The Epstein Files as a Mirror | State of Belief | jaymichaelson.net

Jay Michaelson is an award-winning journalist, meditation teacher, podcast host, and author of ten books.

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The Epstein Files as a Mirror | State of Belief

Monday, March 2nd, 2026 | Multimedia, Law/Politics/Religion

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Recent Articles

What the Manosphere Has in Common with Martin Luther, Jacob Frank, and Allen Ginsberg

Apr 3rd, 2026 in Both/And
Democrats Have a ‘Genocide’ Problem

Apr 3rd, 2026 in MSNBC
Passover’s 4 cups of meaning

Mar 31st, 2026 in Forward
It Matters that Marc Andreessen is Sometimes Really Dumb

Mar 26th, 2026 in Both/And
Antisemitism Explodes on the Right, Watchdogs Blame the Left (but the Left has problems too)

Mar 20th, 2026 in Both/And
more...

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Academic @ emory @harvard
Journalist jaymichaelson.substack.com & @jdforward
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jaymichaelson.net

Come join us at @newyorkinsight on Saturday April1

Come join us at @newyorkinsight on Saturday April18th, in person or online, for a half day retreat on queer sexuality in a Buddhist perspective. It's a chance to meditate, discuss, inquire, and connect with your fellow queer dharma practitioners -- register at nyimc.org or using the QR code here.

Spent a lot of time with #WilliamJames these last

Spent a lot of time with #WilliamJames these last few days at the Psychedelics Intersections conference at @harvard . This question captures one conundrum really well.

This week, I’m sharing a short guided meditation f

This week, I’m sharing a short guided meditation for *gestures broadly at everything.*

Often, meditation is used as an escape — a refuge. And honestly, that is fine. In this practice, though, the invitation is to use the lens of mindfulness to explore feelings you might be resisting (for good reason) and give them a moment to be seen. I find it to be of great help in times like these.

I hope you will as well.

Democrats have a “genocide” problem. And they need

Democrats have a “genocide” problem. And they need to face it directly.

Polls have shown that somewhere between 72% and 77% of Democrats believe that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. But a significant percentage disagree, with some — particularly American Jews — alleging that the charge itself is evidence of antisemitic bias.

No answer is without its costs. To answer “no” is a deal-breaker for progressives — “disqualifying,” in the words of online commentator Matt Bernstein. Yet to answer “yes” is disqualifying for many centrists. And to say “it’s complicated” — as potential presidential contender Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and congressional candidate Scott Wiener of California have tried recently — doesn’t please anybody.

Behold, the Democrats’ circular firing squad.

Read more at MS.NOW -- link in bio.

Adrienne Rich on the meaning she finds in Jewishne

Adrienne Rich on the meaning she finds in Jewishness:

There is something more to Jewishness than food, humor, a turn of phrase, a gesture of the hands... That's why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)

I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now, but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history.

The Manosphere is an antinomian movement. It arose

The Manosphere is an antinomian movement. It arose in response to feminism and, most recently, #MeToo, which can be seen as an assertion of legal power against the privilege of men. But it is obviously not new. For centuries, men had legal and thus a kind of moral authority to oppress women.

Yet in the twentieth century, that legal authority started to shift. Increasingly, men’s liberty to do whatever they wanted to women began to be constrained by law. And so the manosphere rebels, pretending they’ve discovered something new when really it is the recovery of something quite old: men’s freedom from legal and moral constraints, especially regarding women but also regarding amassing wealth and power.

Read more at jaymichaelson.substack.com

In the context of the #meaningcrisis and reactiona

In the context of the #meaningcrisis and reactionary responses to it, I find the observance of Passover, and the Passover Seder in particular, to be a much-needed antidote to disorientation on one hand, and oppressive traditionalism on the other.

Fittingly, for a holiday obsessed with the number four, I explore this in four ways — if you like, the Four Cups of Meaning that can be part of the Passover Seder.

Read more at forward.com

@jdforward

Honestly, this #auden poem is just eerie to read r

Honestly, this #auden poem is just eerie to read right now. Sometimes history doesn't just rhyme.

Marc Andreessen, one of the most influential 'inte

Marc Andreessen, one of the most influential 'intellectuals' in Silicon Valley, has said that introspection is a bad thing. How can someone so brilliant also be so dumb?

To these oligarch-intellectuals, becoming a captain of industry means one is qualified to effectively rule the human race, as if excellence along one vector of optimization implies excellence in all of them.

Up now at jaymichaelson.substack.com

This quote is absolute perfection. Thanks @donshe

This quote is absolute perfection.

Thanks @donsheweynyc for sharing it earlier.

In light of the Right's weaponization of antisemit

In light of the Right's weaponization of antisemitism to deflect criticism and attack the Left, it is understandable that progressives’ reflexive response to accusations of antisemitism is to dismiss them. But to do so would be a mistake. Antisemitism does exist on the left; ask any Jewish person active in progressive spaces. Moreover, the failure to condemn and root out real antisemitism strengthens nationalists, racists, and fascists: first by enabling them to defame and delegitimize progressive movements, and second by advancing their own nativist, antisemitic agenda. It is also a betrayal of progressive values.

What is needed is both a rejection of the Antisemitism Industrial Complex’s weaponization of antisemitism and of antisemitism itself.

This week, in Both/And and @unpopulistmag , I sketch out what that might look like.

https://jaymichaelson.substack.com/p/nationalist-antisemitism-explodes

America’s antisemitism watchdogs are committing in

America’s antisemitism watchdogs are committing institutional malpractice.

While antisemitism explodes on the right, including throughout the Donald Trump administration and popular right-wing online spaces, anti-antisemitism organizations are disproportionally focusing on left-wing anti-Zionists and Muslim politicians, minimizing if not ignoring white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and Christian nationalists — many of whom are active in Republican political circles.

Read more at forward.com -- link in bio. @jdforward

For any single thing of importance, there are mult

For any single thing of importance, there are multiple reasons.

#mscottpeck

As the ADL's #neverisnow gathering begins this wee

As the ADL's #neverisnow gathering begins this week in the wake of last week's antisemitic attack in Michigan, I wrote up a deep dive into some of the most alarming instances of #antisemitism within the Trump administration and the most popular figures online. Why is the Jewish Establishment still focusing on left-wing activists when antisemitism is pervasive throughout the Right?

I answer that too.

Read it now at forward.com . @jdforward

In a way, it seems obvious that movements for chan

In a way, it seems obvious that movements for change need many different kinds of activism. There have to be the protesters on the street, and the deal-makers in the conference room. There need to be radicals taking a stand and pragmatists working with the ‘other side.’ Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund. ACT-UP and HRC. Occupy and the Democratic Party (part of it, anyway). And now, frontline protesters on the streets of Minneapolis and lawyers fighting in the courts; sloganeering memes and think pieces; clear calls to conscience and pragmatic politicians who can actually win their elections.

But it is not obvious; in fact, many people disagree that both moderate and radical forms of activism are necessary, and these constituencies frequently loathe one another.

Read more at jaymichaelson.substack.com

Both/And with #hermannhesse

Both/And with #hermannhesse

Oversimplification is a species of anti-intellectu

Oversimplification is a species of anti-intellectualism, and anti-intellectualism is the handmaiden of dogmatism — usually from the Right, but sometimes from the Left as well. It’s a lot simpler to blame the immigrants, the Jews, the corporations, Israel, or the Woke Mob than to say, yet again, that the causes of a crisis are complex and interrelated. For all the truth about the ‘Epstein Class,’ there’s also the falsehood that our entire economic and political miasma is due to a shadowy cabal of elite pedophiles. That is too simple, and oversimplification leads to conspiracy theories.

Indeed, even the most baroque, outrageous conspiracy theory is, in a sense, simpler than accommodating the multiple array of causes for a phenomenon and the biggest complexity of all: that there is no one minding the store.

I want to resist this urge to simplify. Were I still working as an activist, or a pundit with thirty seconds to make my point, I would, no doubt, still do so as a matter of necessity. But the better way is to accommodate ourselves to complexity, nuance, and uncertainty. These are our allies in the fight against the mob.

Read more at jaymichaelson.substack.com

Wise and careful words from @repyassansari .

Wise and careful words from
@repyassansari .

Before the war started, I had the pleasure of talk

Before the war started, I had the pleasure of talking with Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush on the @state_of_belief podcast about the moral and political importance of the Epstein Files release.

Available wherever you get your podcasts and at the link in bio.

Nihilism seems to be everywhere today: in online c

Nihilism seems to be everywhere today: in online culture, in politics, in celebrity culture, and perhaps above all, in the high rates of hopelessness and meaninglessness reported by Gen-Z Americans. And a lot of it is grounded in reality: the death of the American economic dream (which is partly inevitable but is largely due to greed among the richest); the uncertainties of AI’s economic impacts, of climate disruption, and of the global rise in right-wing nationalism; and the decline in the kinds of shared beliefs, community, and culture that provided coherence and relationship to human beings for generations. It’s realistic to wonder and even despair about what lies ahead.

But the extent and expressions of this societal nihilism are still shocking when stared at directly.

This week in Both/And -- jaymichaelson.substack.com

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