My Front-Row Seat to the Making of Michael Wolff—and the Jeffrey Epstein Predator Class
I moved in these circles and saw the code up close: wealth as virtue, power as morality, and strivers like Michael Wolff treating predators not as warnings—but as career opportunities.
Cliff’s Note: My friends, our fight’s bigger than one dead predator or grotesque social climber. It’s if we finally build independent media strong enough to expose every last predator and hold them accountable.
That’s what we do. A sustained, sharp, historically grounded case against a culture that manufactures these men. If my piece moves you, become a paid subscriber today.
by Cliff Schecter, CEO, Blue Amp Media
‘Cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club…and you ain’t in it.”
That last line’s an oft-repeated aphorism from the late comedian—and I’d argue prophet—George Carlin’s 2005 HBO special, “Life Is Worth Losing.” But the second to last line isn’t quoted as much, and it’s just as important.
We’ve seen it with our own eyes, both in the two decades before Carlin said it (if you were alive), and in the two decades since.
I know this because…I was in this big club. Kinda. I attended their schools, went to their parties, and watched as the world began to burn and nobody could be bothered to get off the couch to grab an industrial-sized extinguisher.
Michael Wolff was and is in this club.
And I’ve become so exhausted analyzing how our politics and culture went so seriously to crap that a court jester with piss-cotton candy for hair, congealed cheese for an IQ, and tantrums like a toddler in between girdle fittings and adult-diaper changings, could be elected to run the “free world.” Without talking about what I saw firsthand.
It’s the banality of evil as a lifestyle choice and accumulation of wealth and power as end goals that got us here. I was often invited to participate, though I was suspect. I attended the right institutions, but grew up in a rent-control apartment below 59th Street. LOL, you should’ve seen how my bus home from school emptied—like it’d sprung a VX gas leak…or Stephen Miller suddenly appeared to hand out dating advice—once we passed the bridge headed downtown on 2nd Avenue.
Michael Wolff, whose babe in the woods routine collapsed once the Epstein Estate released many of the emails between the two men, could not have been any more in this club, or at least he couldn’t have been trying any harder to stay on the right side of its gated community. A perfect product of the era that created Epstein, he was.
So we’re gonna talk about Wolff. And others.
Some may get mad, as I’m naming names. And, well, if they do, too fucking bad. They took the easy path, or hedonistic one, that have helped bring our country to the brink.
So this is where I tell you kids out there that America wasn’t always a fash-adjacent dystopia. There was a time before The Rise of the Super Predators, when America was on a similar path to Western European nations, Australia, Canada, Japan, and other high-income democracies.
Yes, I did mean America. And not, say, Narnia or Wakanda (more realistic these days). If you want just one example, we often led the world in life expectancy in the 1950s and 60s. Well, here we are today in all our “America First” glory:
We didn't arrive here by accident, it was via choices made by Epstein’s Predator Class, from concocted economic theories to enrich the already rich drawn on barroom napkins, to perhaps thinking up policy during turbulent episodes on The Lolita Express.
In the before times, we had an expanding middle class and increasing benefits for workers. President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and, in 1974, offered Democratic legislative leader, Teddy Kennedy, a universal healthcare plan to the left of Obamacare. (Unions pressured Kennedy to hold out for a Democratic President to pass single payer. Bad call. Really bad call).
So what the hell does all of this have to do with Michael Wolff being exposed by the Epstein emails not as savvy chronicler but sleazy advisor? And the billionaires who form the core of The Epstein List, and any cataloguing of predatory activities, from private equity vulture capitalism to tech bro anti-vax vampirism? We’re getting there.
Let’s start with two words, my friends: Two. Ok, three words, and two phrases. Reagan. Human nature. I’ll come back to both:
Psst: God is not who entered the classroom
Ya see, I went to a high school in New York City. The Horace Mann School, to be exact, in the late 80s/early 90s. Alums would eventually be made aware—twenty-odd years later—of a pedophilia scandal that occurred right under our noses. No biggie, just the Headmaster (don’t think it) and President, R. Inslee Clark, who recruited me after 8th grade for my prowess on a dirt (and the new-ish, high-falutin’ polyurethane) track and as a right-winger (don’t think it) on the soccer pitch.
To quote Forrest Gump, “Now you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, but I could run like the wind blows (don’t even think…ok, enough).
Clark also taught a fascinating class called “The Kennedy Years,” during which he’d sometimes walk up to boys—almost always boys—and massage their shoulders during class for a minute or two, before moving on. Meanwhile, my Music History teacher, Johannes Somary, would take classes of students on trips to Europe to see orchestras and opera. And to rape them.
Thank God Guns n’ Roses and Aerosmith were more of my jam.
These two pedophiles and others—a ring you could say—would begin to be exposed after suicides and lawsuits in 2012. Horace Mann’s reaction, ever the cloistered community for masters of the universe, would at first downplay it, then hire “their own investigator” to look into it. Kinda like how OJ was gonna find the “real killers?”
That, my friends, is right around when I cut ties with the school. Forever.
There’s still a Facebook page up called “Processing Horace Mann,” started by alums in the aftermath of the scandal for all of us to discuss the horrors committed by predators at this elite institution. They usually preyed on those from poorer neighborhoods already made to feel out of place among kids who drove red BMW convertibles to school they got as a 17th birthday present (the youngest you could drive alone in NYC), then crashed a week later, only to immediately get a brand new one (true story).
In other words, those who needed friends and self esteem.
And when this was all taking place? Clark was at Horace Mann from 1970-91, or during the time one of Horace Mann’s league rivals, Dalton, employed a certain Jeffrey Epstein to teach math. Epstein sucked at it, and was fired.
So, quite naturally, he ended up in the world of high finance (after rejecting an entreaty to join the NY Times—seriously, the guy was a spy. The only other explanation is an uncanny ability to use the Jedi Mind trick on the unsuspecting).
Horace Mann and Dalton were in a league to compete in athletics. So naturally we called ourselves the “Ivy League,” which obviously wasn’t the slightest bit pretentious. Two weeks ago Jan Ransom of The NY Times made it clear Epstein had his hooks even further into these schools, as The Trinity School and Riverdale Country Day, both posh schools also catering to New York/North Jersey’s elite, had “dozens of mentions” in the Epstein Files (also the Master’s School in Westchester, NY…not in the “Ivy League.” Oh how the must suffer from that snub).
In some cases, hopeful parents contacted Mr. Epstein for help with tuition or gaining admission for their children. In others, he appeared to reach out to the parents on his own initiative.
Horace Mann has had a who’s who of the elite attend over the years. Former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer (who had his own unrelated sex scandal that chased him from office), Arthur Hays Sulzberger, whose grandson A.G. turned The Times into the Biden Is Old Gazette because he was reportedly miffed at Biden for not doing sit down interviews with his paper. Maybe he should ask family members of Alex Pretti or soldiers on the ground in Iran if that was a responsible reaction to a one-sided dick measuring contest when his paper has an outsized influence on our democracy.
And then there’s James Murdoch (yes, that one). He was there when I was, the year behind me. We both spent time running the plush, dog-poop-filled fields of Van Cortlandt Park after school as members of the HM track team. James seemed like a nice enough kid. His dad hadn’t reached infamy yet, and I ended up at parties at his house now and again. He wasn’t what you’d call an able runner, but he did need extra-curriculars and the track team didn’t cut. He did get into Harvard, so I guess it worked.
So you could say I had a front row seat—even though I didn’t know it at the time—to how it would all fall apart as spoiled, selfish self-aggrandizing elites of New York from the Trumps to the Lutnicks to Jeffrey Epstein extracted from all around them.
There were many more names you’d know at the parties and club who’ve gone on to corporatize media and criminalize key vectors of our economy, making millions of lives more miserable [This seems like a good time to mention I’ll be doing a 4-part, sit-down series where I’ll get deep in the details of whom I encountered and what I saw, with Blue Amp Media Contributing Editor, Ellie Leonard].
But it’s time for us to finally get to Michael Wolff’s role in all this. As I said earlier, all it took was Reagan and human nature.
Reagan, to detonate the New Deal consensus that for a half century had created a culture that sustained us and grew the largest middle class in the history of the world. His elevating greed and the individualism made it possible for the existence of Jeffrey Epstein, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and yes, pretend journalists like Michael Wolff.
In the same way we talk about Trump destroying various guardrails today, the guardrail from the early 1930s to the late 1970s was the New Deal Consensus. Even a personally amoral man such as Nixon, as described in the beginning of this piece, operated within it. Hell, Reagan, himself wasn’t fully free of it, as he created The Veterans’ Administration and issued a large scale amnesty for immigrants here illegally,
Yet, Reagan unleashed the one force that’s never left us throughout human history. The temptation the New Deal had tamed, at least for a period of time. The all-powerful, ancient and evil spirit of personal greed. It had only been held in check by legislation and a popular culture shaming those openly displaying it since that fateful day the stock market crashed in 1929.
But once unshackled by The Gipper, it spread like a plague, dancing in the minds of men (and, to a far lesser degree, women). And subsuming every institution it touched.
Greed took a hammer to the Overton Window.
Gone was the worry one would achieve pariah status by proudly flying their greed-freak flag. Hobbes on Line 1! The state of nature, Line 2.
Social acceptance of extreme wealth hoarding and ostentatious displays appeared quickly, leading to outright celebration, even heroism. Movies at the time saw all this coming, from corporate media (Network), to corporate Democrats (The Candidate) to unleashed corporate greed (Wall Street, New Jack City, Pretty Woman).
And the inevitable happened with the guardrail successfully removed, as accruing obscene wealth and power, ludicrous CEO pay, stock manipulation, and gilded-age monopoly enveloped us. The more we unshackled our psychopaths, sadists and narcissists who’d felt their status—their general being—should be rewarded by collecting possessions, people, and wealth via exploitation and extraction, the more they strove to control everything. There would never be enough.
If you didn’t know any of this, you might believe Michael Wolff was a reporter just trying to get to the bottom of the story of Jeffrey Epstein.
Yes it was, how shall we say it, a crock of shit.
Wolff was never merely a reporter orbiting Jeffrey Epstein. He was a creature of this very ecosystem that made Epstein possible: the velvet-rope culture of New York ambition, where access was mistaken for intelligence, cruelty for sophistication, and proximity to predators was proof you mattered. He went to Montclair Kimberley, which was like Horace Mann for the Northern Jersey jet set. Then he went to Vassar, before transferring to Columbia University (where I went to grad school).
Wolff wrote a book…about his own failure during the dot com bubble. Yes, a journalist trying to make it big on the interwebs so he could be in that big club! A columnist for New York Magazine, whose first instinct when it went up for sale wasn’t concern about editorial direction, his column, additional writing opportunities…but putting together the most gross group of marauders outside of Alien Vs Predator: Requiem to try and acquire it: Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Mort Zuckerman (an Epstein client who signed that infamous 50th birthday book, where Trump was…Trump).
One wonders why they didn’t include their other pal they liked to play with, Woody Allen? Did he not have the funds to invest?
Again, Wolff wanted to be The Story. In the big club.
Remember James Murdoch, my schoolmate? Wolff wrote a book about dad, Rupert, who as much as any human being alive has preyed on the carcass of news media and American democracy with Fox “News,” and his other vomitous press outlets. So you’d think such an avatar of journalism done right, like Wolff, wouldn’t defend Murdoch in his News International phone hacking scandal.
You’d be wrong.
Because Wolff wrote the book not to expose Murdoch, but to get to know him, become a power player, travel in his circles. As Michelle Cottle said of Wolff in a 2004 The New Republic piece, he couldn’t care less about the press. He was/is into:
…the power players—the moguls…fixated on culture, style, buzz, and money, money, money…
So the newly revealed emails and back channeling didn’t expose some shocking contradiction in Wolff’s character. They exposed the character itself. Men like Wolff never believed their job was to challenge power. Their job was to flatter it just enough to stay invited to dinner, to the townhouse, to the after-party, to the whispered room where reputations were traded like stock options.
That is what people still miss about Epstein. He was not simply a singular monster. He was the logical endpoint of a culture that taught generations of elite men that appetite was genius and consequence was for other people—and then removed all barriers to their living out their twisted fantasies.
Wolff, Murdoch, Trump, and their fellow social climbers didn’t just tolerate this culture—they translated it into media, politics, and mythology. They made depravity look glamorous, corruption look inevitable, and exploitation look like the spoils of winning.
To give you the whole George Carlin quote as an apt summary for these men who now run politics, business, the military, and so much more:
they want your fucking retirement money, they want it back. So they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something, they’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later.
‘Cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club…and you ain’t in it.
Here’s the part Democrats—and frankly the entire political media class—still haven’t fully learned:
This culture didn’t disappear when Epstein died. It metastasized.
James Murdoch was always in the big club. Michael Wolff sought to get in by any means necessary. I could never live with myself and be in it, so I walked away. And I’ve never regretted it.
The same elite code remains: money as morality, access as virtue, cruelty as sophistication, and journalists too eager to turn monsters into mythology because proximity feels like power.
That’s why this fight is bigger than one dead predator or one grotesque social climber who made a career narrating the rot. I know, I’ve seen it, and I’ll have much more to say about it going forward.
Because this is about whether we finally build an independent media ecosystem strong enough to expose the entire predator class pipeline—from Reagan’s worship of greed to Manhattan’s salons to today’s billionaire-authoritarian protection racket.
That’s what we do here.
Not just headlines.
Not just outrage.
A sustained, sharp, historically grounded case against the corruption culture that keeps manufacturing these men.
If this piece hit you in the gut, become a paid subscriber today.
Because the only way this ends is if independent voices are powerful enough to keep naming the system, not just the symptom.
Let’s make sure they never get to hide behind prestige again.
Grotesque!
I've always thought Epstein was the quintessential con man. He could reflect back to you an image of yourself which is your dream persona. He made tragically bad mistakes when referencing math, so I question his innate abilities. He got by in a similar style to James Murdoch.