Serious Men and the Water They Swim In

I’ll never forget the feeling I got about an hour into reading Hillary Clinton’s emails after they were released in 2016. It was the kind of feeling only a 12 syllable German word could do justice, composed of equal parts relief, admiration, boredom, and an acute, mushrooming anger. 

Anger at the (male) pundits, (male) politicians, and (male owned) media companies that had sold me a Hillary-hating bill of goods for years, and at my damn (male) self for buying way more of it than I had realized. 

I was With Her, of course. It was about a month before the election and I wasn’t the least bit hesitant about supporting Clinton against her odious opponent. But as I read through her emails I began to understand the extent to which I had bought into the caricature of Hillary the Shrew that the media had been pitching to Americans like me for so long.

I found myself, over and over again, surprised at how, well, normal this hyper-capable, powerful person  seemed. How collegial a colleague, how doting a mother, how excited a Broadway ticket-holder.  

There were dozens of notes checking in on friends about sick kids, aging parents or injured pets. Thoughtful letters of thanks to departing staffers. Jokes, recipes, notes of encouragement to twelve year-old girls, goofy conversations about tv shows, sincere and un-self-conscious expressions of faith. And many, many communications about the pursuit and protection of women’s rights around the world.

The picture of Clinton that emerged from the emails was radically unlike the cynical, vaguely corrupt, nagging school marm that had been painted for me by the Serious Men of Politics. 

Not only were the emails entirely free of nefarious, conspiratorial content, they reflected a personality – realistic, instinctively practical, open to opposing points of view — which seemed fundamentally averse to such impulses. 

And as far as national security went, the idea that the earnestly patriotic, capable Secretary of State in the emails was somehow a risk to national security was laughable.

And yet. 

None of that kept the Serious Men from stopping the presses when they smelled political blood. Or plastering the story across their front pages for weeks. Or speaking of almost nothing else, pushing aside topics of genuine import, including the actual threat to national security posed by ongoing Russian interference in the election. 

The Serious Men, in their frenzy, would fatally derail Secretary Clinton’s campaign for president. 

Because they were very concerned with what the emails of powerful people might reveal about the crimes they commit and the threats they pose to national security.

Unless, of course, they are not written by powerful women. 

Even if the emails reveal a… how to put this…a vast rightwing conspiracy, say, a sociopathic enterprise of unfathomable depravity, reach and civilization-destorying ambitions. Even then, it would seem, those cases won't rate But Her Emails-level coverage. There will be no plastering of front pages.

A week after the latest and most sizable release of the Epstein emails on Jan. 31st, the topic is, unsurprisingly, not dominating the national discourse. It certainly hasn’t approached anything like the attention that greeted the release of Clinton’s emails in 2016. 

Donald Trump has been asked about the files by a reporter exactly once, by CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins, who the president, in a grotesquely sexist response given the context, then berated for not smiling more often. It should be noted that his remark was met with silence by Collins’ very Serious colleagues. 

Two days after the emails were released, exactly one guest appeared on a Sunday talk show to speak about the material: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blache, on Fox’s State of the Union.

There have been no indictments, no subpoenas issued to the men in the emails, no press conferences called by congressional leadership. 

That’s because the stories of Hillary’s emails and the Epstein emails are really one story. A story about the misogyny that sends the political/media elite into instant attack mode when the rule breaker is a woman, no matter how flimsy the justification, and into Wait and See mode when the rule breaker is an assaulter of women, no matter how extensive the violence. 

When her emails provided a look behind the curtain at Hillary Clinton, we glimpsed an integrity completely at odds with her public image of corruption. 

And when Epstein’s emails provided a look behind the curtain at powerful men, we glimpsed corruption completely at odds with their public image of integrity. 

The story isn’t about Clinton or Epstein, it’s about the nature and purpose of the curtain. 

In the runup to the 2016 election a veritable parade of soon-to-be notorious abusers of women took turns cutting the Secretary of State down to size. Matt Lauer, Glen Thrush, Mark Halperin, Charlie Rose… men who would reveal themselves, in their utterly clueless eventual apologies for their actions, to be creatures of a misogyny so pervasive it was invisible to them, the very water they swam in. 

It is the same cesspool occupied by the men of the Epstein emails, where they slap the same backs, nudge the same ribs and communicate in the same arrested, towel-snapping, smirk-speak. 

In 2016, faced with clearly inconsequential mistakes by a woman running against an avowed enemy of American democracy, the Serious Men of the American political establishment chose bros before hos.

In 2026, faced with possibly the most powerful and consequential crime syndicate in world history, they are choosing to chill. 

Every decision they make is informed by their deep, abiding disdain for women.

Confronted by alarming evidence of the most venal of crimes, the Serious Men (and their women enablers) are either remaining silent, or making half-hearted attempts to produce the right noises about doing the right thing, but at nowhere near the pitch and volume with which they pressed for the uppity woman to be held accountable ten years ago.  

That is, they were, until word came recently of a development in the Epstein case that seems to have finally roused the attention of the political media and set off alarm bells in every newsroom. 

Next week the Congressional oversight committee looking into the Epstein files is going to hear from a witness that Serious Men everywhere are very eager to see face a grilling about the scandal on live national television. No, it’s not Donald Trump. And it’s not Larry Summers or Alan Dershowitz or Elon Musk. 

It’s Hillary Clinton. 

Of course. 

Because these stories are really one story. One we’ve heard before.

The same old horror story, of the threat women pose to male power, and their expendability in the battle to protect it.