Freedom 250: Part 3

The Original Epstein Files

In this semiquincentennial year, the close relationship of the late disgraced sex trafficker (and likely Israeli intelligence asset) Jeffrey Epstein with the current president of the USA has been pushed from the top of news bulletins.

This is of course outrageous, but perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked, or even surprised.

Sexual violence flows like a vast underground river through all of American history, its inky waters feeding the tap roots of the collective American body politic.

Before we even consider the depravity of so many modern politicians, it is worth reflecting on the long history of sexual predation by USA politicians and social elites on indentured servants, Indigenous peoples, and the enslaved.

Consider this example:

Any random Black American born between 1960-1965 has an average of 51 European direct ancestors out of 365 sixth or seventh great-grandparents.

“White” Americans should pause to reflect on why this is so.

At length.

And yes, we know that sexual violence crosses all class, ethnic, and gender boundaries.

Nonetheless, paedophilia, pederasty, misogyny, and the rank sexual exploitation of the vulnerable (especially those from the underclasses) have always been the particular prerogatives of the rich and powerful - social categories which have almost always been dominated by “white men” in the USA.

See Trump’s teen beauty pageants as a conveyor belt for exploitation.

See the trafficking and abuse of underaged eastern European models by creeps like Jean-Luc Brunel (another Epstein associate who “hanged himself” in jail in 2022).

Note the remarkable overlap between the social circles of Victoria’s Secret principal Les Wexner, Epstein, and Donald Trump.

Just over the last few years, here are the names of some of the politicians, public officials, or other “notables” credibly accused or convicted of sexual misconduct or criminality involving a minor:

Representative Matt Gaetz (2024) - Allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor and solicitation of prostitution

Representative Mel Reynolds (1995) - Sexual misconduct with a minor

Representative Donald “Buz” Lukens (1989) - Sexual misconduct with a minor

Representative Gerry Studds (1983) - Sexual misconduct with a minor

Representative Daniel Crane (1983) - Sexual misconduct with a minor

Justin Eichorn (2026) - Minnesota lawmaker charged with attempted coercion and enticement of a minor, pleaded guilty to lesser charge of attempted possession of child pornography

Ray Holmberg (2024) - long-serving North Dakota senator convicted of child sex tourism

Robert John May (2026) - member of South Carolina House of Representatives convicted of distributing sexual abuse material involving children

Bo Michael Dresner (2024) - Texas GOP leader convicted on child sexual abuse and child pornography charges

Luis Borunda (2024) - former Maryland Deputy Secretary of State, also served on Maryland Economic Development Commission and the Baltimore Board of Education; tapped by Trump to serve on Voter Fraud Commission in 2016; convicted on federal charges of child sexual exploitation

Timothy Lee Nolan (2118) - convicted child sex offender and child sex trafficker, former state district court judge, Trump campaign official

Alexander brothers (2026) - Israeli-American businessmen and convicted sex offenders; Trump associates currently seeking a presidential pardon

Joel Micah Greenberg (2021) - American politician, former tax collector of Seminole County, Florida, convicted sex trafficker who used the state’s driver license system to obtain names of minors for “commercial sex acts”

Ralph Allan Lee Shortey (2018) - convicted child sex offender, former politician and businessman; Oklahoma state campaign chair for Donald Trump in 2016

I could go on and on, but there’s only so much a soul can take at one sitting...

The point which matters most here, is that the sexual abuse of vulnerable children, and the exploitation of the disenfranchised by those in power, is not new or sporadic.

US political bigwigs were at it way back in 1789.

There was a big difference, though.

Back then, the trafficking of minors was completely legal...

*****

This was witnessed firsthand by the Scottish political pamphleteer James Thomson Callender.

James Callender spent pretty much his entire life fleeing from one place to another - in the first instance from his native Scotland to the newly-born USA.

Callender seems to have suffered from a sublimely underdeveloped appreciation for the social discretion required to survive in the viper pit of American politics.

While more conservative American historians like to portray Callender as a “muckraker” or dissolute scandal-monger, others see a gifted satirist who was simply unable to restrain himself in the face of hypocrisy.

For my own part, I tend to recognize an equal-opportunity social critic trying to find a way to earn a living as a writer among an upper-class society only interested in “The Truth” when it can be weaponized against their enemies.

Described as a “Radical Republican” by conviction, James Callender arrived in a USA so new that most of its Founding Fathers were still alive and viciously squabbling among one another, with everyone jockeying for position at the top of the pile.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, it wasn’t “Democrats” versus “Republicans”, though - at least not in the current sense.

No, it was the Federalists and the Republicans.

The latter are somewhat confusing to modern readers. Although they were known as the Republican Party during the 1790s, they shouldn’t really be seen as a direct precursor of the modern GOP.

To avoid confusion, many historians refer to this anti-Federalist group as the Jeffersonian Republican Party.

To complicate things even further, the Federalist Party would fall by the wayside by the 1820s, and with no meaningful opposition, the Republican Party founded by Thomas Jefferson began to splinter into the various factions which would become the Democratic Republicans (the later “Democrats”) and the “National Republicans” (aka “anti-Jacksonians”, and later, “Whigs”).

The Anti-Jacksonians had absorbed many men from the defunct Federalist Party, and it is this “proto-conservative” faction of “Whigs” which can be seen as the forerunner of the modern GOP.

Whew. You’ll be tested on that later...

Boiled down into plain language, the early USA was a political project of the “white” propertied class, and concerned primarily with the interests of:

- the merchant elites

- the landowning and/or slaveholding classes

Squabbles between post-War of Independence parties mostly concerned issues of state versus federal power, debt and tax management, and the exact form a government-chartered central bank should take.

The modern concept of “Left” or “Right” is a much later borrowing from FRENCH political concepts of social equality which followed upon their own revolution of 1789.

This is one of the hardest things to pin down and and explain clearly to Americans today.

There have been rebellions, wars, uprisings, and revolutions everywhere throughout history claiming to be about “liberation” (and its sister term, “liberty”).

But liberty and freedom are not unidirectional. There is “freedom to”, and there is “freedom from”.

If we were to make two columns, we would see that different countries and peoples have completely different things in both columns, and one column might be much longer than the other.

We’ll not go into endless examples here.

The American War for Independence was not a war seeking “liberation” or “democracy” in the sense of greater rights and social standing being extended to ALL citizens.

Democracy as envisaged by the 1789 French Revolution and the 1792 French Commune horrified “Founding Fathers” like John Adams.

The American War for Independence was about the “freedom to” make more money and expand territorially, while securing “freedom from” as many limitations to self-enrichment as possible.

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To the extent that the first political parties in the new USA could even be rightly characterized as “parties” - let alone leftist or rightist - we might see the Federalists as mostly city-based “conservative money men”, eager to create a banking system similar to The Central Bank of England.

Monetary stability matters deeply to people who have already made their money, but find themselves head of a new state and government “too broke to pay attention”.

Federalists were often perceived by opponents as snobbish elites, and closet Anglophiles.

Key leading Federalists included: Alexander Hamilton (1st US treasury secretary under Washington), John Adams (2nd US president), and George Washington (1st US president; officially “neutral”, but clearly a Federalist sympathizer)

The Republicans, on the other hand, were more popular outside cities, and preferred the idea of state-chartered banks to a massive central bank, fearing that the latter would consolidate wealth and power among the urban elites.

If the Republicans could be said to have been truly more “liberal” or “progressive” than the Federalists in any clear regard, it was in terms of their belief that banks should allow “start-ups” access to capital - for example, settler-colonizers on the western frontier might need access to capital for sawmill or farming and mining equipment.

Key leading Republicans included: Thomas Jefferson (3rd US president), James Madison (4th US president), James Monroe (5th US president)

Boiled down even further, it would be fair to say that Federalists wanted a central government strong enough to raise taxes, while Jeffersonian Republicans preferred that power remain more dispersed among local electorates.

Neither of these parties lost much sleep over the impoverished underclasses, Indigenous rights, women’s rights, or enslaved people.

Except for John Adams, every single one of the first 12 presidents of the USA had been slaveholders at one time or another.

Much has been written about the “Enlightenment Thinking” of Thomas Jefferson, and his cheering-on of the ideals of the French Revolution from the sidelines.

Yet once those ideals had managed to spill over into Haiti - leading to Black emancipation and self-governance - the slaveholding Jefferson lost some of his taste for “democracy”.

*****

Gettng back to our man James Callender...

Callender eventually came into social contact with Thomas Jefferson, who saw his facility for biting satire as a potential weapon for use against his political enemies.

Washington had been used to getting a free pass from criticism in the immediate aftermath of the War for Independence, but things had begun to change.

With Jefferson’s financial backing, Callender attacked George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton ruthlessly in the press.

Those who would see the early leaders of the USA as the wisest of “Founding Fathers” treat Washington in particular almost as a secular saint, and point to his stepping down and refusal to seek a third term as evidence of his putting country before personal ambition.

A more sober reading would point to the fact that Washington was 64 years old, and in relatively poor health.

Drinking fine wine under a shade tree on his extensive plantation back in Virginia (with its enslaved chefs and dozens of “servants”) would have seemed preferable to the bear-pit of politics.

Washington believed he had earned a place beyond criticism or reproach, and made clear his disdain for the “infamous scribblers” of a free press.

But whereas Washington kept his dislike of the public print media private, his successor John Adams took his own disdain for the press to another level.

In a move which would make Donald Trump smile and nod in approval, Adams passed The Alien and Sedition Acts in an effort to shut down public criticism of his administration.

This attempt to restrict freedom of speech did not go down well - Adams served only one term before being replaced by Thomas Jefferson.

Before stepping down, Adams still managed to use his new piece of legislation to imprison many journalists - including Jefferson’s attack dog in the press, James Callender.

*****

The year that the French stormed The Bastille, Thomas Jefferson began “sexual relations” with an enslaved girl named Sally Hemings when she was 14-16 years old (Jefferson was in his late 40s).

For reasons too complicated to enter into here in this short article, after his release from prison in 1801, James Thomson Callender managed to have a falling-out with his erstwhile paymaster Thomas Jefferson, who had been elected third president of the USA.

With his career in disarray, Callender got back to writing, and this time he was swinging for people on both sides of the Federalist/Jeffersonian political divide, calling-out the endemic hypocrisy and corruption of the new USA’s political classes.

In 1802, Callender published the first in a series of articles exposing Jefferson’s “shadow family” with Sally Hemings - the early 19th century equivalent to a full release of the Epstein Files:

“It is well known that the man, Whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. The name of her eldest son is Tom. His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the President himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age.”

Caught between libel trials and vicious physical attacks, with powerful enemies and former allies turning on him, stuck in financial disputes with newspaper owners, some say that Callender turned to the bottle for solace.

He was found drowned in the James River in July of 1803, in what some saw as suspicious circumstances...

Black descendants of Thomas Jefferson

And in the same way that The Epstein Files have been released but redacted, Callender’s claims about Jefferson’s middle-aged exploitation of an enslaved teenager were buried under two subsequent centuries of “Founding Father” myth-making, and dismissed as the ravings of a gutter pamphleteer.

America’s “white” ruling class closed ranks around one of their own.

*****

This is the kind of article which invariably attracts comments from those who will say “You cannot judge the actions of people living centuries ago by the standards of today”.

And yet the current regime and its hand-picked Supreme Court majority do precisely that, with their “originalist” interpretation of the US Constitution.

Their belief is that we SHOULD be governed by the thought processes, motives, intentions, and presumably, the hypocrisies of men who lived 250 years ago.

These are the people who have turned a couple of foundational political documents into a form of secular Holy Scripture.

These are the people who always claim that whenever the USA fails morally - with slavery, with women’s rights, Indigenous rights, minority rights - that it has been “failing to live up to the vision of its Founding Fathers”.

This is a mind game.

By claiming that it is we the people who have failed The Founders, the myth of American exceptionalism at birth can remain intact.

In this framing, we are made dependent on the vision and wisdom of “white” Founding Fathers, instead of seeing the truth, which is this:

The arc of history doesn’t bend inexorably toward rights, social justice, and true democracy as envisaged by a small, entitled, and privileged group of men.

WE THE PEOPLE take it, break it, and remake it ourselves.

With political activism, tangible resistance, voter registration drives, trade unions, civil rights movements, sit-ins, uprisings, strikes, rebellions, and even civil wars...

*****

While the comparison of James Callender’s exposé of Jefferson with the “release” of the Epstein Files is far from a seamless analogy, the comparison points to a few home truths.

Power and impunity have ALWAYS been cozy bedfellows in a land where the word “equality” is often nothing more than a mouth noise.

Allowing Washington’s and Jefferson’s rank moral hypocrisy to slide, in order to create a grandiose foundation story for SOME, signalled to every politician who followed them that power equals impunity.

It is the reason Andrew Jackson felt able to ignore Supreme Court decisions in favor of Indigenous Americans.

It is the reason James Knox Polk could manufacture a war designed to steal a large chunk of Mexico.

It is the reason Andrew Johnson’s offspring could leave a trail of disenfranchised Black descendants.

It is the reason long-serving senators like Strom Thurmond could fight like a wolverine for decades to preserve segregation, all while having secret mixed-ethnic children who were classified as Black, and suffered for their Blackness.

Between 1998 and 2010, DNA testing (along with rigorous and proper historical investigation), proved what the Black descendants of Thomas Jefferson had always known.

Not only what they had always known about their ancestry, but what they understood about “male whiteness” equalling power.

And how power equals impunity.

The current president of the USA - a convicted felon and adjudicated sexual abuser - is not an aberration to this ancient equation, except insofar as he has decided he can drop all pretence of even offering lip service to the proposition that “all men are created equal”.

Women and young girls are props and commodities. Wars are business opportunities. Poor people are losers. Voters are either enemies or useful idiots.

The history of women, Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and immigrants of less-than-white ancestry is an utter irrelevance, except when it threatens to obscure or diminish the over-arching heroic tale spun for White Christian Nationalists.

And even if a modern James Callender (with all his human flaws) could be found to expose the darkest secrets of Trumpworld, one has to wonder if even the abject corruption of Donald John Trump will eventually be buried and forgotten under the dead weight of the perpetual myth of “American Exceptionalism”.

*****

Postscript

For the “You cannot judge the actions of people living centuries ago by the standards of today” crowd.

Just over 100 years BEFORE a middle-aged Thomas Jefferson began sexually exploiting an enslaved teenaged girl, American Quaker settlers in Pennsylvania signed a petition against slavery, using powerful arguments invoking the Christian Golden Rule, while cleverly comparing the capture of Africans to the 16th and 17th century Barbary slave trade in European Christians.

Compare the moral wisdom of signatories to this petition - Francis Daniel Pastorius, Garret Hendericks, and Derick op den Graeff, to the words written by Thomas Jefferson a full century later (note - the surnames Hendericks and op den Graeff survive in the Southern Appalachian surnames “Hendrix” and “Upthegrove”).

Thomas Jefferson:

“In proportion to their number, [incompatible immigrants] will infuse into [the nation] their spirit, warp or bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”

― Notes on the State of Virginia

“I advance it therefore...that the blacks...are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

― Notes on the State of Virginia

“Our canon considers two crosses with the pure white, and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of the Negro blood. But observe, that this does not reestablish freedom, which depends on the condition of the mother, the principle of the civil law, partus sequitur ventrem* being adopted here.”

* “childbirth follows the womb”, i.e. the condition of chattel slavery is inherited via the mother