Here's Why the Epstein Files Are Radicalizing You

You may find yourself getting lost in the Epstein files. Maybe you're seeing it happening to others. Here's what's happening and how to process what we're experiencing.

I study extremism, conspiracy theories, and antisemitism online. I have never seen so much of all three spread to so many “normies” as I have since the Epstein files dropped.

You have probably heard people say that “Pizzagate was real” or “QAnon was right.” You may even be saying these yourself. You may see people talking about the Rothschilds or talking about how Israel orchestrated the entire conspiracy. These ideas are now everywhere. And they are radicalizing a large segment of our society.

We need to talk about it and why it’s happening. Because if we don’t, it will keep spreading.

The Epstein files are the perfect storm to legitimize conspiracy theories. It is an actual conspiracy. It involves a shady group of elites. The ringleader was Jewish. Israel and Mossad were connected. It involved a human trafficking ring targeting children. It was hidden in plain sight. There were no consequences.

These are all hallmarks of conspiracy theories. So it makes sense that people are starting to buy into them, even people who might not have in the past. The problem is that most people don’t understand that conspiracy theories aren’t wrong because conspiracies don’t exist. They are wrong because they oversimplify narratives and create mythically evil and devious villains.

Yes, the Epstein files reveal an actual conspiracy. But they also reveal a complicated and confusing picture of the world. One that is deeply unfair, deeply dark, deeply broken. All this is overwhelming. Most of us have a deep desire for the world to: 1. Make sense. 2. Have meaning. 3. Be good.

It is scary to face a reality they may be the opposite of all three. And if things are dark, we’d like to believe there is some simple or at least attainable way to fix it. If we are not used to finding meaning in a world that at times feels meaningless and existentially terrifying, our brains look for shortcuts to bypass those issues when we face them.

Creating a simple, mythical, and one-dimensional villain is one of the easiest ways to face a painful and scary world. The Epstein files are easier to process if people think only one group or type of person is responsible for the conspiracy. And an easy solution. If it’s only Jews or Israel, then they just need to beat that one group. See the way people these people talk about the files: they rarely talk about the victims. They don’t talk about systems, just one group of people or one country.

If they faced the reality of the files fully, they’d have to see how the conspiracy in fact reveals something devastating: the abuse was everywhere. By a vast and diverse group of rich, powerful people. Democrats and Republicans. A prince. A prime minister. A Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist. The CEO of Dubai’s largest port. Billionaires in tech, finance, and entertainment. People from the US, UK, Norway, Slovakia, France, India, the UAE. Self-described feminists and open misogynists. People who publicly championed children’s causes. People from every race and religion.

The common thread was never ethnicity or ideology. It was wealth and power. But that makes for a hard, complicated villain and thus solution.

Part of this is also just pure trauma and overwhelm. No one is made to process an endless onslaught of emails from inhuman monsters, testimony of victims, horrifying evidence. All of it without any filter, just pure horror.

You will often hear of people who just can’t stop reading these files. It is like an addiction. They hope if they read enough they’ll be able to make sense of it, but they just further get lost in it. This is exactly how conspiracy theorists of other forms became radicalized. QAnon believers will become obsessed, uncovering “evidence” to confirm their narratives, etc etc. They believe they are accessing deep truths, but in many ways they are actually avoiding their own emotions.

Ironically, the release of 3 million files to the public did not necessarily lead to more clarity. While they can help us identify perpetrators and other more obvious issues, they do not provide the narrative or interpretation that conspiracy theories seem to provide. So what is happening is that the evidence becomes a tool to prove pre-existing views more than to reveal things people did not know. Or they involve themselves in online communities that often can spin into cycles of interpretation that feed themselves. People become influenced by each other, then they confirm each other’s views. And bad actors then can take advantage of that. Foreign governments, influencers, extremist communities, and others can pretend to be part of these communities while actually feeding them propaganda.

There is a reason that 4chan, X, and Reddit can radicalize people. They become places where communities dig themselves further and further into echo chambers. When that happens, it is not hard to lose connection to reality: the more time you spend in these communities the less time you are challenging your own views.

Look at /r/Epstein on Reddit and you will see supposed detectives sharing various emails and other pieces of evidence that are real, but then also talking about the Rothschilds, Israel, etc etc as if the inclusion of these things in the emails prove that they are the only parts of the story that matter. The subreddit has become a radicalizing machine. People are drawing connections together without the help of experts or journalists and in so doing are opening themselves up to propaganda.

Finally, the most important part: The files SHOULD radicalize you. But not this way.

Conspiracy theories are addressing something very real that is being suppressed. We do live in a world where conspiracies exist. One where a group of people get away with a lot, while the rest of us look on. But the story there is both simpler and more complicated than it appears. That group of people are the rich and powerful. Not one segment. A diverse array of anyone who has the ability to avoid being held accountable.

Trump, Bill Gates, Prince Andrew, Musk, the Duchess of York, Richard Branson, Bill Clinton, Steve Bannon, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, and on and on. The list includes not just non-Jews but antisemites. The thing they all have in common is that they benefit from inequality. They get away with countless crimes, not just child sexual abuse. Because that’s the world we live in.

And we live in a world where child sexual abuse and human trafficking are rampant. They thrive anywhere people are not held accountable. Religious communities of all kinds: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, new religions, etc. Governments. Businesses. Schools. Activist groups.

The difference with the Epstein story is not this, but in the scale and depth. Not in the crimes themselves, but in how the power of these people is so beyond what it should be that they can get away with more than we are used to seeing.

We also live in an abusive society. One that treats the vulnerable with contempt, kills children every day through war, where the low are treated as inherently criminal and the top are treated as inherently innocent. One that mistreats children and especially young girls and women, treating them as objects instead of people.

Of course the Epstein ring happened. Of course.

And there is nothing the perpetrators of the Epstein scandal would like more than for you to only blame the Jews, Israel, or any singular group of people. In doing so, you do two things: 1. Avoid accountability for all the rest of the people involved in the ring. 2. Fail to fight the system that made it possible.

This is why conspiracy theories exist. This is why antisemitism exists. To distract from power and to distract from systems. The people in power, ironically, want you obsessing over the files. They want you over-interpreting them. They want you to get lost in them. By doing so, you will become disarmed and fight only one fight. You won’t fight inequality, misogyny, abuse of power, and the systems and leaders who make all that possible.

The way we address the Epstein files is by combining forces along ideologies, races, ethnicities, religions, economic status, genders, and more. That is how you beat an abusive system. That is how you gain more power than Trump and Elon Musk.

They want us divided. They want us obsessing over conspiracy theories. They want us looking at each other more than we look at them.

Don’t fall for it. Build connections instead of breaking them down. And create something more powerful than the abusive systems that control society today.