The Twenty-First Century Hellfire Club

Darwin Holmstrom
OpEds

What’s an Arkansas virgin? An eight-year-old who can run faster than Bill Clinton.
—Traditional Arkansas hillbilly joke

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n his essay on Roxanne Pulitzer’s divorce trial (“A Dog Took My Place,” Rolling Stone, July-August, 1983), Hunter S. Thompson wrote: “The stomping of the rich is not a noise to be ignored in troubled times. It usually means they are feeling anxious and confused about something, and when the rich feel anxious and confused, they act like wild animals.”

The rich and powerful acting like wild animals is nothing new. For example, former British Prime Minister David Cameron stepped down after being outed for orally sodomizing a dead hog. He claims he only inserted his penis into the stuffed head of a dead pig as part of his initiation into the notorious Oxford dining society Piers Gaveston, which specializes in bizarre rituals and sexual excess, and he could be telling the truth. As far as we know Cameron has no particular fetish for porcine sodomy, but still, the prime minister of the United Kingdom skull fucked a dead hog.


Even in a world where British prime ministers sodomize dead hogs, the Jeffrey Epstein case is a little special. Epstein was arrested not once but twice for raping and sex trafficking hundreds, maybe thousands of children. Epstein’s appetite for raping children was so voracious that for his birthday business partner Jean-Luc Brunel once presented him with a matched set of three twelve-year-old French triplets to sodomize as his birthday present. “Jeffrey bragged after he met them that they were twelve-year-olds flown over from France because they’re really poor over there, and their parents needed the money,” Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s many victims, testified in a recently-unsealed transcript from a 2015 court case. According to the transcripts she met the three girls, each of whom made quite an impression on Epstein; after the fact he repeatedly described to Giuffre how the girls had massaged him and performed oral sex on him.

Epstein turned his predilection for raping children into a lucrative enterprise, building a business empire of child rape with clientele that apparently included U.S. presidents and British royals. This isn’t ordinary perversion; this is Hellfire Club shit. The Hellfire Club, the brainchild of Sir Francis Dashwood, kept a collective tight lip when it came to sharing intimate details of its epic debauchery, but nonetheless sordid odds and ends of genuinely heinous activities slipped into the shadowy alcoves of public consciousness. Founded in 1746, the Hellfire Club (officially called the Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe) found a permanent home in a refurbished abbey. Dashwood had the club’s official motto, Fay ce que voudras (“do what thou wilt”), carved over the door.

What thou wilt tended toward hedonism that would make Anthony “Carlos Danger” Weiner blush. We’re talking Satanic orgies the likes of which Aleister Crowley only experienced in his wildest masturbatory fantasies. Paintings depict naked Hellfire Club members drunkenly gnawing on the bones of dead dogs in the main hall, an activity that pales compared to rumors of what took place in the back rooms of the abbey where elite members gathered. The Hellfire Club would have made a perfect setting for one of Jeffrey Epstein’s Eyes Wide Shut pizza parties.

Epstein had homes around the world, including on his own private island in the Virgin Isles, but his primary residence seemed to be Florida’s Palm Beach, which is no surprise, really. “The very name Palm Beach, long synonymous with aristocratic style, was coming to be associated with berserk sleaziness,” Thompson wrote in 1983. “It’s a place where pampered animals are openly worshipped in church and naked millionaires gnaw the brassieres off the chests of their own daughters in public.” In other words, it was a hospitable locale for Epstein’s modern interpretation of the Hellfire Club.

Palm Beach was also where Epstein first ran afoul of the legal system. In 2006 Florida authorities charged Epstein with multiple counts of molestation and unlawful sexual activity with a minor. In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution from a minor. He was required to register as a sex offender and received an astonishingly mild jail sentence of thirteen months spent in a private cell, with unlimited visitors—including young women—and daily release so his driver could chauffeur him to work in his Palm Beach office.

Though lenient compared to the consequences a peasant would face for the same crimes, Epstein’s sentence was Draconian compared to any consequences faced by members in good standing of the Hellfire Club or very rich Palm Beach residents. The fact that a supposed billionaire like Epstein even ended up in court in the first place is surprising because a rich person has to put his back into running afoul of the law in Palm Beach. The county sheriff said he was astonished that Epstein had to go to prison. That’s how things work for the very rich in Palm Beach, where, as Hunter Thompson wrote, “Rich is strong, poor is weak, and the government works for whoever pays its salaries... The police are no problem in Palm Beach. We own them and they know it.” For a rich person to encounter legal problems in Palm Beach, even a child sex trafficker like Epstein, takes some gumption.

Everyone involved expected it to blow over and be forgotten, like every other heinous crime committed by the very rich because that’s how they roll in Palm Beach. At first this appeared to be how the embarrassing Epstein debacle would play out, but in this new world where information can be dispersed electronically without passing through the filter of corporate media, people began to learn about the case. They noticed Epstein’s preferential treatment and began discussing it on Facebook and Twitter. As social media evolved from a place to post cat photos into a genuinely democratic communications media, more and more people became aware of Epstein’s ridiculously lenient sentence. People noticed, and most found the situation utterly disgusting. Revulsion to the Epstein debacle even began to intrude on the ruling elite’s control of the political narrative. Bill Clinton having been a frequent flyer on the Lolita Express, Epstein’s private jet/flying child brothel, undoubtedly contributed to Hillary getting beaten by Trump. Something had to give, and in July 2019 it did; Epstein was arrested on federal charges of sex trafficking minors.

In his first brush with the law, Epstein had the varsity squad of servants of the rich protecting him, heavy hitters such as Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz, Palm Beach county state attorney Barry Krischer, and the Miami office U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta. They came close to getting Epstein off completely, but ultimately had to settle for his serving a little time in what amounted to a state-funded bed and breakfast retreat.

Epstein’s initial lenient sentence began to make a bit more sense after the public learned that Acosta had arranged for Epstein to avoid the same punishment a mere peasant would face because Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” In other words, Epstein was an intelligence asset who sex trafficked children to members of the ruling elite like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Richardson, George Mitchell, Alan Dershowitz, Britain’s Prince Andrew, and virtually every other politician and celebrity, based on the contacts in Epstein’s little black book, as part of a blackmailing operation conducted for the intelligence community. Epstein was operating a honey trap of the highest order.

A honey trap—trapping people by appealing to their particular perversions, filming them engaging in said perversions, then using the recordings to blackmail them into doing the bidding of the intelligence community—is one of the oldest tricks in the trade of spy craft. For a completely hypothetical example of how this works, imagine that a U.S. presidential candidate shared the predilection of British prime ministers for sodomizing dead hogs. The candidate is introduced to a dashing, mysterious billionaire who offers to fly the candidate around on a private jet, nicknamed the Porcine Express because it’s packed with succulent dead hogs to sodomize. The mysterious billionaire even brings the candidate to visit Porkophile Isle, his private tropical island, which is balls deep in dead hogs.

The candidate wins the election and immediately his transition team receives a detailed memo from Goldman Sachs telling them exactly who the now president-elect will appoint to his cabinet, including, for example, appointing as secretary of treasury a man who played a key role in orchestrating the greatest financial collapse in history, the former head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. The president elect might not cooperate at first, but after he meets with members of the intelligence community and views hour after hour of footage showing him skull fucking dead hogs on the Porcine Express, his resistance to installing the Goldman Sachs-approved cabinet virtually disappears.

As confirmed rakes and iconoclasts, the Hellfire society in England mock-worshipped pagan gods such as Priapus

Even though “bestiality is the key to it,” as Thompson wrote, the honey in Epstein’s trap tended toward the more pedestrian perversion of pedophilia. The voluminous footage of the power elite raping children that Epstein compiled, which is probably being destroyed by intelligence community IT trolls as I write this, would prove problematic for the very rich starring in that footage. By now most people with the capacity for abstract thought were aware of Epstein and his associates’ favorite pastime of raping children so the legal varsity squad didn’t step in to bail him out this time around. That meant being arrested ensured Epstein would not live long in prison. Everyone knew it, including Epstein himself, who told guards and fellow inmates he believed someone was trying to kill him. And of course he was found dead from a virtually impossible “suicide.” In the most improbable sequence of coincidences and mistakes in recorded history, Epstein somehow managed to commit suicide in his jail cell, which is a common fate for intelligence community assets when they are finally brought into the judicial system and become a liability to the ruling elite.

No one knows how this will play out, including the very rich, who are behaving like such wild animals that they are more anxious and confused than they have ever been before. The one thing that is absolutely clear is that the ruling elite consists primarily of glorified pimps and whoremongers. “There is a bull market for whoremongers all over the country these days,” Hunter wrote in 1983, and that hasn’t changed. Not bringing Epstein to trial means that his very rich clients won’t have to testify under oath about having been filmed in the act of raping children, so they’ve at least got that going for them. Whether suicided or not, Jeffrey Epstein is out of the pimp business, but whoremongers like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are still enjoying a bull market.