🔒 Staying Rational When the Conspiracies are Real (Part 1)

I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t expect the US Justice Department to ever release the “Epstein Files.” I made a snide comment about it on Substack literally two days before they dumped a trillion of his emails onto the internet without warning.

The instant result was like dropping a scoop of ice cream on top of an ant’s nest while they’re all just milling about doing everyday ant shit. It doesn’t matter what side of politics you’re on, everybody across social media and journalism are either furiously winding red string around corkboard pins or else just running down the street naked and cracking each other’s heads open. The density of conspiracy theories on the internet has just increased to the supernova point.

 Here's my problem: I like to debunk conspiracy theories. That’s easy when the conspiracy theories are complete bullshit, or even when they’re just mostly bullshit. With the Epstein stuff it’s harder to unpack. There is actual conspiracy here, but frustratingly, it’s not the stuff that the media and y’all are actually focused on, and the stuff that you are focused on does contain some amount of bullshit.

 So let me try to unravel this with the knowledge that I’m navigating a minefield, here, because misspeaking about Epstein is the fastest way known to mankind to get five million people calling you a child molester on Twitter.

 There are two main conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein to address, and two accompanying conspiracy facts that I think are way underreported due to these theories. This article is going to be a two-parter—I was going to write the whole thing up this week but I banged on for too long and ran out of time, so you’ll get the second part next week.

 First up:

Every single person named in these files is not necessarily a you-know-what.

This is the most prevalent and largest misconception about what the Epstein revelations actually reveal about the American aristocracy. In the days since their release, social media has thundered with lamentations of “we are ruled by a cabal of pedophiles” and any concrete evidence that somebody spoke to Jeffrey Epstein in his entire adult life, from his best friends down to his dentist, is ipso facto proof that that person is an active child molester.

I am in no way defending of minimizing child sexual abuse, but considering the sheer scale of Epstein’s network, this is a terrifying thing to believe, and I don’t want you to have terrifying beliefs. So let’s drill down here.

 With full knowledge that this will sound like I’m the one who’s bonkers: We don’t actually know that Epstein was running or was involved in a large sex trafficking ring, let alone a pedophile ring. That’s a general suspicion that has developed out of the frustratingly vague, limited, curated, and incomplete information that the US government will allow the public to see. The suspicion has grown over time into just a fact that everyone knows. This breeds conspiracy theories because it feels like the only possible explanation for there not being mass arrests is that everyone who would do the arresting is in on it.

 Here’s what we know about Epstein:

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