The Epstein conspiracy
The truth finally emerges
Missed over here amid the American mayhem of the last six weeks has been the strange case of the Epstein Papers. It is a story of conspiracism, the collision of reality with online rhetoric and above all, of deflection. Pretty much a story of our times.
It began for me a couple of weeks ago when the Youtube Gods dropped me a video badged by the Sun newspaper as breaking news about the Epstein case. New documents had been released by the US administration concerning the super-wealthy and self-slaughtered serial abuser of young girls; and here was one of those to whom – bound in a folder and marked The Epstein Files: Phase 1: The Most Transparent Administration in History – it had been specially entrusted.
The young woman with long, dyed blonde hair and a face apparently re-engineered by the people who designed Tesla’s cybertruck, was 23-year-old Emily Austin (though the video in fact never told the viewer who she was). Ms Austin, according to her X account, is a “Miss Universe Judge” and a sports presenter with a live boxing channel. Her general orientation can be gathered from this post two weeks earlier on the successful nomination of the US’s new Health Secretary:
Congratulations to both RFK Jr. & to our country! No more forced vaccinations, toxic chemicals in our food, Big Pharma's corrupt lobbying, & negligence of obesity as an epidemic. A win for all!!
Ms Austin was one of small group of beneficiaries of an executive order from the president ordering the release of documents relating to the Epstein case – as well as the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King.
In conventional times, had such documents been important, they would have been released to the press and broadcasters with an embargo time, then posted online with a follow-up press conference. This not being such an age they were instead given to a select dozen or so influencers (“influencer” being to my mind one of the most terrifying word in the English language) of a very particular bent.
So among this set of privileged recipients were a Liz Wheeler, self-described as “Host of The Liz Wheeler Show. Author of Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America’s Kids”; Mike Cernovich who was a proponent of the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy theory which ended up with a gunman searching for a non-existent dungeon basement in a Washington restaurant, and Jack Posobiec another Pizzagate theorist whose various stunts, hoaxes and frauds would fill a book on their own.
If you can imagine the report into handling of the pandemic being pre-released to Laurence Fox, Allison Pearson, Katie Hopkins and “Father” Calvin Robinson (who must surely be an archbishop in some tiny Millerite sect by now), you may get some idea of the strangeness of all this.
Why them and why this?
The notion that that there is a liberal conspiracy involving the mass abuse of children has become a fashionable belief on the alt.right, and its ubiquity has seen the trope spread to people who used to be kinda sensible politicians. The historian in me sees it as linked to the 30-year-old obsession with the Clintons and their supposed immorality, which was taken to run far beyond the Lewinsky case. But it has developed since then into such portmanteau (and almost ideological) conspiracy movements as QAnon.
So, for example, back in 2023 the Republican Senator from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn, was campaigning for the release of the flight logs of Epstein’s private jet, which by law had to include the names of all on board, implying that they were being deliberately suppressed by the Biden administration to protect powerful people. The image created (and overtly suggested by Fox News) was one of top liberals from Hollywood and politics being ferried around to places of child abuse.
The theories
The dossier-receiving Mike Cernovich was an early adopter in the mass-paedophile-ring class of demonising theories. In addition to Pizzagate his YouTube videos have seen him accusing the Clintons of visiting hurricane torn Haiti in order to facilitate child trafficking and he has claimed that every “A list actor” in Hollywood is a paedophile.
When in August 2019 Epstein, awaiting his second trial for sex trafficking minors, hanged himself in his New York cell, the only possible conclusion for conspiracists was that someone did the old man in. And (according to most conspiracy theories) they did so to cover up the involvement in an Epstein sex-ring of very powerful people – only a few of whom – have ever been named by survivors.
In fact of those identified only his main recruiter and accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell has been tried and convicted of direct involvement. In addition one, the politician Bill Richardson, is dead, the lawyer Alan Dershowitz has denied it all and there seems to be no prospect of him being charged and you all know about Prince Andrew. For the rest of it, other associates and flight sharers include a host of disparate celebs including such unlikely abusers as Cate Blanchett and Stephen Hawking.
You-know-Jew
But I was forgetting the obvious and eternal culprits. Whose daughter was Ghislaine Maxwell? Robert Maxwell’s. And who did the fantasist Israeli Ari Ben Menashe tell the credulous and therefore bestselling author Gordon Thomas was a secret Mossad asset? Robert Maxwell. And who tipped him over the side of his yacht Lady Ghislaine? Well it wasn’t Telford CID.