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Offshores, Epstein, & the Reputational Economy (Part One)
A discussion with "Capital Without Borders" author Brooke Harrington
Good morning!
Early Thursday morning New York time—and noon in Italy—I sat down with the author and economic sociology professor Brooke Harrington to talk offshores, Epstein, boiling frogs, and, as she put it, “Jackass played as a global game among the richest and most powerful men in the world.”
Below is a transcript of some highlights of our discussion, edited for clarity.
(Note: I had to divide this video in half because Substack kept kicking out the full version. Sorry for the inconvenience.)
Planet of the Apes
Greg Olear (GO)
I was thinking about how this whole thing, the whole Epstein thing with the trafficking of the young girls and the rapes and all that, is sort of part and parcel with the patriarchy, in a lot of ways. Like, it’s almost like if you distill the patriarchy to its barest, most disgusting elements, that’s what you have left.
And I wonder if that resonates with you at all, that interpretation. And if you think that on some level, maybe, the Epstein stuff coming out now—because it’s clearly coming out now, whether they want it to or not—is it maybe the death rattle of the patriarchy? Is the patriarchy something that we can now smash, because the truth is coming out?
Brooke Harrington (BH)
I think there is this trait in a lot of human beings that only understands human society, human interaction, in terms of dominance relations. It’s a really impoverished way of being a human being. But you can see that for some people, it appears to be that the only way they can relate to other humans is, “Am I above you or below you? And if I’m below you, or even on the same level as you, I have to strive to trample you underfoot.”
And that is their only way of understanding what it means to like be in connection with other humans. And you’d feel sorry for them, if they weren’t so goddamn dangerous, especially with money in their hands….
When I look at primate studies of like chimps versus bonobos, I think that some people are just born more like chimps—and that includes some women as well as men. And chimps really seem to interact with each other on the basis of dominance hierarchies. If they have a conflict, they just beat the shit out of each other until one of them dies or withdraws. Whereas others of us are more like the bonobos. The bonobos resolve their conflicts by cuddling up, even having sex. They have a much more egalitarian kind of society, and they just generally seem to be happier than the stressed-out agro chimps. But the kind of society we’ve created, especially in the corporate world, rewards chimps. It rewards chimp dominance behavior: “Crush those beneath you, scale the ladder.”
And going back to JD Vance, he does seem like the kind of guy who is fully bought into the prospect that one day he can be the dominant chimp of the group. And he’s just biding his time, until his turn comes.
But Trump is really good at those kinds of dominance relations. And you can see that one of the ways in which he is broken, and many of his followers are broken, is that he has no alternative way of perceiving the world or interacting with the world except, like, “Me on top or me beneath. And if I’m beneath, I’m gonna kill you to get on top.” And that’s what this whole “I am your retribution” tour is in his second term.
And obviously some of his followers eat that up. I don’t know if that’s even inherently the patriarchy. Patriarchy builds on it. But my real fear is that that’s just built into a lot of people, no matter what the form of social organization is. And what non-patriarchal societies do is, they exile those people. They’re like, okay, you want to be like that? Go live on your own. Elephant troops do that to unruly young male elephants.
GO
Poor JD Vance is not ever gonna be the lead chimp….
BH
And that’s one of the only sources of hope I have, because nobody but nobody is willing to lay down their lives for JD Vance. And if he becomes president through whatever means, 25th amendment, or if Trump dies for some reason, all of a sudden you’re going to see a bunch of Republican Congress members grow a spine and oppose him because everybody hates him. So that will fracture the MAGA coalition better than any protest.
Get in, the Water’s Great
GO
I’m wondering what your sense is, because you also have a different perspective— because you’re abroad, and you can see how normal people are. Giorgia Meloni is a right-wing politician, but we would love to have her here. We should be so lucky.
What’s your sense of this, looking at the United States from across the pond? How screwed are we, do you think?
BH
I think the frogs are at a full rolling boil, and many of them are just doing the backstroke.
I’m thinking of my MAGA relatives who are still up on Facebook posting about, “Well, if they didn’t want to get rounded up by ICE, they shouldn’t have been illegals.” They just parrot these thought-stopping clichés from Fox News, and nothing seems to be able to break through their bubble.
Or the breakthroughs that do occur—like when a lot of white male gun owners who were Trump supporters saw Alex Pretti executed, you know, disarmed and then executed, that they identified with him. And I’m like, “Okay, good, we’ll take it.” But the process of attrition from MAGA is way too slow.
And I think Trump is doing to America what he’s done to the US court system for decades, which is he’s running out the clock so that he can’t be held accountable for anything. And I’m afraid that the damage that he is doing, and that he will continue to do, cannot be reversed. Like, we can’t magically make the East Wing of the White House reappear or the Rose Garden. I pray to God that he doesn’t get his greasy mitts on the National Parks, because if he starts selling off prime real estate in the Grand Canyon and Glacier, like, there’s also no undoing that.
And that’s nothing compared to all the lives he has taken, those precious, irreplaceable lives, and the reverberations their deaths will have for generations in their families. It’s almost—it’s hard to count the devastation.
And I’m just astonished at the extent to which so many of our fellow frogs are still like, “This is fine, everything is fine.” Like, what is it going to take? I really don’t know what it’s going to take for them to say it’s not fine.
GO
We had a plague and that didn’t work. I mean, if the plague doesn’t work, I don’t know what would work
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Shame, Status, & the Reputational Economy
BH
One of the things people get confused about with Trump and other wealthy people is they say, “Clearly these guys have no shame.” And that’s true in the sense that shame is premised on the idea of a shared moral code. And clearly there is no more shared moral code here. Or these rich guys evaluate their status in terms of their ability to violate it. So you can’t have shame and participate in that kind of status competition.
However, this understanding of the wealthy men forgets about a related phenomenon, which is status. They care a lot about status and reputation. So what they want is other people’s respect and deference. And when they don’t get it, they get very upset.
Think Alan Dershowitz going on this personal jihad against the poor pierogi dealer in Martha’s Vineyard. Some guy selling pierogies at a farmer’s market declines to do business with Alan Dershowitz. And instead of just taking his lumps and walking away, Dershowitz turns it into this sort of multi-week self-owned fiasco in the media— filming it, threatening to file charges. And, you know, it degrades him. But this is also the guy who in Trump One was whining publicly about not being invited to certain parties on Martha’s Vineyard because he was associated with Trump. And that is a big clue about what these guys care about.
Think also in Trump One, Sarah Huckabee Sanders being denied service at a restaurant and making a huge deal out of it rather than walking away quietly. That is a status offense and they really, really care about it. Putin cares about this. Remember after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, some European orchestras were refusing to play Tchaikovsky, or some of Putin’s associates were denied entry to Italy to enjoy their villas in Lake Como? That’s what finally made Putin get in front of news cameras and talk about, you know, “Russia is being canceled, and all this woke shit is so unfair!”
It’s like, why would it matter to Putin whether European orchestras played Tchaikovsky? You’d think he had better things to worry about. But if you’re a rich guy, you care about status and deference. And this was a status insult to Russia. And therefore Putin had to stand up and defend against it.
So what’s going on in this world of the Epstein files. And what Epstein is trying to leverage and also protect with secrecy is the reputational economy of some of the most powerful men in the world. Not even necessarily the richest, but people like Noam Chomsky and Larry Summers, who are revered—or were revered—figures in their academic fields, but not necessarily particularly rich. But what they have is reputational wealth. They have social capital. And Epstein traded in that, in just the way he managed the financial wealth of some of his associates, like Les Wexner….
GO
…Maybe this idea of, you know, social injury is the way to come at these people. Because we’ve had, this week, Greg Bovino got thrown out of a bar in Las Vegas, which is hysterical to me.
BH
Exactly, exactly. And that is exactly what we should be doing more of,. because it’s legal, it’s free. And anybody who encounters these figures can participate. Like if you’re the server at a restaurant where some Trump administration official comes in, you can just refuse to serve them. You can walk off the job.
Now I’m not saying that that is easy. People have mortgages to pay and food to put on the table. But especially, you know, if you talk about it with the owner of the establishment where you work, and they have your back, then by all means, do it. Because it seems so simple. It seems like it couldn’t possibly hurt these people. But we are constantly getting evidence that it’s among the most effective weapons, these status insults against these fascist pedophile monsters. Perversely, they want and expect to be liked and deferred to, and denying them the liking and the deference— they regard that as a serious injury that requires a response on their part.
GO
I think it’s a good idea. And it reminds me of this thing I read. I don’t even know if this is a true thing, but somebody posted this on social media a couple of years ago where he was sitting in a bar and a guy came into the bar who was very nice, you know, sort of egregiously friendly. And he was wearing a jacket with insignia on it. And the bartender went over and said, “Get the fuck out of here.” And the guy was like, “Well, I’m not doing anything.” He’s like, “I know what the signs mean. Get out.”
So the guy left, and the guy sitting there asked the bartender why this had happened, and he said, “That’s a Nazi insignia there. Those are white supremacist Nazi symbols. So what they do is, they send their nice guy, their face-guy Nazi. And if you yield to him, he’ll bring a friend, and then they’ll bring another friend. And the next thing you know, it’s a Nazi bar—and we can’t have that. So you have to stop it dead in its tracks.”
And I feel like that’s the takeaway from that is, you know, here’s poor Scott Bessent at the wine bar trying to enjoy his wine, but don’t let him enjoy his wine. That’s the other thing you’re allowed to do. If you see these people, you’re allowed to give them a hard time, because it will ruin their dinner. You know, ruin their dinner. There’s nothing wrong with ruining somebody’s dinner.
BH
Yeah. And in case some listeners think, you know, that’s a fun hobby, harassing MAGA fascists, it actually has political impact. One of the reasons that Pinochet’s regime fell in Chile was that you can’t be a fascist unless you have supportive elites. And you can peel away the support of those elites by making the elites persona non grata, making sure that they can’t be admitted to the parties they want to be admitted to, that they’re not received in polite society. So basically, you make the cost benefit analysis very unfavorable to the elites who support the dictator. And that’s how you peel away the dictator’s support, and ultimately, the dictator falls.
It took about a decade for that to work with Pinochet. We won’t have to wait that long with Trump because he’s just clearly not in good enough health to hold up until, you know, 99 years of age. But it works. And you can tell that it works by how loud those hit dogs holler in the Trump administration.
GO
Yeah. Yeah. And they do. They do holler—and they shouldn’t be allowed to go anywhere ever again in polite society without being called out. You know, I don’t want to say the word “harassed” because that implies some illegality, but it’s not illegal to be like, “Hey, that’s that guy. He’s awful. Why are we allowing Nazis to sit here?” Like, Stephen Miller should never be allowed in a restaurant again, you know, comfortably.
BH
Yeah. Right.
GO
Which I think he knows. That’s why these people are holed up at military bases. So whoever the Door Dash driver is there—you know, be mindful. You know, it’s OK to bring the food late and cold.
Out, out—
BH
The pieces of the big jigsaw puzzle are coming together. And it’s horrifying. The picture is horrifying. And I expect it will continue to get even more horrifying as more and more pieces find their way out to the public.
And it’ll be useful to have real-time accounts like this, where historians have a record of people like us trying to work out what the bigger picture is. And I expect that I’ll be surprised not just by the depravity but by the extent of this network. You know, Jackass played as a global game among the richest and most powerful men in the world.
GO
There’s names in there we haven’t heard yet. That’s the other thing, I think. I have some suspicions about who might be in there. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens and what comes out. And hopefully, the flip side of all of this is that all of this evil can produce a response that will send it back from whence it came and hopefully destroy all the rotten institutions so much that they’ll have to be rebuilt in a way that we can ensure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen ever again.
BH
I hope so. A lot of people have been saying, “Nothing’s going to happen. It’s going to be like the Panama Papers.” But with the Panama Papers, the reason there weren’t a lot of prosecutions, and even fewer convictions, is because a lot of what happens financially offshore is technically legal. It shouldn’t be, and it’s clearly immoral. But it’s hard to prosecute when someone hasn’t broken the law.
Child sex abuse is a whole different animal in this respect. You can’t really wiggle out of that, especially if there are tapes. The only attempts to wiggle out of it that we’ve seen have been efforts that have really backfired spectacularly, like saying, “Well, you know, the girls were 15. They were practically adults. What’s everyone getting so worked up about?” Yeah, who was it? Megyn Kelly was trying that one, and that went over like a lead balloon.
And now that more and more evidence is getting out of children who are nine, 10 years old being involved in this, that takes that deflection completely off the table. There’s a lot less wiggle room to escape accountability among these elites in the Epstein files than there were in the Panama Papers.
My fear is that we’re going to get another Gerald Ford type response of, “Let’s turn the page and heal the nation by pretending none of this ever happened.” And we know how that turns out. And I hope there will be enough anger and uprising in American civil society that we don’t let them turn the page and allow the complicit to escape accountability.
Brooke Harrington is an Economic Sociologist studying the offshore financial system and the professionals who run it. Her research addresses inequality, both political and economic, as well as globalization and the professions. Since 2007, she’s focused on the offshore financial system, which she studied from the inside after spending two years earning a wealth management credential; that was followed by six more years traveling to every region of the world, interviewing and interacting with practitioners in 18 offshore centers.
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