"The Network" in the Worlds of the Elites

Baffled by President Trump's Response to the Epstein "Client List"? I Think I Get It.

Is there something about liberal elite networks, you should understand?

Half the country is up in arms about President Donald Trump’s inexplicable decision to mock his base, because many are appalled that Attorney General Pam Bondi seems to be orchestrating a coverup of a serial rapist of children. Bondi’s Justice Department released a memo last week: “The two-page document said the department found no evidence of an Epstein client list and that no additional files from the investigation would be made public.”

President Trump’s response to all this has been startling: He stated that “[O]nly really bad people […] want to keep something like this going.” According to NBC, he also called MAGA supporters of his who are upset at AG Bondi, “weaklings” who “bought into this bull—-t” —.

President Trump’s supporters, including Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and even Alex Jones, are furious, and calling for full release of the “Epstein files.” Polls show harm to his support: numbers that could threaten Republicans in the midterms.

Democrats are racing to capitalize on the fissures opening among Republicans, as Politico reports. President Trump’s appeal to his base is that he is “one of us”, and that he promises transparency. A situation that casts him as a rich guy with muddy motivations protecting another late rich guy’s friends — the dead man, the worst of the worst — could lose him the base, and cause MAHA voters - millions of them moms and dads of girls like the ones that Epstein abused — to flee.

Conservatives are baffled. My husband, a truly objective man (as well as an ardent President Trump supporter who also worked for numerous intelligence agencies for almost three decades), is puzzled, to the point of wondering if the President is acting uncharacteristically in response to some serious unnamed threat (or threats), perceived or actual.

Because I spent decades in the same elite liberal circles that sheltered Epstein, I am not puzzled. I think I understand the matrix of this situation.

It has, in my view, to do with “the network.”

I think that it is likely that multiple people who are critical to this administration’s success — my guess is, that these are mostly guys from the Silicon Valley community, who have been the ones to put the fuel of their billions and their technical and media support into President Trump’s campaign and administration’s engines — whether they are innocent or guilty, are in the Epstein files. (Remember why Mrs Gates broke up with Mr Gates?) And I think this nation’s most important scientists, innocent or guilty, are in the files. And my guess is that the funders have confronted President Trump.

Why do I think this? There are several clues.

One is the interview of the late Epstein’s former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, with Chris Cuomo. Remember, Dershowitz used to represent President Trump as well. Dershowitz confirmed that there is a redacted list of people accused of improper conduct, stressed that no one who is a public figure who is in office currently (you get it) is on the list, and called on AG Pam Bondi to ask the New York Courts, who have custody of this list, to release it.

If you read the hieroglyphics here correctly, what you should see (this is why it is useful to have been a political consultant; you can read the code, which often involves triangulation or “deniability”) that A/ President Trump is not on this list. B/ President Trump does not wish the horrific baggage of being the one to infuriate all the powerful people who are on this list, by releasing it himself via his AG. C/ They — the Trump administration — want it released by others, ie, the New York courts, so that they themselves don’t receive the appalling blowback.

I also believe that there are make-or-break tech bro Trump supporters on the list, because of a moving interview given by Eric Weinstein on July 14, 2025— interestingly, in the midst of the Bondi furor — to Steven Bartlett, on the “Diary of a CEO” podcast.

Weinstein was til 2022 managing director for the American venture capital firm Thiel Capital. Weinstein is a compelling intellectual, in addition having served at the very top of one of Silicon Valley’s key organizations. He created a physics-based “theory of everything” that he brought to a fellowship at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford, and he was trained in mathematics at Harvard University.

On the podcast, he stated that “[s]ex offender Jeffrey Epstein was a "product of one or more elements of the intelligence community." Weinstein, who said he had met Epstein, described him as "certainly was not a financier in any standard sense. That was a cover story."‘

“British entrepreneur Bartlett asks about Weinstein having met Epstein, and he says, "He wasn't a financier the day I met him." Weinstein goes on to describe Epstein as a "weird guy," who "didn't seem to know a lot about currency trading."

Weinstein also describes Epstein as a "construct"‘.

This interview has been seen by 2.4 million people. It is riveting. I felt a deep sense of recognition when Weinstein was speaking. My sense is that Weinstein was speaking extremely carefully; that his goal, among others, was to establish that one could be enmeshed in documentation around the Epstein community and “lists”, without being a pedophile — indeed, one could be enmeshed in those documents simply for being a cutting-edge scientist; and that one intention of his was to put this situation on the record.

I know that Weinstein is correct; “the list/s” will have pedophiles on them, and they will have innocent men (and women) who are snapshotted forever in the vicinity of Epstein - even at his New Mexico ranch and yes, even on his island — simply because they had the misfortune to be some of the most important scientists and mathematicians — and technologists — of our time.

Weinstein argues that the Epstein “construct” was what the military calls “dual use” --that is, that Epstein had multiple missions running concurrently.

One mission, of course, was that of running a grotesque sexual honeypot, exploiting minors, for purposes of blackmail.

But another, Weinstein argues, is the management and direction of Western science itself. Weinstein notes that Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, the late publishing magnate/reputed intelligence asset Robert Maxwell, founded the scientific imprint Pergamon Press, the Oxford-based imprint that published medical books and journals, which was bought by Elsevier, which is the main scientific publishing imprint (and the advance guard scientifically for the COVID/vaccine narrative; indeed, Elsevier created a “resource hub” about COVID for “librarians, campuses and health professionals”, an oddly activist offering from what is supposed to be a neutral scientific platform).

Weinstein notes that Epstein funded a number of important scientists, and that he had an office at Harvard. Weinstein says in the podcast, with what looks like suppressed rage, that he wants to know why Epstein was aware of his, Weinstein’s, work, and why Epstein was embedded in the Harvard mathematics department.

Harvard Mathematics Department:

Indeed, Harvard was an avid matchmaker for Epstein among the scientific and mathematics community. Harvard accepted about $9 million from Jeffery Epstein, and gave him an office in the institute that he helped to fund. Epstein visited Harvard more than 40 times.

Key Harvard academics were brought to him by connectors in the university, and encouraged to socialize with him. “Some [Harvard] professors beyond [mathematics professor Martin Nowak] appear to have enjoyed close ties with Epstein, the [Harvard] review found. The report says "a number" of faculty members visited Epstein at his homes in New York, Florida, New Mexico and the Virgin Islands. [Italics mine]. Some said they visited him in jail or took trips on his planes. The visits were done in a personal capacity, the report said, and do not appear to violate Harvard rules.”

So: systematically, consistently, major intellectuals, especially in the fields of computation, genetics, evolutionary biology, and consciousness, were being herded by gatekeepers into proximity to Epstein, who had been planted physically in their midst; and these academics were urged to accept his funding money and to meet with him and by implication, to befriend him or to accept his friendship, and even his invitations. I think this is the “Why?” that Weinstein is asking. We will return to the implications of this systematic engagement structure, later.

Eric Weinstein is correct. Jeffrey Epstein did fund cutting-edge scientists and mathematicians, especially in the fields of genetics and and evolutionary biology. He even convened them via another entity, into a community under his funding structure.

Weinstein’s larger claim — that the Maxwell/Epstein nexus or “construct” served not just to fund but to direct and manage and gate-keep and put a frame around and essentially set the direction of science — is a claim that makes sense, from what I know.

I know that Weinstein is right because I was unknowingly part of a network that overlapped with a part of this network. My agent for almost all of my career, since I was “discovered” by him and since he helped me to publish my first book, The Beauty Myth, a bestseller, at the age of 26, was the legendary literary agent John Brockman. Brockman became as famous as his famous stable of intellectuals, especially during the 2000s and 2010s, for promoting something he called “The Third Culture,” an intersection between the humanities, technology and the sciences.

Brockman’s roster of writers had no mass market novelists, no thriller writers, no cookbook writers, no popular historians. It was, in retrospect, a remarkably curated list. I was honored to join it. Brockman Inc primarily represented the very pinnacle of science and science-adjacent writers: evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, cognitive scientist Daniel Dennet, psychologist Daniel Kahneman. “Nimble Deal-Maker for the Stars of Science” reads a gushing New York Times profile of John Brockman.

Jeffrey Epstein funded the Edge Foundation, Brockman’s digital and irl salon. No one knew this. Or, at least, no one I knew, knew this.

This entity held gatherings of these intellectuals, and published a website and books in which they were asked critical questions (the website is still up). Edge.org’s website hosts commentary by the best of the best — the minds that are directing our culture and our science: theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann, cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, Gnostic Gospel scholar Elaine Pagels, theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, Google co-founder Larry Page.

Its motto is: “To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.”

Edge.org hosted “millionaire’s dinners”, which later became “billionaires’ dinners”; these brought the elite of the world of science together with the elites of Silicon Valley. Edge.org also published commentary by some of the most influential intellectuals in the world — men (mostly men) from both of those worlds, in dialogue. (Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein and Eric Weinstein both contributed to Edge.org, and in 2018 Eric Weinstein thanked Brockman in a tweet, for the opportunity to speak “as me”.)

I will just lift out the sections from Wikipedia that explain the basics of the Epstein link with Brockman Inc, as I do not wish to locate myself in the cross-hairs of any new reporting for this dangerous story:

“In an interview with Prince Andrew dated November 17, 2019, BBC reporter Emily Maitlis mentioned that both Andrew and John Brockman attended an intimate dinner at child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion to celebrate Epstein’s release from prison for charges which stemmed from at least one decade of child sex trafficking.^[7]

Andrew’s presence at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion was corroborated by Brockman himself, in emails published in an October 2019 New Republic report. The story suggested that Brockman was the “intellectual enabler” of Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who died in August 2019 while again awaiting trial on charges related to sex trafficking.^[8]

Brockman's famous literary dinners—held during the TED Conference—were, for a number of years after Epstein’s conviction, almost entirely funded by Epstein as documented in his annual tax filings.^” This allowed Epstein to mingle with scientists, startup icons and tech billionaires [Italics mine].^”

In 2009, Jeffrey Epstein was released from prison.

By 2010, Brockman’s community of intellectuals went far beyond the scruffy if distinguished Harvard professors of the early 2000s. By that year and then throughout the teens, Brockman’s Edge Foundation, via the “Billionaire’s Dinners”, somehow convened the leaders, indeed the emperors and empresses, of the tech world.

Here, in one improbable room, in 2010, were Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington; Marissa Mayer, then at Google; Larry Page, who cofounded Google; Craig Venter, who sequenced the human genome; biologist George Church, who later had to apologize for accepting funding from Jeffrey Epstein; weirdly, PCR test inventor Kari Mullis; weirdly, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening; and Nathan Myhrvold, formerly CTO at Microsoft and founder of Intellectual Ventures, the Tech Brotherhood’s Ground Zero of venture funding; Susan Wojcicki, later CEO of Youtube; Jason Calacanis, the tech investor who turned, per his book, $100,000 into $100,000,000; and Michael Tshao, who eventually led Apple’s foray into electronics such as the IPad.

And that is just one single year. The star-studded tech and scientific names march on through the subsequent decade: cofounder of Google Sergey Brin; cofounder of Microsoft Paul Allen; Tony Fadell, “Father of the IPod”.

In 2019, the news broke that Epstein funded Edge.org. Buzzfeed and other news outlets ran stories.

I immediately broke up with my career-long representation, and wrote a heartbroken letter to John Brockman and his wife and colleague Katinka Matson; heartbroken because I had actually loved them, and because I had trusted them with my development as a writer, which task they had managed brilliantly for decades, and heartbroken too because I was a survivor of child rape myself.

After I left, I had a lot of conversations with Brockman’s other clients. They called me — I did not call them.

To a man (and they were all men) these distinguished intellectuals explained that they empathized with my views and shared my indignation about Epstein’s misdeeds, but that they were not going to leave Brockman Inc.

I guess what I am trying to explain is the power and endurance, and really, the sanctity, of “the network” in the worlds of the elite.

Even with the news breaking that the agency’s cultural activities were funded by a pedophile, Brockman’s other clients rightly calculated that their staying within the shelter of such a powerful network, would be more beneficial to them, than would be leaving, even if on principle, and losing the support of and access to that influential network.

And they were right.

What you need to understand, taking this all back to what I believe is President Trump’s dilemma, is that that calculation about the power of “the network,” and the scary losses sustained by crossing “the network”, let alone losing its protection and resources, are not restricted to the Edge Foundation.

All of liberal elite society works in this exact same way.

It is all kind of like the mafia — you may not agree with the capo or some of the dons around you, but you know very well that crossing them means certain destruction for yourself.

So: everyone aligns.

I think this is what President Trump is also trying to explain, though of course he cannot state all this overtly.

Understand, too, what Weinstein and Dershowitz are separately trying to tell you. The Epstein files probably contain many innocent people as well as many guilty ones; but again, they are very likely to contain, innocent and guilty, some of the most powerful of President Trump’s current supporters; and some of the greatest of scientists and some of the most influential technologists of our time.

And even someone as powerful as the American President, in my calculation, can’t cross that most powerful of all powerful “networks.”

You should also absorb the nuances of what Weinstein is, as I understand him, trying to tell us.

In Epstein we are not just looking at a sexual blackmail operation for US and foreign political leaders and hedge fund guys.

We are also looking at a “construct” that seduced and lured scientists; that was institutionally set up to seduce and lure scientists; and that may have created conditions that look compromising on paper, whether the scientists did anything wrong or not. We are also looking at a machine constructed to entrap and perhaps pressure, whether they are innocent or guilty, a generation of the most important scientists of our time.

Why? Perhaps, as Weinstein is suggesting, to steer science itself.

Weinstein is sure that Epstein was an intel op. So, if he is correct — and I have no idea — those steering science, and to some extent, technology, by setting up via Epstein “kompromat” that can destroy and pressure both innocent and guilty scientists and technologists, is either our intelligence community — or not. Think about the national security implications of this, either way, if either possibility is true.

Who was drawn in? The scientists targeted were the precursor minds of our current world in its more dystopian aspects.

The scientists in this targeted “stable” deal with various dimensions; with pre-AI; with the management of awareness; with the difference between brain and consciousness; with genetics and the altering genes; with evolution; with ritual; with what makes humans human, and with what allows them to transcend human limitations. “Transhumanism'“is a reductive term in this context but someone powerful, as I think Weinstein is seeking to tell us, is very interested in science taking the same directions that support and align with where the Tech Bros are seeking to steer humanity; and the Tech Bros are taking the same directions that the targeted scientists took. This is non-random cultural evolution. What is behind this? What is the ultimate meaning? What is the desired outcome?

I don’t have the answers, but to me it seems that these are the key questions, and these questions may explain the megalith of internal resistance that may be facing President Trump.

The dinners of 2010 and beyond, turned into our reality in 2025.

This all greatly complicates the Epstein story. It makes it a story about the corrupting and perhaps even the blackmailing and directing of science and technology, and maybe even of both guilty and innocent scientists, and maybe even of guilty and innocent technologists, as well as being an easier-to-assess story about royals and retail clothing moguls and about, above all, the sexual abuse of children.

It may mean that innocent people as well as guilty — major scientists and major technologists, perhaps — may have been set up or enmeshed in circumstances that they now fear coming to light, whether they did nothing wrong at all, or whether they did something wrong.

It may mean that whoever was steering Epstein — was also steering our science.

That makes it a very different, very significant — perhaps culture-changing; perhaps history-changing — story.

It would make it a story with which we have to be persistent and steady in our demands; but also cautious, and methodical, and discerning.

This all may be even bigger and even more worrying, than we realize.

#####

I used to go to events hosted by publicist Peggy Siegel, who was also Jeffrey Epstein’s publicist. There were Wall Street guys and star journalists and B list movie stars and A list TV stars; politicians and fashion icons and socialites; old money and new money. After 2010 or so, there were tech royalty and tech investors.

The events were fun: movie premieres, and galas celebrating this or that charity; silent waiters and waitresses, horrible food, glowing candles; bare shoulders, magnolias in artsy tablescapes; soaring columns of the Library, or of the historic interior of 48 Wall Street, an ornate former bank.

At one event — I think it was a film premiere, so this would have been in a deluxe movie theatre — I remember that someone pointed out Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was finding his seat, as I recall, and he was so, so tall; his silver hair gleamed in the darkness; and, as monsters go, he looked personable.

He carried himself proudly — with no shame at all in his physical demeanor. This must have been about 2012; his rehabilitation PR lap. I was in a small group, and someone said he that had been in prison for the sexual abuse of children.

I recall a kind of collective shrug from the hedge fund guys who were standing around: a kind of, “Huh.”

Epstein obviously still had “juice,” was the vibe, and he had served his time. F Scott Fitzgerald pointed out that “there are no second acts in American lives”; but many in the Peggy Siegel crowd, in contrast, loved a good comeback from disgrace.

As I recall, some of the people with whom I was standing made their way over to meet him. Notoriety was the aura he brought to the scene; a frisson. Others did not react with the repugnance that I felt, or at least, not visibly.

I guess what I am trying to show you is — no one, or very few, in truly elite circles, wants to risk losing the valuable, precious, life-sustaining network.

So he or she goes along with just about anything, in the characters of others in the network.

This doesn’t mean they approve — but they go along.

You can’t cross the network.

Is that what President Trump is facing now?

I wonder.