Last week, when Hillary Clinton testified for 6 hours before the House Oversight Committee about her knowledge of and connections to Jeffrey Epstein, people online wondered who the bit of legal theater was for. Those who remembered the run-up to her 2016 presidential campaign, and the #pizzagate hashtag in particular, were not among them. Epstein’s name, preceded by the descriptor “billionaire pedophile,” appeared in the viral Facebook post that identified Clinton as the leader of a child sex-abuse ring allegedly run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor. But as #pizzagate took off, Epstein largely vanished from the narrative: After all, why would anyone care about some rando “billionaire pedophile” when the woman they’d been conditioned to hate for 20 years was revealed to be more evil than they suspected?
In recent weeks, a lot of those who went along for the ride as #pizzagate expanded into QAnon — those who, in other words, had no problem believing that the former secretary of state was raping, murdering and eating children — have responded to revelations from the files with a victory lap. The files don’t validate most of QAnon’s most lurid accusations (the adrenochrome, the child-eating, the Satanic rituals), but no matter. As with every Q prediction that failed to materialize — so, all of them — believers are rebounding quickly: Okay, maybe Comet Pizza wasn’t really running a child sex ring from the basement it doesn’t have . . . but there sure are a lot of references to pizza in these files.
The Epstein files were always going to be a gift to conspiracy theorists, and have indeed resulted in a raft of brand new theories, including one that has Epstein alive and well and living in Israel. But parsing the tranches of documents — the most recent release puts the total at roughly 3.5 million pages — turns out to be making normies feel suspicious too. All over social media, people with no ties to conspiracy communities are unsettled by what they reveal: The sheer breadth of Epstein’s network, the casual references to abuse, the confirmation of everything that hid in plain sight.
There’s no order to the files themselves: No indexing, no differentiation between material evidence and uninvestigated complaints, missing files and overenthusiastic redactions — a build-your-own-conspiracy board minus the red twine. The result is that “the Epstein files are kind of like the Bible: Whatever you’re looking for, with enough confirmation bias you can find it,” says Anna Merlan, a staff writer at Mother Jones and author of the 2019 book “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power.”
The Epstein files were always going to be a gift to conspiracy theorists, and have indeed resulted in a raft of brand-new theories, including one that has Epstein alive and well and living in Israel.
Conspiracy theories are now part of the mainstream culture and political landscape in ways that are both more overt and more quotidian, than previously. And each new one is more likely to reach an audience that wasn’t looking for it. In the summer of 2020, amidst the mounting spread of COVID, Merlan wrote a piece for Vice called “The Conspiracy singularity has arrived” that reported on the strange and unlikely alliances she had begun seeing in her conspiracy research. People who were already deep into conspiratorial belief systems — anti-vaccination zealots, for instance — were suddenly crossing ideological paths with QAnon folks; health and wellness influencers were suddenly preoccupied with 5G and 15-minute cities. “Conspiracy communities that have previously only brushed past each other like schools of fish borne along on different currents are suddenly, abruptly, swimming in the same direction,” Merlan wrote.
In the United States, the convergence of disparate conspiracy theories that began during the initial pandemic lockdown and multiplied as the 2020 election grew closer were, Merlan recalls, “being drawn together in a sort of grand unified theory of COVID, to create a single explanation for everything that was going on.” She sees this happening anew: The hydra-headed sprawl of the Epstein files is a new singularity “where everything is linked to Jeffrey Epstein, and everything comes back to the Epstein story.”
This isn’t an unreasonable response, because everything that a grand unified theory of Epstein implies — the power, the importance, the influence, the menace — describes exactly the person Epstein wanted to be. He befriended the men of science and culture he invested in because he sought out people whose worldviews he suspected aligned with his own and whom he could likely trust to keep his secrets.
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The recent four-episode series of the podcast “Behind the Bastards” called “How Jeffrey Epstein Helped Build the Modern World” lays out how the predator’s fingerprints came to be on the most consequential discourses and zeitgeists of the early 21st century, from Black Lives Matter to Gamergate to #MeToo. But Merlan emphasizes that no one should mistake his Forrest Gump–like ubiquity for impeccable timing: “[Epstein] had so much to do with so many famous and powerful people, and was involved in so many things. So part of the reason we’re seeing [the Epstein files] and going, Wow, he’s everywhere, he’s the grand unified answer to every bit of corruption that is plaguing us is because, by design, he tried to be everywhere. He worked very, very hard at it.”
“Behind the Bastards” points out, as just one example, that Epstein’s philanthropic interest in scientific research was sparked by either fear and resentment of others (transgender people, Black people) or connected to his own eugenic desires: Cloning himself, operating an elite breeding farm at his New Mexico ranch. He wasn’t interested in capital-S Science, but in funding research that would validate the beliefs he already held.
Conspiratorial thinking, Merlan points out, follows a couple of key patterns: It flourishes in times of political and social upheaval, and it tends to resonate within minoritized groups “who are systematically kept from participating fully in society.” The conspiratorial thinking of the Epstein Class was a privileged twist on the latter — a result not of being marginalized but of fear that they might be: Donald Trump was not notably interested in conspiracy theories until he began feeling personally attacked by Barack Obama’s presidency; Trump began seeding racist citizenship theories not because he was materially disempowered, but because he recognized that Obama’s success and likeability far outpaced his own.
Conspiratorial thinking follows a couple of key patterns: It flourishes in times of political and social upheaval, and it tends to resonate within minoritized groups who are “systematically kept from participating fully in society.” The conspiratorial thinking of the Epstein Class was a twist on the latter.
Likewise, Epstein saw #MeToo as a problem to be neutralized because the success of any social movement in which women were treated as reliable narrators of their own exploitation would impede his own racket. Characterizing Epstein as a turn-of-the-millennium Forrest Gump or Tom Ripley or even Waldo is an easy goof, but it’s more accurate to identify him as a reactionary snowflake on high alert for any social, political or technological shift that might eventually challenge the status quo at scale. “We’ve always known that powerful men get away with sexual abuse in a way that other people do not,” says Merlan. “The Epstein files are further confirmation that there are different systems of justice and different systems of accountability for different kinds of sex criminals.”
The files are symbolically powerful because everything about them — the records of emails with well-known academics, the name-drops of those well-known academics to others, the confidence represented by his lazy, typo-strewn communication style, the sheer volume of accumulated materials — invites a reading of Epstein as omniscient, industrious and hungry for knowledge. The mechanics of searching the documents for bold-faced names play up his omnipresence, emphasizing his connections to forward-thinking industries while obscuring that he leveraged most of these connections in pursuit of regression and impunity. Epstein wasn’t an architect of democracy’s downfall; he was just one of its fluffers.
The increase in conspiracy theories that has followed the release of the Epstein files suggests that the event horizon of the files has come and gone. Now they’re just fodder for more conspiracies: Austin Tucker Martin, the man who was shot and killed at Mar-A-Lago late last month when he was discovered trying to break into the resort with a gun and a gas can, was supposedly reacting to information in the Epstein files. A decade of living in a conspiracy-pilled world has affected all of us, but the impact of a larger erosion of truth is what allowed that world to take shape.
Merlan notes that it’s common for people who might not actually believe in conspiracy theories to also not resist their pull — “Republic of Lies” is about how living in a country that has from the start been conspiracy-minded makes us more likely to either buy in or tune them out. “We know that conspiracy theories wax and wane throughout history,” she says, “and we know that periods of social stability [are] correlated with slightly less visibility of conspiracy theories, and times of social instability with more people discussing conspiracy theories openly. [Conspiracy theories] appeal to people who feel locked out of systems of advancement, who feel that the functions of American society are not working well for them. And that is true for more and more people as the wealth gap widens and other kinds of inequality get worse, as we live through this age of mass instability where a lot more people are not able to achieve what they were told was the American dream — as we see things like the Epstein files, and as we see evidence of people getting away with behavior that’s not just reprehensible but criminal.”
But just as there was enough accumulated dislike of Hillary Clinton to make #pizzagate unnecessary, in the end, to defeat her (Rolling Stone’s 2017 forensic investigation of the hashtag found that, despite the network of bots and fake social-media accounts created to push it, didn’t actually go viral until after the election), there’s no shortage of confirmed corruption within American political and social systems to make conspiracy theories fee a little redundant. We already know plenty about systems of inequality that have impacted Americans as much as any incursion of lizard people ever could. We know about FBI-led assassinations, secret drug experiments, private health insurers, the for-profit prison pipeline, media consolidation and disinformation platforming. And we certainly know that men will create all manner of chaos in their desperation to distract from their own misdeeds.
So why is the frame of conspiracy still so often the default one? Merlan thinks it’s because “conspiracy theories are a useful framing if you are looking to place blame on a specific person or group of people — and that’s always what so many of the political ones come back to. It’s how things like xenophobia work. And when the social ills we’re facing are as complicated as they are, conspiracy framing works to simplify them enough that they target a useful scapegoat.” Beyond that, the opportunity to make money from promulgating conspiracies is larger than it’s ever been. The one problem now “is that so many other people trying to do the exact same thing. It’s a problem of congestion — but it’s still making a lot of people very rich.”
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