In the 19th century, a Boston entrepreneur named Frederic Tudor started hauling blocks of ice to taverns and restaurants, pitching his stock as a fancy way to keep drinks cold. It was a hit. Tudor was far from the first to put ice in drinks, but he became known as “the Ice King” because of his innovation in branding. He pitched ice as a status symbol. Lukewarm drinks were for chumps and losers. Icy drinks were classy and refined. Amy Brady, author of Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks, a Cool History of a Hot Commodity, told Vanity Fair that ice became “this thing to strive for … it’s imbued with this sense of aspiration.” Americans took to ice in droves because, she says, it came to represent “upward class mobility—or at least that illusion of upward class mobility.”
The U.S. is a fake-it-till-you-make-it paradise. If you’re not rich, just pretend. Do what they do until they accept you as one of their own. This impulse is benign enough when it comes to icy drinks, but there are darker places where imitation becomes complicity. As the Apostle Paul warns us in 1 Timothy 6:9: “But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.” And if you want proof of Paul’s words, look no further than the release of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails.
Epstein was a multi-millionaire and sex offender who died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking allegations. The “Epstein files” refer to a massive collection of documents—including court records, flight logs, contact books, and seized digital materials—tied to his investigations. The proposed public release of these documents has been the source of all sorts of political conflict and controversy. Given the fraction that’s been released so far, it’s not hard to see why.
In just the small sliver we’ve already seen, left-wing figures like public intellectual Noam Chomsky and attorney Kathryn Ruemmler trade emails with Epstein, as do MAGA architects like Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, and President Donald Trump himself. While emailing Epstein is not, by itself, a crime, it’s clear that his network was vast, and remained so long after his sex crimes were known to the public. You get the same sense from flipping through Epstein’s infamous “birthday book,” which is a who’s who of the New York City social scene, offering Epstein a series of winking, knowing birthday messages. A crude poem and drawing, allegedly written by Trump himself, became the most famous entry. But the book also had messages from the likes of former President Bill Clinton, fashion designer Vera Wang, and lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
Reading all this fosters a kind of despair. Is this what it is to be rich and powerful? Tudor convinced rich Americans that ice was a quintessential part of making it in the U.S. Did Epstein convince rich Americans that a tolerance of sexual abuse is also part of the equation?
Some public reactions seem to disturbingly affirm that conclusion. Right-wing political scientist Richard Hanania—a writer with a documented history of racist, white nationalist views—disputes the idea that Epstein and his alleged clients were pedophiles, writing that male attraction to teenagers is so universal that “to call being attracted to 17-year-olds pedophilia is basically calling all men pedophiles.” Right-wing journalist Megyn Kelly soft-pedaled a version of the same argument, claiming that she has a friend closer to the Epstein investigation who told her that Epstein “is not a pedophile” because “he liked 15-year-old girls.”
“I’m not trying to make an excuse for this,” Kelly insisted. “I’m just giving you facts.”
READ MORE: Is the Epstein Controversy an Apocalyptic Moment for the MAGA Movement?
What we’re seeing here is a sort of trickle-down morality, where the vices of wealthy and powerful people start to mutate the consciences of everyone else. I do not think you’d see this ethical hemming and hawing if a poor person got caught exploiting teenage girls for his friends. We would all rightly call such behavior deviant and predatory. But the rules are different when the deviant predator is connected and influential. Who wants to alienate themselves from a club they hope to join?
What we’re seeing here is a sort of trickle-down morality, where the vices of wealthy and powerful people start to mutate the consciences of everyone else.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, a physician named Bill (Tom Cruise) scams his way into a mansion hosting a strange sex cult made up of masked elites. After he’s found out and dramatically ejected from the soirée, Bill spends the next day trying to piece together exactly what happened—and how much danger he’s in. His friend Victor, who is secretly a member of the cult, assures him that it’s all a mirage.
“Did you ever consider the possibility that the whole thing might have been nothing more than a charade?”
Bill doesn’t buy it. He saw sinister things happening, and he believes powerful people were involved. So, Victor clarifies, pointedly, to Bill’s face that it was a “charade played out for the benefit of someone who didn’t belong.” He was telling Bill the same thing comedian George Carlin would later tell his audiences: “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”
Kubrick’s point in the film is that the people who attend these events aren’t united by libertine desire but by status. The ritual is an initiation into a world defined by secrecy, hierarchy, and the intoxicating feeling of being permitted to do what others cannot. Bill’s presence was a problem not because of what he saw, but because he didn’t belong to the class of people who are allowed to see it. The powerful shame the lowly.
But of course, we don’t have to be kicked out of these perverse parties to be shamed by them. We have all, as a country, been pulled into this ugly, degrading affair. I do not enjoy spending any of my one, wild, precious life studying the activities of powerful deviants. I do not enjoy living in a country where we are so busy trying to bring some measure of justice to known criminals that we scarcely have time for art and beauty. The amount of mental space we must give to these horrid affairs just to keep them at bay is appalling. We were created for more than this.
Maybe this is why Jesus’ kingdom looks nothing like this one. Paul writes that God chose “what is foolish” to shame the wise, and “what is weak” to shame the strong (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). The gospel’s moral economy starts from the bottom and works its way up, not from the top down. It is an upside-down kingdom where the powerful don’t shame the lowly, the lowly shame the powerful. In such a kingdom, status is not something to imitate, and vice is not something that trickles down. Justice rises from the margins and spreads from there.
Frederic Tudor sold ice as a symbol of social arrival, and Americans drank it up. Epstein and the culture around him revealed a more insidious instinct: a willingness to overlook sexual abuse if doing so keeps you aligned with those who seem unaccountable. But Jesus offers another way, one where our moral vision is shaped not by those at the top but by Christ, who identified with the poor, the exploited, and the powerless. In a world where trickle-down morality leads to devastation, the kingdom of God grows from the ground up.
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