Episode Transcript
18.1 Talking to Young People about the Epstein Files pt 2
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[00:00:09] Welcome, Patreons, to part two of episode 18 of the Antifascist Dad Podcast: Talking to Young People About the Epstein Files. I’m Matthew. I’m grateful for your support. I hope this project brings some joy, hope, and utility to your ears, and to your work and days.
[00:00:28] In part one, I thought out loud about how to talk with tweens and teens about the Epstein files from an antifascist perspective. At a moment of shock, spectacle, and fragmentation, I said that the content is one thing, but there’s also affective damage downstream of these constant waves of sensational, decontextualized material that can train dissociation rather than understanding—or the will to action.
[00:00:53] Parents and mentors, I think, have to become anchors rather than amplifiers of panic.
[00:01:00] I said that, like everyone else—but with less executive function—young people will encounter the most lurid claims first, through influencers and algorithms that bump outrage to the top and downrank evidence.
[00:01:15] I talked about slowing things down, sticking with what we actually know, and refusing speculative excess while still taking abuse extremely seriously, because it is real. Extreme abuse under capitalism is here, and it’s already the worst. The conversation needs to shift away from exceptionally evil individuals and toward the material conditions that reward domination, impunity, and the exploitation of women and children.
[00:01:44] I also flagged a possible replay of QAnon dynamics, where intuition outruns evidence and speculation fills the gaps.
[00:01:54] And while those intuitions often come from real, unresolved experiences of systemic abuse, conspiracy thinking ultimately harms survivors and benefits fascism by scrambling the information landscape.
[00:02:08] So now, in this brief follow-up, I want to turn to two more issues that I think carry intergenerational weight.
[00:02:13] First: what do we do when we find out that someone we admire is implicated in a network of abuse?
[00:02:19] What does guilt by association mean?
[00:02:22] How does it transform what that person has to offer?
[00:02:26] Second: at all ages, we can confront a decision about how we want to spend our time.
[00:02:35] Sometimes I feel a fork in the road with the time I have. Am I going to spend it refuting lies, or building true things?
[00:02:44] We’ll always need to do both, but sometimes it feels like living on the defensive is taking up too much of our energy.
[00:02:51] That’s something to consider—and to balance.
[00:03:03] Over the past several years, young people, to varying degrees, will have heard about large networks of corruption and abuse in industries that produce part of the soundtrack for their world: the trials of R. Kelly and P. Diddy. In film, the lawsuit involving Johnny Depp is another example. These point to subcultures of complicity in which many talented people know abusive acts are going on.
[00:03:33] Victims and their allies can be scared to expose what’s happening, while those who benefit from proximity to power suppress the news.
[00:03:41] What are we to make of the rapper, the R&B star, or the Hollywood star—and their music or acting—when they’re caught up in this?
[00:03:53] How is it that a person’s public-facing artistry didn’t save them from terrible systems of abuse?
[00:04:01] I’ll use an Epstein-files example here that impacted a lot of adults in my sphere. But I think the principles apply to any charismatic influencer kids might encounter—and then be disillusioned by.
[00:04:13] The example is that many people were shocked to learn that New Age super-guru Deepak Chopra was emailing gross, suggestive messages back and forth with Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:04:24] The exchanges show that he was playing—or trying to play—guru to a sex trafficker, using his own branded parody of Indian philosophy.
[00:04:35] People shocked by Chopra’s appearance in the Epstein files may not have known about a sexual-harassment suit against him in the late 1990s. And in 2021, an anonymous account published online alleged that he used his guru status at his Ayurveda center to pose as a therapist-wizard. The author said she disclosed childhood trauma to him, including sexual abuse, and alleged that he held power over her in a sexual relationship to which she did not fully consent.
[00:05:07] Through the last several years of work on Conspirituality, it was clear to me that Chopra was a charlatan—a pseudoscience huckster—always. It was also clear to me and many others that he performed a kind of cultural labor on behalf of neoliberalism.
[00:05:24] A central political function of New Age spirituality was to lock in the depoliticization of an anxious generation of post-’60s liberals—to get them focusing on the self-project rather than class solidarity.
[00:05:40] Deepak Chopra did for spiritually inclined liberals what Scott Galloway is now doing for young men: telling people to concentrate on the self instead of creating communities that would challenge the social conditions that oppress them.
[00:05:54] So what did the Chopra-style New Age self-project sound like? High vibrations, crystals, manifesting, herbs—and “who needs feminism if you have the divine feminine?” Take my course, find your flow, and you can thrive in the precariat. You don’t need health care when you have smoothies and coffee enemas.
[00:06:16] Yoga means union—but not the labor kind of union. And if you can’t afford rent, millennial starseed, well, your home is right in your heart, or in the universe itself. All of it was a cheesy attempt to sell people on the lie that everything would be alright in the end times if they bought products to perfect their bodies.
[00:06:34] And now we’re living in the endless echo of this in every commodity offered to us—or to our kids—as some kind of consoling relief.
[00:06:42] However: Chopra didn’t accumulate 3.3 million followers on Instagram by offering nothing.
[00:06:49] Pretending he wasn’t attractive to a lot of people for reasons that made sense—or that those people were simply stupid or gullible—doesn’t account for his popularity.
[00:07:00] As critical as I want to be about his content, many people from many walks of life found some kind of peace in it.
[00:07:08] Chopra could teach basic meditation ideas about interconnectedness with nature. He could tell you that food is a ritual to pay attention to, and give you a morning routine you could start your day with and feel a little dignity or self-respect.
[00:07:22] Like an artist, he could inspire you. So I can only conclude that he really did meet deep needs for many people.
[00:07:31] People can be drawn to charismatic influencers through situational vulnerabilities: job loss, divorce, estrangement, despondency over the state of the world, doomscrolling images of genocide, or navigating illness in a predatory medical system.
[00:07:50] You can be so low that Chancellor Palpatine himself can tell you to take a deep breath into your belly and you’ll feel a bit of relief—and then flood with gratitude because you associate that relief with Palpatine rather than with your own willingness to try something new, or to find the Force within you.
[00:08:10] And on the social side, charismatic groups and cults often offer an ersatz experience of socialism: a shared project and shared resources.
[00:08:18] People can learn genuinely useful things in spaces that later turn out to be toxic or dangerous.
[00:08:24] I learned breathing techniques, meditation, and how to cook for 300 people at a time. Those are good lifelong skills. If it came down to it, I could be a base-camp cook for a brigade of antifascist fighters. I could help them breathe and rest while feeding them—because I was in cults, ironically.
[00:08:45] But really: while I was there, I learned skills, and I did work.
[00:08:52] Everyone misses red flags, and there’s no real cultural guidance on how to avoid charismatic influence. Now we live in a media culture built on charisma, which is why I think every kid needs some early inoculation—and it isn’t complicated.
[00:09:10] Kids can learn that overly confident, simplified takes on complex issues spread because their communicators are popular, not because they’re accurate.
[00:09:20] If a creator never references sources, if they’re willing to expound on any topic under the sun, if they cannot seem to stop talking, we’re seeing charisma in action—which is another way of saying a lack of substance.
[00:09:35] There can also be anxiety driving the charisma, fanning a flame that tries to light up what’s missing underneath.
[00:09:45] One more thought for everyone, including kids.
[00:09:49] When cracks begin to show in a celebrity’s image, there’s a surge not only of outrage, but vindication.
[00:09:58] People will say, “I always knew there was something wrong with that guy.”
[00:10:02] “He always gave me a bad feeling.”
[00:10:04] Sometimes people are retconning their reservations into the past. But there’s also a quieter contingent who were blindsided, who didn’t “know it all,” and who will feel the implicit mockery and reproach from those who clocked it first.
[00:10:21] It’s sad to see followers of a fallen inspiration express shock or grief online only to be met with derision.
[00:10:30] It shows how platforms flatten human culture into the illusion that everyone is coming from the same place, while obscuring the fact that each of us is at a different stage of education, self-awareness, and community-building.
[00:10:44] Being out of sync can make the internet unconsciously tactless.
[00:10:58] Chapter 4: How much disastrous evidence do we need?
[00:11:03] There’s always a flood of bad news, accelerated by acute events like the Epstein files and increasing fascist violence.
[00:11:12] By contrast, there seems to be very little reporting on what can be done—what our successes are, and what they might be.
[00:11:19] I think a lot of us feel like we’re constantly bailing water out of the boat.
[00:11:23] We have to know, metabolize, and protect ourselves against so much.
[00:11:28] I have a story about what happened to a guy who invested fully in learning about the trouble of the world and spoke the truth as best he could. But it was so horrible that it seemed to paralyze his fellow citizens, while making no difference to those in power, even though the stakes were existential.
[00:11:46] So what did he do?
[00:11:48] This is a story about a midlife crisis and a pivot in direction.
[00:11:55] I think it may resonate most with adults and parents, but it also presents a productive conundrum for teens who might be in their first extended experience of “what am I doing here—what is this all for?”
[00:12:06] Often, a teen in existential crisis is told, “It’ll be alright. You’ll figure it out. You’ll come out the other side.” Maybe they do, but maybe they end up postponing a real reckoning about meaning and purpose.
[00:12:23] To digress for a moment: this is part of why I love Peter Kropotkin’s “Appeal to the Young” from 1890.
[00:12:29] He addresses it to the young educated class preparing for professions, but he telegraphs ahead for them—to show, like a Dickensian dream, where their efforts will lead. He addresses a young doctor, a young engineer, a young scientist. He tells them what they will find when they are ultimately deployed to protect capitalist power.
[00:12:50] And to the young lawyer, he presents the scenario in which he is to uphold property law by representing a landlord against a peasant in arrears. Listen:
[00:13:01] If you reason instead of repeating what is taught you; if you analyze the law and strip off those cloudy fictions with which it has been draped in order to conceal its real origin, which is the right of the stronger, and its substance, which has ever been the consecration of all the tyrannies handed down to mankind through its long and bloody history; when you have comprehended, your contempt for the law will be profound indeed. You will understand that to remain the servant of the written law is to place yourself every day in opposition to the law of conscience and to make a bargain on the wrong side. And since this struggle cannot go on forever, you will either silence your conscience and become a scoundrel, or you will break with tradition and you will work with us for the utter destruction of all this injustice, economic, social, and political. But then you will be a socialist. You will be a revolutionist.
[00:13:55] That’s the vibe—the spirit—of the following story: meeting a fork in the road. Though the conditions I’m going to describe are a bit more complex.
[00:14:09] Years ago, I formed a dear relationship through a weekly online Zoom call with the American journalist Dahr Jamail, who got his stripes as an unembedded freelance reporter in Iraq between 2003 and 2007. He wrote for Truthout, Al Jazeera, The Nation, The Guardian.
[00:14:29] “Unembedded” means no protection or talking points from the U.S. military. It means finding local fixers who can show you around and provide introductions under extremely dangerous circumstances.
[00:14:41] While he was there, he was dodging bullets and airstrikes, and living through the deaths of friends.
[00:14:47] It burned him out. When he returned to the U.S., he retreated to the mountains of Washington State to recover, and maybe try a little homesteading.
[00:14:56] I didn’t know Dahr from his war reporting. I first heard him on an excellent podcast called Last Born in the Wilderness, hosted by Patrick Farnsworth. Dahr was talking about losing hope in journalism and what that meant for him. I must have listened to that episode half a dozen times.
[00:15:15] How did he recover and find some relief?
[00:15:18] He took up mountaineering. He traveled to climb near-mystical peaks like Denali. He found peace in inner quiet and a love for glaciers—so much love that when he understood how much the ice had shrunk over decades of global warming, he made it his mission to visit and climb the highest mountains in the world and write about it.
[00:15:39] The result was a masterpiece of travel memoir and science journalism, and a perfect title for these days: The End of Ice.
[00:15:48] The book was lauded around the globe. He was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2020.
[00:15:55] In the book, he not only climbed each mountain with an eagle eye for beauty—he also talked to local scientists and mountain people to hear their stories of climate destruction.
[00:16:04] Those interviews were crucial because they conveyed an ongoing, silent ecocide that is nonetheless noticed and felt. The people on the front lines—like Iraqis behind the lines of an imperial conflict—had the most important stories, the most inaudible stories, and Dahr went out and found them.
[00:16:25] After the book was published with a lot of fanfare, he waited for something to happen.
[00:16:30] There were glowing reviews from top experts. He hoped the book would move the needle, just as he’d hoped that telling stories of U.S. imperialism from behind Iraqi lines would help end the war.
[00:16:43] But nothing really happened. The book disappeared, as it were, into a giant snowdrift, while temperatures rose in tandem with elite empathy.
[00:16:54] As a writer of books myself, I’ve had this experience many times.
[00:16:59] A book is an enormous undertaking for me—each one is three years, minimum. With my last two books, one on cults and modern yoga and the other on Conspirituality with my co-hosts Derek and Julian, I also received high acclaim from prominent figures in the anti-disinfo world and in the study of fascism.
[00:17:19] But in both cases, publication was followed by mostly silence, as though I’d given birth to a child and then given it up for adoption, never to hear about it again.
[00:17:31] I don’t think you have to have high expectations—or be an egoist—to find that hard.
[00:17:37] Publishing books about urgent matters also gives you a crash course in how quickly cycles of cultural amnesia spin.
[00:17:46] My book about yoga cults is seven years old now, and people still reach out to ask if I know anything about cults extensively documented in the book or in investigative pieces.
[00:17:59] Every few months, social media ripples with news that the yoga world has an abuse problem, as if it hasn’t been established for decades. And commenters will say, “Wow, I had no idea.”
[00:18:12] In the context of the Conspirituality book, we now watch wave after wave of influencers go viral with videos describing links between yoga, wellness, and fascist ideas of the body.
[00:18:23] And in every one, the creator makes it sound like they’ve discovered something brand new and extraordinary.
[00:18:29] The upside is that these stories and principles stay current and in circulation. But in a broader sense, it shows that awareness wouldn’t move in these cycles if there were a reliable way to turn journalism into cultural memory, rather than ephemeral—and maybe alarmist—entertainment.
[00:18:51] Dahr’s book wasn’t about cults or disinformation. It was about the impending end of civilization through climate disaster.
[00:18:58] And unlike books about yoga cults and conspiracy theories, it carried a message that demanded immediate, clear action.
[00:19:05] Surely it would do better, right?
[00:19:08] Well, what did he do when it became clear that action wasn’t coming—when his journalism might even be feeding the beast of apathy and too much information?
[00:19:20] He began to spend time with First Nations elders, talking with them about the cultural and spiritual skills needed to survive genocide and ecocide.
[00:19:29] He had reported disasters. As far as he could tell, nobody responded.
[00:19:35] So he turned to documenting wisdom. He worked for years with Elder Stan Rushworth on a collective volume called We Are the Middle: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth.
[00:19:48] All of this makes me think about the Epstein files: three million files, six million files—how many files are there? How many files do we need?
[00:19:57] How many connections do we need to make?
[00:20:00] Sometimes we want more files, more revelations, more connections, because we labor under a delusion about the power of exposure—that somehow sunlight will trigger conscience and accountability.
[00:20:11] But we haven’t seen that happen.
[00:20:13] There is no cultural or moral norm that can stop capitalism or fascism.
[00:20:19] We have to build new things.
[00:20:23] In my view, we have to keep reporting from war zones and shrinking glaciers because we need solid information.
[00:20:31] But there’s also a fork in the road between becoming big social-media creators and podcasters writing big books that get absorbed into the discourse—and putting out small zines and pamphlets that a few hundred people read, cherish, and use to build a new world with each other.
[00:20:49] We’re all going to get older and more tired, and hopefully more pragmatic about where our energy is best spent.
[00:20:56] And at some point, maybe most of us pivot into becoming dogged scavengers of hope.
[00:21:03] I don’t know if that’s too melancholic a view for a teenager. But I remember moments in my own teens when the senselessness of culture, economy, and global wars felt overwhelming.
[00:21:16] I know my sensitivity to those conditions compelled me to seek relief—but what did I have available?
[00:21:24] I had an outdated answer from the 1970s: find a spiritual community, disappear from the world.
[00:21:31] That didn’t work.
[00:21:33] But I think if someone had laid out for me that, first, I was correct that the world was unmanageably chaotic—and second, that if you feel you have to pause and change direction, that doesn’t mean giving up—
[00:21:47] You can carve out a space in that world to focus on the perennial wisdom of those who have been through it before.
[00:21:54] This accountability crisis, along with information overload, can make it feel like there are no adults in charge anywhere—except those who would harm children.
[00:22:05] And we who are parents, caregivers, and mentors are often limited to harm reduction until we build something new with those we care for.
[00:22:17] Thanks for listening, everybody. Keep safe. Take care of each other.
[00:22:28] Sam.
