“…Jeffrey Epstein checks every conspiracist box. The late sex trafficker was a Jewish financier linked to the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. His influence extended to the House of Saud, the House of Windsor, the Russian Federation, and Israel. He liked pizza. Renewed attention to the astonishing number of prominent men cultivated by Epstein has poured fuel on simmering conspiracy theories of shadowy child trafficking rings run by powerful elites. As Ana Marie Cox observed in the New Republic, “every new file drop brings at least a whisper of validation to QAnon’s core contentions.” Even some serious-minded observers are willing to entertain increasingly outlandish claims. Tara Palmeri, one of the most prominent journalists on the Epstein beat, even suggested that Epstein might have been growing mind-control plants in his garden to turn his victims into zombies.
As a result, in February former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found herself fielding questions about Pizzagate and UFOs when she testified before Congress about her nonexistent relationship with Epstein. Beginning in the 2016 presidential election, peddlers of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which laid the groundwork for QAnon, held that Clinton and other high-ranking Democrats were trafficking children from the basement of a beloved family restaurant in Washington, D.C. that has no basement. Internet sleuths convinced themselves that references to pizza in campaign manager John Podesta’s leaked emails were a pedophile code. “I think that this is all very reasonable,” said Representative Lauren Boebert after asking Clinton whether any of the codewords from Pizzagate surfaced in the Epstein files. “I mean, I expected a lot of interesting questions today, but Pizzagate was not on my list,” the former secretary replied. “That’s okay. We’re asking all sorts of things here,” Boebert answered cheerfully. “You certainly are,” Clinton sighed. “You certainly are.”
The Epstein records released by the Department of Justice have exposed a world of unimaginable privilege and sparked a global backlash against what has come to be known as the Epstein Class. QAnon was a right-wing movement, but Epstein conspiracism has now gone fully bipartisan. Presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hold the powerful to account, we are teetering on the edge of lunacy. Yet the real scandal of the Epstein saga is not that a billionaire cabal runs the world. It’s that there is a billionaire class. The moral of the Epstein files is that nobody should be that rich…”