Epstein Was Never the Head of the Conspiracy. The Reality is Worse. (Part 2)
Releasing the Epstein emails in the manner that they did was considerably worse than not releasing them at all. I’m not even convinced that releasing them was a good idea in the first place and there, I’ve said it.
Right up to the point that they actually did it, I thought this was going to go one of two ways: Either they wouldn’t release anything, and would just continue along in the same tradition of “you and what army?” that they’ve thrown at every attempt the law has made to force them to do anything. The other plausible scenario was that they would release a ton of stuff that makes Bill Clinton look bad and keep pretty much everything else sealed.
What they did do, actually, should have been the most foreseeable thing—they released the files incompetently. It's here, if you want to play around with it. All these millions of emails just dumped in an unsorted decontextualized mass for the public to sort through, just rooting through a mountain of slop and trying to find meaning in whatever your hand happens to pull out. Names have been redacted, or not redacted, seemingly at random. In some documents a name is redacted in one place but openly appears elsewhere. A ton of emails have multiple, differently redacted copies, so you can see all the names if you compare them. Some of the redacted names are “Jeffrey Epstein.”
They did it incompetently because they are a breathtakingly incompetent administration, staffed by TV personalities based on how much loyalty they showed Trump in public. He put a Fox news anchor in charge of the military. He put two podcasters in charge of the FBI. To run the entire health and medical apparatus he appointed a guy whose only knowledge of medicine is that he’s an anti-vaxxer, as well as Doctor fucking Oz. Of course this was done incompetently. The reason the Biden administration didn’t release them wasn’t because they were covering them up, it was because they knew that what would happen is exactly what is happening now: Conspiracism and panic.
Of course the Department of Justice wouldn’t ordinarily just dump a decade of one criminal suspect’s personal correspondence on the world and invite everyone to go hog wild on it. They had to pass a law through congress to make this happen—to carve out an exception for this specific case. They did that because the incompetent MAGA apparatus campaigned on it to get elected and then couldn’t walk back the mania they had triggered once they realized how stupid it was.
Why do I think it was such a bad idea? Because I remember “Pizzagate.” And so do you, if you’re reading this, because Pizzagate was only ten years ago! And this is a lot more of the same thing!
Now, I know people will object here on one important point: Pizzagate was based on an imaginary child trafficking scandal, while Epstein is based on a real one. That is a very important distinction! Last week, I wrote about why I don’t think Epstein was running a massive pedophile ring (though I don’t discount he may have been running a smaller one) but we can actually put the entire child molestation thing aside when we talk about why releasing the Epstein Files was a bad idea.
As we saw with Pizzagate, trying to decode non-contextualized personal correspondence between people who are very familiar with each other (but who we have never met) kind of drives us nuts and sends us on an all expenses paid trip to conspiracy town. The Epstein Files have got people thinking that this pervert sort of, kind of, controlled the world for a brief time. At least long enough that he’s almost singularly and deliberately responsible for the entire Trump phenomenon and the New Right resurgence we’ve seen in the 21st century.
Now, this is kind of personal to me because I’m writing a book about who’s actually responsible for this (for my paid subscribers, who get to read chapters as I write them, please forgive the delay, I am very close to finishing the next chapter!) so when everyone comes out in chorus declaring it was Epstein All Along I have to furiously triple down on my research to confirm that’s bullshit.
Someone discovered that it’s apparently the case that Epstein met with 4Chan founder Christopher Poole (“moot”) days before Poole added the “/pol/” forum to the site. /pol/, of course, was the online cesspool(e) that bred a very far right internet subculture, its participants being the generation just now coming into political power.
This revelation has been explosive, and long articles have been written about its implications: Jeffrey Epstein was the true father of /pol/, which makes him the founder of the alt-right, the ringleader of Gamergate, and the architect of the MAGA movement. Following that, he created Pizzagate and QAnon to “weaponize paranoia.” People are theorizing that he was “Q.”
Remember, this is all because some emails said that Epstein met with Christopher Poole once in October 2011. And I will grant that’s really fascinating. It’s so fascinating that the people who discovered it were sure it must be important. And of course, everything started falling into place. The Pizzagate pedophile hysteria was the call coming from inside the house. Epstein’s personal friendships with Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. They were his puppets. Epstein was the 5-D chess player the whole time. He essentially ascended himself to the presidency via his Trump proxy through blackmail and mass cultural brainwashing in order to cover up the largest scale sex trafficking operation in human history. It all makes sense now, and it all follows from Epstein having lunch with moot.
Does it, though?
Dumping these emails on the public has created the same problem that the 2016 WikiLeaks DNC email dump created: Everybody now feels like they are a detective, and everybody feels qualified to be a detective. The illusion is that every one of these three million documents is important and every one of them means something, and if the meaning of any one of them isn’t immediately obvious then we have to decrypt it.
That’s how “Pizzagate” got its name. A bunch of the emails contained references to pizza, and because every email had to be important in some way, they had to figure out what “pizza” was code for. The cart leads the horse and the premise informs the evidence: There must be a grand conspiracy, or else why would they drop all these emails for us to rifle through? Our job as detectives is to figure out how each email is important to the conspiracy. The average person will gamify anything.
But how could Epstein possibly have orchestrated all of this? Even if his meeting with Poole influenced Poole somehow to establish /pol/, how could he have either predicted or influenced its evolution into a fascist subculture? There’s no evidence he had any ongoing communication with Poole, so all of this had to come out of one lunch meeting. But Epstein was not Grima Wormtongue. He wasn’t a mentalist or a body snatcher. He wasn’t a character from Inception.
His connection to Poole feels meaningful because it places him one degree of separation from Pizzagate, the precursor to the Epstein Files drop. We are uncomfortable calling this coincidence, so we feel there has to be a causal link. But why on Earth would Epstein orchestrate the Pizzagate panic? Why would the, allegedly, ringleader of a massive international elite pedophile ring deliberately plant the idea of a massive international elite pedophile ring in the public consciousness? That’s the exact opposite of what such an individual would want to happen.
The Epstein-as-puppeteer narrative has evolved further as people noticed that he had a lot of the same awful intellectual interests as a bunch of Silicon Valley people—he was into some race realism stuff, some transhumanism stuff, some eugenics… he was all the fuck over those “heterodox” science communicators in the Lawrence Krauss set.
Every discovery is important and must serve the conspiracy in some way, so the natural conclusion here is that Epstein is the actual reason the tech billionaires are the way that they are. He seeded these ideas in the minds of the grand tech oligarchs who would fall into Trump’s orbit. That he somehow orchestrated, fully, largely, or in part, the technofascism movement.
This is, again, the evidence being used to forced to support the conspiracy theory rather than to test it. I believe that, in another world where Epstein wasn't arrested, he'd be just another one of these tech guys tweeting about AI shit and retweeting Elon Musk's idiotic orbital data center musings.
Just as I said last week, there are conspiracies that come to light in the Epstein Files, they’re just not the ones that everyone talks about. The important thing they actually reveal is that rich and powerful people, almost exclusively white men, especially since the advent of the internet, secretly network and conspire to shape narratives and world politics at a larger scale than we ever knew. Far from needing to meet in person and in public at conferences and men’s clubs where they can be witnessed, today’s Bohemian Grove takes place 365 days a year over email and chat.
This is not brand new information, either. A smash hit Semafor article by that publication’s Editor in Chief, Ben Smith, in April of last year revealed what Smith aptly refers to as “the dark matter of American politics”—group chats over messaging apps like Signal that include vast swaths of the right-wing political, media, entrepreneurial, tech, and influencer landscape. Everyone from Marc Andreessen to Richard Hanania to Ben Shapiro to Curtis Yarvin to Christopher Rufo, in the same room, splitting their time between coordinating tactics to further the anti-woke agenda to talking shit about Taylor Lorenz.
The Epstein emails just shine another spotlight on this dark matter, which shows it to be deeper and darker than even Semafor indicated. But the only reason it feels like Jeffrey Epstein is at the center of this global conspiracy is kind of like the anthropic principle of elite dark politics: It’s because Epstein’s emails are the only ones we’ve been shown.
I am almost certain that, in a hypothetical reality where it was, for example, all of Peter Thiel’s personal correspondence for the last two decades that had been leaked, it is Peter Thiel who everyone would be calling the central pillar of the elite world. And, probably, the ringleader of a huge global sex trafficking ring. The same with Steve Bannon or Marc Andreessen or Howard Lutnick or Bill Ackman.
In reality, none of these men are, singularly, the head of a global conspiracy to replace democracy with a system more to their particular tastes. They are all, collectively, a toxic mass. Epstein wasn’t a puppeteer. There are no puppeteers and there are no puppets—just one big group chat, and we’re not in it.
Jeffrey Epstein is dead. (Yes, Thoms Massie, he’s dead.) He was a vile, egomaniac, pedophile. His impact on American politics, let alone world politics, is likely close to zilch. His emails make him seem like the evil equivalent of Forrest Gump—the spawning point of everything bad that’s happened in the 21st Century, from 4Chan to the Great Recession. In reality he was just kind of there for all of those events, the same as all of the other men who appear in his correspondence and who will continue emailing and texting and messaging each other and barely even notice he’s left the chat.
Remember that we believe in conspiracy theories because they are actually comforting. We want to believe, now that the head vampire is dead, it’s just a matter of cleaning up the mess. Unfortunately, we don’t get out of this that easily. There is no head vampire and there never was. There’s just a dark mass, and it gets bigger every day we choose to ignore it in favor of trying to figure out what a man who famously preferred burgers and pizza and jerky over more refined “rich people” food might have “really meant” when he and his friends mentioned those foods over email. Sometimes a pizza is just a pizza, and sometimes it’s a distraction and not a code.
The Epstein emails are probably going to force some revisions (and fill some gaps) in the book that I'm writing about toxic masculinity, misogyny, and the libertarian-to-fascism pipeline that has bubbled up on the internet in the first quarter of the 21st Century. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
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