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The Software Upgrade Australia Didn’t Need.

18 March 2026 AIMN Editorial, By Ricky Pann https://theaimn.net/the-software-upgrade-australia-didnt-need/

Palantir and the Digital Dictator’s Operating System

Australia is undergoing a system update. It didn’t pass through a referendum, nor was it meaningfully debated in Parliament. Arriving quietly under the guise of maintenance and safety, Palantir Technologies has embedded itself into the central nervous system of Australia’s financial and intelligence apparatus. Through AUSTRAC and the Fintel Alliance, data from banks, law enforcement, and government agencies are now integrated into a single “God view”. The Australian Government is in fact investing in Palantir through stocks held by our Future Fund.

An Upgrade Without an Uninstall

Palantir represents a new phase in Silicon Valley’s evolution, a shift from consumer platforms to sovereign infrastructure. From apps designed to distract us to systems designed to govern us.

Palantir’s software deployment in Australia comes ahead of a coordinated lobbying push to expand adoption of its systems, positioning them to become a de facto operating system for governments globally through sheer market dominance.

Australia is making an unspoken admission: that social democracy is now seen as too slow and inefficient for an AI-driven world, where speed is quietly replacing human judgment. This is the great deception of hasty AI adoption.

These are the quiet admissions of a society steered by populist fear: the myth that productivity driven growth is limitless, and the delusion that automating human empathy will not edge us toward autocracy.

So where do we stop?

Do we outsource judgment.
Do we automate trust.
Do we accept a black box view of reality in exchange for speed.

The result is a feedback loop. Data feeds the system. The system reshapes perception. Perception justifies more data. Slowly, the world begins to look exactly as the software expects it to.

There’s a familiar feeling after a software update.

Nothing looks different.
The icons are where you left them.
The system boots. The coffee still tastes the same.

But something subtle has shifted.

Menus rearranged.
Permissions altered.
A few options you used to have simply evaporated.

We’re expected to accept a system that doesn’t reason, doesn’t ask permission, operates without consent, and collapses the complexity of human context, nuance, and lived experience into binary outcomes.

No announcement. No apology. Just a new normal.

The quiet inversion Orwell warned about: not brute force, but soft machinery. Not the scream, but the hum.

A world where seeing everything replaces understanding anything, where speed outranks judgment, and probability passes for truth.

The system doesn’t need to lie.

It just decides what is perceived as real.

Palantir isn’t a surveillance scandal. It’s a design choice.

Who’s Watching the Watchers?

One day, sitting on a bench, watching light move through trees, you realise something small but irreversible.

You’re no longer being seen by people.

You’re being interpreted by infrastructure.

That’s not a crisis moment.

It’s an installation moment.

And installations, once embedded deeply enough, rarely come with an uninstall option.

Australia didn’t choose authoritarianism.
It chose efficiency

We didn’t suspend democracy.
We quietly routed around it.

You don’t lose freedom all at once. You outsource it, piece by piece, to systems that promise to manage burden for us.

The pitch is seductive to politicians and bureaucrats: efficiency, seamless integration, prevention over response. But this isn’t a routine upgrade. It’s a Trojan Horse, quietly ushering in a new era of global corporatocracy.

Palantir does not merely process data; it installs a proprietary “ontology” with a map of clusters of a calculated reality that dictates to a government what is considered relevant or risky.

It replaces the presumption of innocence with algorithmic probability, shifting justice from what you did to what you might do. Once a sovereign nation relies on such a system, it no longer acts as a customer but as a dependent, outsourcing responsibility and accountability.

Authors note: I don’t mean to be nasty but…

I’m not in the habit of playing the man/woman/person instead of the ball but, this is the age of disruption in a period of brazen populism that rewards narcissism.

People like Trump, Musk, Altman, Karp and Thiel routinely make statements that are disconcerting, extreme, misleading, and at times plainly unhinged.

They face little consequence because wealth and power insulate them, reinforcing the belief that billionaire status equates to insight – despite being far removed from the lived reality of the people most affected by the chaos caused by the systems they shape.

Buyer Beware: To understand the creeping authoritarianism we as Australians just installed, we must look at the radically unhinged ideologies of the architects who designed it.

Peter Thiel: The Sovereign Dream

Founder Peter Thiel has been unusually candid about his beliefs. He has stated that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.

His worldview, influenced by René Girard’s theory of mimetic conflict, treats human society as inherently unstable, something to be managed, contained, and overseen by a competent elite.

Thiel’s Zero to One philosophy celebrates monopolies. Competition, he argues, is wasteful. Governance by consensus is inefficient. The future belongs to singular systems operated by those smart enough to bypass friction.

This worldview is not theoretical. Thiel is now a New Zealand citizen and has publicly acknowledged preparing for large scale civilisational disruption.

He owns property on New Zealand’s South Island, widely reported as part of a network of fortified survival infrastructure intended to function during a catastrophic global event, often described in Silicon Valley as an H2 scenario, a hard reset moment involving systemic collapse.

This may sound like a dramatic interpretation of his intention however, considering the dots we are joining, Palantir is the practical expression of this thinking.

Its a monopoly on state intelligence designed to operate beyond the slow checks and balances of democratic process, resilient not just to crime or terrorism, but to  political instability itself.

This is mostly true for all disruptive big tech firms. They grow and evolve so fast that the consequential fallout of the technology lags years behind legislation. They operate in the wild west at the expense of law, privacy, social cohesion, mental health, criminality and human rights till the sheriff arrives.

Alex Karp: The Dialectical Justifier

CEO Alex Karp presents differently. He speaks the language of philosophy, progress, and reluctant necessity. He frames Palantir through a dialectical lens, civil liberties on one side, a dangerous world on the other, resolved by a system powerful enough to neutralise chaos.

Alex Karp acts as the “dialectical justifier, using Hegelian philosophy to reframe total mass surveillance and the reduction of citizens to managed variables as a necessary, moral “synthesis” between civil liberties and global chaos.

In this framing, surveillance is not abuse but compromise.
Dominance becomes protection.
Efficiency becomes morality.

Karp has acknowledged that bad times are very good for Palantir. The company is built for crisis. It thrives on instability, on moments when societies are willing to trade uncertainty for control.

The contradiction is hard to miss. In claiming to prevent fascism by enforcing order, the system quietly adopts fascism’s core mechanism, total visibility, preemptive control, and the reduction of citizens to managed statistical variables.

It is not win lose.
It is domination.

It is founder Peter Thiel who pushes this idea of world domination into the realm of absolute madness.

Thiel delivered a series of private, unhinged lectures titled “The Antichrist”. Using cobbled-together 1st-century doomsday theology and pop-culture manga like One Piece, he attempted to frame himself and his fellow technocrats as heroic rebels holding back a demonic, stagnant global state.

If you strip away this ridiculous theatrical charade, you don’t find a philosopher. You find the Nero of Silicon Valley, a wanna be digital dictator actively engineering the end of inconvenient democracy.

Here is the actual plumbing behind the smoke and mirrors:

A: The Hypocrisy of the “Anti-Satanist” Thiel preaches that global governance and regulation are the “Antichrist” of our era. Yet, his primary engine of wealth, Palantir, is the ultimate weapon of the administrative state.

Palantir provides the data-mining backbone for ICE, the Pentagon, and global police forces. He decries the global surveillance state while acting as Big Brother’s lead software engineer.

He isn’t fighting the system as a small government libertarian; he just wants the monopoly on its operating system.

B: The Untruths of “Stagnation” In his lectures, Thiel claims the world is trapped in scientific “stagnation,” literally labelling anyone who advocates for climate change mitigation, environmental survival, or AI safety guardrails as a “Luddite” and a “legionnaire of the Antichrist”.

This is a blatant untruth used to mask regulatory capture. He doesn’t care about stagnation; he simply demands a world where his tech monopolies can operate without the friction of human empathy, environmental protection, or legal boundaries.

C: The Puppeteer Behind the Chaos Thiel presents a false binary choice between total “Armageddon” and a stagnant global state.

But he is not a prophet warning us of the fire; he is the arsonist selling the fire extinguisher.

Operating through dark money donor networks, Thiel is the primary financial engine behind figures like J.D. Vance and organisations such as the Heritage Foundation – the architects of the Project 2025 blueprint.

He is one of the chief puppeteers behind the Trump-era chaos. Thiel actively funds anti-establishment disruption to dismantle regulatory frameworks, intentionally manufacturing the very societal chaos he claims only Palantir’s mass surveillance can manage.

D: The Delusion of Superiority and Human evolution Driven by René Girard’s “Mimetic Theory,” Thiel views the general public as a mindless, moronic mob that must be controlled by elites like him.

Embracing the delusion of the Sovereign Individual, Thiel has no intention of fixing the democratic systems he helps break. Instead, he is hoarding fortified doomsday bunkers in New Zealand, actively preparing for an “H2 scenario” heralding a catastrophic, systemic global collapse.

This deep disregard for humanity culminates in an obsession with redesigning human evolution itself. Thiel treats human limitation and death as defects to be solved, pouring massive investments into transhumanism, cryonics, and young blood transfusions.

His endgame is a complete evolutionary split: engineering a future where the billionaire class achieves digital eternity as a sovereign, immortal species, leaving the masses to burn on an unregulated, collapsing planet.

This may be hard to grasp but thats the type of people Australia has entrusted their government data to.

The Verdict

Australia didn’t choose authoritarianism; it chose efficiency. We are quietly outsourcing our reality to an unaccountable technocracy.

Thiel’s lectures aren’t a warning about a coming digital dictator; they are a job application for the position.

He is the man who sells you the matches, then offers to build you a fireproof bunker for the price of your freedom.

Palantir isn’t just software. It is an installation moment. And installations this deep rarely come with an uninstall option.

March 18, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

A Catholic guide to understanding the war with Iran

The primary international law that seems to have been violated by the United States and Israel is the U.N. Charter’s prohibition of the use of force except in self-defense. The United States, whose diplomats were among the founders of the United Nations just after the horrorshow of World War II, is a signatory to the U.N. Charter and presumably willingly governed by its prohibitions against wars of aggression or choice.

by Kevin Clarke, America, March 6, 2026

“…………………………… First of all, what do we call this thing that the United States and Israel have begun, which has so far cost more than 1,000 lives in Iran and 12 in Israel and taken the lives of six U.S. service members? In his declaration announcing the attack, Mr. Trump described the joint Israeli/U.S. air campaign as “major combat operations in Iran.”

Since the strikes began, members of Congress who support that “major combat operation” have struggled to classify it, reluctant to refer to it as a war, perhaps attempting to avoid the delicate problem of constitutional limits on the executive to engage in war-making. The framers of the American Constitution, concerned about the possibility of a renegade, unbound executive abusing this gravest authority, reserved that power to Congress under Article I, Section 8, Clause 11. You can look it up.

But like Congresses before them that demurred as former presidents began a “police action” in Korea, trudged deeper into the big muddy of the Vietnam War or cheerfully pronounced “mission accomplished” as the epic misadventure in Iraq unraveled, the current U.S. Congress has preferred to leave the authority to engage in this latest war (and perhaps ultimately the blame for it) to the Trump administration.

Some members of Congress have settled on “significant military campaign” to describe the conflict, too akin to the Putin-ish “special military operation” to my ears. Others argue that the attacks on Iran can’t be called a war until U.S. boots are on the ground—something not ruled out by the White House.

But I say if it looks like a war, bombs like a war, takes the lives of combatant and noncombatant alike like a war, it’s probably a war.

International humanitarian law, 19th- and 20th-century conventions and agreements meant to temper state tensions that lead to conflict as well as the behavior of warring parties, is likely to be further undermined by this new war. It may seem absurd to seek moral limitations on conduct in something as barbaric as war-making, but I.H.L. had notable practical successes over time in terms of the treatment of prisoners of war and the protection of noncombatants. In recent years it has included conventions abolishing land mines and chemical and biological weapons.

The primary international law that seems to have been violated by the United States and Israel is the U.N. Charter’s prohibition of the use of force except in self-defense. The United States, whose diplomats were among the founders of the United Nations just after the horrorshow of World War II, is a signatory to the U.N. Charter and presumably willingly governed by its prohibitions against wars of aggression or choice.

In the past, the United States has turned to the United Nations to provide a veneer of legitimate authority to its military actions in Korea, during the Gulf War, various Iraq incursions and other military campaigns in Kosovo, Haiti, Libya and Syria. The Trump administration this time did not bother to seek U.N. cover for its attack on Iran, extending its disdain for the United Nations to perhaps this ultimate conclusion. But U.N. officials should not feel especially slighted since the president similarly did not bother to seek an authorization from the U.S. Congress.

Self-proclaimed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has made a point of mocking the niceties of international law as the United States continues an illegal campaign to kill alleged drug smugglers across the Caribbean Sea. He has, with alarming gusto, asserted that U.S. forces, or warriors as he prefers to call service members, will not be limited by international law or “woke” rules of engagement; they will instead be focused on victory, whatever the cost. He appears to be a man of his word in this regard.

A New York Times analysis points to U.S. forces as the likely author of a missile strike on an elementary school that claimed 175 lives, mostly schoolgirls, on Feb. 28. The U.S. military has so far not confirmed its role in the strike nor apologized for its gruesome outcome.

A Just War or just more war? 

The church’s just war tradition has been challenged by contemporary theologians as insufficient and outdated, yet it remains a worthy filter through which to judge the moral defensibility of a turn to war-making. Jus ad bellum is the church’s tradition of moral instruction meant to guide discernment before making the decisions to begin an armed conflict. Jus in bello is the church tradition that governs behavior during armed conflict.

According to just war teaching, conflict can only be joined as an act of self-defense or in defense of an ally, though it may be engaged to protect the vulnerable or respond to a grave threat. Intention in choosing armed conflict cannot be darkened by a desire for vengeance or retribution but focused on preventing a greater evil and the restoration of peace.

War-making must be a last resort, all peaceful avenues of resolution having been exhausted. The use of force must be proportional, that is, the suffering it prevents must be greater than the misery it is likely to create. The conflict cannot be the cause of more disorder and evil than those it seeks to address. In conflict, belligerents must discriminate between combatant and noncombatant, taking all measures to protect the latter.

The administration seems to have ignored or violated a number of these preconditions and prohibitions in its decision to go to war with Iran………………………………………………………………………………….https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/weekly-dispatch/2026/03/06/iran-israel-united-states-catholic-just-war/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=A%20Catholic%20guide%20to%20understanding%20the%20war%20with%20Iran%E2%80%8B&utm_campaign=Daily%203%206%2026

March 9, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Pope Leo rejects Trump invitation to join Gaza ‘Board of Peace’ 

The Vatican flatly rejected a U.S. invitation to join the Trump-led “Board of Peace” for Gaza. The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem previously described the project as “a colonialist operation” focused on “others deciding for the Palestinians.”

Mondoweiss, By Jeff Wright  February 20, 2026 

Pope Leo XIV, the U.S.-born Pontiff, has formally declined U.S. President Trump’s invitation for the Vatican to join his so-called Peace Board for Gaza.

According to Trump, the board—which he will head—will oversee Gaza’s governance and reconstruction. Trump has said that the board may later address other global conflicts under his leadership. 

But in delivering the Pope’s firm “no,” Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, insisted that “at the international level it should above all be the U.N. that manages these crisis situations,” not a U.S.-led board.

Responding to the Pope’s decision, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the decision “deeply unfortunate.” In spite of the fact that not a single Palestinian has been invited to serve on the board, Leavitt said, “I don’t think that peace should be partisan or political or controversial.”

Earlier this month, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa was asked what he thought of Trump’s board. He said, “I think it is a colonialist operation: others deciding for the Palestinians.” Noting that Trump has said that permanent membership on the board carries a $1 billion price tag, Pizzaballa said, “I’ve never had a billion, but above all this is not the Church’s task: It is the sacraments, the dignity of the person.”

Asked by Mondoweiss to comment, Rifat Kassis, General Coordinator of Kairos Palestine—the broadest ecumenical movement of Palestinian Christians—echoed Pizzaballa’s charge. Kassis said, “The Pope’s rejection of the proposed council signals a clear principle: neither global powers nor global foreign institutions can claim to build peace while silencing the Palestinians whose land and future are at stake.”………………………………………………………………………………………….

As Trump prepared to host the Peace Board’s inaugural meeting in D.C. this week, Priests Against Genocide USA—an international network that includes 2,200 priests from 58 countries, along with 22 bishops and archbishops and two cardinals—penned an open letter to Paul Coakley, Catholic Archbishop of Oklahoma City, who is serving as the President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Citing the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, the network’s Steering Committee writes, “We humbly appeal to the Catholic leadership in the United State to speak with moral clarity and to bear courageous witness to peace and justice.”

The letter continues, “[T]he convening of President Trump’s so-called ‘Board of Peace’… underscores the urgent need for our Church’s prophetic witness.” They ask Archbishop Coakley “to help form the conscience of our nation regarding this so-called Board of Peace and to inspire all people of goodwill to become instruments of authentic peace. The Gospels teach that peace is the fruit of truth and justice. Yet any claim to peace becomes hollow when Palestinian voices are excluded from decision-making, when systemic injustice is normalized, and when fundamental rights of the oppressed are subordinated to profit-driven interests.” https://mondoweiss.net/2026/02/pope-leo-rejects-trump-invitation-to-join-gaza-board-of-peace/

February 25, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

The Plutocrats Who Rule Our World Aren’t Even Enjoying Themselves

Caitlin Johnstone, Feb 07, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-plutocrats-who-rule-our-world?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=187153072&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

I saw a tweet by Elon Musk the other day, “Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about.”

He put a sadface emoji at the end.

I personally do not feel the slightest bit sorry for Elon Musk and his feelings. But the fact that these billionaires aren’t even enjoying themselves as they poison our planet and rob us all says so much about the madness of the civilization we are living in.

I mean, think about it.

It’s not even making them happy. All that exploitation and extraction, all the parasiting and hoarding and manipulating politics and inserting themselves into governments, and it’s not even making them happy.

It would be terrible if these obscenely wealthy oligarchs were robbing everyone else of happiness in order to make themselves exponentially happier than all of us. But they’re not even making themselves happy. They’re fucking miserable. Everyone involved in this abusive dynamic is suffering from it — even the abusers.

And really, how could they not be?

Can you think of anyone less likely to be happy than someone who can’t be content simply retiring with a house and maybe twenty million dollars in the bank, ensuring that all their material needs will be cared for for the rest of their lives? Someone who must instead press on until they have obtained more money than they could reasonably spend in a thousand lifetimes?

Can you think of anything less conducive to happiness than becoming so much wealthier than everyone else that you have to isolate yourself from normal society, eventually surrounded only by people who are in your life because of your wealth? Never knowing how they truly feel about you or what they’d be doing with their lives if not for your vast fortune?

Can you think of a more surefire path to a lifetime of dissatisfaction than spending your years storing away wealth like some kind of fantasy dragon creature hoarding gold in a mountain, while people panicking over paying their bills look upon you with disdain?

Can you imagine a more miserable way to spend your days on this planet than becoming an oligarch and manipulating state power to ensure that your unfathomable wealth will never be redistributed to the needful and the struggling, and that ordinary people will forever remain trapped as powerless gear-turners whose labor exists solely to turn billionaires into trillionaires?

I know I can’t.

The plutocrats who control our society are not sincerely dedicated to the pursuit of happiness; if they were, they wouldn’t be plutocrats, and they wouldn’t be controlling our society. Happiness comes from contentment with one’s present experience, and those who keep compulsively amassing wealth for its own sake can never experience that contentment.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his poem “Joe Heller”:

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!

The Elon Musks of our world can never have the experience of having enough. They exist in a permanent state of lack. They’ve got a giant hole inside themselves that can never be filled, no matter how much money they throw into it, no matter how many private jets and private islands and media outlets and bought politicians they try to fill it with.

We are ruled by deeply wounded and dysfunctional emotional infants. The people who control our society are whipped about by primitive forces within themselves that they don’t understand. Their actions are motivated not by the pursuit of the common good, nor even their own good, but by psychological disorder and unconscious compulsion.

And yet we are assured this is the best possible way to run a society.

I kind of doubt that. I really don’t think that’s true.

February 9, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Hedonism’s Dance: How the Governing Classes Fell for Jeffrey Epstein

2 February 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark , https://theaimn.net/hedonisms-dance-how-the-governing-classes-fell-for-jeffrey-epstein/

How did he generate so much paperwork, traffic and comment? New York financier, mountebank, all purposes conman and dedicated rake that he was, Jeffrey Epstein continues to nag living figures from beyond the grave and place them in a tight spot of bother. His correspondence with these individuals runs into the millions, a figure suggesting his only work in life was being a pimp for pleasure and valet to the rotten.

The press vultures have been feeding most excitedly on the latest carrion released by the US Department of Justice on January 30 in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, comprising some 3.5 million pages with more than 180,000 images and 2,000 videos. “Today’s release marks the end of a very comprehensive document identification and review process to ensure transparency to the American people and compliance,” stated Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Leaving aside Blanche’s perky claim to thoroughbred compliance, those found corresponding or engaging with Epstein have had to qualify any engagement with the late financier as utterly innocent and certainly unconnected to the sexual trafficking arm he operated with the incarcerated Ghislaine Maxwell, herself the daughter of that mighty confidence trickster, serial litigant and press mogul, Robert Maxwell. What did not seem to bother Epstein’s vast network of correspondents, foolish confidants and dissolute playmates was a conviction for soliciting sex from a 14-year-old girl in 2008. The sinner always knows best.

The list of the dishonourable is long and impossible to enumerate without expectorating. A handful of rummy specimens will suffice. We have the morally stunted tech brat billionaire Elon Musk discussing travel to Epstein’s properties for reasons of entertainment. “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”, he asks in one yearning inquiry. Musk continued to press the financier for information of any planned parties, claiming that he needed to “let loose”. “I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose.”

In 2009, despite Epstein serving a prison sentence at the time, the emails reveal the financial provision of a loan to Lord Peter Mandelson’s husband Reinaldo Avila da Silva regarding an osteopathy course. Mandelson, the Mr Fixit of Britain’s New Labour, had his tenure as UK ambassador to Washington terminated once the cloacal gatherings of his association with Epstein proved too hard to ignore.

We find Britain’s founder of Virgin Group, Richard Branson, expressing his pleasure at meeting Epstein before adding “Any time you’re in the area would love to see you. As long as you bring your harem!” (The company hurriedly tried to dispel any needless assumptions of prurience: “harem” in this case was a reference to three adult members of the Epstein team.)

As is already known, royalty is not exempt from the turd lined trough. Recently deprived of his status as prince for scouring Epstein’s fleshpots with rutting glee, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, known as “The Duke” in the correspondence, is most accommodating to Epstein in emails sent in September 2010. “We could have dinner at Buckingham Palace and lots of privacy,” suggests Epstein. The reply: “Delighted for you to come here to BP [Buckingham Palace]. Come with whomever and I’ll be here free from 1600ish.”

The matter gets even more squalid with Mountbatten-Windsor’s former wife, Sarah Ferguson, calling Epstein the “brother” she “had always wished for.” (The provision of £15,000 to pay off her debts probably helped.) Showing how liberal his house arrest conditions were, Ferguson implies that the pair had lunch. An August 2009 exchange points to a meeting between Epstein and her daughters, Prince Beatrice and Princess Eugenie. “I have never been more touched by a friends [sic] kindness than your compliment to me in front of my girls.”

Showing that the royals of other countries also slid into the honeypot, Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit had extensive contact with Epstein between 2011 and 2014. From what can be gleaned from the correspondence, the financier had made quite an impression, being “soft hearted” and “such a sweetheart.” In one message dated November 1, 2012, the crown princess responds to a message of sheer gibberish discussing the protective facilities of nature and the problems of unnatural products. “You always make me smile,” she reflects. “Because you tickle my brain.”

The timing was most unfortunate for Mette-Marit, as her son, Marius Borg Høiby, is facing 38 criminal charges, including allegations of rape of four women including assault and drug offences. “I showed poor judgment and I deeply regret having had any contact with Epstein,” she said in a statement, conjuring up contrition. “It is simply embarrassing.”

Figures from the world of sports are not exempt. “We had a brief association where we exchanged emails about adult women, and in addition we discussed movies, philanthropy and investments,” claimed New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch, mentioned over 400 times in the files. “I did not take him up on any of his invitations and never went to his island. As we all know, he was a terrible person and someone I deeply regret associating with.”

To keep Tisch in sporting company is chairman of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games, Casey Wasserman. In his case, it was an enduring infatuation with Epstein’s collaborator in vice, Ghislaine. “I think of you all the time,” he says in a charged exchange in 2003. “So what do I have to do to see you in a tight leather outfit?” A statement from Wasserman on the matter expressed “regret” for correspondence “which took place over two decades ago, long before her horrific crimes came to light.”

A generous assessment of these files would suggest the sense of sheer beguilement shown by Epstein’s correspondents, who seemed to be playing fools during much of their acquaintanceships. But the cosmic expansiveness of it all at the highest social and political level points to the ethically desiccated nature of the governing classes and their willingness to be depraved and blinded. Operating in the realm of power and influence, these figures have shown themselves to be dunces and cavorters before hedonism’s dance, utterly indifferent to the prospect that they would, eventually, be found out.

February 5, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment