, and long-time Currents writer Noah Kulwin. ‘Was Epstein Mossad?’ isn’t so much a thing to get hung up on, it’s in reality straightforward to see, as one finds it necessary to appreciate this picture of Davos players and back-channel expediencies in which Israel’s is of course one government whose members will figure prominently.

AA:There’s . . . this great line, Noah, in the piece that you published with Ari Brostoff in 2019, that says, ‘Rather than endlessly tracing these webs of influence, we might do better to just listen for ideological echoes.’ I love that line in terms of how to understand some of this stuff.

And I’ve been thinking of Epstein almost a little bit as a cipher, like as I’ve been reading these Drop Site pieces, in the sense that Epstein is the conduit for a lot of this stuff and he is directing some of this stuff in certain kinds of ways, but he’s almost just the mirror of the flow — like, the way that we see the flow of power in action. You know, there’s so many other different interests, obviously, being represented, and he’s extremely interesting just in terms of what he tells us about our world and how he reflects it back to us in all of its sordidness. And, you know, obviously like he’s an individual who did really terrible things, but for me, like, in terms of the way the story operates, you go through, in the Drop Site pieces, whole sections without mentioning Epstein. Because so much of like what is set in motion by a meeting then takes on a life of its own and has its own impacts in the world. . . .

NK:One thing that I think is really helpful as well is also to consider that Epstein-like figures have existed before. Like it’s a, almost, an archetype, to consider the person he most reminds me of is a guy named Sidney Korshak, who was the Chicago Mob’s big L.A. fixer. He was this really infamous figure, everybody was connected to him. And there’s a great book about him called Supermob. And one of the things that it gets at is the idea that stuff like organized crime, and that figures like a Korshak or, in today’s age, an Epstein, these essential conduits — to use your word, Arielle — are a key part of explaining how the world works today. . . . There’s a way in which, I think, today, again, in a more globalized society, in a society where ownership and the assetization makes this kind of influence a little bit different — you see the sort of power-brokering, though, emerge in these similar kinds of underground criminal networks, however you want to call them.

But rather than . . . get caught up, trying to determine ‘Who’s the real Jeffrey Epstein, what was he really doing? . . . ,’ instead of trying to come up with some distinct, singular truth, in the Robert Caro sense perhaps, to me it’s been helpful to think about — in the context of all of this reporting and all the specific facts we’re learning, that, like, these are evidence of how these kinds of criminal, power-broker, underworld overlord type figures operate — . . . that it also, you know, it doesn’t make us cynical to see that people like this exist and operate, you know, free from democratic and public vision and control, but that it does, like, sharpen our understanding of how it is that the ruling class and how the power elite are able to maintain that power and propagate it. ’Cause people like Jeffrey Epstein would not exist were he not viewed as indispensable toward that end by the highest, most powerful people in our society.

Listen to the whole (44 min.):

[UPDATE (6 Dec. ’25): Currents has followed the Epstein episode with one on Israel’s place in global trade in arms and enforcement systems, ‘Debating the “Palestine Laboratory,”’ a good companion listen — link below.]