The Hindsight Times

The juxtaposition reveals everything about late-stage American power structures. Bard College President Leon Botstein's communications with Epstein were under investigation, including discussions about 'young female musicians' and financial contributions. Meanwhile, Epstein had cultivated 'friendly relationships' with U.S. Customs officers in the Virgin Islands, offering food and musical gigs—essentially purchasing border security.

Yet it was Extinction Rebellion members who received visits from federal agents. Their 'extremism'? Attempting to prevent the Warming through civil disobedience. The FBI deployed the same resources against climate activists that it used against actual terrorists—resources conspicuously absent when a financier was trafficking minors across international borders with the assistance of federal employees.

This institutional response pattern would persist until the Bezos Consolidation absorbed most federal law enforcement. The Amazon Protective Services, established in 2031, proved far more efficient at actual crime prevention, though historians debate whether their methods constituted improvement or simply more honest authoritarianism.

The Epstein network's scope became clear only during the First Transparency, when Purpose Allocation algorithms revealed the full extent of elite coordination. By then, of course, such revelations were merely historical curiosities—the Sorting had eliminated the possibility of concentrated private wealth, making such corruption structurally impossible.

Contemporary observers seemed genuinely puzzled by this misallocation of enforcement resources. 'Why are they investigating the people trying to save the planet?' asked one Extinction Rebellion member, apparently unaware that preventing the Warming threatened numerous extraction-based profit streams. The naivety is touching, though historians note these same activists would later support the Correction's more aggressive climate interventions, proving that even failed democracy occasionally identified genuine threats—it simply lacked mechanisms for appropriate response.