At last, the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory is falling apart

The doom-scrolling community is not happy. From basement bedrooms across the US comes the muffled sound of huffing and puffing. Reddit is ablaze with the anger of digital hysterics who haven’t seen sunlight in months. Why? Because their most beloved conspiracy theory is coming apart at the seams. The Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory – that all-purpose, fact-lite morality tale about our decadent, venal elites – is falling apart. What will the Epstein heads do now?

No sooner had the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the FBI poked a very large hole in the Epstein story than the internet was consumed by fury and moaning. These officials have concluded that Epstein did not in fact have a ‘client list’ implicating politicians, businessmen and celebs in a vast Caligulan regime of sordid sex parties. And nor was he bumped off by some nefarious actor – Hillary Clinton, people say – while awaiting trial for sex trafficking at a correctional facility in New York. No, he really did kill himself.

And just like that, the two pillars of this crazed fable have fallen down. For years the internet buzzed with whispers about a ‘list’ showing that everyone from Bill Clinton to Wacko Jacko to poor old Stephen Hawking partook of criminal debauchery on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island. Paedo Island, people called it. When we see this list, this holy grail of establishment depravity, we will at last know the truth of the demonic forces that govern us, cried oddballs online. But there is no list. It was a figment of childish, unripened minds that can only conceive of power as something shady and sinister.

Then there was the ‘Epstein didn’t kill himself’ cry. There was a time when you couldn’t browse the web without encountering some mad sleuth insisting that someone snuck into Epstein’s cell and killed him. Why? To hide ‘the list’. To kill the truth. To protect the rulers of society from what Epstein knew: that they’re all paedos. Yet it turns out the murder tale is bullshit, too. Investigators have now released hyper-clarified footage of the area around Epstein’s cell between 10.40pm on 9 August 2019 and 6.30am the next day – when he was found unresponsive – and guess what? No one enters. The medical examiner was right all along: Epstein died by his own hand.

The Epstein story seemed to have it all. An island. A covered-up murder. A list of names – nothing beats a list of names. And yet much of the story is now falling down like a house of cards. And people are pissed off. With galling predictability, they’re calling the DoJ and FBI’s findings a ‘cover-up’. ‘A shameful cover-up to protect the most heinous elites’, says right-wing hothead Rogan O’Handley. I think the real reason these people are mad is because their comfort blanket of conspiracism, this mad theory that flattered their juvenile delusions of a demonic elite, has been unceremoniously torn from them. Good, I say.

This is not to say Epstein was in reality a nice guy. He was a nasty piece of work indeed. This Wall St moneyman was a registered sex offender, having been found guilty in 2008 of soliciting sex from girls as young as 14. At the time of his suicide he was awaiting trial for trafficking minors in Florida and New York. That is depraved behaviour. This was someone who exploited his huge wealth and social clout to exploit vulnerable young women. I lament his cowardly death only because I would love to have seen the book thrown at him.

No, the problem was the extrapolation from the truth of Epstein’s sordid behaviour to weave wild, unevidenced stories about a vast network of similarly rapacious elites. On the proven wickedness of Jeffrey Epstein, digital warriors built an unproven story of a paedophilic ruling class. From his crimes they spun a spider-web theory that said we in the West are ruled by a faceless, ruthless cabal that will do anything, including murder, to maintain its power. It was a fatalistic story of doom that was intended to implicate the elites but which ended up infantilising us, the demos, by reimagining us as the witless subordinates of a shadow establishment.

The Epstein insanity is in part the fault of the Trumpists now calling it out. Trump himself once promised he would release the ‘Epstein list’, which was red meat to Very Online MAGA people. Kash Patel wondered out loud if Epstein was murdered – the same Kash Patel who is now director of the FBI that has found not a sliver of evidence Epstein was murdered. That some MAGA folk, including Trumpist apostate Elon Musk, now accuse Trump and Co of yet another ‘cover-up’ is a warped kind of justice – live by conspiracism, die by conspiracism.

The bigger question, though, is why so many people just can’t let go of the Epstein tale. No amount of the sunlight of disinfectant, no amount of hyper-clarified jail footage, can wake them from their Paedo Island stupor. And it’s because this conspiracy theory makes them feel good. It gives their lives meaning. It lets them circumvent the tough task of thinking seriously about power and democracy in the 21st century, and instead just say: ‘Everything is beyond our control.’ Like all conspiracy theorists – from 9/11 truthers to ‘anti-Zionist’ fruitcakes – they find strange comfort in the powerlessness bestowed on them by their own theories. Their frenzied belief in distant cabals absolves them of the far harder democratic duties of thought and discussion and change.

The lunacy is bipartisan now. Witness how well the Epstein tale lends itself to both right and left. For years it was held up by right-wing cranks as proof of the depravity of Clintonites and their Hollywood luvvies; now it is wielded to the end of damning Trumpists and ‘populists’ and what they have to hide. I don’t give a damn about Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t much care for the powerful people he mingled with either, though of course I think all are owed the presumption of innocence. I do care about democracy, though. And right now, there are few threats to democracy as insidious and toxic as the tragically fashionable belief that we are ruled by devils and there is nothing we can do about it.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy