Disappearing Bodies: Epstein, ICE, and the Hidden Architecture of Gangster Capitalism
S. E. Anderson
Disappearing Bodies: Epstein, ICE, and the Hidden Architecture of Gangster Capitalism
Disappearance under neoliberal fascism does not operate through a single institutional or aesthetic form. Alongside the spectacular violence of ICE raids, militarized policing, and the public staging of racialized terror exists a quieter, long-standing mode of disappearance practiced by elites and insulated from democratic scrutiny. The case of Jeffrey Epstein exposes this hidden register with disturbing clarity. What unites these seemingly distinct regimes of disappearance is not only the violence they enact but the way they are consumed. ICE raids circulate as viral footage, cable news spectacle, and partisan theater. Epstein’s crimes reappear endlessly as podcasts, Netflix docuseries, continuous news alerts, and conspiratorial gossip. In both cases, atrocity is converted into content, stripped of historical depth and severed from the economic system that produces it. Gangster capitalism survives not simply by disappearing bodies, but by transforming disappearance into consumable spectacle.
Where contemporary fascist governance increasingly places violence on full display, externalized and dramatized as a public pedagogy of fear, Epstein’s operation depended on secrecy, misogynist terror, and the systematic annihilation of social conscience. This was the hidden violence of gangster capitalism, planned and executed in the exclusive spaces of the ruling class—billionaire townhouses, private islands, elite restaurants, and country clubs—where zombie politics thrives through greed, domination, and an anesthetizing language that renders cruelty banal and power obscene. At the core of this cultural and political cesspool is what Melinda Cooper calls a class of “billionaire patriarchs of the American far-right [who] want to rule an economy of masters and servants." This anesthetization is crucial. Violence that once provoked moral outrage, if not shock, is now folded into the rhythms of everyday media consumption. Raids become clips. Survivors become case studies. Abuse becomes trivia. Under this regime, suffering is neither denied nor confronted; it is endlessly circulated without consequence, producing familiarity rather than outrage.
Epstein’s victims did not vanish into detention centers or public raids. They disappeared into private aircraft, gated estates, billionaire-owned townhouses, and transnational circuits of wealth and influence, shielded by dense entanglements linking oligarchs, politicians, intelligence services, and global finance. Global sex trafficking operated as a system of pleasure, profit, and risk for a billionaire class convinced that money confers immunity from law, justice, and consequence. This ruling caste of ghouls is sustained by a state that treats the disappearance of migrants, the cold-blooded killing of citizens, and the spread of concentration camps across American soil as legitimate instruments of governance. Within this logic, civic resistance to fascism is rebranded as domestic terrorism, exposing dissenters to surveillance, disappearance, or death. The Epstein case reveals the other side of this machinery: how women are made to vanish into chambers of sexual terror, lured by fraudulent job offers, trapped by lies and manipulation, and, at times, seized outright by force.
In this sense, ICE and Epstein share a final, chilling convergence: both are narrated as aberrations rather than expressions of a corrupt and exploitative system. ICE abuses are framed as policy excesses or rogue enforcement. Epstein is rendered an exceptional monster, detached from the financial, political, and intelligence networks that sustained him. This isolation is ideological. It prevents systemic recognition by recoding structural violence as scandal, misconduct, or spectacle—events to be consumed, debated, and forgotten rather than understood as endemic to gangster capitalism itself.
This is not a departure from the politics of disappearance but its upper register of the workings of gangster capitalism—run by the rich billionaire class. Both ICE enforcement regimes and Epstein’s network were allegedly sites of human trafficking; both enacted extreme cruelty; both were grounded in white supremacist, patriarchal, and racialized logics of disposability. The distinction lies not in violence but in visibility: the authoritarian state now stages disappearance as spectacle, while elites have long perfected disappearance under the cover of respectability, secrecy, and impunity.
What is newly unsettling is not simply what these revelations expose, but how easily they are absorbed. Irony functions here as a technology of moral evacuation, dulling judgment and shielding elite brutality from sustained reckoning. Yet the deeper danger lies elsewhere. Epstein does not interrupt this argument; he completes it, exposing gangster capitalism as a toxic system that disappears bodies through both overt terror and hidden privilege, through raids and secrecy alike. When disappearance becomes entertainment, accountability collapses. The public is trained to binge on cruelty rather than trace its causes. This is how gangster capitalism governs affect: by producing endless scenes of horror while foreclosing the possibility of structural understanding.
To confront this machinery requires more than reform, exposure, or moral revulsion. It demands a clear-eyed understanding of how power operates across its visible and concealed dimensions—and a politics willing to name gangster capitalism itself as the enemy. Any viable form of resistance must therefore aim not to humanize this system, but to dismantle and overthrow it before disappearance becomes the final, normalized condition of political life.
*I want to thank Rania Filippakou for helping me think through many of the ideas in this article.
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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