The Epstein Files Reveal Silicon Valley's Dangerous Obsession

Ten years ago, a convicted sex offender was quietly seeding dangerous ideas among Nobel laureates, Harvard professors, and AI researchers. Today, those same toxic concepts are flowering in Silicon Valley boardrooms and political rallies.

The Financier's Intellectual Poison

The latest Jeffrey Epstein file dump reveals something almost as disturbing as his crimes: his systematic promotion of "race science" - the pseudoscientific practice of attributing racial inequities to genetics. In February 2016, Epstein recommended an article from a white supremacist website to left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky, arguing that improving the world "might require accepting some uncomfortable facts" about race and intelligence.

This wasn't casual conversation. Epstein was building a network. He pursued Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, and cultivated relationships with James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist who was stripped of his honors in 2019 after doubling down on claims that Africans are genetically less intelligent than other races.

The emails show Epstein wasn't just collecting famous names - he was specifically drawn to academics willing to entertain biological explanations for social hierarchies.

Academic Enablers and Awkward Silences

AI researcher Joscha Bach told Epstein that Black children "have slower cognitive development" and are "slower at learning high-level concepts." He's since backtracked, claiming he never said different races have different cognitive abilities - a contradiction his own emails expose.

Steven Pinker of Harvard called Epstein "intellectually deeply unserious" but still attended events with him. Richard Dawkins, who has argued that race is a biological reality, was also on Epstein's contact list. The pattern is clear: even brilliant academics struggled to definitively reject ideas that should have been immediately dismissed.

This intellectual hedging created space for dangerous concepts to seem legitimate, wrapped in the authority of prestigious institutions.

From Island Emails to Mainstream Politics

Fast-forward to today, and Epstein's intellectual investments are paying dividends he never lived to see. Elon Musk regularly engages with accounts posting statistics about racial inferiority and genetic determinism. His Wikipedia competitor, Grokipedia, reportedly embeds race science perspectives as legitimate viewpoints.

Donald Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt in November 2024 that murderers have killing "in their genes" and complained about "bad genes" entering America. His administration simultaneously launched deportation raids targeting Somalis while Trump declared he doesn't want them in "our country" because they're "garbage."

Conservative media figures Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson have platformed prominent race science advocates, normalizing ideas that were academic fringe topics just a decade ago.

The Utility of Biological Determinism

Why did a sex trafficker care about IQ research? The answer reveals the deeper appeal of race science to powerful elites. For someone like Epstein - who treated women as disposable objects - biological determinism provided perfect moral cover. If intelligence, behavior, and social status are genetically predetermined, then his wealth and influence weren't products of exploitation but natural superiority.

This same logic now appeals to tech billionaires and political leaders seeking to justify extreme inequality. If success is biological destiny, then concentrated power isn't a problem to solve but a natural order to preserve.

The Network Effect of Dangerous Ideas

Epstein understood something crucial about how fringe ideas become mainstream: they need prestigious validators. By cultivating relationships with respected academics, he gave pseudoscientific racism an intellectual pedigree it could never earn on merit.

Today's tech moguls are applying similar strategies, using their platforms and influence to mainstream ideas that were confined to white supremacist websites when Epstein first shared them. The difference is scale - where Epstein worked through private emails, today's race science promoters have global audiences.