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10 months ago
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A day before the so-called Epstein list was supposed to drop, far-right conspiracy theorists buzzed with excitement over the expectation that it would crucify prominent figures on the left for their involvement in sex trafficking. It’s a wildly popular notion in that world, where Pizzagate and QAnon fantasies run rampant.
The truth, of course, was far different: The material made public in federal court last week, with more now being released, wasn’t some kind of Jeffrey Epstein client list, as had been speculated online. It was actually documents from a court case filed by one of Epstein’s victims that did include people’s names, but provided little new information on whether they knew of or participated in Epstein’s heinous crimes.
To get a sense of why conspiracy theories centered on sex trafficking and pedophilia — and now the “Epstein list” — are so buzzy in MAGA circles, POLITICO Magazine called up Mike Rothschild, author of The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything and Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories.
Rothschild pointed to a toxic stew of age-old antisemitism; the worst incentives of today’s social media; and the right’s unending obsession with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump pops up in the documents, including some released on Monday, but that’s typically not a problem for his hard-core supporters. As with most conspiracy theories, adherents create their own reality.
“There’s nothing Trump can do that will lose these people’s loyalty,” Rothschild said. “Anything that is inconvenient, that alters their worldview, they’ll just ignore it, or they’ll make up some bizarre justification for it.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are the conspiracy theories surrounding the so-called Epstein list?
The conspiracy theories are that this new release of documents is going to finally be the thing that brings down the elite trafficking cabal that's been running the world for 6,000 years. There's this perception that there's been information that’s been held back by the courts or by politicians or the media, this is finally going to put everything out in the open.
And because I've studied these movements for so long, I know that these movements really revolve around this idea that there will be a document or a memo or a list or a recording. And that will finally be the thing that finally ends the evil grip of the New World Order, and it never does. They always move on to the next one.
A common misconception is that the list documented Epstein’s clients who partook in sexual acts with minors, but that’s not the case, right?
It's not the case at all. It's a dump of documents related to the case. It's not the smoking gun that's going to finally bring down all of these powerful ones. A lot of the information and many of the names that are being revealed in these documents have already been known. Some of them were redacted.
But so far, I don't really think there's much of anything that we've learned that really changes our perception of what Epstein did and kind of who in his orbit knew what, because we know a lot of that already. We know it because of tenacious reporting, and the courage of the accusers who have faced him.
Then why was there so much excitement for the list within MAGA circles online — especially when the list itself wasn’t even documentation of Epstein’s clients?
I think it really ties back to this industry of conspiracy theories about the Clintons. I think they really feel like this will be the thing that brings down Bill and Hillary Clinton. They’re still obsessed with the Clintons. And so anything that can serve as the final nail in their coffin, they're going to rally around, even if, of course, Trump and a lot of the people around Trump are also implicated in all of these documents. They don't care about that at all. It's about the Clintons and the rest of the liberal establishment.
What is it about the Clintons that captivates far-right conspiracy theorists like this?
Part of it is that it's already been three decades of this: The Clinton conspiracy industry started in the early 90s. It started with stuff like Whitewater, Travelgate, stuff that is ancient history now. But there was a really well-funded, very organized and popular effort to bring the Clintons down. And then of course, it resulted in the impeachment, it resulted in the dump truck full of conspiracies about Hillary Clinton when she ran for president. And even though they're not really in the public eye much anymore, it's so prolific that conspiracy theorists have stuck with them because they know what works. They're just like a classic rock band playing the hits.
You wrote a book on QAnon. Based on your research, why are conservatives so obsessed with the theory that prominent left-wing figures like the Clintons are running pedophile rings? Where does that conspiracy theory originate from?
There's always been a certain amount of salaciousness in these conspiracy theories, and there are theories going back about the awful sexual depravity of the Catholics or later on of the Jews. So you're always going to find a certain amount of attention paid to any kind of conspiracy theory involving sexual proclivity of trafficking. And if it involves children, people immediately just lose their mind — even if these children don't exist. There are no children who have been trafficked because of Pizzagate because Pizzgate isn't real.
But if you just put out the suggestion there, it grabs ahold in a way that is difficult to dislodge. I think a lot of it has to do with antisemitism. I think a lot of it has to do with fear of the occult and Satanic panic. So you get all of these things that are mixed together: the anti-Jewish sentiment, the fear of Satanism. And, of course, now it extends to social media. So you have these powerful figures, in media, in politics, in culture, academia. It's very easy to kind of put these people together as part of this vast conspiracy. And if there’s a conspiracy of them, well, they're probably doing horrible things to children, too, because that's what evil people do.
You’ve mentioned that all these conspiracy theories are connected. How does the Epstein saga fit into the broader ecosystem of far-right conspiracy theories, including QAnon and Pizzagate? Particularly when Epstein was never even a figure on the left?
The QAnon and Pizzagate people — they really have embraced Epstein as the most obvious example of these sort of high-level traffickings. Of course, with Epstein, a lot of it was true. He was doing these things, he was connected to this absolutely abhorrent behavior.
But part of what happens is we lose the ability to discern noise from signal. So you're tarring as a pedophile anybody who had any kind of association with Epstein. And of course, most of the people who were associated with Epstein had nothing to do with what he was doing. Some of them may have known about it, some of them may have looked the other way. And they certainly have a lot of hard questions to answer about their associations with Epstein and what they knew. But just because a person had a meeting with Jeffrey Epstein doesn't make them part of sex trafficking rings. But it’s very easy to point at all of these people and say, “They're all working together. They're all hiding the same things. They're all doing the same horrible things. And we're the only people who will talk about it.”
Do you think if the Clintons weren’t involved, the “Epstein list” wouldn’t have blown up like this?
I really don't think it would’ve. I don't think it would have gotten quite the attention. I think there would have been some attention; you do have people in that world who are really obsessed with the idea of trafficking and Pizzagate and all that other stuff, but I think the Clinton connection is really what vaulted it into the stratosphere.
How did these people use the “Epstein list” as ammunition for their conspiracy theories, and how does the role of the internet factor into all this?
Internet is a huge part of it, and social media in particular. It spreads incredibly quickly, because it sounds believable and if you share it with some documents, it doesn't matter if they're real or not. The people who are passing this stuff around don't care.
It's very easy to spread these things around and very easy to ignore the parts of it that you don't find to be palatable to your worldview, such as Donald Trump's connections to it, and you play up the connections of people like Bill Clinton.
Do you see that misinformation about Epstein has been spreading more than other conspiracy theories?
I think it's definitely spreading more. I think part of it is the fact that Twitter (now called X) has been so completely eviscerated as a source of truth. As soon as the documents came out, I started seeing fakes. And they were getting passed around by verified accounts with a million followers, who are making tons of ad money, because Elon Musk has completely eviscerated verification on Twitter. They have every incentive to pass fake documents along and if somebody says, “Oh, that's not real,” who cares?
Disinformation and conspiracy theories spread so quickly and so readily on social media, while the rest of us are doing our research and writing our articles and doing our interviews, trying to figure out what this actually means. The people who believe this stuff have already decided what it means. And they don't want to be told differently.
Twitter and people like Alex Jones and people like Steve Bannon, they have an alternative media ecosystem. These are not fringe people anymore. This is not the guy standing outside the football stadium waving a sign about the end is coming. This is a massive industry. You’ve got billions of dollars being pumped into misinformation, into these products, into these podcasts, into these books. It's a job for a lot of these people, and they're very good at it. They spread this stuff very quickly. They know it doesn't matter whether it's real or not, their audience doesn't care.
Trump’s appearance in the documents unsettled some conservatives, like Alex Jones. Others like Jack Posobiec rushed to Trump’s defense by posting screenshots from the released court documents, claiming that Trump was exonerated. How does Trump’s presence here complicate the worldview of MAGA conspiracy theorists, especially those who thought Trump would save the nation from pedophiles?
It doesn't complicate it at all. They just sweep it away. There's nothing Trump can do that will lose these people's loyalty. Whatever his involvement is, they just pretend it’s not there. Or they say, “Well, he was only there because he was getting information on Epstein to give to the FBI.” I saw tons of that early on in QAnon. The idea that there’s some sort of undercover sting operation. I'm like, really? I don't think Donald Trump could stay quiet about that for five seconds. But you believe it, you talk yourself into it.
So it's a lot like a lot of Trump’s other associations, and I write about this in my book on the Rothschilds. The Trump Taj Mahal was actually saved from bankruptcy by Rothschild Inc. Their bankruptcy guy was Wilbur Ross, who helped structure the deal that got the Taj Mahal out of bankruptcy. And, of course, Wilbur Ross later became Trump's commerce secretary. You've never heard a peep about it from Trump believers, they just sweep it away. Anything that is inconvenient, that alters their worldview, they'll just ignore it, or they'll make up some bizarre justification for it.
With Epstein, we know how bad he was. And there may be some people who have a difficult time because they wind up in one of these documents. But ultimately, it's not going to change that Epstein was a horrible person, and that it was people who were connected to Trump who helped him get out of prison the first time, that it was the incompetence of the jail that allowed him to take his own life. That is not going to change. There's not going to be a document that completely alters our understanding of what happened.
What does it take to change the minds of conspiracy theorists, especially when it seems they’ll jump through all sorts of hoops in order to distort their reality for the sake of their own beliefs?
Most people will not change their mind. Most people will double down, they will show absolutely no interest in being wrong. For a lot of these people, that's the worst thing that can happen. They have to go back to their friends and family and say, “You were right, I was wrong, and I'm an idiot.”
Sometimes it does happen. You will find people who have gotten out of movements like QAnon or have broken away from the hardcore Trump worship because they'll read something or they'll hear something that they just can't reconcile with how they see the world. And once you find one thing that doesn't work for you and these movements, you start to find more of them. I liken it to a tapestry where if you pull on one thread, the whole thing immediately unravels. But you have to want to pull on that thread, you have to prepare yourself for the possibility of it all, and you being left with a view that is completely collapsed. For a lot of people, that's just too difficult. They just can't handle it. So they just burrow into it more, and the more things go wrong, and the more predictions fail, and the more things don't come true, the more they believe because they just have nowhere else to go.
