On Edge

Why science cannot be left to the intelligentsia

On Edge, photogravure etching; at Internet Archive

'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,..' — Allen Ginsberg, 'Howl' (first and last lines)

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Almost August 2025

The intelligentsia — artificial, human, and extra-terrestrial — is all the rage these days. For most of the 20th century, computers couldn't think fast or comprehensively enough to simulate human consciousness, and alien intelligence was the stuff of science fiction. Now, as the finale of the first quarter of the 21st century draws near, these barriers are breaking down. And those human thinkers who are storming the barricades have become much sought-after by financial and sexual predators.

At the height of his game, Jeffrey Epstein was sated with sex, money, real estate, and aircraft, but he wanted something more. He had used each element of his career to propel a quantum leap into a faster orbit. Teaching math to the daughters of the rich at the Dalton School (whose Headmaster Donald Barr was the father of Attorney General William Barr) introduced Epstein to the nexus of finance and sex that he parlayed into an alliance with Victoria's Secret founder Leslie Wexner. The models or wanabe models entertained clients in Wexner's New York mansion which he gifted to Epstein. This and other lavish settings in the Caribbean and New Mexico, decorated with teenage girls, proved irresistible to highly placed officials and influentials. Who were they? The furor over the Trump Administration's refusal to release the client list is curious, because an annotated list was already published in 2019! An updated list was published in June 2024, with additional names from Court filings and other sources.

But we were talking about the 'higher calling', the title of an apologia by former FBI Director James Comey, to whose daughter Maureen Comey fell the task of prosecuting Epstein. A well-honed acquisitive bent and a talent for deception had served him well, but he wanted intellectual respectability above all. He set out to buy it.

His collaborator in this endeavor was famed literary agent and master-networker John Brockman. Epstein financed Brockman's Edge salon,¹ bringing together those who regarded themselves as the best minds of their generation to contemplate... their own minds. They thought about thought, in all its transcendental variations — consciousness, awareness, artificial intelligence, neural networks, genetic evolution, computational reasoning, information systems, mind control, and so on, billed as 'redefining who and what we are'. The ominous overtones of that notion, as in tinkering with the human genome, had not yet broken out of the laboratories.

Brockman was an inspired party-giver, adept at ferreting out common interests among people of diverse disciplines and sensibilities. They turned out to be interested in money and sex. One of Edge's most successful events was its annual millionaires' -- later changed to billionaires' — dinners with the great minds. Epstein collected them as trophies, like the stuffed animals he decorated his homes with.

They (the great minds, not the stuffed animals) proved remarkably pliable to Epstein's nonsensical patter. Edge posed a question for the great minds to mull over every year. An example of Epstein's 'thinking' which his grantees praised as 'profound' or 'enlightening' was his response to the 2008 Edge question: ‘What have you changed your mind about? Why?’

'The question presupposes a well defined “you”, and an implied ability that is under “your” control to change your “mind.” The “you” I now believe is distributed amongst others (family friends, in hierarchal structures,) i.e. suicide bombers, believe their sacrifice is for the other parts of their “you”. The question carries with it an intention that I believe is out of one’s control. My mind changed as a result of its interaction with its environment. Why? because it is a part of it.'²

Jasun Horsley observed that 'Jeffrey’s [hobby] was scientists... Lawrence Krauss, Marvin Minsky, and Roger Schank; also Gregory Benford, George Church, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, David Gross, Stephen Hawking, Danny Hillis, Gerard ‘t Hooft, Stephen Kosslyn, Jaron Lanier, Seth Lloyd, Martin Nowak, Oliver Sacks, Lee Smolin, Robert Trivers, Frank Wilczek, and more.'

Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman (physiology and medicine, 1972) says 'Jeff is extraordinary in his ability to pick up on quantitative relations. He asked Is it true that the brain is not a computer? He is very quick.' What a novel idea! Epstein gave half a million dollars to Martin Nowak for research on how altruistic behavior arises despite competitive instincts. Nowak says 'Jeffrey has the mind of a physicist. It’s like talking to a colleague in your field' — the highest compliment possible, elevating a mere financier into the ranks of the tech-intelligentsia. Epstein was apparently not the only person in this dyad adept at intuiting what the other wanted to hear. How altruistic of him!

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The Epstein Files Resurface and Submerge, Again

The Epstein files, which Attorney General Pam Bondi said were 'sitting on my desk' in February 2025, apparently got up and walked away over the July 4 Independence Day holiday. To quash further speculation, Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy Director Dan Bongino recited, unconvincingly, the catechism that Epstein killed himself. President Trump himself deplored Epstein's taking attention away from the economic successes that he (Trump) preferred to focus on. He told a reporter: 'I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein, at a time like this, where we're having some of the greatest success.' When the furor refused to die down several days later, he claimed, preposterously, that Democrats made up their own guilty appearance in the Epstein files, likening this to their proven fabrication of the Steele dossier.

Nothing excites greater interest in such a story than an attempt to suppress it. A broad swath of supporters and opponents alike voiced skepticism, renewing their concerns about sexual exploitation of children, the obscure sources of Epstein's wealth, what the highest echelons of government and education were getting from their association with Epstein, and whether a disgruntled prominent person or oligarch had arranged for him to be murdered.

Bondi said her February statement about the Epstein client list 'sitting on her desk' actually referred to 'a file, along with the JFK files, MLK assassination and other files, is what I meant by that.' Her memo on DOJ stationery said 'Epstein died by suicide. This systematic review revealed no incriminating client list. There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.'

Patel in January 2025, in response to news-host Laura Ingraham asking Why is the FBI protecting Epstein, said 'Simple, because of who's on that list'. Patel also asked rhetorically: 'You don’t think that Bill Gates³ is lobbying Congress night and day to prevent the disclosure of that list?'

Patel in July 2025 echoed the new claim there is no list, adding that 'Having been a prosecutor and seen many prisons, you know a suicide when you see one, and that's what that was.' Bongino remarked while pointedly not looking at the camera: 'He [Epstein] killed himself.' Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt deflected a question about Epstein with 'This Administration has done more to lock up bad guys than certainly the previous Administration.... They [DOJ] committed to an exhaustive investigation, that's what they did -- and that's transparency.' They all at least have the good grace to appear embarrassed at the inconsistencies, and give every appearance in their facial expressions that they'd rather be anywhere else.

They seem unaware that an annotated list of names compiled from Epstein's 'little black book' and flight logs had already been published. Perhaps they wish to avoid having to sort through hundreds of names, some of whom appear to be casual acquaintances, society-party attendees, suppliers of interior-decorating services, and others who would object strenuously — and legally — to being swept up in a dragnet of bad guys. It's also possible that suppressing information that has already been released is meant, as Tucker Carlson has suggested, to reassure those who have good reason to fear exposure, that they are being protected at all costs.

The numerous lapses — surveillance film missing, guards asleep or absent, rope-marks not consistent with suicide — suggest not only a reassuring message of protection of prominent people, but also an effort to deter additional revelations. Where deterrence is a motive, the very sloppiness of the hit advertises the ability of the perpetrators to get away with murder.

Epstein counsel and Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz argues that the most complete and accurate information about Epstein would come from Ghislaine Maxwell. 'She knows everything. She arranged the trips, coordinated everything. She's serving the sentence that Epstein should have served. She should be released with immunity, and compelled to testify before Congress on what she knows.' Dershowitz argues that discovery documents and depositions, currently sealed, would be more informative than grand-jury records or Federal records. These could only be disclosed by Court order.

Dershowitz claims that 'Epstein did not work for any intelligence agency, not Mossad, not the CIA, none'. Dershowitz says he would know because he would have used such connections to get a better deal for his client. 'That's what lawyers do.' But U.S. Attorney (later Labor Secretary) Alex Acosta said that Epstein received a lighter sentence than he deserved because he (Acosta) had 'been told' to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. 'I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to 'leave it alone', he said to the Trump transition staff.

The DOJ arranged with Epstein’s attorneys to avoid sending 'notification letters' to Epstein's victims, as required by law, that would inform them of the plea deal and afford them the right to testify at any plea hearing. This also suggests especially lenient treatment that's hard to explain away in the absence of forceful influence. Appearance in Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book does not necessarily signify client status, but it does prompt inquiry about what sort of quid pro quo existed between them and Epstein.

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A Higher Orbit

Returning to Epstein's quantum leap into a higher orbit beyond sex, riches, real estate, and aircraft, what he really craved most, as noted previously, was intellectual respectability. Yet actually reading books and journal articles, or doing lab experiments, or even sustaining interest in a topic of conversation for more than 30 seconds — these were not his forte. Even after his own desire for money and sex had plateaued, they could be used to gain the allegiance of those who lacked them. They provided Epstein with a convenient short-cut. Corralled into the Edge salon and Harvard/MIT, the intelligentsia were easy prey for someone spouting their jargon and offering them money and the teenage girls they missed out on in high school.

But what was Epstein ultimately after? Naomi Wolf suggests that Epstein, Brockman, and others were part of a mission to control the direction of science, by compromising all the top scientists in the United States. These self-nominated 'top scientists' are not the ones solving practical problems in, say, agronomy or structural engineering, but those working in cognition, artificial intelligence, neurology, brain science, biology, mind control, machine learning, computer-human interface, and the like. Regardless whether they did anything naughty or not, they gradually and in some cases reluctantly understood that their association with Epstein would not, on balance, be good for their careers and reputations.

Naomi Wolf guesses that

'guys from the Silicon Valley community, who have been the ones to put the fuel of their billions and their technical and media support into President Trump’s campaign and administration’s engines — whether they are innocent or guilty, are in the Epstein files. (Remember why Mrs Gates broke up with Mr Gates?) And I think this nation’s most important scientists, innocent or guilty, are in the files. And my guess is that the funders have confronted President Trump.'

With what?, one might ask. Naomi Wolf cites her own experience in watching Epstein's network cling to him even after his abhorrent crimes were known to them. She concludes that even the President of the United States wants to be part of this tech-network. For someone who thought in 2015 that Obama was using such primitive methods of surveillance as wiretapping, Trump has learned enough in the ensuing decade to persuade himself that the tech-network is essential to national (and his own) security. If these people represent science, it's prudent to stay on their good side. Even though Trump tried in 2020 to 'follow the science' at 'warp-speed', the science didn't follow him, preferring a president with dementia. After three years of that, Trump and his tech-savvy VP-to-be JD Vance found ready acceptance among the Silicon Valley tech-elite. Both Trump and Vance very much wish to stay in the tech-network.

Eric Weinstein, in a July 14, 2025 interview quoted by Naomi Wolf, attributes the interest Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine's father) had in starting Pergamon Press to a desire to control the direction of Western science. Pergamon Press was later acquired by Elsevier. Alternatively, perhaps Robert Maxwell merely sought to add to his extensive publishing empire, with no end-in-view other than further expansion. Scientific and medical publishing did in fact later undergo drastic changes, censoring any publication stating that the Wuhan virus leaked from the Wuhan lab, that Ivermectin is a safe and effective treatment, and that mRNA injections cause heart disease and damage the immune system. Adoption of a draconian censorship code by nearly all scientific and medical journals during the covidian episode (2020 - 2024) did nothing to advance intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Through pre-prints, Substack, and numerous other Internet outlets, however, innovative and dissident research became widely available from about 2022 onward. If Robert Maxwell's successors were trying to control the direction of Western science, they haven't done a very good job of it.

It may be, as Naomi Wolf's thesis suggests, that Epstein and Brockman with their Edge salon had previously contrived a better way of exerting control over science. As Wolf notes, 'Harvard was an avid matchmaker for Epstein among the scientific and mathematics community. Harvard accepted about $9 million from Jeffery Epstein, and gave him an office in the institute that he helped to fund.' There had actually been a lot of debate within Harvard about providing an uncredentialed person with an office in such a prime location, but in the end the nine million dollars proved persuasive. Soon after Epstein had settled into his chambers, complaints were heard about his luring coeds there, but these were dismissed, for the same reason.

The Harvard/MIT - Edge axis provided a friendly community for innovative and dissident thinkers uncomfortable with disciplinary barriers, who wished to roam freely in wide-open fields of inquiry.

'So: systematically, consistently, major intellectuals, especially in the fields of computation, genetics, evolutionary biology, and consciousness, were being herded by gatekeepers into proximity to Epstein, who had been planted physically in their midst; and these academics were urged to accept his funding money and to meet with him and by implication, to befriend him or to accept his friendship, and even his invitations. Brockman Inc primarily represented the very pinnacle of science and science-adjacent writers: evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, cognitive scientist Daniel Dennet, psychologist Daniel Kahneman.'

'By 2010, Brockman’s community of intellectuals went far beyond the scruffy if distinguished Harvard professors of the early 2000s. By that year and then throughout the teens, Brockman’s Edge Foundation, via the Billionaire’s Dinners, somehow convened the leaders, indeed the emperors and empresses, of the tech world.'

After learning in 2019 that Edge had been financed by Epstein, Naomi Wolf broke ties with Brockman's literary agency. Her decision had a searing personal basis:

'I immediately broke up with my career-long representation, and wrote a heartbroken letter to John Brockman and his wife and colleague Katinka Matson; heartbroken because I had actually loved them, and because I had trusted them with my development as a writer, which task they had managed brilliantly for decades, and heartbroken too because I was a survivor of child rape myself.'

Many of her fellow members of the Edge intelligentsia felt called upon to explain their own failure to break ties with someone whose avocation and vocation were to have sex with children.

'After I left, I had a lot of conversations with Brockman’s other clients. They called me — I did not call them. To a man (and they were all men) these distinguished intellectuals explained that they empathized with my views and shared my indignation about Epstein’s misdeeds, but that they were not going to leave Brockman Inc.'

'I guess what I am trying to explain is the power and endurance, and really, the sanctity, of 'the network' in the worlds of the elite.'

'Even with the news breaking that the agency’s cultural activities were funded by a pedophile, Brockman’s other clients rightly calculated that their staying within the shelter of such a powerful network, would be more beneficial to them, than would be leaving, even if on principle, and losing the support of and access to that influential network.'

'And they were right.'

Naomi Wolf cautions that the files probably contain innocent as well as guilty names, but does not support concealment of any information that would lead to the prosecution of child-sex abusers and traffickers. She also sees clearly there is more to the Epstein case than 'a sexual blackmail operation for US and foreign political leaders and hedge fund guys'.

'We are also looking at a 'construct' that seduced and lured scientists; that was institutionally set up to seduce and lure scientists; and that may have created conditions that look compromising on paper, whether the scientists did anything wrong or not. We are also looking at a machine constructed to entrap and perhaps pressure, whether they are innocent or guilty, a generation of the most important scientists of our time.'

'Why? Perhaps... to steer science itself.'

'The scientists in this targeted 'stable' deal with pre-AI; with the management of awareness; with the difference between brain and consciousness; with genetics and the altering of genes; with evolution; with ritual; with what makes humans human, and with what allows them to transcend human limitations.'

'This all greatly complicates the Epstein story. It makes it a story about the corrupting and perhaps even the blackmailing and directing of science and technology, and maybe even of both guilty and innocent scientists, and maybe even of guilty and innocent technologists...'

'It may mean that innocent people as well as guilty — major scientists and major technologists, perhaps — may have been set up or enmeshed in circumstances that they now fear coming to light, whether they did nothing wrong at all, or whether they did something wrong.'

'I guess what I am trying to show you is — no one, or very few, in truly elite circles, wants to risk losing the valuable, precious, life-sustaining network. So he or she goes along with just about anything... This doesn’t mean they approve — but they go along.'

'Is that what President Trump is facing now?'

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Where the Worship of Genius Leads

This post started as an effort the rate the Trump Administration on its successes, failures, and work-in-progress on vital matters of national and international well-being. These include prosperity, trade, debt, sovereignty, public safety, freedom, and culture, on which the rating is largely positive (as President Trump himself is the first to admit). The best that can be said of progress on resolving overseas wars and improving health and medical freedom is that these will take more time. On the last category, removing malicious officials from power, virtually no concrete progress has yet (as of almost August 2025) been made. However, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has referred Barack Obama for prosecution for intentional falsification of an intelligence assessment.⁴

Whether Obama will actually be prosecuted, it's too soon to say. This matters because all officials, including a former President, who have abused their authority or committed crimes under color of that authority, will try to protect themselves and those still in office from accountability. The public outcry for release of the Epstein files — even though the names of his contacts were already published in 2019 — reflects an understandable desire for prosecution of those named. But the Epstein files probably have less utility for removing malicious officials from power than the records DNI Gabbard cites.

Both Alan Dershowitz and Naomi Wolf warn that exposing the innocent together with the guilty damages reputations needlessly. Their reasons are different but complementary. Dershowitz points to one accuser who admitted making up her story, and others whose testimony he regards as unreliable, as legal grounds for distinguishing true from false accusations. Naomi Wolf concludes that the demand for transparency should recognize that Epstein’s list mixes-up the innocent and the guilty, but that this caution should not impede identification and prosecution of the guilty. She believes the Trump Administration considers it unwise to mix-up the innocent and the guilty because of the possible harm to the entire tech-intelligentsia and the ‘best and brightest’ scientific minds in America.

Are they really the best that science has to offer? The Edge scholars have produced many original thought-provoking theses and much reductionist nonsense. It is beyond the scope of this post to sort out which is which, but the common-sense of the matter is that the contributions of today's intelligentsia are determined not by their content but by their effects. The most visible effect so far has been to refine methods of mind control to a previously unimaginable degree. Both popular and elite belief have become subject to extraordinarily adroit manipulation, oblivious to common-sense and direct experience. These very geniuses in the Epstein community (with one notable exception, the professional optimist Daniel Pinker) have been motivated to praise their benefactor unreservedly as an avatar of wisdom. Endorsed and paid by an exploiter of children for his own and others' sexual enjoyment, one has to wonder whether these geniuses are truly the best scientific minds around. That is not to say they should all be pilloried, merely that they should not be worshipped either.

Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of the company that bears his name, once said 'we don't need geniuses in our organization'. As the uncomplimentary nickname 'maneshita' (真似した) ('copied') implied, too much conformity can stifle innovation. But the Western worship of untrammeled genius has led to that self-annointed tribe seeking god-like powers. Geo-engineering, genetic tinkering, bio-weaponry, programmable brain implants, eugenics-inspired depopulation, planetary climate modeling, central-bank digital currency — these are just a few of their plans for humanity. This is not the first time that central planners have used new technologies to re-do humanity, as witness the 'New Soviet Man' and the National Socialist 'Ubermensch'. Those experiments did not turn out well. Neither did America's worship of the nuclear priesthood, an earlier generation of scientists entrusted with apocalyptic powers. It is predictable, indeed inevitable, that endowing the current crop of scientists with god-like powers will not turn out well; early returns suggest they are already outdoing their predecessors.

All the more reason, then, not to leave science to the intelligentsia, but instead to apply our own innate common-sense to sort out what is worthwhile from what is useless, corrupt, ideologically-driven, self-promoting, wasteful, or harmful. Opinions may differ, but everyone can see that inflicting a plague on humanity is not a good thing, that taking an experimental gene-altering injection damages the innate immune system, and that boys and girls are fundamentally different in ways not subject to change, to take a few obvious recent examples. Accepting such absurdities on faith jeopardizes not only the truth-basis of the scientific enterprise itself, but divides humanity between the few who profess to know and the many who passively submit to their 'expertise'. This passivity is a key precursor of the malice that many experts and officials feel for ordinary people, as I wrote here:

Scientific expertise enabled the techno-utopians to bypass moral restraint, at the same time projecting the appearance of a natural aristocracy privy to the secrets of the universe. No sooner had they arrived at this pinnacle than the common run of humanity, viewed from above, appeared to them as an amorphous depersonalized mass.

Even on less obvious matters, it is the responsibility of scientists (or science writers) to explain what they are doing and why, in common-sense terms. Hiding in obfuscatory, jargon-filled language is a tip-off that a scientist does not wish his work to be understood. Decoding and translating it into common-sense terms distinguishes the charlatans from the truly creative practitioners. Fortunately here on Substack and on many independent news and analysis sites, the intellectual resources for informed consent — or refusal — are at hand.

1. BuzzFeed News analyzed the Edge Foundation’s IRS filings from 2001 to 2017, published at ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. As reported by one of Brockman’s former clients, Evgeny Morozov, who writes about the political and social implications of technology, foundations associated with Epstein provided $638,000 out of a total of almost $857,000 received by Edge over this period.

2. This could be a winning entry in a post-modernist prose contest. Jasun Horsley commented 'Glad that’s cleared up then'.

3. Bill Gates wanted something from Jeffrey Epstein, but probably not money. Instead, Gates wished to leverage the kompromat Epstein had on a member of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, to obtain the Peace Prize for himself. Jagland had entertained Epstein at Jagland's lavish residence in Strasbourg France (though Jagland denied ever meeting with him).

4. Obama ordered the Intelligence Community to create an Intelligence Community Assessment they knew was false, promoting a contrived narrative, with the intent of undermining the legitimacy and power of a duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump.