How the Epstein Files Turned Everyone Into Conspiracists
“It was all a lie,” Marjorie Taylor Greene recently said about MAGA, capping off an unexpected career turn in which she parted ways with the president and resigned from Congress. A handful of factors precipitated Greene’s about-face, but chiefly she felt betrayed by Donald Trump’s efforts to stymie the release of the so-called Epstein files. Greene was one of four House Republicans who broke with their party in November to compel the Department of Justice to disgorge millions of pages of emails and other material related to Epstein. The fallout has been unremitting.
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The tranches of files — the largest of which was released on January 30, comprising more than 3 million documents, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images — contain reams of reputation-staining correspondence between the late sex offender and a seemingly endless list of VIPs, including MIT’s Noam Chomsky, Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, New Age guru Deepak Chopra, Katie Couric, Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and whoever else’s name will surface next as people make their way through the searchable justice.gov database.
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Thanks to Greene’s apostasy, she is being received as a changed woman, invited onto talk shows that until recently characterized her as a rage-driven conspiracymonger. “I was just so naïve” is the quote The New York Times Magazine chose for the headline of a profile of Greene that refers to her as a “former believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory.” But in a way, Greene hasn’t changed much, and it is everyone else who looks kind of naïve, including the lawmakers and journalists who were seemingly content to let the Epstein story fade away.
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QAnon is premised on the idea that a global cabal is engaged in the rampant sex-trafficking of minors, and one takeaway from the never-ending Epstein blowback is that we really are governed by an overclass of degenerate elites. What’s more, the crude underlying logic of QAnon is being reinforced with every new screen-grab of a terse missive from jeevacation@gmail.com, making the universe of conspiracy thinking increasingly legible to the rest of us and creating a cycle of perpetual astonishment at the discovery of previously unsuspected webs of influence and intrigue. In other words, the Epstein files are making us more like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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The emails between Epstein and various luminaries are nauseatingly chummy, but they have not thus far revealed a wider sex-trafficking plot than what was known. Still, thanks to Greene & Co., we are learning more about the people who run our world. Here is Karp gushing to Epstein about a gathering: “It was truly ‘once in a lifetime’ in every way, though I hope to be invited again. You are an extraordinary host — and your home … !!!” Here is Chopra telling Epstein that “only this morning I sniffed the wine of Moroccan youth.” Here is Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway asking Epstein, “Is it inappropriate for a mother to suggest two naked women carrying a surfboard for my 15 yr old sons wallpaper?” (“mother shoudl stay out of it,” Epstein replied).
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The DoJ trove makes no distinction between pedestrian and charged subject matter. In addition to thanking Epstein for his supposed help in getting her daughter into Bard College, Woody Allen’s wife, Soon-Yi Previn, once sent along a detailed suggested takeout order from the Mark Hotel (“Woody loves sliced tomatoes”) and also a note that “it was disgusting what the 15- year-old did to” Anthony Weiner, blaming the teenager he was sexting with for the scandal that would send him to prison. Throughout, there is Epstein’s bored-seeming, typing-with-one-thumb epistolary style, often met with verbose, fawning replies from his global pen pals.
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In response, conspiracy lifers have been taking a victory lap, while also reading into the emails classic elements of QAnon and its predecessor Pizzagate. The files are varied enough to indulge just about any pet interest, whether that’s “Plandemic”-style COVID theories or insider trading. The horseshoe nature of the scandal makes it hard to untangle speculation about, say, Epstein’s intelligence ties from the antisemitism that is pervasive in Epstein discourse. “Yes, we are ruled by Satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” announced the YouTuber Candace Owens, who may have been reading the same emails that prompted the left-wing commentator Cenk Uygur to post, “To my knowledge no one in legacy media has ever even discussed the possibility that Epstein was Mossad when it is all over the files.”
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Neophyte conspiracists have also gotten in on the action, posting their findings on social media. The DoJ’s “Epstein Library” is keyword searchable and surprisingly user-friendly, starting with its darkly ironic entry point: Users are asked if they are “18 years of age or older” and then ushered into the dead pedophile’s email inbox simply by clicking “yes.” One of the appeals of QAnon was its citizen-journalist aspect, with ordinary people reading the anonymous poster Q’s “drops” — the gnomic riddles that formed the spine of the movement — to build the theory together. The Epstein files work in the same democratic way: In theory, you can add to the collective understanding of the case simply via a novel interpretation of a blurry photo or one-line email.
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The files open up mysteries for even these normies to consider. Why is this or that email redacted? What files are still being held? And what about Trump? “The Epstein files are proving it’s all one big repulsive club, no matter which party is in charge,” Greene posted on X after the latest file dump, underscoring the perceived political divide between “them” (a shadowy ruling class out of Eyes Wide Shut) and “us” (the intrepid investigators trying to unmask them).
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After Trump lost the election in 2020, Q faded from view, and the spirit of the theory became absorbed into various strains of MAGA. Now, that spirit is flowing into the broader political bloodstream, resulting in real-world consequences such as Karp stepping down from his position at Paul Weiss, the Clintons being forced to testify to Congress about their ties to Epstein, and the British government staggering from revelations that Labour Party stalwart Peter Mandelson seemed to share privileged information that could have further enriched Epstein.
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But for many Epstein obsessives, new and old, it is not enough that the releases have laid bare the workings of an amoral elite. The decontextualized nature of the emails, as well as the typo-ridden manner in which Epstein communicated, resembled nothing if not Q drops, hinting at sinister revelations to come. If the old conspiracy consensus was that Epstein was murdered, the latest speculation is that he is in fact still alive. “Does anybody really believe otherwise?” posted SGAnon, a prominent Q account. And in a way, he is alive, sending us messages about our depraved world from beyond the grave.
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The more time I spent plugging in search terms, the more I found I was using the database as if it were ChatGPT or a Magic 8 Ball: to spit back answers about how the world worked. Inevitably, it occurred to me I should probably search my own name. When I did, exactly one result came back. In 2016, I was working on a profile of lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who had represented Epstein when he was first being investigated for sex crimes in the mid-aughts. In the course of my reporting, I sent an email to the journalist Michael Wolff, telling him I understood he was friendly with Epstein and that I was curious for his insights into Epstein and Dershowitz’s relationship. Wolff then forwarded my email to Epstein.
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What did it mean? Had I, butterfly-effect style, greased some silent gear of the secret machine that powers the universe? Conspiracies have a way of flattering one’s own existence. Often they tell us nothing at all. There I was in the Epstein files, ten years earlier, doing more or less the same thing I am doing now: trying to learn something new about Jeffrey Epstein.
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