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 sick social climber. It’s whether we finally build independent media to expose every last predator and hold ALL accountable.
That’s what Blue Amp Media does. A sustained, sharp, historically grounded case against a culture that manufactures these men. If my piece moves you, become a paid subscriber now.
We Can’t Do This Without You
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 late comedian—I’d argue prophet—George Carlin’s 2005 HBO special, “Life Is Worth Losing.” But that second to last line isn’t quoted as much, and it’s just as important.
We’ve seen what they own with our own eyes, in the two decades before Carlin said it (if you were alive), and the two decades since.
I know, 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 none could be bothered to get off the couch to grab an industrial-sized extinguisher.
Michael Wolff was, and is in this club.
So I’ve become exhausted analyzing non-stop how our politics and culture went so seriously into the crapper 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.”
It’s time to talk about what I saw firsthand.
The banality of evil as a lifestyle choice and accumulation of wealth and power as end goals got us here. I was often invited to participate, though I was suspect. I attended the right institutions, but grew up in a rent-controlled apartment below 59th Street in Manhattan. LOL, you should’ve seen how my school bus emptied—like it’d sprung a VX-gas leak or Stephen Miller climbed aboard to giving dating advice—once we passed that midtown bridge headed downtown on 2nd Avenue.
Writer 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. Many. 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’s helped bring our country, economy, and international standing to the brink…
So this is where, for you kids out there, I add a bit of history for context. America wasn’t always a fash-adjacent dystopia. There was a time before The Rise of the Super Predators that America was on a similar path to Western European nations, Australia, Canada, Japan, and other high-income democracies.
Yes, this America. Not Narnia or Wakanda (though I get they seem 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:
Look, we’re totally whooping Portugal!…
We didn't arrive here by accident, it was choices made by people, if you wanna call them that: Epstein’s Predator Class. From concocted economic theories to enrich the already rich drawn on barroom napkins, to clearly thinking up policy during turbulent rides 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, as well as 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 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, was to at first downplay it, then hire “their own investigator” to look into it. Kinda like how OJ was gonna find the “real killers.”
That 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 to discuss horrors committed by predators at our elite institution. It seems they usually preyed on those from poorer neighborhoods. Those 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 of course we called ourselves the “Ivy League,” which 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 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).
From Ransom’s piece:
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 the former president for not doing sit down interviews with his rag.
Maybe A.G. 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, of those Murdochs). He was there at the same time as me, one 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 got into Harvard if I recall correctly, 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 clubs, men who have gone on in their adulthood to corporatize media and criminalize key vectors of our economy, making millions 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 into the details of whom I encountered and what I saw, with Blue Amp Media Contributing Editor, Ellie Leonard. Date TBD.].
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 created a culture that sustained us and grew the largest middle class in the history of the world. His elevating greed and a radical 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, creating The Veterans’ Administration and issuing a large scale amnesty for immigrants here illegally.
Yet, Reagan unleashed the a force that’s never been vanquished throughout human history. A 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 a myriad of 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, possessing 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 of venality, which attained a kind of heroism. Movies of the time saw it all 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 that guardrail successfully removed, and 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—or general aura—should be rewarded with the collection of possessions, people, and wealth via exploitation and extraction, the more they strove to control everything. There could 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.
Yet that explanation was, how shall we say…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 as 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 the 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 his dear old 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 an avatar of professional journalism, like Wolff, wouldn’t defend Murdoch for his company’s role in a grotesque scandal hacking the phones of the British Royals, celebrities, politicians, even victims of terrorism.
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 monstrous 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.
Excellent article Cliff. I always knew Ronnie Reagan started the destruction of this country by dismantling the regulators and making greed a virtue. I saw it coming and saw fox slowly but surely brainwash the idiot class into accepting all this shit as the new American utopia. Every one of these elite assholes needs to be not only exposed but punished with a severity that makes any future wannabes think twice about trying this shit again. Keep it up brother!!
I take it you got a good laugh out of the Laffer Curve too.