Was this the militant wing of the Epstein mania?

That armed intrusion into Mar-a-Lago in the early hours of Sunday morning – was this the militant wing of the Epstein mania? Was this the moment that the swirling digital belief that the world is run by a secret cult of Satanic paedos finally turned violent? The intruder – one Austin Tucker Martin – was reportedly obsessed with the Epstein scandal. He is said to have been in the grip of a feverish conviction that ‘evil is real’. Did he sneak on to Trump’s Florida estate to vent his wrath over the ‘Epstein elites’?

Much is still unclear about this latest incursion on Trump’s home turf. What we do know is that the president wasn’t there – he was hosting the National Governors Association dinner at the White House. We know the suspect is 21 years old and from North Carolina. After breaching the security perimeter of Mar-a-Lago, he reportedly placed a can of fuel on the ground and aimed his shotgun at it. He was accosted by Secret Service agents who told him to lay down his weapon. He refused and was shot dead.

It may be some time before a motive is discovered, if one is discovered at all. But friends of Mr Martin are already volunteering the fact that he had become consumed by the Jeffrey Epstein drama. He was ‘obsessed with [the] Epstein files’, says a headline in the New York Post. The ‘armed madman’ was ‘reportedly obsessed’ with the Epstein issue and had implored pals to ‘raise awareness’ about it. Newsweek is running with this angle, too. He was ‘angry over [the] Epstein files’, it says.

A co-worker claims Martin messaged him about the Epstein files just one week ago. ‘Evil is real and unmistakeable’, he reportedly wrote. He told his friend he should ‘tell other people… about the Epstein files’. Other colleagues claim Martin was convinced that the Trump administration has covered up the Epstein insanity. As the Post says, he believed there was ‘a concerted government campaign to cover up the Epstein files’ so that the ‘elites could continue “getting away with it”’.

We await further info about Martin and his beliefs. But if he did indeed take up arms after becoming convinced that ‘evil’ men are puppeteering politics from the shadows, can we really be surprised? The Epstein mania lends itself beautifully – and terrifyingly – to a Helter Skelter-style conspiracism. To the dangerous belief that a cabal of rapists is running the show and there’s not a damn thing you or I can do about it. Depicting the ruling classes as uniquely demonic, and the rest of us as a morally emasculated blob who are powerless before the paedos, is a recipe for blind rage. In demonising the powerful and disenfranchising the public, the Epstein mania opens up a space for delirium, grievance and even violence.

The Epstein drama has become the rotten soil in which all sorts of lunatic beliefs have taken root. It long ago ceased to be a historically specific scandal involving criminal behaviour by a wealthy financier, instead morphing into a dystopic fairytale about vast networks of the powerful hosting Satanic orgies and bowing down to the Jewish State (which is Moloch to online imbeciles). Conspiratorial thinking always leads, not to ‘enlightenment’, but to a bleak cynicism towards democracy and a bottomless pity for the self, as people become more and more convinced that hidden forces are running / ruining their lives. Violence, or certainly anti-social behaviour, is a natural outgrowth of the cancer of conspiracism.

The events at Mar-a-Lago raise serious questions about our sick culture. Even beyond the Epstein issue, there’s the Trump question. There are reports that Mr Martin was previously a Trump supporter but may have lost faith. Let’s see. But it is undeniable that the media treatment of Trump has been unhinged these past few years. He is depicted not just as a bad president but as a fascistic one – a Hitler-like pox on America who is laying waste to every virtue of that great republic. That some people have come to see him not only as a bad politician but as an existential threat to all that is good is shocking but not surprising.

This would appear to be the third dream of serious violence against the president. During the 2024 presidential election, he narrowly survived a shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. A few months later, he survived an assassination attempt at Trump International Golf Club near Mar-a-Lago. I am not saying the media’s legion sufferers from Trump Derangement Syndrome are responsible for these attempted assassinations. Only the gunmen themselves are culpable. Yet surely we need a grown-up conversation about how ceaseless vilification can generate physical hostility?

We live under a cultural establishment that thinks saying ‘he’ about a fella in a dress is an act of outrageous ‘erasure’. Yet it also thinks screaming ‘Nazi!’ at a politician on a loop has no problematic impact whatsoever, and anyone who says otherwise must be a Trump brown-noser. My view is that the violent animus for Trump is of a piece with the lethal intolerance of our times. From these attempted assassinations to the slaying of Charlie Kirk, from the racist targeting of ‘Zionist’ businesses (Jews) to the death threats against TERFs, it feels like there is a new barbaric style in Western politics. In replacing democratic discussion with a depthless spiral of grievance-mongering, cancel culture has birthed monsters, prime among them a savage disdain for those who disagree with us.

For me, the most chilling thing is the tyranny of nonchalance that reigns after every threat against Trump. Sure, the threats get media coverage, but they cause little moral fury. The response feels increasingly blasé. If we as a culture fail to take a firm stand against this dream of death for a democratically elected leader, we will normalise savagery. It matters not one iota what you think of Trump – you should be loudly horrified by any attempt to violently silence a man elected by 77million good Americans.

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, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy, is out now. Find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.