"Epstein List" Controversy Reveals Multiple Layers of Distraction

Content warning: child sexual abuse (CSA)

Successful conspiracy theories often exploit deep feelings of anxiety and victimhood. So it makes sense that some of America’s highest-profile and dangerous conspiracy theories relate back to a legitimate fear: that vulnerable children are being victimized in upsetting and unacceptable ways.

But of course another element of successful conspiracy theories is that they offer big-target scapegoats for complex and difficult-to-address problems.

For example, many QAnon conspiracists believe that children are being systematically trafficked and abused in order to extract the chemical adrenachrome from their blood (a conspiracy theory that itself echoes past anti-Semitic “blood libel” conspiracy theories which accused Jewish people of murdering Christian people and stealing their blood). The antagonists in this conspiracy theory are often well-connected elite Democrats. The would-be savior of the children is often president Trump.

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

The problem with successful conspiracy theories is that they address a partly-real problem with poorly-supported claims about often nonsensical causes and solutions. As a result, they endanger scapegoated groups, distract from real solutions, and confuse the issue without addressing it.

Perhaps the highest-profile and most obvious example of this is the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory.

As Politifact reported in 2016, “Pizzagate” mirrors many elements of QAnon conspiracy theories that would develop in the following years. A popular version of the conspiracy— which arose among chronically-online people poring over leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager— is that Clinton was helping to run a secret pedophile out of a D.C. pizza restaurant.

Famously, one person who believed the theory, Edgar Madison Welch, entered the pizza restaurant in question and fired a gun before being arrested.

Fortunately, no one was physically hurt, and Welch peacefully surrendered to police at the time. (Welch was shot and killed during a traffic stop earlier this year, some time after his release from prison, when he apparently drew a gun on a police officer.) But the incident should have been a loud national warning about just how dangerous conspiracy theories can become.

Child exploitation, trafficking, and abuse are major problems.

According to the CDC, at least 1 in 7 (and probably more) children in the United States suffered abuse and/ or neglect in the most recent studied year. The rate of child sexual abuse (CSA) is even higher against young girls, with at least 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys experiencing CSA according to the CDC.

People are right, then, to be cautious about the safety of children. And concerns that people with broad access to children— including teachers, clergy, family friends, and family members— may victimize them are valid.

But these concerns have also been effectively politicized for purposes that have little or nothing to do with protecting children, and often in ways that detract from real efforts to protect children.

For example, sexual exploitation and abuse of children by educators is a real issue, which has resulted in high-profile cases over the years which might make it seem like educators are statistically likely to abuse children. Over this summer, at least two educators in South Carolina have been accused of sexual misconduct involving students. And schools can and should probably do better in preventing inappropriate relationships, in making it easier for students to report inappropriate behavior, and in investigating complaints.

But fixating on schools as the main hotbeds of abuse and “grooming,” particularly when the policies being proposed to supposedly combat these issues attack unrelated issues like book availability and “gender ideology,” is counterproductive. A study commissioned by the US Department of Education in 2004 found ambiguity among various studies, but suggested that around 9.6% of students in one credible survey had been “targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career”. Obviously, this would account for a very small fraction of the total CSA cases (particularly since the researchers used “sexual misconduct” to include some inappropriate behavior which did not constitute CSA).

Ignoring the statistics can take our eyes off of statically likely perpetrators of abuse: family friends, peers, and family members.

Groups like Moms for Liberty have often attacked “woke” schools by conflating “gender ideology” (the recognition of categories like transgender and nonbinary) and sexual “grooming,” despite the lack of evidence that there is a connection between the two. Similalarly, they have often described providing books acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ+ people, books dealing with sexual abuse, and books featuring sexual and romantic relationships, as forms of “grooming”.

All of this makes the discourse around the alleged “Epstein client list” and alleged related government coverups both fascinating and troubling.

I’m not going to get into the weeds of the controversy here. (Heather Cox Richardson has a helpful recent article that breaks much of it down, with sources.) What I will say is that the outrage over what appears to be disparate treatment for powerful men like Epstein has some validity. Epstein, who was eventually arrested again, before killing himself in prison, may have been able to continue his crimes against children, in part, because of an arrangement with then- Miama U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta— who president Trump later named as his labor secretary— that allowed him to plead a lesser charge in 2008. (The deal between Acosta and Epstein was kept secret at the time and came to light in 2019.)

Epstein’s death in prison added fuel to the fire of conspiracists, who believed powerful men— like former president Bill Clinton— might have had him murdered to prevent their own names from coming out. Hence, the fixation on a so-called “client list” that would, perhaps, reveal the names of powerful figures that Epstein had helped to abuse children.

It’s not clear whether that client list exists. The Justice Department now says it doesn’t. Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, previously suggested she had the “client list,” before later claiming that her comments had been misunderstood. Trump’s FBI director Kash Patel and other administration officials also suggested the list is real in the run up to the election.

Is it real? Who knows.

The list presents the kind of Schrödinger’s Cat problem of many conspiracy theories: if it exists, it makes some sense that powerful figure might want to keep it from the public. If it doesn’t exist, conspiracy theorists will use its absence to argue for its existence.

It makes sense that people who have gained political power by appealing to conspiracy theories about coverups involving abuse of children would promote ideas supporting those theories, even if they didn’t have the evidence. It’s possible that Trump’s team took office believing or hoping there was some kind of “client list,” and didn’t know how to consistently respond when one didn’t turn up. It’s possible, too, that they have such a list and are covering it up— perhaps because of president Trump’s own well-documented connections to Epstein (and his existing convictions for sexual misconduct).

But certainty about any of these possibilities is a belief not in a theory— which can be tested— but in a hunch that can be driven by emotion.

I don’t think we have enough evidence to make an informed guess. But what I do think the Epstein case suggests is that there is widespread concern about the abuse of children, but not widespread agreement on how to prevent it.

Because many of us feel helpless in the face of such a widespread problem, some of us are choosing to embrace faulty logic and scapegoating— even when it sometimes comes from the very people who are most likely to be committing child abuse, and/ or the very people with the most to gain by scapegoating the wrong people.

I also think that the whole thing should serve as a lesson (but almost certainly won’t) for people who embrace conspiracy theories for political aims: they tend to blow up in your face.

This summer, I attended a meeting on a bill that would become South Carolina’s newest (probably unconstitutional) voucher law. There was an empty seat next to me, and Oran Smith took it.

Oran Smith famously edited a Lost Cause journal called The Southern Partisan. The journal hosted a wide variety of revisionist Southern historians and thinkers, and also some outright fascist conspiracy theorists, including Robert Whittaker, who coined the white supremacist “mantra” often cited by American Nazis and whose ideas inspired Dyllan Roof, perpetrator of the Charleston Mother Emmanuel Church shooting. Roof cited the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory explicitly in his written plans for the attack.

Smith also created a “dossier” with a Glen Beck-style infographic titled the “constellation of indoctrination” (though it pictured a planetary system rather than a constellation) that purported to link together all of the pro-public school groups¹ in South Carolina in a shadowy network of evil, and which repeatedly suggested that organizations that wanted to honor students’ gender identities and preferred names were up to something sinister. It criticized a school district for using a resource from the Anti-Defamation League’s “No Place for Hate” project.

But, surprisingly, a significant number of the people who were speaking against the voucher bill (which Smith supported), were calling on anti-globalist and anti-government conspiracy theories in making their arguments. While several of these speakers supported very similar policies as Smith— they wanted to homeschool their children, they didn’t trust “government schools”— they also didn’t want government agencies involved in the education of their children, even in the form of funding school vouchers.

Smith audibly scoffed, and I couldn’t resist turning to him.

“I guess that’s what happens when you push conspiracy theories,” I said, and he laughed.

I clarified that I was specifically referencing him.

He laughed again, uncomfortably, and didn’t respond.

1. (I felt honored to be included as a Board member of the grassroots nonprofit SC for Ed.)