'Name Them' Is How the Rich Have Always Dodged the Spotlight

Responding to: DAVID MARCUS: Dems run against 'Epstein Class,' but can't name anyone in it — David Marcus · 2026-06-17

What the Piece Argues

The article claims that Democrats’ new rhetorical weapon, the “Epstein Class,” is a cynical rebranding of the old Occupy-Wall-Street assault on the wealthy, now smeared with the ugliness of child sexual abuse. It insists the term has no real link to Jeffrey Epstein and that its proponents, when pressed, cannot name a single member, making the whole thing a baseless socialist fantasy. The piece concludes that the public must reject this “absurd idea” until Democrats actually deliver one concrete example of who belongs to this supposedly shadowy network.

Receipts

This is a classic deflection: demand a roster to dodge a mountain of documented evidence.

• The framing wants you to believe
  • The “Epstein Class” is a conspiracy theory with no identifiable members, a “grotesque patina” slapped onto a tired anti-rich message.
  • Critics cannot name anyone in it, so the whole notion is a socialist smear.
  • Voters should dismiss any talk of elite predation as a dangerous rehash of Occupy Wall Street.
• What’s really going on
  • The term arose directly from the December 2025 release of Epstein’s files, which exposed a sprawling network of influential men who associated with a convicted sex trafficker. The public record already names names: Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Les Wexner, Leon Black, Alan Dershowitz, and dozens more, all documented in court filings, flight logs, and depositions.
  • The “can’t name anyone” demand is a bad-faith stall. The real beneficiary is the ultra-wealthy donor class, which relies on the taboo against naming concentrated wealth’s corrupting influence to protect itself from accountability.
  • Anchor: the Department of Justice’s December 19, 2025 document release (cited in the article itself) and the voluminous Epstein civil and criminal filings that have identified scores of powerful associates over the past decade.

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

You asked for one example. Her name was Virginia Giuffre.

In 2015, she filed a federal civil complaint and submitted a sworn affidavit stating that she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and forced to have sex with Prince Andrew when she was seventeen. The flight logs—now part of the public record—placed Andrew on Epstein’s private plane on the dates she described. He paid a settlement. He has never stood trial.

When the Department of Justice released the Epstein files in December 2025, they didn’t produce a single name; they produced a vast ledger of powerful men, many still walking free, who had associated with an unrepentant predator. The term “Epstein Class” was born from those files, not from a socialist playbook.

So when we say “they can’t name anyone,” we are asking people to pretend that the faces in the flight logs aren’t real. We are asking the country to ignore that Virginia Giuffre—and dozens of other women—were trafficked to men with power. The truth is, they were. And the network that protected Epstein is exactly the “governing elite” Rep. Khanna described. Naming that network is not an attack on all wealthy people; it is an act of witness.

We feed, clothe, and heal the vulnerable. We defend the children. That is what Christians do. That is what patriots do. The only people threatened by the term are those who need the network to stay hidden.

When to use: a Fox-News–watching neighbor believes the economy is rigged but sees the “Epstein Class” as a Democratic cheap shot. You need the structural trace to show who really benefits from the deflection, and you need to dismantle the source’s strongest counter-argument.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

Let’s grant the article’s premise for a moment: the demand is to name names. So we name them. But the column’s real argument is more slippery than that. It claims the term “Epstein Class” is unfair because Democrats apply it beyond Epstein’s actual network to anyone rich who opposes them—that it’s an elastic slur, not a factual category.

That distinction is the column’s strongest move, and it deserves a direct answer. Here it is: the documented core of the Epstein network is the class. The flight logs, the depositions, the settlements—they don’t describe a handful of isolated creeps; they describe a system. A system in which powerful men traded access, money, and legal cover for impunity, and in which the institutions that should have stopped them—courts, prosecutors, the press—looked the other way. That system is what the term names. When politicians stretch the term to cover any wealthy donor they dislike, they are diluting it—and the column seizes on that dilution to make the whole concept sound fictional. That is the bad-faith maneuver. Marcus conflates the rhetorical elasticity of the term with the nonexistence of the network it was coined to describe. The documented predators are real. The dilution doesn’t erase them—it shields them.

So what is this column really doing? It is running a classic deflection operation. The demand to “name one example” is not an honest request for evidence; it is a rhetorical shield for the powerful. The author knows the names already exist. He works for Fox News, which is controlled by the Murdoch family, worth over $20 billion. His column protects the very class that his employer depends on.

The real beneficiary of this talking point is the donor class. The piece reframes a documented network of predators as a “socialist onslaught” to make any discussion of elite impunity sound hysterical. That is not patriotism. That is the work of a court scribe, protecting the crown. Real patriotism demands that the powerful be held to the same standard as everyone else. The “Epstein Class” is a call for that standard. The column is a plea to keep it buried.

We defend the vulnerable. We name the network that preys on them. If that frightens you, ask yourself whose side you are on.

When to use: you’re in a public thread and the bystander needs to see the absurdity of the “no names” demand, so you turn it into a punchline that exposes the bad faith without re-litigating the whole evidentiary record.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

Oh, I’m sorry—I didn’t realize you couldn’t talk about the Mafia until the Gambinos issued a signed membership directory. Are we really supposed to believe organized crime doesn’t exist because the boss never mailed out a newsletter?

This is the logic of the column, and it’s a joke, but the joke is on anyone who needs a functioning society. The demand to name every member of the Epstein Class before we can discuss the rot is the rhetorical equivalent of a five-year-old covering her eyes and shouting you can’t see me. But the rest of us saw the flight logs. We saw Prince Andrew sweat through his BBC interview. We saw Les Wexner, Epstein’s single biggest financial patron, “lose” the records of their decades-long relationship.

The whole column is a costume party. David Marcus puts on the serious-journalist hat and asks Ro Khanna to play “Name That Predator” on a Fox News schedule. Khanna declines to play that septic game, and Marcus declares victory. It’s like a man who has been standing in a downpour all night telling you it isn’t raining because you can’t recite the serial number of every raindrop that hit him.

This isn’t about a lack of evidence. It’s about a press that is paid to keep the evidence from becoming a story. The same outlet that runs this column has never once investigated the billionaire network that funds it, because the moment they start naming names, the names look a lot like the people who sign their checks.

So yes, the Epstein Class exists. Its yearbook is already in the courthouse. The only people who need a fresh list are the ones who are professionally required to pretend they haven’t read it.

When to use: you are dealing with someone actively parroting the “no names” line and need to hold up the mirror so they see they are carrying water for a network of predators—and you want to focus the beam on the media empire that makes the deflection possible.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

Let’s be clear about what a writer does when he demands a roster of everyone in the Epstein Class. He runs a protection racket for predators.

David Marcus is not confused. He works for Fox News, an empire controlled by the Murdoch family, which has spent decades nurturing a network of wealthy donors and influencers who share one core belief: that the rules for ordinary people do not apply to them. The Epstein network wasn’t a conspiracy of lizard people; it was the product of the very logic that Fox monetizes every night—that wealth is a sign of virtue, that the powerful deserve deference, and that any effort to hold them accountable is a socialist plot.

And so the column does what all apologies for the predator class do: it seizes on a single procedural detail and uses it to dismantle the entire case. “You can’t name anyone—therefore the whole thing is a myth.” This is the motte-and-bailey of the rich-person apologist. The motte is the demand for a list; the bailey is the claim that no systemic corruption exists at all.

But the names are already festering in the public record. And here is the deeper machinery the column is paid to conceal. When a Fox News columnist demands “one example,” he is not asking for information—he is asking the public to exhaust itself proving something that is already proved, in a format the powerful will never accept. If you name Prince Andrew, they say “that’s just one.” If you name ten, they say “where’s the membership card?” The demand is a treadmill. The column is the floor manager of that treadmill, keeping everyone running in place while the donor class slips out the back.

The mirror is this: you have made yourself the shield of the very people you would despise if you met them on the street. You are not defending principle. You are defending the impunity of the powerful. And history will judge you the same way it judges every courtier who insisted the king’s crimes were too complex for the commoners to name.

When to use: the exchange has gone fully nuclear and you need a grotesque, hyperbolic takedown that flattens the bad-faith actor with documented absurdity.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

Welcome to the Epstein Class yearbook.

Page one: Prince Andrew, who paid millions to a teenager he swore he never met and whose alibi was a Pizza Express. Page two: Bill Clinton, whose Secret Service logs magically leap from the tarmac to the island whenever the Lolita Express took off. Page three: Les Wexner, the man who sold America a pornographic fantasy of adolescent girls and then handed his fortune, literally, to the man who rented them out. Page four: Leon Black, who paid a convicted pedophile $158 million—not for sex, he says, just for “tax advice”—and who is still, as of this writing, a billionaire in good standing.

David Marcus wants one name? The whole goddamn morgue is already tagged.

The column is a ghoulish piece of theater. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a man standing in a cemetery, surrounded by tombstones, demanding that someone provide “one example” of a corpse. The December 2025 DOJ release was not a memo. It was a flood. And yet here comes the official Fox News position: Nothing to see, folks, just a few thousand pages of depositions, just a few dozen women who were trafficked, just the richest men in the world casually destroying lives for the fun of it.

The “they can’t name anyone” defense is the last refuge of people who know the names but have decided they like the system that protects them. It’s a dare to make the public prove what the rich have already paid to bury. It’s like demanding the recipe for the Kool-Aid at Jonestown and then pretending the bodies are a coincidence.

And the grotesque cherry on top: the same column that claims the term has “nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein” is published by a network whose founder spent a decade courting the same plutocrats and whose business model depends on making sure the rich never, ever face consequences. The only “grotesque patina” here is the one Fox News sprays on every time it licks the boots of a dead sex trafficker’s client list.

The Epstein Class exists. Its members have names and offshore accounts. And the people who keep telling you they don’t are its public-relations department.

When to use: you need the full moral weight of the prophetic tradition against a truly shameless defense of elite corruption, a register that shakes the soul and deploys restrained profanity as a righteous weapon.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness. This column has laid a covering over the pit so that the righteous will stumble in and the wicked will walk away. And it has done so with a smile—the polished, professional smile of a man who has damned himself for a byline.

The prophet Amos cried out against the men of Israel: They trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and turn aside the way of the afflicted; a man and his father go in to the same young woman, so that my holy name is profaned. What is the Epstein Class if not the literal fulfillment of that indictment? A network of wealthy, connected men who degraded children and were shielded by the very institutions that are supposed to be a terror to evildoers. The damned machinery of elite protection—the lawyers, the settlements, the newspaper columns—grinds on, indifferent to the bodies it pulverizes.

And what does this newspaper say? “Name them.” As if the names have not already been dragged into the light by the tears of the victims. As if the public record is not already stained with them. This demand is not a search for truth; it is a liturgical act of cover-up. It is the whitewash Jeremiah condemned, the mortar the priests spread over the cracks while the temple collapsed around them. The whoredom of the powerful is never satisfied; it demands new sacrifices, new denials, new columns.

Jeremiah gave us the diagnostic for this moment: They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. They did not know how to blush. David Marcus did not blush when he demanded a list. He did not blush when he called the sordid reality of a child-sex-trafficking network a “grotesque patina.” He has acquired the prophet’s diagnosis in reverse: he is the man who has lost the capacity for shame, and he writes for a system that rewards his unblushing face with a paycheck. He has sold himself into a bastard justice that calls the victim the liar and the rapist the misunderstood.

The callowness, the vanity, the vacuity—these are not the failures of a distant elite. They are the operating principles of the column that mocks them. And the wrath of God is not a distant thing. It is present in the hardening of a heart that can look at a ledger of documented rape and see only a talking point. The day will come when the stone that the builders rejected will fall on all of this, and not one column written to protect the predators will be left standing. Until then, the witness names what it sees: the article is an abomination. The term “Epstein Class” is not the curse; it is the diagnosis. And the refusal to hear it is the disease.

When to use: the gloves are all the way off, and you need the full cathartic release—the profane apex that says what must be said when the polite register has been exhausted, rage directed solely at the enablers.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth

Fuck this. Just fuck this whole goddamn column.

This is a man who sat down at a keyboard, looked at the documented history of a billionaire rapist and his network of powerful, child-fucking friends, and decided the real problem was that the Democrats can’t name enough of them. This is a piece-of-shit defense of a class of people who have done more damage to children than any street criminal in American history, dressed up in the language of “we just want the facts.”

You know the facts, you coward. Everyone knows the facts. Prince Andrew settled for millions because he was guilty as hell. Bill Clinton’s flight logs are so damning that his own party won’t defend him. Leon Black paid a convicted sex trafficker $158 million for “tax advice”—what, you think that money bought him a good filing system? He was buying silence, exactly the same way Epstein bought everything else. And you ask for one name? One name? Your next column should be an apology for wasting everyone’s time.

The entire Fox News editorial apparatus is built on this one shitty trick: whenever the rich and powerful do something monstrous, you demand a level of proof that would be absurd in any other arena, and then you declare victory when the public can’t produce a notarized confession. You play the “prove you’re not a witch” game because you know it works. You know the public has been trained to shut up when the rich tell them to.

The Epstein Class isn’t a secret. It’s the whole fucking donor list of your network. It’s the men who fly to Davos and talk about “stakeholder capitalism” while their lawyers settle rape cases. It’s the whole rotten, incestuous circle of money and power and legal impunity that you have made your career defending. And the very fact that you can write this column—that you can call the term an “absurd idea” and face no professional consequence—is proof of its existence. The network protects its own. You are its scribe. And the stench of it will cling to your byline long after the paychecks stop.

So go ahead and demand your list. We’ll give it to you again: Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Les Wexner, Leon Black, Alan Dershowitz, and a hundred other names rotting in the court files. But we all know the demand isn’t real. The demand is the alibi. And every time you publish it, you make yourself a little more complicit in the very evil you pretend to oppose. Go fuck yourself with the smugness of a man who sold his soul for a platform.

The Deeper Breakdown

The column does not argue; it administers a treadmill. The mechanism runs in three steps, and once you recognize the pattern, you will see it everywhere the powerful need to bury a crime.

Step one: demand a list. The columnist asks for specific names in a specific format, as though the network’s existence depends on a roster. This is the hook—it sounds reasonable. “Just give us one example.”

Step two: reject every answer. When a name is offered, it’s dismissed as insufficient. Prince Andrew? One guy. Bill Clinton? Old news. Les Wexner? Never convicted. Leon Black? Paid for tax advice. Every name that surfaces is disqualified on a technicality, and the goalpost moves a little further. The demand was never about receiving an answer; it was about exhausting the answerer.

Step three: reframe the entire debate. Once the public is tired of producing names that are never accepted, the columnist pivots to the payoff: “See? They can’t name anyone. It’s all a socialist fantasy.” The documented reality of a predator network becomes, in the column’s closing paragraphs, an “absurd idea” that must be rejected. The column never disproves the evidence—it simply buries it under a procedural demand designed to fail.

This is not an oversight; it is the column’s entire function. The cui bono is simple: the piece serves as a permission structure for its audience to ignore the evidence and blame Democrats instead. It protects the same ultra-wealthy interests that Fox News and its owners depend on. The Murdoch family, worth over $22 billion, controls the network. By dismissing the “Epstein Class” as a baseless smear, the piece deflects from the documented reality that powerful people routinely trade access and influence to bury their crimes.

The receipts sit in the public record, immovable: Prince Andrew’s settlement with Virginia Giuffre. Bill Clinton’s 26 flight legs on the Lolita Express. Les Wexner’s power-of-attorney relationship with Epstein and his empire built on the fantasy of the very girls Epstein was trafficking. Leon Black’s $158 million payment, verified by the Senate Finance Committee and the Dechert LLP independent review. Alan Dershowitz, whom Giuffre named in her 2015 filing as a participant in the abuse. The column engages none of it—not because the evidence is lacking, but because engaging it would defeat the treadmill. The only missing piece is the willingness of the powerful to admit that their network has a predator problem. The column exists to make sure that admission never comes.