It is deeply important to be connecting the dots of the many interrelated forms of relentless and brutal violence that we are facing rather than seeing these ongoing crises in isolation —something which Henry Giroux does brilliantly. — Molly
Disappearance under neoliberal fascism does not operate through a single institutional or aesthetic form. Alongside the spectacular violence of ICE raids, militarized policing, and the public staging of racialized terror exists a quieter, long-standing mode of disappearance practiced by elites and insulated from democratic scrutiny. The case of Jeffrey Epstein exposes this hidden register with disturbing clarity.
Where contemporary fascist governance increasingly places violence on full display, externalized and dramatized as a public pedagogy of fear, Epstein’s operation depended on secrecy, misogynist terror, and the systematic annihilation of social conscience. This was the hidden violence of gangster capitalism, planned and executed in the exclusive spaces of the ruling class—billionaire townhouses, private islands, elite restaurants, and country clubs—where zombie politics thrives through greed, domination, and an anesthetizing language that renders cruelty banal and power obscene.
Epstein’s victims did not vanish into detention centers or public raids. They disappeared into private aircraft, gated estates, billionaire-owned townhouses, and transnational circuits of wealth and influence, shielded by dense entanglements linking oligarchs, politicians, intelligence services, and global finance. Global sex trafficking operated as a system of pleasure, profit, and risk for a billionaire class convinced that money confers immunity from law, justice, and consequence. This ruling caste of ghouls is sustained by a state that treats the disappearance of migrants, the cold-blooded killing of citizens, and the spread of concentration camps across American soil as legitimate instruments of governance. Within this logic, civic resistance to fascism is rebranded as domestic terrorism, exposing dissenters to surveillance, disappearance, or death. The Epstein case reveals the other side of this machinery: how women are made to vanish into chambers of sexual terror, lured by fraudulent job offers, trapped by lies and manipulation, and, at times, seized outright by force.
This is not a departure from the politics of disappearance but its upper register of the workings of gangster capitalism—run by the rich billionaire class. Both ICE enforcement regimes and Epstein’s network were allegedly sites of human trafficking; both enacted extreme cruelty; both were grounded in white supremacist, patriarchal, and racialized logics of disposability. The distinction lies not in violence but in visibility: the authoritarian state now stages disappearance as spectacle, while elites have long perfected disappearance under the cover of respectability, secrecy, and impunity.
What is newly unsettling is the cultural moment in which these revelations now circulate. In a political culture saturated by spectacle and poisoned by irony, even systematic sexual violence by elites is metabolized as rumor, meme, or dark entertainment. Irony functions here as a technology of moral evacuation, dulling judgment and shielding elite brutality from sustained reckoning. Yet the deeper danger lies elsewhere. Epstein does not interrupt this argument; he completes it, exposing gangster capitalism as a toxic system that disappears bodies through both overt terror and hidden privilege, through raids and secrecy alike. To confront this machinery requires more than reform, exposure, or moral revulsion. It demands a clear-eyed understanding of how power operates across its visible and concealed dimensions—and a politics willing to name gangster capitalism itself as the enemy. Any viable form of resistance must therefore aim not to humanize this system, but to dismantle and overthrow it before disappearance becomes the final, normalized condition of political life.
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