Jeffrey Epstein is dead, and the world has ideas about how and why.
What makes more sense? An evil man facing a lifetime behind bars taking the coward’s way out, or something darker?
World-class political assassin Hillary Clinton could have performed a flawless HALO parachute jump onto the roof of the Manhattan Correctional Center, rappelled down the elevator shaft, infiltrated Epstein’s cell, killed him, and made a perfect getaway with her helmet of blonde hair perfectly in place and not a single stain on her tactical pantsuit. Jared Kushner could have crawled through a 10” sewer pipe in his tactical coverall/gimp suit, slithered through the HVAC ductwork and popped into Epstein’s cell to strangle him. It’s not entirely implausible in the mush-minds of online Clouseaus.
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The facts will come out, but that process takes time.
Meanwhile, the president is retweeting this trash:
In the universe where Roger Stone, Bill Mitchell, Jim Hoft, Mike Cernovich, and Jack Posobiec helped create and propagate the vivid fictions of Pizzagate’s underground child slaughterhouse and the Democrats’ murder of Seth Rich, anything goes, and the sooner the better.
Donald Trump’s endless torrent of bullshit created a White House of alternate facts, where there’s been no cost to lying; no penalty for shaping a universe where the test isn’t Occam’s Razor but Epstein’s Blanket.
The real fear is that with trust in, well, everything collapsing, the facts of Epstein’s death may be lost in the raging hellscape that is Twitter even before they are found.
The conversation is running laps around the known facts, and that’s exactly the problem.
Put five eyewitnesses in the room to confirm Epstein did himself in, and within 10 minutes some internet Javert will find a tweet — pro-Trump or pro-Hillary, it makes no difference — and off we go.
Many of the ideas being posited about the unlamented death of this disgusting, degenerate man are a ridiculous farrago of black comedy and conspiracy lunacy. Some resemble spy fiction so overwrought it borders on comic. Some are deliberately ugly attempts to gin up the weaponized conspiracy loons on the Trumpist right.
What we’re seeing today is a perfect exemplar of our broken political culture following the (cue scary music) alleged (air quotes) suicide of Jeffrey Epstein. (If that’s even his real name.)
After a week in which America has been rocked by the results of a real-life movement to radicalize lost young men into violent reaction to an imaginary invasion, the fan-fictional conspiracy of dark forces killing Jeffrey Epstein is upon us.
On the edges of the left, it’s already obvious to many this was Trump whacking a man who could expose him. On the wider and more fetid edges of the right, it’s clear that the Clintons offed a man—another—who could reveal they were in the center of a global ring of child predation, sex slavery, and cannibalism. A few on either side are trolling, but a frightening number aren’t.
We’ve become a nation that’s moved past the famous “Paranoid Style” into outright paranoia, a weird, sick merger of wishful thinking and wild conspiracizing incentivized by a news media ecosystem—particularly on the right—that loves the idea of dark Satanic forces standing behind their political opposition.
This was the Drudge Report, moments after the story broke:
SKEPTICISM AFTER SHOCKING DEATH...
'SMELLS FISHY'...
DAY AFTER DOCS DROPPED...
WHERE WERE GUARDS?
WAS ON SUICIDE WATCH!
PHOTOS...
QAnon Twitter has exploded in the hours since (and Epstein wasn’t on suicide watch, by the way). So have the edges of Resistance Twitter. And on TV and online many of the respectable pundits have joined in on the insane speculation as the Jeffery Epstein case becomes a partisan Rorschach test for our times. Democrats see underaged girls at Mar-a-Lago. Republicans see the Clinton kill list. Everyone sees through a partisan lens.
Somewhere in a Russian troll factory, they’re pumping out Hillary Body Count memes by the score. They’re also generating memes on the flipside, with Trump photoshopped into a mankini on Sex Slave Island. An hour after the sucide, the trending hashtags were: #clintonbodycount, #clintons, and #PrinceAndrew.
In the dark and suspicious place we are in, it’s essential that every aspect of the investigation of Epstein’s death be public, transparent, and most importantly, immediate. Bill Barr announced the FBI is on the case, but for 60 percent of the nation, Barr is anything but an honest broker. Given Epstein’s ties to Trump, the attorney general ought to recuse himself from this case at once.
This is a chance for leaders to find the facts, wherever they lead, and to share them, and for the rest of us to judge facts as we learn them, instead of playing some sick parlor game guessing at what facts we might learn and filling in the rest.
The court documents and investigatory material in this case are the tip of a repulsive iceberg of criminal sexual abuse of children and young women. It’s not a conspiracy to say that a vast array of enablers, handlers, allies, and employees of Epstein were part of operating this vast, continuing criminal enterprise.
It’s not a conspiracy to note that Epstein used his operation not only to satisfy his own grotesque lusts, but to influence powerful people in both political parties, drawing a protective cloak around his criminality.
Here is what Southern District U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said after Epstein’s death, pointing to a real conspiracy and one where those who remain living may still be held to account: “To those brave young women who have already come forward and to the many others who have yet to do so, let me reiterate that we remain committed to standing for you, and our investigation of the conduct charged in the Indictment—which included a conspiracy count—remains ongoing.”
That’s how a real investigator, not some online Agatha Clicksie, talks—one that’s poised to peel back all the layers of this sick puzzle and reveal all that can be revealed. If those facts take down Bill Clinton, so long Bubba. Donald Trump? Wave goodbye, Small Hands. But unspooling Epstein’s web is going to take time and discipline.
Conspiracymongers can GTFO in the meantime.
