Trump-Epstein Friendship Month Statues. Photograph Source: Joe Flood – CC BY 4.0

There’s a reason we talk more about power than individual people. Take Jeffrey Epstein.

The man is dead, but the power problem lives on. The files not only revealed a whole lot of individual predators, but also an entire ecosystem of money, and power, and abuse, and protection by bankers, and billionaires, and politicians, and protectors, many of whom continue to wield enormous power at the very height of our society today.

Put that creepy picture next to another, one of a sprawling network of secretive detention centers and camps where tens of thousands of people, including women and girls, are hidden away in far off places and moved from camp to camp and state to state and cage to cage without documents or phones or anyone to hear their calls. We do not come to this moment uninformed.

We know about women abused in detention. We know about children disappeared for years. We know about trans people supposedly put in solitary for their own protection, but abused. And we know that misogynists don’t come wearing clan hoods or slave patrol badges, but look like anyone raised in our sexist, hierarchical society who believes they can get away with being cruel.

So if Congress fails to prosecute the powerful and tear down this system today, they are not only failing to prevent the next Jeffrey Epstein from coming around, they are using federal policy to build and maintain his trafficking machine.