Pedophile Isle

On the utility and futility of the Epstein files

I publish twice a month. On the first Saturday of every month, readers can expect a “mainline,” often multi-part essay clarifying, applying, or adding onto Marxist theory. Two weeks later, a “sideline” essay is published, usually analyzing a major current event or viral point of discourse. Every essay is free for one month after publication, after which it is automatically paywalled (with exceptions). For access to the entire archive, please consider a paid subscription.

The Prior Decade

Image pulled from “Watch Live: Hillary Clinton Campaigns in Florida.” Time Magazine, November 1, 2016. Photo by Jewel Samand, AP/Getty.

I do not use the term “conspiracy” pejoratively. Whatever Epstein was, he was at the center of a conspiracy. On this, virtually everyone today can agree. But from 2016-2020, much ink has been spilled vilifying the people interested in his activities as “conspiracy theorists,” cranks, and cultists. There is, of course, some truth to these malignments (more on that later). Mostly, though, the disavowals of Epstein conspiracy theorizing came from institutions and powerful individuals who were associated with his network during a more stable period. The damage they were attempting to contain was not any one individual’s public standing, but the nostalgia for a “simpler time,” when people were “kinder” and governance was “good.” The liberal political project of the latter half of the 2010s was to restore the End of History consensus.

As of 2025, that project has dissolved. While the rank-and-file footsoldiers of the Democratic Party may still believe in it, the elites have signaled that they do not. They openly weaponize Trump’s Epstein connections for political leverage, where they once denied Epstein and his probable intelligence handler, Ghislaine Maxwell, were at all important. They brazenly pretend the inadmissible accusations made on a public hotline to be fact—that Trump and Bill Clinton blew each other, that they were eating babies, that there are bodies buried at Mar-A-Lago—acknowledging that they are not real evidence, but repeating them nonetheless.

The people truly obsessed with Epstein during this period were predominantly those in Q-Anon circles, or leftists committed to undermining that digital cult’s accusations (I think of TrueAnon in particular) in order to put forth their own version of events. Regardless, spirited public discussion of Epstein was niche. The public found it weird, “Epstein didn’t kill himself” became a meme, but the truth was too obscure—and carefully censored—for most people to take an interest. With Trump in office again, this has changed.

The Farce of American Glasnost

Produced by ChatGPT 5.2

Though the release of the Epstein files by the Department of Justice was framed rhetorically as an act of transparency and accountability, it has served to obfuscate real elite networks and divide the American public even further. Realistically, it could have only ever done so in this climate. There is no longer a shared epistemic reality, and few people have the time or the bandwidth to comb through millions of documents themselves to ascertain the full truth and nothing but the truth. Conspiratorial thinking is now mainstream, but no one can agree on what the conspiracy is. This is both indicative of and useful for a fragmented political elite.

The flood of documents renders any attempt to parse truth from fiction futile. Because of disclosure, we are unable to ascertain beyond a very thin degree of accuracy what actually transpired in this network, what it was for, whose interests it served, and who was even in the “inner circle.” Almost everyone taking a stab at it does so to benefit the political coalition they believe themselves to be a part of. Most people making claims online are repeating them from someone else who has compiled a narrow set of documents to frame a narrative. Now that the Clintons are out of the picture for the most part, the Democrats are more comfortable throwing their past leaders under the bus if it means Trump will go down with them. In the meantime, Trump’s base uses whatever documents they can find to claim his own Epstein connections are false kompromat invented to defame him, or that he was actually one of the heroes of the story. The benefit for Trump—and the rest of the Republicans—is that whichever way the cookie crumbles, the outcome is the same: The old world is dead, and they are better positioned to write the history of the next decade, even if their man is narratively compromised.

Disclosure, ironically enough, has actually done more to obscure the real inner workings of the Epstein network than censorship. It’s an inverse of the Streisand effect. Thus far, there is nothing in the documents that definitively places Trump as the perpetrator of a major crime—had there been, the Justice Department would have already used this against him during the Biden presidency. But, at the same time, there hasn’t been anything all that legally incriminating to put Bill Clinton in prison either. There is plenty of innuendo and some major figures have taken a hit to their reputations (Noam Chomsky, Ehud Barak, Stephen Hawking), but nothing so explicit that the DoJ could form a slam-dunk case against anyone but Epstein and Maxwell themselves. If there were anything like that going on—and there certainly was—it’s unlikely anyone involved would be stupid enough to put it on a Gmail server in plain language.

Moreover, as the files came in, we began to see a new discursive fringe emerge: The anti-conspiracists, those who acknowledge the secrecy and sexual nature of this boys and girls club, but who deny the allegations of human trafficking, blackmail, and/or child rape. To them, Epstein was just a weird rich guy with weird rich guy interests, and the entire affair is just a media circus for more salient political issues that affect people’s day to day lives.¹ This in itself is indicative of the fragmentation of a shared reality and the disclosure’s utility as a cover-up for the very activities carried out in the files.

Whether or not particular figures are morally or legally culpable for what Epstein was doing is largely irrelevant. More important is the function of the network itself, and its connections to intelligence and finance. Was it a blackmail ring? Money laundering? An underground criminal network? Evidence of global elite consolidation? Well, to an extent the answer is yes to all of these things, but because of the disclosure, the botched redactions, and the TikTok hysteria, we will never actually know what that extent was and who specifically could be implicated. We don’t even know whether the participants in these interactions are telling the truth to each other, whether the evidence collected is real, and if it is proven not to be, who put it there for release. Moreover, we will never know what network replaced it, or who the nodes might be, because this particular network has been smashed to pieces. Whatever was relevant about Epstein himself has already been buried along with him (or, if you are not convinced of his death, his body double). It is a waste of time to argue for any individual’s innocence, heroism, or guilt, especially when the reason for doing so is sentimentalism or fear of attachment to a corrupted figure.

Another odd development in the discourse is that many who firmly believe Trump and/or Clinton were raping prepubescent children on Little Saint James and that Trump ordered a shoddy redaction of his own name from the files are still willing to insult you a conspiracy theorist if you begin discussing Ghislaine Maxwell’s likely role as an intelligence handler, or claim that some of the publicly-known victims were themselves enthusiastic groomers of later (and younger) victims. The pejorative is applied not to those who see a narrow moral conspiracy of decadent elites abusing their power, but to those who see a broader structural conspiracy performing a specific function within the global political economy. Withholding one’s disgust response to ask “Well, what was the actual fucking point?” is considered inadmissible.

The Actual Fucking Point

Gerhard Richter, September, 2005.

That debauchery was the only end in itself is what is inadmissible. A state dinner is not just a meal, it is a diplomatic engagement. Important decisions are made which affect the course of millions of lives. I see no reason why an orgy on a private island between extremely powerful men would be any different. On the contrary, an elitist orgy may be an even more important encounter than a state dinner, since it requires both intimacy and discretion, whereas the dinner is a highly public affair.

So what was Epstein? I cannot say with any certainty. I haven’t looked at the files myself, only seen screenshots shared by others (which are themselves of dubious origin). In all likelihood he was an intelligence asset, handled by Maxwell, to be a facilitator for secret meetings between a variety of wealthy individuals who, for whatever reason, needed privacy to talk shop. They likely collected kompromat, sold state secrets, maintained backchannels, laundered money, and were a publicly acceptable point of contact for the international criminal underworld. The individuals in touch with them could maintain plausible deniability, and the involvement of varying intelligence organizations (CIA, MI6, Mossad, FSB) could be minimized. It is basically certain they were also sexual predators, but the extent to which this was the case remains unknown.

Why is this useful to know? The scandal showed us that such networks exist and that their actions are difficult to expose by design.² There is profound information asymmetry between the public and the elite, and this must be factored into any broad-based political or economic organization. Moreover, even if some of the information is accessible, it is easily manipulated or distorted by the very public which was hungry for answers in the first place. It also instructs us on what not to do when such events transpire:

• Don’t argue about the details, attack the framing.

• Don’t argue for a useful figure’s innocence/culpability; accept they are compromised and factor it in as a limitation.

• Don’t claim to know, with full certainty, the difference between reality and fiction; instead, create and maintain your own reality.

• Don’t get wedded to the moral and institutional narratives of this day and age; they are subject to change, and everyone else’s will change with them

• Don’t expect disclosure to clear anything up

• Don’t expect reasoned debate to change anyone’s mind; it won’t. Ask yourself if it really matters first, and if it does, find some other way to get through to them

• Don’t write anyone off just for having a fucked up interpretation of events; you still need people in your corner, and disagreeing on things like this is not worth losing someone who might otherwise be valuable to you

And finally: Don’t freak out when crazy shit like this happens. It’s going to keep happening. Stay in your frame and outside of everyone else’s, but with a caveat: Don’t allow maintenance of frame to be an end in itself. New evidence which challenges a perspective is not a threat or a hazard, it is simply evidence. A strong person, a person with real clarity and purpose, is able to incorporate it and change their own frame without being set completely adrift. The epistemically weak exhibit both a desire for control for its own sake, and an inability to insulate themselves from other people’s narratives; do not allow yourself the luxury.

1. On the media circus point, I can agree with them. It still doesn’t stop them—or me—from leaning into the discourse surrounding him, although I’m doing so here selectively, specifically to try putting it to bed. I am not pulling a Michael Tracy and constantly interacting with people whose sole axe to grind is this one issue, while simultaneously saying it’s not that important or interesting.

2. No shit, Sherlock.