A few days ago, a claim started making the rounds online that Kim Jong Un had announced North Korea would execute anyone named in the Epstein files, presumably by firing squad, if they were handed over. It spread fast, the way these things do, shared and reshared with a kind of grim satisfaction, as if the idea of a dictator meting out summary justice to rich and powerful predators was somehow a comforting thought. For what it’s worth, fact checkers have found no evidence this ever happened. No North Korean state media outlet reported it, no reputable outlet picked it up before the social media version took off, and the trail leads back to a single Facebook post with no sourcing behind it. So as far as anyone can tell, it’s fabricated. But that’s almost beside the point, because the reason the post spread wasn’t because people carefully verified it, it spread because a lot of people liked the idea. And that, the liking of the idea, is the thing I actually want to talk about.
Because whether or not Kim Jong Un said it, a lot of people reading it felt a flicker of yes, good, do it. And I understand that feeling. I’m not going to pretend I don’t. When you think about what’s alleged to be in the Epstein files, when you think about the scale of harm, the children, the powerful people who may have participated or looked away or covered it up for decades, it is entirely human to want something swift and final to happen to them. It’s human to want blood. But wanting something doesn’t make it right, and I think this particular moment, this fake news story that so many people wanted to be true, is a good occasion to talk about something I’ve been building for a while now, a philosophy I call radical empathy, and the broader framework I’ve developed around it that I call anarcho compassionism.
I started thinking seriously about this about a year ago, not long after Charlie Kirk was killed. That event, and the reaction to it, crystallized something for me. I watched people who disagreed with Kirk on nearly everything struggle with how to respond to his death, and I watched other people celebrate it outright, and I watched people who had spent years being cruel to their opponents suddenly demand grace be extended to them. And somewhere in that mess, I found myself asking a harder question than just how do I feel about this particular man dying. I asked, what does it mean to actually hold a consistent ethic of nonviolence and compassion, one that doesn’t collapse the moment it becomes inconvenient, one that doesn’t only apply to people I already like. Because it’s easy to be compassionate toward people who deserve it, or who would return the favor, or who share your politics. That’s not really a philosophy, that’s just tribalism with better manners. The actual test of a compassionate ethic is whether it holds for people who make you furious, people who have done real harm, people who, if the roles were reversed, would show you no mercy at all. That test is where anarcho compassionism was born, and it’s gotten stronger in me ever since, not weaker.
The name is a mouthful, I know. But the pieces of it are pretty simple once you break them down. It’s anarchist in the sense that I don’t believe any centralized authority, whether that’s a state, a monarch, a court, or a mob, should hold the unilateral power to end a human life as punishment. Not because I think every person is innocent or that actions don’t have consequences, but because I don’t trust that kind of power in anyone’s hands, ever, including hands I might otherwise like. And it’s compassionist, if that’s a word, because the core operating principle isn’t detachment or neutrality, it’s active, deliberate empathy, extended especially to people who make it hard. Radical honesty is in there too, because you can’t build real compassion on top of comfortable lies about who deserves what. You have to look clearly at what someone did, name it honestly, and still choose not to become the kind of person or society that kills them for it. That’s the hard part. That’s the actual discipline of the thing.
I want to be really clear about something, because I think this is where people jump to the wrong conclusion the fastest. None of this is about excusing anyone. It is not about saying what Epstein did, or what his associates may have done, wasn’t monstrous. It was. It is not about pretending accountability doesn’t matter. It does, enormously. I believe, and I’ve said this before, that we absolutely need to hold people accountable for the harm they cause, especially harm on this scale, harm against children, harm enabled by wealth and power and a legal system that too often protects the powerful instead of the vulnerable. Accountability is not optional in my worldview. What I’m arguing against is a very specific thing, the idea that the correct or necessary form that accountability must take is death. I think that’s a failure of imagination dressed up as justice, and I think it’s dangerous precisely because it feels so satisfying in the moment.
Here’s the reasoning, laid out as plainly as I can put it. The moment you grant any entity, a government, a tribunal, a dictator, a mob, the legitimate power to decide that a specific human being should die as punishment for what they did, you have created a tool. And tools don’t stay pointed only at the people you originally intended them for. History is not subtle about this. Every system of state execution that has ever existed has eventually been used, expanded, or twisted to kill people who didn’t deserve it, political dissidents, the wrongly convicted, people who were simply inconvenient to whoever held power at the time. North Korea itself, the country supposedly volunteering to be the world’s executioner in this fake news story, is one of the starkest examples on the planet of what happens when a state has unchecked authority over who lives and dies. People are executed there for infractions most of the world wouldn’t consider crimes at all, for watching foreign media, for trying to leave the country, for having the wrong family connections. That is not a system anyone should look to as a model of justice, and it’s more than a little ironic that a fake quote attributed to that regime was being celebrated by people as a fantasy of moral cleanup. The tool of state execution is not neutral. It does not stay calibrated to only the worst of the worst. It expands, because power always tests its own limits, and the people writing the rules today are not guaranteed to be the people enforcing them tomorrow.
So when someone says, sure, normally I’d be against the death penalty, but for people like this, for billionaires, for people who trafficked children, surely we have to make an exception, because otherwise how will we ever build a fair or better world with these people still walking around, I understand the impulse, but I think it’s wrong, and I think it’s wrong for a very specific reason. The fair, better world people are imagining when they say that isn’t actually achieved by execution. It’s imagined that way, but that’s a fantasy, not a plan. Killing Epstein’s associates doesn’t undo the harm that was done. It doesn’t return anything to the victims. It doesn’t dismantle the systems of wealth and impunity that allowed the abuse to happen and to be covered up for so long. What it does is give a small, sharp hit of emotional satisfaction, and it hands enormous power to whoever gets to decide who’s on the list. And once you’ve built that machine, once you’ve normalized the idea that certain categories of person can simply be killed by the state or by whoever currently holds power, you have not built a better world. You’ve built the exact same kind of world these people were part of, just with the barrel pointed in a different direction for now. That is not liberation. That’s just a change in who’s holding the gun.
I also think there’s something important in separating this from self defense, because people conflate the two constantly and I don’t think they’re the same thing at all. If someone is actively attacking you or someone else, right now, in the moment, you have every right to defend yourself, with force if necessary, up to and including lethal force if that’s what the situation truly demands. That’s not a contradiction of anything I’m saying. Self defense is a response to an active threat, it’s immediate, it’s about survival in a moment of danger. The death penalty, execution, whatever fake or real version of it people were fantasizing about in this Kim Jong Un story, is not that. It is a premeditated, deliberate, after the fact decision by an institution to end the life of someone who is, at that point, in custody, controlled, no longer an active threat. That’s not defense. That’s punishment, dressed up sometimes as deterrence or justice, but at its core it’s still just a decision by people in power to kill someone who is no longer dangerous to anyone in that moment. I think that distinction matters more than almost anything else in this conversation, because it’s the line between protecting people and just satisfying a desire for vengeance.
And I want to say something about vengeance specifically, because I don’t think it’s a dirty word, I think it’s an honest one, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend our appetite for it isn’t there. People wanted that Kim Jong Un story to be true because it scratched an itch. It offered the idea that somewhere, someone with enough power was finally going to make the bad people pay in the most permanent way possible. That itch is real, and I’m not going to sit here and tell anyone they’re broken or evil for feeling it. Wanting harm to be answered is one of the most human responses there is. But radical empathy asks something harder of us than just following that itch wherever it leads. It asks us to notice the itch, name it honestly, or that’s the radical honesty part again, and then choose a different response anyway, not because the people involved deserve our mercy in some abstract cosmic sense, but because who we become in the process of delivering justice matters just as much as whether justice gets delivered at all. A society that builds its sense of righteousness on the ritual killing of its worst offenders is not a society that has transcended the harm those offenders caused. It’s a society that has found a new outlet for the same impulse toward domination and control that produced abusers like Epstein in the first place. Power over life and death was exactly what let people like that operate for as long as they did, the power to control, to silence, to make consequences disappear or appear according to their will. Handing that same kind of absolute power to a state, even one that claims to be acting on behalf of victims, doesn’t undo that dynamic. It just relocates it.
This is, I think, the piece people miss most often when they hear anarcho compassionism described for the first time. They assume it must be soft, naive, unserious about harm, maybe even indifferent to victims. It’s the opposite of that. It is precisely because I take harm seriously, because I believe victims deserve real accountability and real structural change, not just a satisfying headline about someone being shot by a firing squad, that I reject the death penalty as an answer. Execution is, in a strange way, the easy option. It’s cheap catharsis. It requires no rebuilding of systems, no redistribution of power, no uncomfortable reckoning with how wealth and status let predators operate in plain sight for years. It just requires someone to pull a trigger, and then everyone gets to feel like justice happened, and move on. I don’t think that’s justice. I think real accountability is slower, harder, and far less satisfying in the short term, but far more meaningful in the long term. It looks like exposing every enabler, seizing ill gotten wealth and redistributing it to survivors and to systems that protect vulnerable people, dismantling the legal and social structures that let abuse of this scale happen without consequence for so long, and yes, imprisoning people, restricting their freedom, forcing them to live the rest of their lives inside the consequences of what they did, without ever giving any single person or institution the power to simply erase them from existence.
I keep coming back to rehabilitation and repentance too, because I think people hear those words and assume I’m arguing that Epstein’s associates, if guilty, would somehow become good people again, or deserve forgiveness, or get to walk free one day feeling cleansed. That’s not the argument. Some people may never repent. Some people may go to their graves as unrepentant and cruel as they were the day their crimes were discovered. I’m not naive about that, and I’m not demanding that victims or anyone else extend warmth or forgiveness to people who show none in return. Radical empathy doesn’t mean radical forgiveness, and it definitely doesn’t mean forgetting. What it means is that even in the case of someone who never changes, who never shows remorse, who remains exactly as monstrous on their last day as their first, I still don’t think the answer is to kill them. Not because they’ve earned mercy, but because I don’t believe killing them accomplishes what people think it accomplishes, and because I don’t believe any of us, individually or collectively, are well served by becoming a society organized around the idea that some lives are simply forfeit. That idea doesn’t stay contained. It never has.
So that’s really the heart of it. The Kim Jong Un story turning out to be fake doesn’t change any of this for me, if anything it sharpens the point, because it means the thing that actually went viral wasn’t a real geopolitical event, it was a wish. A wish that someone, somewhere, would just take care of it, permanently, with violence, so the rest of us wouldn’t have to sit with the much harder and slower work of building justice systems that actually hold the powerful accountable. I get the appeal of the wish. I really do. But I think anarcho compassionism, radical empathy, radical honesty, radical compassion, all of it, exists precisely to resist that kind of shortcut. Accountability, yes, always, as much of it as we can build, as thoroughly as we can enforce it. But not execution. Not for anyone. Not even for people whose names appear in files that make your stomach turn. Because the second we decide some lives are simply disposable if the crime is bad enough, we’ve handed away the one principle that actually protects everyone, including the people we love, including ourselves, which is that no one, no matter how much power they hold or how righteous their cause feels in the moment, gets to be the one who decides who doesn’t get to keep living. That has to stay off the table, for everyone, or it isn’t really a principle at all.