Julian Walker unpacks the DOJ’s chaotic release of 3 million Epstein files, exposing systemic abuse and toxic masculinity through misogynistic emails from Peter Attia—like "pussy is indeed low carb"—and Deepak Chopra’s 1700 mentions, including dehumanizing remarks about women. Epstein’s crimes (1,000 victims) reveal elite complicity amid global trafficking data: 50 million enslaved annually, 6.3 million sexually exploited, and 20 million in forced marriages. Walker traces toxic masculinity from his grandfather’s racist domination to Trump’s "grab them" tape, MAGA conspiracies, and ICE’s authoritarian tactics, urging men to reject objectification and embrace vulnerability as the antidote to systemic harm. [Automatically generated summary]
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In the wake of the DOJ's dump of 3 million documents from the FBI's Epstein investigation, I'm thinking about the broader cultural context, as well as specifically about maleness and how we learn to be men.
You're listening to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Of course, there are both women and men who must have been directly involved in Jeffrey Epstein's inner circle of sex trafficking and child rape.
And the process that turns someone into such a monster no doubt involves a complex combination of genetics and psychology, intersecting then with the opportunities available to hyper-privileged, seemingly untouchable elites.
But most often, the predators are grown men and the victims are women and girls.
Correspondingly, I see my social media feeds right now flooded with mostly women reporting overwhelming grief, anxiety, somatic symptoms, sleep disturbance, and seething rage in response to what is in the files.
And all of that feels to be about a broader and deeper context of living in a world that enables systemic abuse and fails to both protect and punish appropriately.
More broadly, I'm also seeing some people reaching for conspiracy theories that include demonic, satanic, sacrificial, and even cannibalistic frameworks to try to make sense of the epistemic overload.
And much of that overload comes from the hugely irresponsible move of the government releasing so many documents with no real context or organizational logic.
Emails, text messages, bank statements, phone tip line allegations, accounts from survivors, and thousands of half-redacted images and videos are all just available to be searched through in a 3 million deep pile, leaving journalists, content creators, and everyday people to try to connect dots that form narratives and a schema for what all of this means.
And then on Instagram, well-meaning individuals crying out for justice are sometimes also prone to reshare deeply disturbing images that they've been told by someone else are from the files, which actually originate elsewhere and are unrelated.
And this outcome is emblematic of the cruelty and incompetence of the current regime.
We don't get a carefully considered report with well-categorized distinctions between how weak or strong certain pieces of evidence are, or with clear lines of custody or a walkthrough of what the investigation found and explanations for why it has pursued some allegations and not others.
This leaves massive room for speculation, paranoia, and conspiratorial logic that fills in the factual gaps so as to mirror the valid emotional deluge.
It all stinks of a cover-up, and the injustice of redacting the names of what we can only imagine are powerful men while non-consensually exposing the identities of survivors twists the knife in the heart of all who value justice and anyone who's been oppressed or abused by white male-dominated systems.
No wonder then, that for the first time in years, resurrected Pizzagate and QAnon beliefs are suddenly widespread again on social media, along with satanic panic material from the 80s and the 90s.
For a whole new demographic and political orientation, the Epstein files mean that all of this has always somehow been true.
The world is ruled, as it turns out, by an elite cabal who worship the devil, eat babies, drink blood, and engage in ritual pedophilia, which in some versions of this story gives them their power and keeps them magically youthful and healthy.
There are no good reasons to believe that this hyper-saturated, nightmare, dark fantasy is true, but it is perhaps less terrifying than the ugly everyday reality of institutional power and moral bankruptcy.
So stay tuned to this feed for upcoming, but sadly also backward-looking work from us here at Conspirituality about all of that.
The figures at the center of Epstein's disgusting activities are criminal monsters, and we can stop there.
But I also think that there are burning questions about why they are that way.
Fully understanding the sociology, the genetics, the psychology, and the likely cycle of childhood abuse that probably drives these dynamics requires ongoing deep study and research.
In the meantime, there are survivors who need our care, crimes that demand justice, and at-risk children and young people who must be protected.
But there's something else here that speaks to what ordinary people, and especially men, can do.
In looking through the files myself, I'm struck by the text and email conversations in which men who may not be involved in Jeffrey Epstein's crimes are nonetheless complicit through a kind of fawning enablement.
Even if we buy that some of them were ignorant of his 2008 conviction, their willingness to play along thereafter conversationally with his grotesque misogyny and winking objectification is sickening.
But, you know, I doubt they were ignorant.
And so for those not directly involved in abuse, proximity to wealth and power made them all too willing to turn a blind eye to how Epstein's ugly jokes and bad boy bravado communicated his unrepentant predatory appetites.
They saw it, and I can only think they chose to ignore what it meant.
Or even for the most naive or oblivious, what it might have meant, and therefore how to respond.
In one email exchange, for example, the prominent doctor and wellness influencer Peter Attia seems to be referring to the diabetes drug metformin that he used for a while and prescribed off-label for longevity before he realized it had problems.
When he writes, just got a fresh shipment.
Epstein then jokingly replies, me too.
And the attached image is redacted.
But Attia says it was an image of an adult woman.
And he says, please tell me you found that picture online.
Dot, dot, dot, bastard.
Afraid not, says Epstein, to which Atia tellingly replies, the biggest problem with becoming friends with you?
The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can't tell a soul.
What is so outrageous about the picture he sent?
What couldn't you tell a soul, Peter?
In his public statement, he says it was just how overwhelming the lavish lifestyle was to him when he was first exposed to it as a young man, and how there's a kind of discretion required in not talking about the rich and famous people you meet at dinner parties.
That rings really hollow to me.
In another email, he joked with Epstein that pussy is indeed low carb.
And in another, Epstein muses that he doesn't understand why women live past reproductive age at all.
No pushback from Peter Atiya.
Now, for a deeper dive into the Attia files, you can just scroll back in our podcast feed about a week.
That kind of dehumanizing of women by men requires reduced or disabled empathy.
And this is a feature of what is sometimes referred to as toxic masculinity.
And that's a hotly contested term for some people, especially in today's discourse about young men.
But here's a definition which clarifies why I'm choosing to use it.
Toxic Masculinity Defined00:08:08
This is from Cambridge Dictionary.
Toxic masculinity defines manhood very narrowly in terms of violence, sex, status, and aggression.
It's nothing new.
It rules by force and sadism and punishes any sign of emotional intelligence or vulnerability.
In this framework, being a worthwhile, acceptable man means identifying with the aggressor, the dominant one, and having status means showing callous disregard for others, being willing to bully, to violate, to humiliate in order to maintain power.
It's the zero-sum binary division of the world into the strong and the weak, which says the only way to not be a victim is to have power over others.
Men possessed by toxic masculinity have contempt, not only for the weakness of those it victimizes, but for any perceived weakness in themselves.
That's the trap.
We see this theme echoed and remixed both in Manosphere Jimbro self-development culture, some of which misuses Stoic philosophy from ancient Greece to give itself some sense of legitimacy and gravitas, but also more deceptively in a lot of new age pop spirituality concepts that are espoused by male and female influencers alike about creating your own reality and overcoming victim consciousness.
This is where Deepak Chopra comes in, as we covered earlier this week.
In every moment, he says, you have a choice to either be a victim or a creator.
This is a popular quote widely shared on social media.
He's also attributed climate change and natural disasters to human consciousness and repeated the prosperity gospel type tropes rampant in New Age spirituality about money being manifested via one's ability to tap into infinite awareness,
all of which literally translates into poor people just not being spiritual enough and wealth equating with a kind of enlightened superiority and the climate crisis being something we can solve if we just think about it during meditation correctly.
Alongside that sit dumbed down versions of non-dual Indian philosophy, which in his distorted version translates into moral outrage being a sign of unevolved spirituality.
And this is exemplified, in case you think I'm caricaturing him here, by the following excerpt from a 2024 blog post he wrote.
You can tell that you don't have clarity by noticing your own reactions to horrific news stories about behavior that people would quickly label as evil, such as child pornography, mass shootings, drug wars in the street, and violent domestic abuse.
In most people, such news reports create a confused and inconsistent response that includes the desire for revenge, passive acceptance, resigned resignation, a plea for justice, horror, guilt, and so on.
The play of these responses is a symptom of why the war between good and evil as a concept is at once never-ending and futile.
So how do these spiritual bypassing and morally bankrupt beliefs show up in Deepak's 1700 mentions in the Epstein files?
Well, he quips to Epstein, God is a construct, cute girls are real.
That's been quoted everywhere, but what comes right before it is even more disturbing.
He types, cells are human constructs, no such thing.
Universe is human construct, no such thing.
Cute girls are real when they make noise.
I can only imagine how that feels for women, especially for women who followed Chopra for years.
As a man, that last phrase is a gut punch in terms of the image it evokes and the abusive dehumanization it conveys, its casual but extreme toxic masculinity in the charlatanical language of quantum mysticism.
But it's also much worse than that.
As with Atiya, we can't know yet for sure if Chopra was involved in Epstein's trafficking activities or grotesque abuse parties.
But the frequency with which he references girls, specifically the word girls, in their back and forth emails, and the fact that he tries to set up a business-related meeting between Epstein and his son-in-law, along then with the shorthand warning in parentheses, can't talk about girls, is all highly suggestive.
What we do know for sure is that there was a well-organized system that looks to have victimized around a thousand or more women and children, with key inner circle figures, no doubt involved, most of whom come from the highest echelons of wealth and power.
More facts, evidence, and prosecutions should be on the horizon if any of the world's justice systems are functioning correctly.
In the meantime, I want to ask, what can we do, especially as men?
Toxic masculinity dehumanizes everyone, and it is expressed in myriad ways, sometimes alongside seemingly contradictory qualities, like the type of personalities that Peter Atiyah and Deepak Chopra seem to have to everyone who admires them.
I think most male listeners will recognize the following basic and conventional nuts and bolts message that we learned and witnessed growing up.
To be vulnerable, emotionally attuned, honest about insecurities or relational needs.
All of that is weak.
And weakness is not manly.
It is feminine.
To be weak is to be like a woman.
And to be like a woman is to be deserving of violence, especially if you're male.
If there's anything toxic men hate as much or more than women, it is gay men.
And any man or boy who is emotional, vulnerable, creative, or expressive in ways outside of narrow male stereotypes is therefore under suspicion of being gay.
But it's not just being gay, right?
It's being disloyal to the boys' club rules that the rest of us feel we have to follow.
Now, before I get into some personal reflections on maleness, I want to say this.
Parents and teachers and influencers and artists should actively encourage precisely that kind of disloyalty to the boys' club mentality.
We should link the idea of being a strong man with courageous integrity that speaks up for and protects the powerless and names and rejects misogyny, homophobia, and abusive power.
We should teach boys that this is the most masculine thing you can do, and that emotionally intact men earn the trust of women and children through respect and kindness.
We are enlarged by that trust and love, not diminished or controlled by it, that we as men are made immune to the ugliness, the smallness, the pettiness, the cruelty of insecure and toxic masculinity by locating our identity in relational intelligence and emotional depth.
Grandpa's Rhodesian War00:03:20
I have a very young daughter.
And if I had just one wish, it would be that the boys she is growing up with right now are being taught these kinds of truths.
Now, my first awareness of what it meant to be a man lived in the tension between my father and my maternal grandfather.
Grandpa Mike had just turned 17 when he lied about his age to go fight the Nazis.
He would parachute into North Africa and Italy and then come home with a chest full of medals, as well as those tiny pieces of shrapnel he would still be picking out of his head into old age as I was growing up.
He remained a military man for life and never rose above the rank of staff sergeant, though he went on to fight with the British Army on the wrong side of several wars of independence in Africa.
I'll spend more time unpacking this with some storytelling from my own background in a future bonus episode.
But for now, here's a vignette that might serve as a bit of a preview.
Bear with me here.
I was born in the country known as Rhodesia.
And my grandpa Mike was involved in the 15-year civil war that stretched from 1964 to 1979 before that country would eventually become Zimbabwe.
Technically, Rhodesia was already independent from Britain at that time, but it was ruled over by a tiny white minority of 4% until universal suffrage was eventually achieved and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
My father, on the other hand, is South African, and he was just working in Rhodesia when he met my mother there.
He'd already suffered his mandatory military service in South Africa, where he was once so badly beaten by the drill sergeant on his upper arm, it took a week to heal, and he wasn't able to train during that time.
At roll call for a while, he was also made to reply to the name Communis after a private conversation in which he was told to be frank about his political views.
And so saying he thought South Africa should be a democracy with equal rights qualified, of course, as communism to those loyal to apartheid's white supremacy.
Needless to say, he wasn't about to line up for any similar experiences in the Rhodesian army, which was a country going through a civil war where he identified more with the other side.
So we fled back to South Africa once the Rhodesian government announced that it was going to start drafting non-citizen whites to fight in the war.
Mike and his wife, Dorothy, my grandma, would eventually join us once Zimbabwe was fully established and not particularly friendly to former Rhodesian military folks.
The South African military, of course, welcomed him with open arms.
And for a brief period, they actually lived with us.
This was not easy.
They were extroverted colonial English people of their generation, playing oldies radio loud, sitting at the dining room table, drinking endless cups of tea, chain smoking, and laughing at their own largely substanceless conversation and jokes.
Winding You Up00:14:09
Dottie, as we called her, had those pointy-cornered glasses that were popular in the 60s, and her hair was always stiffly curled and sprayed.
Mike only really knew how to connect via what the English call winding you up.
It's that delightful custom of figuring out via observation what really upsets your friends and family, and then finding ways to bring it up in conversation as a joke in the hope that the person will get really irate, at which point everyone can have a good old laugh.
The winding up metaphor refers to generating enough tension and pressure, like you're winding up a spring-loaded toy that you can then release.
And wow, how entertaining to watch the person thrash about and protest emotionally.
And that last word is the rub.
Get others to reveal their pathetic, supposedly, and helpless emotional selves, and you've won the game.
But even when those kinds of opportunities weren't readily at hand, Mike's relational style was derision and domination, dressed up as harmless humor.
With us, that meant upon greeting, he might ask my mother if she had gained weight.
It might mean asking my dad if he had forgotten to wash his upper lip when he grew a mustache.
It meant grabbing the two inches of hair at the back of my head and grinning at me saying, hello, ducky, a reference to the ducktail hairstyle of the 1950s, which was completely meaningless to me.
He would also casually mention in detail how much better the new Mercedes model car was supposed to be than the latest BMW, because my dad worked for the latter company.
And then, knowing how much their politics diverged, it also meant deliberately dropping little bombs of casual racism in our presence and then smirking at the reaction.
It was a bit like today's internet trolls owning the libs.
Because there was conscription of all white boys into the military, Mike's one real gesture of paternalistic warmth toward my brother and I took the form of frequent reminders that he would be able to pull some strings and have us do our basic training at his base, where he could turn us into real men and get the cradle marks off of our soft asses.
I'm pleased to say our parents, however, were determined to spare us that ordeal.
So in the end, we had the last laugh.
I go on this detour with you as I reflect on toxic masculinity.
There's a lot more here.
Growing up under a police state, going through a school system with corporal punishment, but I'll save all of that for next week or whenever I get to that bonus.
I'll say here too, though, that I arrived at music school in the U.S. at 19, a sensitive, creative, intellectual, very liberal kid who did daily yoga and meditation on my bedroom floor and found American guys my age as unpleasant as they found me weird.
They convinced one another I must be gay and were both speechless and repulsed in the face of my no doubt condescending rebukes at their bigotry, homophobia, and what I characterized as ignorant stupidity.
I didn't bother to correct them about not being gay though because I genuinely couldn't have cared less what they thought about me.
It's been a lot of years since then and I remember sitting down to breakfast with a long-time fellow sensitive artist friend in 2016.
You remember this moment.
It was right before the election.
Trump's done, he said to me with a smile and a twinkle in his eye.
A recording was just released of him admitting to forcing himself on women.
It's over.
He said, he just grabs them by the pussy, and they let him do it because he's famous.
Perhaps you too, like my friend and I, felt some sense of relief in that moment, because in the world we thought we inhabited 10 years ago, that seemed like more than enough to turn the tide away from Donald Trump.
Surely, come November, we'd be celebrating an admittedly imperfect first female president in Hillary Clinton in the wake of eight years of our first black president.
I wrote a piece that I shared with my subscribers urging calm, saying, the GOP is so out of ideas and so lacking in good leaders, they've been forced to accept this completely unelectable doofus as their candidate.
I speculated that the Democrats were going to win for the next two decades and keep implementing progressive policies that were on the right side of history, because that was now what an undeniable majority of the country wanted.
Obama, imperfections and all, represented the fulfillment of MLK's dream, especially to a kid like me who grew up under apartheid in South Africa.
There were surely no looking back now.
I know.
All of that was naively optimistic and grandiose.
My post-election email was a humbled and disconsolate apology for being so wrong.
We actually have gone backwards.
MAGA has shown time and again that they don't care what Trump does or says, and it's not just the men.
Republican women will rationalize all of it as locker room talk or political prosecutions or fake news manufactured to derail his true calling to return America to white Christian nationalist glory.
No matter his crimes, even the many against women, they pale for them in comparison to the propaganda and conspiracism that creates an infinitely worse seeming enemy on the other side.
You know, us, communist, nihilist, godless, atheist, demonic, mutilating children medically, forcing deadly vaccines on everyone, wanting to euthanize grandma, flooding the country with criminal brown immigrants, and at the apex of all of this, of course, sacrificing babies in sex rituals and getting high on the fear chemicals in their blood.
Which is why the current wave of reanimated zombie, QAnon, and satanic panic style conspiracy theories emerging on our side of the aisle now is so disquieting.
People unfamiliar with all of those tropes and all of the factual debunking and cultural analysis of those tropes we've spent, along with others, a good chunk of the last six years engaged in, are understandably vulnerable to the perception that maybe it was all true the whole time.
In this case, it doesn't necessarily make them more prone to vote for Trump's eventual successors, hopefully.
But projecting this abuse into supernatural realms and imagining all elites as satanic predators who somehow get their wealth and power from the evil they do distracts attention from the real work.
I mean, look, here are some facts and figures.
The grim reality is that human trafficking is an aspect of global organized crime that affects over 50 million people each year.
If we include forced labor and forced marriage in that number, the latter category, forced marriage, accounts for over 20 million.
These numbers are from the International Labor Organization.
Around 6.3 million of that large group are forced into sexual exploitation, and 1.7 million of those are children.
Despite making up about 12% of that 50 million, adult and child sex trafficking is the most lucrative.
It accounts for over 75% of the profits.
And so the overwhelming majority of people involved in this aspect of organized crime, the bad guys in this case, are not Satanists.
They're not billionaire elites or powerful politicians or movie stars and royal family members.
It's all much more seedy and low-rent than any of that.
And it's happening everywhere all the time.
Now, that doesn't exonerate the Epstein class or minimize their crimes.
Each of those 1,000 or more victimized women and children is a real person who matters deeply.
But these facts might highlight a level of naivete about the world we live in.
When we see that social media is awash with narratives that make it seem like trafficking and pedophilia is mostly the movie villain leisure activity of a small group of the wealthiest people in the world.
In fact, the large majority of this awful trade happens outside of the West, especially in low and middle income countries, and most prevalently in authoritarian countries with the lowest levels of democracy.
Some of those countries also allow, legally, for adult men to marry girls as young as 10.
But let's come back to the U.S. to wrap up.
Given the relative global rates of trafficking, the slide toward authoritarianism that MAGA has initiated puts more women and girls at risk.
As an instrument of that authoritarian agenda, ICE is often compared to the German Gestapo.
But some have pointed out that Hitler and others actually took inspiration from earlier stages of the United States.
So we don't have to look to Germany for comparisons.
The earliest version of law enforcement in the Americas took the form of slave catchers.
Going back to the 1700s, patrols made up of ordinary white citizens eager to make a buck would demand to see the papers of any black person they came across so that they could apprehend them if they were runaway slaves.
The Nazis would later draw inspiration from America's Jim Crow laws and eugenics models that perpetuated racial hierarchy after slavery had been abolished.
Today, the rise of ICE as a kind of mercenary militia loyal only to the patriarch echoes this shameful and brutal history, as does the racial profiling and dehumanizing treatment they feel empowered to enact with impunity.
The social media videos we've all seen too many of likewise embody an archetype of toxic masculinity that uses anonymity to act out a sadistic fantasy of intimidation and absolute power over helpless victims with the state backing them up.
All of this amplifies and enables forms of male power which dehumanize all of us, but disproportionately impact minorities, women and children, especially girls.
I'm not confident we can fight that out in the street against ICE agents.
Hopefully there will be political ways to right these wrongs.
But speaking now to my fellow men, whenever possible, we must stand up for women and girls.
And that's not some kind of mirror image heroic fantasy of violent retribution.
It's in all the everyday ways.
It's in countering casual misogyny, rejecting attitudes that turn women into objects or that sexualize girls.
It's in doing our own inner work alone and with other men so as to embrace relational integrity and the courageous vulnerability of equal and loving relationships and then initiating younger men and boys into that kind of consciousness.
It's a dark time.
And so this commitment to making male culture healthier may only be in our own circles for the time being as the country goes through its MA convulsions, but the fact that we cannot influence the entire culture right now, as tradwives and incels and manosphere dicks and white Christian nationalists have their moment, none of that is a reason to acquiesce, quite the opposite.
Because in the same way that people unfamiliar with QAnon or Pizzagate or satanic ritual abuse stories can get sucked in when they first encounter that material, each new generation of boys has to be taught fresh to be kind, to hold on to their humanity, to treat themselves and their male friends as emotionally whole human beings in the face of this toxic conditioning,
and to naturally then actively extend that to girls and women too.
In spiritual circles, I think this also means countering victim blaming and that remixed prosperity gospel entitlement, as well as the traditional gender role BS, dressed up in the flowing robes of sacred masculine and divine feminine content.
None of that, none of what I'm saying here will change the fact that there are still genuinely evil sociopathic sick people in the world.
But it might make men, men like Peter Atiya and Deepak Chopra and others in the Epstein files, who for whatever reason find themselves in their orbits,