I don’t usually read David Brooks or spend any time thinking about his columns, but a headline today caught my eye: “The Epstein Story? Count Me Out.” Brooks writes that “America’s political class [has] decided to obsess” over “a guy who has been dead for six years and who last was in touch with Donald Trump 21 years ago…”¹

He continues:

Brooks goes on to say that “the Epstein case is precious to the QAnon types because here, in fact, was a part of the American elite that really was running a sex abuse ring,” but that this is foolhardy because Epstein was not “a typical member of the American establishment” but rather “an outlier.” He compares their mentality to that of the John Birch Society in the 1950s, which, “not content to claim Alger Hiss was a Communist spy, which he was,” also “had to insist that President Dwight Eisenhower was a paid Soviet agent.”

There are some fundamental problems with this analysis. A big one is that, in fact, Epstein is not particularly “precious to the QAnon types.” Quite the contrary: For all their obsessive imagining of Eyes Wide Shut-style elite sex cabals around every corner, QAnons and PizzaGaters spent an inordinate amount of time ignoring Epstein and making excuses for Trump’s longstanding associations with him. In their book Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko write: “The irony of Trump’s documented association with Jeffrey Epstein — a convicted trafficker and sexual abuser — as well as a number of lawsuits filed against Trump by women and girls — accusing him of harassment, misconduct, or rape — is lost on the QAnon followers. QAnons dismiss all criticism of Trump.”²

This is, in fact, one of the big reasons why Epstein and his well-known links to Trump and his administrations have been so politically salient: They expose the hypocrisy of a right-wing populist movement, supposedly fixated on protecting children and exposing corrupt elites, being constructed around a rapacious and (allegedly) predatory billionaire who was close friends and bragged about sharing “wonderful secret(s)” with the most notorious pedophile of the early 21st Century.

I’m sympathetic to those worried about an obsession with Epstein fueling the worst paranoid and conspiratorial tendencies in American life, if not the Western world. It isn’t hard to foresee how a shadowy real-life conspiracy of elite sex abusers, headed by a Jewish financier with reported links to Israeli intelligence, will encourage far more destructive and patently false beliefs. (One of the livest wires there was Epstein’s apparent late dealings with the Swiss Edmond de Rothschild Group — a relatively young private bank, totally separate from the larger and better known Rothschild & Co., both of whose surnames are basically synonymous with “batshit antisemitic conspiracy theories.” Very helpful, Jeff!)

But there are good reasons not to follow Brooks’ lead and dismiss the story entirely. For one thing, as Brooks himself notes, the Epstein story is something millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people are currently fascinated by and engaged with. It is wrong to say, as he does, that Epstein’s fuzzy connections and interlocking networks are “easy to understand” — very much the opposite, when you actually try. But as a notion, it is pretty simple: it’s a story of rich people using their wealth, prestige, and connections to hurt the vulnerable, then turning around and using the same to avoid consequences for their harm.

That is a fact of life that it is tough to get Americans, the lot of temporarily embarrassed capitalists we are, to pay attention to, much less in a wildly rare bipartisan fashion. And it isn’t something you can just swap out with another tale of avarice or corruption, however plentiful those might be. There are plenty to choose from: Olivia Nuzzi’s obscene remuneration for corrupt fraternization with (apparently multiple?) presidential candidates while publicly covering them, the Trump family’s endless grifts with foreign potentates, or any number of other options. But to get something with equal power, you’d need one that involves ex- and (crucially!) current U.S. presidents, a senior member of the British royal family, a president of Harvard, and movie stars. And you’d need to convince millions of people that this other story is more worth pursuing than the story with which they’re already familiar.

The late Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson once described conspiracy as “the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.” When people can’t access or even learn about the actual mechanisms by which elites control our lives and fortunes, they resort to stories. Those stories are often wrong — they can, in fact, be dangerous — but they come from a genuine and rational impulse to make sense of a world in which power really does operate through networks of personal relationships and constantly evades democratic accountability.

The Epstein case is fascinating precisely because it collapses those distinctions. It was an actual elite network, operating through personal relationships and mutual protection, flying on private jets and meeting on an exclusive tropical island — more or less what the paranoid style typically imagines. And — and this is really key — it involves, in ways we are getting glimpses of but do not yet fully understand, the sitting president of the United States, whose former chief political adviser, former labor secretary, current attorney general, and others were all tied in.

It is absolutely the case, as I’ve said before, that the Epstein case does not and cannot explain everything — the closer one gets to declaring that the Epstein circle was or is the shadowy cabal controlling the whole world, the more we should all collectively and slowly back away. But running in the other direction — dismissing public interest in the Epstein case as heedless conspiracy-mongering — ignores the fact that, sometimes, lurid popular narratives, however crudely expressed, point toward truths that institutional discourse avoids.

David Brooks certainly knows more about elites than your average American — he is, despite his protestations, one of them. His defense of his friends (“say what you will about our financial, educational, nonprofit and political elites, but they are not mass rapists”) may often be true. Still, as the #MeToo era exposed, it isn’t always as true as we’d prefer to believe. Brooks finally tips his hand at what he is really defending as he sets up his closing plea: “No governing majority will ever form if we’re locked in a permanent class war.” Being worried about the knock-on effects of the Epstein story on one’s billionaire and party-elite friends may be the worst argument for ignoring it of all.

If you’re interested in more on this, as well as more thoughts on the Olivia Nuzzi journalism scandal, check out my conversation with Maria Bustillos at Flaming Hydra:

And re-upping my deep dive into the material reality of his island, the much-ignored role that Virgin Islanders play in the story, and how it all fits into the much bigger saga of American and European empires from this summer: