The bizarre case and suicide of a sex trafficker seemed designed to foment over-the-top speculation. And that has inevitably led to it becoming a focus of Jew-hatred.
Conspiracy theories aren’t generally concocted out of whole cloth. They are almost always rooted in quite real and terrible events for which there are no conclusive and satisfactory answers.
That is why last week’s announcement that the U.S. Department of Justice’s attempt to take a deep dive into the records of the case of disgraced financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein produced no great revelations. Neither did it reveal a much-sought-after list of celebrity “clients” for whom he procured underage victims. The lack of any definitive results was bound to be met with anger from an Internet audience already prone to disbelieve any official response. Predictably, it strengthened the conviction among those who had immersed themselves in this sordid story that this, too, was just more evidence of a grand plot to fool the public and cover up unspeakable crimes.
But just as predictable was the next step down the rabbit hole of Epstein conspiracy theories. Within days of Attorney General Pam Bondi admitting that no evidence in the FBI’s files would allow the Justice Department to continue the investigation, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson doubled down on the idea of a government cover-up while speaking at the Turning Point USA conference in Tampa, Fla.