News sites and gossip boards are spilling over with talk about Jeffrey Epstein. The American government, one of the most morally debased institutions to ever exist, is busy denying what is obvious to almost everyone else. Epstein (1953-2019) was a human trafficker, sex abuser, blackmailer, and probably double or triple spy whose base of operations was a tiny private island in the Caribbean. He was “suicided” in his prison cell to protect those who might be compromised were he to testify in a trial. People in Washington in both parties, including the current president, are up to their neck in the Epstein filth. So, the administration in power is keeping the Epstein files — including, most importantly, the list of senators and CEOs and billionaires who raped children whom Epstein and his accomplices had trafficked — under permanent lock and key.

What happened on Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious private island was probably even worse than most of us realize or could even imagine. The horrors of pedophilia and the sex trade once covered that Caribbean islet in darkness. Even now, the most powerful political and monied forces on the planet are conspiring to keep any of it from coming to light.

But there is something else about the sordid Epstein saga that must be told. News reports and the eternally chattering punditry act as though the Epstein affair were localized. A Harvard-educated magnate, his rich and powerful cronies, and their evil deeds in a remote corner of an archipelago — all of this, journalists and commentators would have us believe, is isolated, something that politicians and their backers do, part of the true and stomach-turning nature of money and power in our world. Isn’t the truth much bleaker than even this, though?

The pornography industry in America is a revenue and entertainment giant. CovenantEyes, a website countering the damaging effects of pornography on society, conveys the facts. Sixty-one percent of Americans view pornography, a figure not very different than the 54% of practicing Christians who do the same. (See stats here.) Every week, it seems, or even more frequently, there is another news story about a teacher or pastor who has been caught with child pornography, a euphemism for the filmed sexual assault of minors. Sex tourism is a global blight, with travel for the purpose of abusing minors a substantial part of this booming industry (see here). The New York Times reported three years ago (here) on the billion-dollar human trafficking industry around America’s southern border. Many of the victims were children, who were sold across the border into America right under the noses of the government officials tasked with stopping such things from happening (see here).

All of this is more than a failure of policy. Looking the other way as children are trafficked, many into horrific conditions of sexual slavery, is not just a question of government oversight gone wrong. America has become a society where pornography use is habitual for more than half the people, where the abuse of women and, often, children, is normalized. Jeffrey Epstein? There are tens of thousands of wannabes putting smut on the internet, and people are consuming it by the terabyte. The Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website (https://www.nsopw.gov/) is a good place to start to understand how pervasive sex crime is in the United States. And the number of people convicted for sex crimes is surely lower than the number of abusers. Sexual assault and human trafficking are rampant. More than half of Americans spend their free time watching videos of these things.

Jeffrey Epstein was not a lone criminal working on a remote island. He was part of a culture: American culture. He wasn’t one of them. For many Americans, he was one of us.