Democrats invented the Epstein Class but won’t tell you who’s in it

There’s a peculiar game being played in Washington right now, and it reveals more about the left’s messaging strategy than they’d probably like to admit. Democrats have conjured up a new villain for the 2026 midterms. They’re calling it the Epstein Class, a term so deliberately loaded with sinister implications that it practically drips with accusation. The problem? Nobody seems willing to actually name who belongs to this shadowy cabal.

You know what strikes me about this whole charade? It’s the intellectual cowardice of it all. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are out there railing against Elon Musk potentially becoming the first trillionaire after SpaceX’s IPO. They’re using this Epstein Class language with abandon. Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff has picked it up. Maryland Representative Jaime Raskin too. It’s spreading through progressive circles like wildfire at a campaign rally.

But when journalist David Marcus actually pressed Representative Ro Khanna of California, one of the term’s leading proponents, to name names, the congressman suddenly got cagey. Marcus offered him easy targets. Musk himself. George Soros, the left’s favorite billionaire benefactor. Tom Steyer, who burned through his fortune trying to buy the California governorship. Khanna wouldn’t bite on any of them.

This isn’t just political messaging. It’s character assassination by implication, a tactic that should offend anyone who believes in honest debate. The left has decided they need a rebranding of their old “one percent” rhetoric because frankly, that got stale. Americans stopped caring when they realized the one percent included their successful neighbors, the small business owner who made it big, the entrepreneur who took risks and won.

So now we get the Epstein Class, named after a convicted sex trafficker whose crimes were genuinely monstrous. The associations are intentional and ugly. But here’s the thing about throwing around terms with such vile connotations: you’d better be prepared to back them up with specifics. You’d better be ready to point fingers and make your case.

The refusal to name names isn’t an accident. It’s a feature, not a bug. Keep the enemy vague and you can apply the label to anyone who becomes inconvenient. Today it might be Musk because he’s not playing ball with the regulatory state. Tomorrow it could be any business leader who questions progressive orthodoxy on climate policy or labor unions or whatever the cause of the week happens to be.

This kind of rhetorical sleight of hand insults the intelligence of American voters. We’re supposed to be outraged at this sinister Epstein Class, but we’re not allowed to know who’s actually in it? We’re meant to fear their influence, their wealth, their power, but the accusers won’t specify who they’re accusing?

It reminds me of the old communist tactic of identifying class enemies without ever quite defining what made someone an enemy. Keep the criteria fuzzy enough and anyone can be targeted. Keep the accusations vague enough and nobody can mount an effective defense. It’s brilliant politics if you have no scruples about fairness or truth.

The irony gets even richer when you consider that Democrats have no problem taking money from billionaires. They just prefer their billionaires to be the right kind, the ones who fund the approved causes and stay quiet about government overreach. Soros can pump hundreds of millions into progressive district attorney races and that’s just civic engagement. But let a conservative billionaire support school choice or question climate regulations and suddenly we’re talking about oligarchy.

What we’re witnessing is the left’s fundamental discomfort with success that doesn’t bend the knee to their agenda. Free market capitalism creates winners, and those winners have resources and influence. That’s always bothered progressives who believe the state should be the ultimate arbiter of who gets what. But in America, we still mostly believe that people who create value, who build companies and take risks, deserve the rewards that come with success.

The Epstein Class rhetoric is dangerous precisely because it’s designed to bypass rational argument. It’s emotional manipulation dressed up as populist concern. And the fact that its own proponents won’t define it tells you everything you need to know about its legitimacy as a political concept.

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