Scandal individualises corruption, creating a spectacle that redirects anger away from structural power.
By Yoav Litvin
After the beginning of Trump’s second term, the connections between capitalism, white supremacy and imperial domination became increasingly clear. These have been highlighted through ICE raids as modern-day slave patrols, global criminal operations such as the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and United States assistance to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a bipartisan US and transnational corporate experiment.
The growing understanding that people in the Global South, along with Black, Indigenous and other People of Colour (BIPOC) within the imperial core, face a common enemy has galvanised an anti-colonial, revolutionary movement committed to radical transformation.
And then the release of the Epstein files flooded public discourse.
Epstein and the media
Jeffrey Epstein was a financier convicted of sex crimes involving minors. After renewed federal charges in 2019, he died in jail (officially ruled a suicide). The case triggered public outrage about ruling class impunity, media focus on unsavoury associations between the political and corporate class and a plethora of conspiratorial narratives about cover-ups.
The Epstein case became far more than a criminal proceeding; it reflects a symbolic exposure of ruling class impunity and concentrated power and a spectacle of corruption within an empire in deep crisis and decline.
The Epstein case exposed ruling class criminality while simultaneously displacing structural accountability.
Importantly, “spectacle” does not mean “fake”; it means the organisation of politics through symbolic drama that displaces structural political analysis. With spectacle, social contradictions (inequality, social crises and instability) are dramatised rather than structurally challenged….
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/2/26/epstein-and-the-politics-of-distraction
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History and revolution in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle
After the truth-shower 