The Waters Recede

Every flood story ever told shares the same terrible arithmetic: the waters do not rise for everyone equally. Those with means build arks. Those without are left to the current. And when the waters recede, what is revealed is not new ground… it is the old ground, with its graves exposed.

The Epstein files are a receding.

Three million pages. 180,000 images. 2,000 videos. Released in selective batches by a Justice Department run by a man whose own name appears in the evidence thousands of times. What has surfaced is not revelation. It is confirmation. The documentary record of what the body already knew: that the powerful moved freely through a kingdom built on the trafficking of children, and that every institution charged with stopping it found reasons not to look.

Bill Clinton’s staff emailed Ghislaine Maxwell for years to coordinate travel. Clinton swam in Epstein’s pool, flew on his planes, was photographed in his company across continents. Maxwell, later convicted of sex trafficking minors, was honored at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2013, four years after the accusations against her were public. When Epstein was asked under oath about Clinton, he did not deny. He invoked the Fifth. On every question. Including whether Clinton came to his island accompanied by two young women approximately eighteen years old.

Donald Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side,” two years after Virginia Giuffre was recruited into a sex trafficking ring from the spa at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s own property. Flight logs show Trump on Epstein’s jet at least eight times, once with only Epstein and a twenty-year-old whose name remains redacted. In private emails, Epstein told Maxwell that Trump spent hours at his house with a trafficking victim and had “never once been mentioned”… the dog that didn’t bark. Maxwell replied: “I have been thinking about that.” Trump sent a birthday note with a nude drawing and the words: “May every day be another wonderful secret.”

Neither man has been charged. Neither accused by a named victim. These facts matter. But the absence of a charge is not the absence of a moral catastrophe. The plea deal that let Epstein walk after thirteen months while thirty victims waited… that was the crime. The system that allowed a convicted sex offender to host Summers and Gates and Barak and Clinton at his dinner table after serving time for crimes against children… that is the crime. The cameras in guest bedrooms. The labeled discs in the safe. The fake passport. The hacker selling zero-days. The wealth no one can trace. These are not the accessories of a socialite. They are the infrastructure of an operation that used children as currency.

I take my daughter to the park at sunrise. She is small and the world is large and every morning I hold her hand and we walk into the light and I think: this is what it means to be entrusted with a life. That is the baseline. The frequency against which every other signal must be measured. And measured against it, the Epstein record is not ambiguous. Over a thousand children were fed into a machine, and the men who built it, and the men who walked through its rooms, and the men who saw the cameras and the young faces and said nothing.. they are still here. Still in office. Still protected.

The Flood wants you to pick a side. Clinton or Trump. Red or blue. The Flood will give you selected photographs on a Friday night and let the algorithm sort the outrage into profitable channels. But the Word… the counter-signal, the thing that cuts… says: they were in the same rooms. They flew on the same planes. They smiled in the same photographs. They both, when the waters began to rise, built arks for themselves. And a thousand children had no ark at all.

The waters are receding. Look down. Do not look away.