The Epstein mania turns lethal

No doubt we’ll learn more about the motives of Cole Allen, the suspected shooter at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, during future court proceedings. But his rambling ‘manifesto’, emailed to family members minutes before Saturday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump, gives us a good idea of what was driving him. ‘I am a citizen of the United States of America’, he writes. ‘What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a paedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.’

That’s right, Allen believes that the US president is a paedophile and a rapist. Yes, there are also critical but vague allusions to US foreign policy in Allen’s missive. But it’s the distinctly Epstein Files-inspired claim that Trump and ‘many other criminals in this administration’ have been engaged in the sexual abuse of minors that is used to seemingly justify Allen’s actions. It is this Epsteinist claim that allows him to imagine he is on the side of good against evil – and that his alleged plan to carry out murderous violence serves a righteous end.

What is most troubling about all this is that Allen is far from alone in these deeply Manichean delusions. Right now, it feels as if far too many others of all political stripes are breathing in the same noxious air of Epsteinism. They, too, seem to be similarly convinced that, thanks to the Epstein Files, they have an almost occult knowledge of what they believe to be the true evil at work in the world.

Of course, Jeffrey Epstein really was a grubby, wicked man. A former financial adviser (who stole millions off some of his clients), he was also clearly a sexual predator, as indicated by both his conviction for sex trafficking in 2008 and the fact he was awaiting trial for more sex-trafficking offences when he died in 2019. By all accounts, he procured countless underage victims for his own perverse gratification. But there is no evidence that the wealthy, powerful and famous people this arch networker collected like trinkets were involved in his infamous crimes. And that goes for Donald J Trump, too.

But the facts don’t matter when it comes to Epsteinism. The Epstein Files serve a purpose other than to establish the truth. They affirm and fuel the moral mania of a wide range of actors on both the right and the left. They convince them of the moral rectitude of their prejudices and, above all, of their hatreds. In some cases, they have legitimised their loathing of Trump, a sometime friend of Epstein. In others, they have super-charged their hatred of the super-wealthy businessmen and politicos with whom Epstein fraternised; and, across the board, they have inflamed their hatred of Jews and Israel, on account, it seems, of Epstein’s Jewish heritage and friendship with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.

Some on the right have used the Epstein Files to justify and explain their turn against the Trump White House. Candace Owens argued on her podcast that the Epstein Files prove ‘we are ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel’ – a reference to the widely recycled but baseless claim that Epstein was a Mossad agent. Tucker Carlson, on his podcast show, said that ‘rich and powerful people [are] sexually abusing young people’ as part of ‘ritual’ abuse. Railing against the Iran War, Carlson’s guest – implying that Israel, via Epstein, now had as yet unseen evidence of said abuse – claimed that ‘our government has been blackmailed on behalf of a foreign, malign, malignant interest’. And so, even a decision as momentous as going to war is said to have ties to the machinations of a long-dead paedo. All of which rather ignores the fact that the antagonism between the US and the Islamic Republic long predates Epstein’s schmoozing and partying heyday.

Meanwhile, for the ‘progressive’ left, the files have been used to paint Trump and anyone else with a mere mention in an Epstein email as a member of the so-called Epstein class – a super-wealthy elite that pursues its desires, sexual or otherwise, with impunity.

The bipartisan duo of Democrat Ro Khanna and Republican Thomas Massie, who pushed through the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November last year, were the first to trail the phrase ‘Epstein class’. Khanna has been particularly fond of the term, claiming in a speech just this month that ‘the Epstein class’ is ‘a group of elites who seem to operate outside the law’, including ‘abusing and trafficking young girls without consequence’. He told his listeners that it’s time to take ‘back our nation from the Epstein class’.

Khanna is not challenging the Trump White House as a political opponent. He is challenging it as if it’s part of a cabal of moneyed, child-abusing fiends. This is no longer a political battle between Democrats and MAGA Republicans; it’s been turned into a fight between good and evil.

Khanna’s Manichean framing is proving popular with his fellow Democrats, particularly among those with a deep loathing of Israel. Matt Duss, a sometime foreign-policy adviser to the leftist duo of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has accused the ‘Epstein class’ of deliberately manufacturing a conflict between the US and Iran. Sanders’ former press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, claimed the Epstein class is a ‘ring of billionaire paedophiles with ties to Mossad’.

Even the high-brow leftists of Jacobin magazine are more than happy to deal in Epsteinist demonology, shot through as it is with ‘anti-Zionist’ sentiment. In the words of one of its staff writers: ‘Was Trump’s association with Epstein used by Israel to amass political leverage and influence US policy?’ This, the article suggests, is a rhetorical question.

The moral mania of Epsteinism, conjuring up a world ruled by malevolent sexual predators, now seems to pervade even the most supposedly respectable of outlets. In the New Yorker, one writer claims that the Epstein Files confirm what progressives have always known. That the Epstein class of hyper-rich capitalists have been getting away with abuse, sexual and economic, for decades. The Epstein Files are the revelatory moment, the point at which the conflict between good and evil reveals itself: ‘If a movie starts out normally, with a family moving into a new house, and then the family discovers a demon in the basement, then the whole movie is changed – it was always a horror movie. That’s what [the Epstein Files] feels like.’

Epsteinism has engulfed Britain, too. It has leant a particularly dark, moral clarity to the outpourings of an already shrill bourgeois left. The Guardian paints a similarly sinister picture to the New Yorker, claiming that the Epstein Files have revealed ‘an informal global club of powerful, ultra-rich people who all seemingly know each other, help one another out, and protect each other from the consequences of their depravity’.

The Greens, the current party-political vehicle for middle-class leftism, have drawn deep on the Epstein moral mania. Their political analysis – if that’s not too grand a term for shallow conspiracy theorising – is now thoroughly refracted through the good-versus-evil terms of Epsteinism. As leader Zack Polanski and other leading members have it, the Epstein class – aka the super-rich, aka ‘the one per cent’ – has rigged the system in its favour. As one Green leftist puts it, the Epstein class ‘has – as well as abusing women and girls for its own pleasure – funded the far right around the world, driving the shift to an emerging system of authoritarian capitalism’. This is not the analysis of ‘authoritarian capitalism’ he thinks it is. Through Epsteinism, impersonal economic forces are reduced to evil baddies and those to whom they’re doing bad things. Capitalism becomes a plot, a get-rich-quick scheme for rapists.

And just to ensure we can put a British face to the evil of the Epstein class, Polanski has resorted to Epsteinism to try to smear his opponents. He told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that ‘Nigel Farage is in the Epstein Files, but no one wants to talk about that’. (It’s true that Farage is mentioned in the Epstein files some 30-odd times, but only because emails mentioned his name. Just as they mentioned Jeremy Corbyn’s name. It goes without saying that neither had any contact with Epstein, let alone sexually abused young girls.)

The miasma arising from the Epstein Files is everywhere now. Pseudo-radicals dismiss the Iran War as the work of the Epstein class – ‘murdering children to distract from sex crimes against them’. They talk of the files exposing a ‘tight-knit group that runs society, that protects its members, and that regularly engages in conspiracies against ordinary Americans’ – truly the socialism of fools. All the while, increasingly deranged right-wingers talk of the Epstein regime as an Israeli / Jewish conspiracy to control America.

Replete with barely concealed anti-Semitism, Epsteinism is a deeply corrosive force. It reduces politics to a battle between good and evil, between patriots or progressives and billionaire child-abusing predators, possibly under the thumb of Israel. No wonder the Islamic Republic of Iran has been using Epsteinism in its own anti-American, anti-Western propaganda – its anti-Semitic leaders clearly see elements of their own worldview reflected in the West’s Epstein mania.

Cole Allen, the alleged would-be assassin of Donald Trump, is a partial product of this madness. In a climate in which political opponents are accused of the worst crimes imaginable, there will be some who want to clean up society, Taxi Driver-style. It’s a derangement that has now turned murderous.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.