Make Epstein Dead Again

The Epstein speculations won't go away unless you kill them and you must kill them by dragging Epstein's dead body back into the light

Grok dutifully complied with my request to “make an image of Epstein as a zombie on a private jet surrounded by zombie women” but DALL-E would not.

The Epstein story is officially undead. It does no good to pretend as if people don’t care, or shouldn’t care, even if the least consequential version of the Epstein story—that he was an unusually well-connected “fixer” with a taste for underage girls and sex parties, who gained access and favor to influential people through his sociopathic charm and the presumption of importance conferred by relationships with other influential people, and that his initial wealth came mostly from one man, Leslie Wexner (whose own deep connections to Israel were incidental), but was not involved in any kind of intelligence operation or blackmail ring except maybe for the banal purposes of his own self-enrichment, that his plea deal in 2008 was a normal legal outcome given the nature of the charges and only looks more sinister in hindsight, and finally that his suicide was, well, just a suicide—turns out to be the truth.

Do you believe that’s the truth? Does it seem like it might plausibly be the truth?

Maybe, but after everything that has been said about Epstein, and all that we know—and all that we don’t know, and all that appears to remain purposefully shrouded in mystery—one is forgiven for doubting that this is the actual story, and certainly one is forgiven for not passively accepting this story as the default accounting of who this guy was and what he was up to.

Epstein was a real man who lived a bizarre and deeply compromised life that, at minimum, revolved around some of the most powerful institutions and individuals in the Western world. His activities unfolded under salacious and opaque circumstances, leaving behind a trail of unanswered questions with clear political and legal implications. His network was never fully mapped, but it almost certainly included an unusually high concentration of global elites. Major media outlets have repeatedly suppressed serious inquiry into his operations. The high-profile figures most frequently linked to him—Clinton, Gates, Prince Andrew, etc.—have never faced meaningful investigation or consequence. And nearly every aspect of his public identity remains clouded in implausible detail, suggestive of associations far more complex and troubling than anything officially acknowledged.

So yes, Epstein is a real man with a real story, but he is also a symbol of the public’s fears and anxieties about how power actually functions. People generally distrust that what they see on the surface is how things actually are. How could it be otherwise? What they see on the surface is a carnival of incompetence and venal decision-making that doesn’t seem to be administered by any consistent logic. At the very least there doesn’t seem to be a straight line between the expressed interests of the governed, writ large, and the people doing the governing. The assumption is that there is some hidden architecture of forces and interests—elite interests, billionaires’ interests, corporations’ interests, gloablists’ interests, deep state interests, Jewish interests, [choose your fighter]—intermediating between the People’s interests and whatever actually gets done at the highest levels of government and society.

Every once in a while a figure like Epstein breaches the surface—providing something the people can see—suggesting the hidden iceberg underneath.

Are people wrong that there is something underneath the surface? There is a line of “serious” thinking that we ought to dismiss sub-surface speculations as “conspiracy theories.” I have written about this topic at some length, explaining that this dismissiveness is wrongheaded—there is something under the surface—but also that the concrete claims of the conspiracy theorists tend to evaporate under close scrutiny. These claims live in a kind of quantum epistemic No Man’s Land where the moment they are verifiable, the moment they are seen, they cease to be conspiracy theories and instantaneously migrate into the realm of rational inquiry. The conspiracy theory skeptic therefore can never be wrong. His definition of conspiracy theories precludes these ideas ever being verifiably true, even as he depends on the conspiracy theoretical mode of thinking to allow him to uncover and arrive at certain truths he’d otherwise stay ignorant of (Covid lab leak is a good example).

All of that analytical gobbledygook aside, what matters for the Epstein case is that the presently knowable details indicate that some of the sub-surface speculations might be true, or in any case that these speculations are pointing in the direction of what might be true, and the slow-rolling, if not outright suppression of the full Epstein treasure trove of documentation—as promised—creates the exact conditions in which conspiratorial speculation becomes perfectly reasonable and even necessary.

Truth is good for own its own sake and doesn’t require additional justification beyond itself, but if the goal of the administration and its messaging around Epstein is to get people to “move on” from this story and not allow it to be a distraction, the best way to achieve this goal is to, as plainly and transparently as possible, simply explain who Jeffrey Epstein was, what he did, for whom, and to what ends.

As I said in my post about conspiracy theories:

“The antidote to all of this—the paranoia, the schizobabble, the speculative excess—is simple: tell the truth. People sense (correctly) that they are being lied to or denied a full accounting of reality and their (reasonable) response is to gravitate toward whatever most expediently fills in the narrative gaps. This leads to a lot of bad thinking and epistemic traps since there is a lot of complexity and counterintuitive facts about the world and for which Wikipedia and internet sleuthing is not an adequate bridge. But the solution to bad thinking is not to suppress inquiry or dismiss conspiracy theorists as uniquely bad; it is to create conditions where people do not need to rely on speculative narratives to make sense of the world because they’re actually told what is going on.”

So, okay, what does this look like in practice? How might the messaging on Epstein be improved so that it doesn’t continue to metastasize or damage the administration's credibility?¹²

As with any rhetorical encounter, it starts with demonstrating that the government knows and understands what the public knows, and knows and is sympathetic to what the public feels. The demand here is not some theatrical declassification dump. And in fact not everything needs to be revealed. The admin can continue to withhold information and/or not disclose certain details if it determines doing so might jeopardize national interests. That’s fine. Most people will understand there are tensions and tradeoffs that might include keeping certain state secrets secret.

The operating question is whether the public can trust that what they’re being told—and not being told—reflects good-faith judgment rather than institutional self-preservation. “Nothing to see here,” simply isn’t sufficient. People have a good nose for stories that are being curated to protect reputational interests, and/or are designed to distract them from embarrassing or otherwise compromising information. It is, in fact, in this empty space of non-information where alternative speculations are given the oxygen to grow and become politically active.

The federal government holds thousands of pages of sealed material, including flight logs, financial records, communications, and testimony that could clarify the basic architecture of how Epstein operated and on whose behalf. I don’t expect all of this to come to light. I don’t need to know every last detail. Again, if certain redacted details need to remain so, fine. Most people just want a clear explanation of who this guy was and enough documentation to verify the narrative.

I can imagine a possibility where Trump himself is implicated in the documents. This appears to be what the admin is currently signaling. The reframing of the Epstein Files as a “Hoax,” in parallel to the Russiagate Hoax suggests the admin thinks the information in these files were fabricated and/or shaded in such a way as to cast suspicion on Trump and his associates in order to hamstring his political efforts.

If this is accurate, it might be that Trump appears on flight logs or in third-party testimony or elsewhere in the files that are not fake, per se—i.e., they are not constructed from whole cloth—and which suggest certain patterns of quasi-legal behavior or at least proximity to them. It is also entirely plausible that this information on Trump, however circumstantial, was compiled by some collection of mid-level intelligence bureaucrats and agency holdovers from hostile administrations to keep around as a “just in case” folder to not only harm Trump but whoever might create an existential risk for these agencies in the future.

Or consider the possibility that the maximalist version of the Epstein narrative is true, that Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset running a state-backed blackmail operation that trafficked underage girls to entrap and control American and other Western elites, with the full knowledge and occasional cooperation of compromised U.S. officials, protected for years by the DOJ and media partners, all to secure political leverage for Israel’s strategic aims.

The disclosure of such a betrayal would undoubtedly detonate a foreign relations nuke that would potentially touch on every last inch of American politics. The collateral damage of something like this is hard to imagine. Such a revelation could conceivably trigger a cascade of reciprocal revelations of further intelligence disclosures that might jeopardize ongoing operations abroad, or disrupt ongoing diplomatic efforts, or even, depending on the scope and nature of Israel-Epstein's sexual blackmail campaign, and what U.S. officials and institutions might have been penetrated or otherwise complicit, could catalyze a total collapse in public trust and destabilize core functions of the U.S. government.

There are dozens of other versions of the Epstein story that fit the known facts that range up and down the spectrum of lurid and existentially significant and very real to mundane and trivial and merely superficially suggestive but ultimately inconsequential.

In any of these versions, including the one where Trump is directly implicated as well as the one that might genuinely threaten political stability, there is still a way to effectively message the truth.

It starts with a sober, non-defensive framing that acknowledges the unusual history of the Epstein saga, that the whole thing is very strange and contains elements that have been suppressed or manipulated, and also acknowledges that the unwillingness of political officials to straightforwardly address it is itself a part of the story.

This must also be paired with a surgical and clear explanation of who Jeffrey Epstein was, how he got his money, his motives, his (illegal) activities, and whatever else was substantively relevant about his life (and death). If this implicates Trump, say so. The public is not naive about how hostile intelligence operations work. We watched Russiagate unfold in real time and will extend Trump all of the benefit of the doubt he asks for. Explain who was involved in constructing this story, and what steps have been taken, or are being taken, to expose and hold these people accountable.

If Israel is implicated, then that also must be stated directly. It is a matter of national self-respect. If certain details need to be withheld to protect ongoing national security interests, so be it, but giving away leverage to a junior foreign power—for fear of escalation—is also a matter of national security interest, and if there is any truth at all to the suggestion (which people will assume anyway) that Israel was “handling” Epstein, then a full accounting of that reality must take place in the open.

A public that is permanently dependent on speculation is not going to organically settle on the equilibrium that there is no there there. The most deranged and damaging version of the story will prevail. I ask that Trump’s comms team, with all due humility and respect, kindly reconsider their strategy.

Thank you for your attention in this matter!

1. Whether this case should or shouldn’t damage the admin’s credibility is a separate question. It is. That’s just a plain fact.

2. It’s also possible this messaging strategy, while damaging in the short run, is part of some longer term effort to close the Epstein case and for whatever reasons that must remain obscured to random people on the internet like me, the admin must signal a commitment to moving on from it so that the full strategy can play itself out. (I doubt this, but I guess it’s possible.)