Here’s my Gen X confession: I’m not wide-eyed about Epstein because I’ve been marinating in this storyline my entire life.

I saw Eyes Wide Shut and understood the metaphor immediately. I grew up during the satanic panic era. I watched decades of crime TV where every season ended in a warehouse, a shipping container, or some shadow network moving terrified people around like inventory. I’ve heard Alex Jones talk about occult elites. I’ve watched QAnon build cinematic universes out of trafficking rumors. I’ve listened to No Agenda break down elite hypocrisy. I’ve read the “more slavery now than ever before” statistics for decades.

By the time Epstein became front-page news, it didn’t feel like a genre shift. It felt like the latest episode in a very long series about power, secrecy, vice, and the fact that when people operate without constraint, they often slide toward appetite.

That doesn’t make it acceptable. It makes it unsurprising.

We’ve also lived through decades of cultural contradictions. People dismiss the satanic panic of the 1980s as hysteria but insist that modern revelations are categorically different, as if exploitation was invented in 1995. Meanwhile, everyone quietly understands that wealth plus insulation plus status equals access, and access plus lack of accountability creates rot.

On top of that, I’ve seen enough of the social climbing ecosystem to know how proximity works. There are always “tests.” Always blurred lines. Always a gradient from harmless indulgence to moral compromise. Power circles are rarely wholesome summer camps.

And culturally, we’ve never exactly been naive about age gaps, sexual scandal, or hypocrisy. America pretends to be shocked while simultaneously producing endless narratives about the older executive and the barely-legal assistant. Europe shrugs at age differences that would light up American cable news for weeks. Hawaii’s age of consent was 14 until 2001. The world has always had wildly inconsistent norms.

So when people clutch pearls as if they’ve just discovered that powerful men can be grotesque, I feel less outrage theater and more weary recognition.

The revelation isn’t that depravity exists. The revelation is that some people thought it didn’t.

That’s my Gen X baseline.