The week they tried to sell us everything at once
Posted on: 22 February 2026
There was a moment on Thursday when the world turned into a street market where every stallholder was shouting the price of their goods at the same time. A former British prince arrested for the first time in modern royal history. A "Board of Peace" inaugurated in Washington with forty countries and seventeen billion dollars in pledges. The Pentagon ready to strike Iran within hours. And to close the evening, the President of the United States announcing the release of government files on aliens. All on the same day. All real. All competing for the same space inside the head of anyone trying to work out what on earth is going on.
The mechanism deserves attention, because it is neither new nor accidental. When too much information of maximum relevance arrives simultaneously, the result is not a better informed public; it is a public that cannot process anything at all. The economics of attention, which Herbert Simon described as far back as 1971 when he observed that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, has never been more visible than in this week of February.
Let us start with the facts, because facts are the only thing that survives when the noise becomes deafening.
The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is unprecedented. Thames Valley Police detained him on suspicion of misconduct in public office, an offence carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. This is no longer about the sexual allegations that dominated public discourse for years: the investigation concerns the sharing of classified government documents with Jeffrey Epstein during Andrew's tenure as UK trade envoy between 2001 and 2011. The shift matters, because it moves the question from the private sphere to one of national security. King Charles stated that "the law must take its course"; Buckingham Palace received no advance warning. Andrew was released after twelve hours, under investigation. The Prime Minister said what prime ministers say: "Nobody is above the law." Other royals carried on with public engagements the same afternoon, which tells you everything about how institutions manage proximity to scandal.
But Andrew's arrest is merely the latest tile in a cascade that has been gathering force for weeks and deserves to be examined in its entirety to understand its mechanics. The US Department of Justice has so far released approximately 300 gigabytes of Epstein-related documents. That sounds enormous and it is: three million pages. But it corresponds, by current estimates, to two per cent of the total. The remaining 98 per cent is still sitting on federal government servers. That two per cent has been enough to collapse a system of mutual protection that had functioned for decades.
The list of those who have fallen reads like a geography of power cutting across sectors, countries and continents. Kathryn Ruemmler, General Counsel of Goldman Sachs and former White House Counsel under Obama, resigned on 12 February after more than ten thousand documents revealed a relationship with Epstein very different from the "strictly professional" one she had maintained for years. In emails she called him "Uncle Jeffrey", signed off with "xoxo", asked his advice on managing the Secret Service scandal at the White House and inquired about taking a day trip to his private island. Goldman defended her for months; CEO David Solomon described her as "an excellent lawyer" as recently as December. Then the calculation changed, as it always does. Brad Karp, chairman of law firm Paul Weiss, resigned on 4 February after emails showed him thanking Epstein for a "once in a lifetime" evening and asking whether Epstein could help his son land a job on a Woody Allen film. Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, CEO of DP World Dubai, was replaced on 13 February after emails revealed exchanges with Epstein referencing pornography and escorts. Thomas Pritzker, chairman of Hyatt Hotels, stepped down on 16 February. Former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland has been charged with aggravated corruption. Norway's ambassador Mona Juul discovered that Epstein had left five million dollars to each of her children in his will. Jack Lang, former French culture minister, resigned from leading a Parisian cultural centre.
The pattern is identical in every case: first denial, then minimisation, then the magic formula, "it has become a distraction" or "I am putting the firm's interests first". Never "I was wrong". Never "I knew and I did nothing". The decision to step down is never ethical; it is the precise point at which the reputational cost exceeds the residual benefits of the position held. It is the same calculation that worked in the opposite direction for years: everyone knew who Epstein was after the 2008 conviction, nobody severed ties, because the benefits of the network outweighed the cost of association with a convicted sex offender.
While the Epstein dominoes were accelerating, Washington was staging the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace. The name itself is a masterclass in strategic communication: who could possibly be against peace? Trump convened representatives from over forty countries, appointed himself chairman for life, announced a ten billion dollar American contribution without congressional authorisation and with no clarity on where the funds would come from. Nine countries pledged another seven billion. Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo Global Management and executive board member, estimated Gaza's coastline to be worth at least fifty billion dollars and identified "115 billion dollars of value" in the destroyed territory "that just needs to be unlocked and financed". Tony Blair called Trump's plan "the best, indeed the only hope for Gaza". Twenty thousand troops from Muslim-majority nations, Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo and Albania, will form an international stabilisation force. Hamas has sixty days to surrender all weapons, including individual Kalashnikov rifles, or Israel will resume full-scale military operations.
According to Palestinian health authorities, more than six hundred people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since the ceasefire began. Trump described these incidents as "little flames". A Palestinian father interviewed by PBS at the funeral of nine relatives killed in weekend airstrikes said: "Do you believe that there is a Board of Peace? Do you believe that Trump would come defend us, the one who is supplying Israel with weapons, money, protection and an international umbrella?"
The same day, in the background but with potentially more devastating consequences than everything else combined, the Pentagon was completing the largest military deployment to the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Two aircraft carriers in the region, submarines, additional air defences, fighter jets. All in preparation for a possible strike on Iran that could be launched at any moment, should Trump decide to pull the trigger. The options on the table, according to CNN and NBC News sources, range from limited strikes on nuclear sites to sustained operations lasting weeks, up to and including attempts to eliminate Iran's leadership and force regime change. Trump has not yet decided. Two advisers compared the situation to the lead-up to both last June's Iran strikes and the capture of Venezuela's Maduro in January: in both cases, the president oscillated until the very last moment before giving the order.
Iran meanwhile is fortifying nuclear sites by burying them under concrete and soil, conducting joint naval exercises with Russia in the Sea of Oman and seeking to communicate a precise message: an attack will cost far more than last June's. Ramadan began on Wednesday. The Winter Olympics end on Sunday. Some European officials told the American press they do not believe a strike will come before the closing ceremony. There has been talk of a surprise Trump appearance at the ice hockey final, should the United States qualify. The real world and the spectacle overlap until they become indistinguishable.
And then, Thursday evening, the cherry on top. Trump announced on Truth Social that he would order the release of all government files relating to "alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena, unidentified flying objects and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters". The announcement came hours after Obama, on a podcast, said that aliens are real and extraterrestrial life exists. Trump immediately accused him of revealing classified information. Then promised to do himself precisely what he had accused Obama of doing.
Republican Congressman Thomas Massie responded: "They've deployed the ultimate weapon of mass distraction, but the Epstein files aren't going away... even for aliens." Comedian Seth Meyers had predicted exactly this move seven months ago, saying on live television that Trump would produce UFOs to distract from the Epstein files. Prophecy fulfilled with almost unsettling precision.
The contrast is surgical: the alien files he releases "overnight", by popular demand. The Epstein files, three million pages out of an estimated fifty terabytes total, have been drip-fed for months with heavy redactions, to the point where an independent panel of experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council described what has emerged so far as a "global criminal enterprise" involving acts that could meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity under international law.
Anyone who operates at the apex of decision-making, in any sector, ought to pause and observe what this week reveals about the structure of contemporary power. The mechanism is not conspiracy; it is competition for the scarcest resource in existence, public attention. No orchestrated plan is required: it is enough that every actor pursues their own interest within the same time window. Trump needs to distract from the Epstein files in which his name appears; Israel needs the Board of Peace to legitimise Gaza's reconstruction on its own terms; Iran needs to project strength in order to negotiate from a better position; the British justice system needs to demonstrate that nobody is above the law. Everyone is selling their wares at the market. The aggregate result is that none of these stories receives the critical attention it deserves.
The lesson is not new, but rarely does it manifest with this density: when everything is urgent, nothing is. The informed citizen, the strategic decision-maker, anyone trying to understand what is actually happening, faces an obligatory choice: select, go deep, ignore the noise. Or surrender to the flow and let each story erase the one before it, exactly as it is designed to do. Two per cent of the Epstein files has already brought down heads across three continents. The remaining 98 per cent is still there. The aliens, in all probability, can wait.