The Trump administration’s botched handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal put conspiracy theories back in the headlines. It has also highlighted that assessing conspiracy theories’ political meaning and significance can be complicated.
Epstein, financier and convicted child sex offender, died in prison in 2019 five weeks after being arrested on sex trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide, but suspicions that he was murdered to stop him from testifying against other powerful people have been integral to right-wing conspiracy theories about pedophile elites ever since. That populist anger helped fuel Donald Trump’s return to power, but when his administration reneged on promises to release Epstein-related files (which might implicate Trump himself), and then Trump ridiculed those still fixated on Epstein as “stupid” and “foolish,” a lot of the anger turned against him. Democrats in Congress joined the debate, seeing the demand to “release the files” as a way to embarrass and weaken the president.
The Epstein controversy points to significant fault lines in the Trump coalition, especially since it has been connected with other in-fights. Weeks after leaving the administration, former DOGE head Elon Musk began attacking Trump publicly for his handling of the Epstein files. And many of the MAGA leaders taking Trump to task over Epstein—notably Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and Marjorie Taylor Greene—have also been sharply critical of Trump’s pro-Israel stance, including U.S. intervention in Israel’s recent brief war with Iran and support for its ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
It’s heartening to see Trump in trouble with his support base, but to what extent does the revolt over the Epstein case target the ugly realities of wealth, power, and sexual violence, and to what extent are we seeing mass scapegoating take on a frightening life of its own, beyond even the great leader’s ability to control? Dan Brooks argues that when it comes to Epstein’s life and death, “the conspiracy theory is just the simpler, more dramatic version, and if it gets the facts wrong—which it almost certainly does—the important parts are still true”:
“It’s the story of finance taking over the economy and money taking over politics, the story of a system that doesn’t do enough to restrain the power of those few Americans who live well without working, even as the rest of us are supposed to rule by majority. In other words, it is the story of vampires, whose existence is defined by exemption from the rules that determine the shape of ordinary people’s lives.”
But if, as Brooks suggests, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal is “about how our culture understands its ruling class,” it’s also about gender, specifically the sexual abuse of young women and girls. As Rebecca Solnit argues, our society’s focus on high-profile cases of sexual abuse tends to misrepresent the problem as “shocking aberrations rather than part of a pervasive pattern that operates at all levels of society.” This critique applies to both conspiracist and non-conspiracist versions of the Epstein narrative, but while the mainstream media downplays systemic gender inequality, much of the MAGA movement explicitly advocates women’s subordination.
In addition, Ben Lorber cautions that “the specter of Epstein and the pedophile cabal” reflects “centuries of European tropes that demonized Jews as satanic tricksters, occult and preternaturally powerful predators of Christian children.” Lorber sees a thread of anti-Jewish scapegoating running through MAGA discourse about the case, notably in widespread speculation that Epstein may have been working for Israeli intelligence. This antisemitism is often coded but sometimes explicit, as when the X account of Elmo the Muppet was briefly hacked with the words, “DONALD TRUMP IS NETANYAHU’S PUPPET BECAUSE HE IS IN THE EPSTEIN FILES. JEWS CONTROL THE WORLD AND NEED TO BE EXTERMINATED.”
The Epstein story is not Pizzagate or QAnon—it’s not a completely made up world of fantastical crimes. As Lorber acknowledges, “Epstein really was a monstrous sexual predator, and his case really does appear to implicate some of the most powerful people on the planet…” Brooks emphasizes two claims that take the conspiracist version beyond factual reporting: “(1) Epstein didn’t kill himself while awaiting trial; he was murdered, and (2) he kept a ‘client list’ of wealthy and powerful people to whom he had provided underage girls for sex, which he used to blackmail public figures.” Neither of these claims is supported by evidence, but both are plausible—certainly a lot more plausible than QAnon nonsense about a global cabal of cannibalistic Satan-worshippers. And Lorber even concedes “There is circumstantial evidence…to support speculation that Epstein was an asset of Israeli, American, Russian or other intelligence agencies, whether to furnish blackmail on global VIPs or to launder money.”
Part of Lorber’s point is that antisemitism (or arguably conspiracism more broadly) doesn’t just make stuff up; it also makes use of facts by putting them in a distorted framework. One version of MAGA antisemitism “insists that American elites have been hoodwinked by world Zionism, imagined as a tight-knit elite Jewish network, loyal to no nationalist project save their own…” In this context, the idea that Epstein was not only Jewish but may have been working for Mossad helps to deflect blame, reinforcing a myth of American innocence.
Maybe there are versions of the Epstein conspiracy theory that aren’t steeped in antisemitism, that just tell the story of rich men’s power in “simpler, more dramatic” terms, as Dan Brooks suggests. But even if we somehow leave out the anti-Jewish motifs, if “simpler, more dramatic” means focusing on specific evildoers without addressing the capitalist and patriarchal systems that enable them, then we’re treating oppression as a problem of personalities or bad behavior rather than structural inequality.
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Conspiracism is central to a lot of far right ideology, and it has a long history in the United States, stretching back to the colonial period. Studying conspiracism has been pivotal to my own work as an antifascist researcher; which began in 1990-1991 with efforts to combat right-wing conspiracy theories circulating within the movement against the first U.S.-Iraq War. There’s more awareness now than there was 35 years ago about conspiracism’s poisonous effects, but there’s still a lot of confusion about it, both on the left and among the general public. So I want to offer some general points that I think are often missing from discussions about conspiracism.
“Conspiracism exaggerates the role of small groups in making politics and history. By defining power in fundamentally subjective terms, it diverts analysis and strategy away from the real systems, movements, and large-scale forces that predominantly shape our world.”
First of all, some conspiracies are very real, which is just another way of saying that sometimes institutions or groups of people plan or carry out political activities in secret—sometimes in defense of the established order, sometimes against it. Every FBI covert operation, every CIA-backed military coup, every illegal union-busting campaign has involved a conspiracy. So did many slave revolts, assassinations of dictators, and nonviolent civil disobedience actions. Recognizing these conspiracies has a legitimate place in understanding how politics works.
Conspiracism, however, is something different. As Chip Berlet and I wrote in Right-Wing Populism in America (p. 10):
“Conspiracism differs in several ways from legitimate efforts to expose secret plots. First, the conspiracist worldview assigns tiny cabals of evildoers a superhuman power to control events; it regards such plots as the major motor of history. Conspiracism blames individualized and subjective forces for political, economic, and social problems rather than analyzing conflict in terms of systems, institutions, and structures of power.
“Second, conspiracism tends to frame social conflict in terms of a transcendent struggle between Good and Evil that reflects the influence of the apocalyptic paradigm.
“Third, in its efforts to trace all wrongdoing to one vast plot, conspiracism plays fast and loose with the facts. While conspiracy theorists often start with a grain of truth and ‘document’ their claims exhaustively, they make leaps of logic in analyzing evidence, such as seeing guilt by association or treating allegations as proven fact.”
In Right-Wing Populism in America, Chip and I also noted that conspiracist thinking can be directed either “upward” (against supposed sinister elites) or “downward” (against supposed subversives threatening to overturn the established order). In right-wing populist ideology, the two are combined in fears of evildoers at the top of the social hierarchy manipulating oppressed or marginalized groups to attack the virtuous people in between. In this way conspiracism can simultaneously embody both fear of radical change and anger at the status quo. Historically in the United States, conspiracism has tended to articulate the outlooks of two social groups: white working- and middle-class people, who hold positions of relative privilege but little real power within racial capitalism, and outsider factions of the capitalist ruling class. (Much of the history in the following paragraphs is summarized from Right-Wing Populism in America.)
A lot of conspiracism is rooted in anti-Jewish ideology—but by no means all of it. The image of “the Jew” as a malevolent, superpowerful figure who manipulates events from behind the scenes has been a fixture of European culture for at least a thousand years. The medieval European stereotype of the Jewish moneylender evolved into the modern image of the Jewish banker, from Lord Rothschild to George Soros. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this anti-elite scapegoat was joined by the countersubversive image of the Jewish radical, whether anarchist, socialist, or Bolshevik. The fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Tsarist Russia in 1903, details an international Jewish plot to conquer the globe through secretive means, and laid the groundwork for a lot of the conspiracist ideology that followed. The International Jew, a compilation of essays first serialized in Henry Ford’s newspaper The Dearborn Independent in 1920-1922, gave The Protocols an American inflection by claiming that Hollywood, jazz music, and bootlegging were part of the plot. Anti-Jewish conspiracism was ideologically central for U.S. fascist groups in the 1930s, from the German-American Bund to Charles Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice. Since the 1980s, claims that an international Jewish conspiracy is trying to destroy the white race have been pivotal to the rise of the white nationalist movement. Less explicit forms of anti-Jewish scapegoating have infused both Christian nationalism and the Patriot movement.
However, some leftists and liberals have mistakenly claimed that antisemitism underlies all conspiracist ideology. In fact, the United States alone has seen repeated waves of conspiracism quite independent of Jew-baiting. In the 1820s and 30s, fears of a sinister plot by Freemasons briefly fueled Antimasonry as an important movement and political party with a largely progressive agenda, and a reactionary version of anti-Freemasonry later influenced conspiracist organizations such as the John Birch Society. Anti-Catholicism was a major force in the United States from the 1830s through mid-20th century, combining fear of Catholic immigrants as a supposed cultural and economic threat with claims that Catholics were secret dual loyalists plotting to seize control of the United States for the pope. Anti-Catholicism was central to the ideology of the second Ku Klux Klan, which was founded in 1915 and attracted millions of supporters in the early 1920s. John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential election was widely seen as a victory over anti-Catholicism.
Hatred of radicals (regardless of their ethnic or religious identity) has been endemic to U.S. politics since the 19th century and has often taken conspiracist forms, especially during periodic red scares, or times of intensified repression against the left, most dramatically in 1886 (the aftermath to the Haymarket bombing), 1917-1920 (during and after World War I), and 1947-about 1954 (the early Cold War). The third of these culminated in Senator Joe McCarthyism’s four-year campaign to expose a supposed vast communist conspiracy at the heart of the U.S. government. What set “McCarthyism” apart from the larger Cold War crusade against radicals and their allies was that McCarthy targeted high-ranking officials such as Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense George Marshall. McCarthyism spoke to an outsider faction of big business, who resented the more powerful Eastern Establishment and wanted to roll back the New Deal reforms that had become integral to U .S. capitalist rule.
While conspiracism centered on Catholics or Freemasons is probably a spent force in U.S. politics, anticommunism remains strong, and it would be a mistake to assume that all fantasies about a Red Plot trace back to hatred of Jews. Also very much alive is the 150-year-old tradition of anti-Chinese conspiracism. Starting in the 1860s, a mass influx of Chinese people to the western U.S. was met with a racist backlash that included laws banning all Chinese immigration and white mobs that massacred or violently expelled Chinese people from many towns and cities. LIke Jews but distinct from them, Chinese people have been stereotyped as evil plotters with mysterious powers, as parasites or vampires, as subverters of gender norms, and as spreaders of disease–a theme that infuses recent claims that China is behind the covid pandemic.
Despite its deep historical roots in the far right, conspiracism sometimes also expresses liberatory goals. In the 1980s and 90s, for example, many Black people believed that the U.S. government scientists had deliberately created HIV as a weapon of genocide, based on the well-documented history of deadly medical experiments on people of color and other murderous plots such as the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program). Longtime political prisoner and AIDS activist David Gilbert noted this history but debunked the false claim about HIV in his 2001 pamphlet, AIDS Conspiracy Theories: Tracking the Real Genocide. He cited documentation that Black people who believed HIV was engineered were less likely to use condoms or get tested, thus “[t]he false conspiracy theories are themselves a contributing factor to the terrible toll of unnecessary AIDS deaths among people of color.” In addition, Gilbert argued, conspiracist explanations for AIDS diverted attention from the real exploitative systems such as neocolonialism that were fueling mass AIDS deaths in Africa and in communities of color.
David Gilbert’s pamphlet also pointed out that one of the most influential authors promoting AIDS conspiracy theories was a member of the John Birch Society with a long history of white supremacist and homophobic propaganda. This highlights another issue: anti-elite conspiracism has been a major vehicle with which far rightists repackage their ideology in progressive-sounding ways, and with which they try to manipulate, or form alliances with the left. Chip Berlet exposed this dynamic in his groundbreaking report, first published in 1990, titled Right Woos Left: Populist Party, LaRouchite, and Other Neo-Fascist Overtures to Progressives, and Why They Must Be Rejected. Other antifascist researchers have followed suit, such as Spencer Sunshine detailing right-wing and conspiracist involvement in the Occupy movement and the anonymous anarchist “Vagabond” exploring red-brown alliances, including efforts by reactionary state media in Putin’s Russia, Assad’s Syria, and the Islamic Republic of Iran to manipulate western leftists.
“All conspiracism involves scapegoating, but the motivation behind such scapegoating varies widely, from demonizing subversives in defense of entrenched power, to a well-meaning but misguided effort to challenge such power.”
While some far rightists have used conspiracism in an effort to forge ties with leftists, centrists and liberals sometimes use conspiracism to attack the far right in ways that gloss over the latter’s roots in the existing social order. For example, in the two years before the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a mass movement opposed U.S. intervention in World War II. Many antifascists portrayed this movement as a giant plot orchestrated by Hitler—essentially a foreign import. This portrayal obscured how U.S. fascism was shaped by this country’s own white supremacist and authoritarian traditions. It also obscured the fact that the anti-interventionist movement encompassed not only fascists but also conservatives, liberals, and leftists. Although many of them were willing to work with fascists, they opposed the war as an inter-imperialist conflict or feared it would weaken the United States or result in increased political repression, as World War I had done.
Echoing the description of World War II anti-interventionism as a Nazi plot, a comparable position today is the claim that Donald Trump is an “asset” of the Russian government. As one liberal newspaper put it, “a decades-long foreign plot…successfully infiltrated the Oval Office, transforming the United States into a vessel for Moscow’s ambitions.” This conspiracist explanation for Trump’s politics not only oversimplifies Trump’s policies toward Russia, it also spares us from having to grapple with the fact that his politics enjoy mass support, are firmly rooted in U.S. traditions, and in key ways have been enabled by the Democratic Party.
Liberal or centrist conspiracism can also be deployed in countersubversive mode against the radical left. Thus some anti-“extremism” groups, such as the Network Contagion Research Institute, claimed that the 2020 George Floyd rebellion was instigated by leftist outside agitators through skillful use of social media, rather than growing out of broad popular fury at systemic racism and police violence.
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In all of these different forms, conspiracism exaggerates the role of small groups in making politics and history. By defining power in fundamentally subjective terms, it diverts analysis and strategy away from the real systems, movements, and large-scale forces that predominantly shape our world. It’s the obverse of the equally fallacious belief that history is ruled by iron-clad laws that leave no space for human agency.
All conspiracism involves scapegoating, but the motivation behind such scapegoating varies widely, from demonizing subversives in defense of entrenched power, to a well-meaning but misguided effort to challenge such power. Conspiracism also varies widely in the degree to which its claims are plausibly grounded in reality, from assertions that Democratic Party leaders engaged in Satanic ritual abuse in a nonexistent basement, to believable but unsubstantiated theories that Jeffrey Epstein was involved with Israeli intelligence.
For these and other reasons, we need to be wary of treating conspiracism as something intrinsically bizarre, alien, or uniquely problematic. I’m deeply skeptical, for example, of equating conspiracism with a “paranoid style.” This notion was first promoted by Cold War liberals who wanted to draw a clear dividing line between McCarthyism and their own version of red-baiting, and it often bleeds into the idea that conspiracists are just plain crazy. What Chip Berlet and I wrote 25 years ago about right-wing populist ideology also applies to many conspiracist claims, that they
“are no more and no less irrational than conventional claims that presidential elections express the will of the people, that economic health can be measured by the profits of multibillion-dollar corporations, or that U.S. military interventions in Haiti or Somalia or Kosovo or wherever are designed to promote democracy and human rights” (Right-Wing Populism in America, p. 348).
This doesn’t mean we should accept conspiracism as a legitimate part of political discourse. Rather, along with challenging the idea that secret plots drive history, we should also challenge the many widely accepted, “common sense” beliefs that help to mask and thus protect oppressive and exploitative systems.
Image Credits
1. Cloister Conspiracy, a sculpture of Philip Jackson, at the Bishop’s Palace in Wells, Somerset, United Kingdom. Photo by Steve Lee, 13 August 2006, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2. Conspiracy theorist. Photo by Marc Nozell, 15 August 2019, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.