(1)

so: the core module of u.s. conspiracist thinking is the one it inherited from the european christian intelligentsia, whose history norman cohn traced brilliantly in Europe’s Inner Demons (if a little dryly, especially if you’re not an archive-rat like me). it goes back to ancient roman political maneuvering – in sallust’s account of the “catiline conspiracy”, from the last century before the christian era, for instance – and perhaps even further¹, but consolidated itself through anti-jewish and anti-christian attacks over the first few hundred years of the christian era.

that module says:

there is a hidden group of people who seek power for themselves and control over our society; they gather in secret and hold perverse sexual rites, abusing children (and also adults – willing or unwilling – often incestuously); they ritually kill humans (often children, specificially) and drink their blood or eat their flesh; their ultimate goal is to undermine the political and social systems that we live within.

i won’t go into the history of that module (i’d only be summarizing cohn, and you should just read him instead) but it moves essentially unchanged from roman anti-christian polemic through christian anti-heresy and anti-witchcraft polemics and the anti-jewish blood libel, inspiring and excusing a massive number of murders and massacres along the way. almost all of those deaths, importantly, were carried out by the state (whichever one, of whatever form), or with the explicit or implicit support of the state.

we’ve seen a very classical version of this module emerge and grow over the past decade: the ongoing Pizzagate/QAnon movement.

and we’ve seen an equally classical mobilization of it in a more open-ended form over a slightly longer period: the ongoing anti-trans campaigns centered in the u.k. and u.s.

and we have also, over more or less the same years, seen more and more detailed evidence of something else:

the actual involvement of an impressive number of public figures with someone they knew was actively involved with the sexual exploitation of both children and adults on a very large scale, which many of them directly participated in or saw happening.

(2)

one response to that has been “the conspiracy theorists were right”.

it’s a tempting throw-away line, and i can understand why i’m seeing it so often from people in my circles.

but it’s also both untrue and dangerous.

the conspiracist vision – around the Epstein Files just as around menachem mendel beilis or lucius sergius catalina – is entirely in the service of Defending Our Society. its goal is to preserve the world we live in as it is, or at best with some minor reforms that do not change its structures or alter its core hierarchies of gender, race, class, family, age, etc. it says: the problem is a secret group that exists within but against society; the immediate task is to identify and eradicate the Bad People and their Evil Cabal; the longterm task is to identify potential Bad People and eradicate them before they can form a new Evil Cabal.

but what the Epstein Files show us, in fact, is that there is no plot against our society. that the people who enable and carry out these kinds of horrific violence and exploitation, and who protect the people who do, are precisely the beneficiaries of², and most ardent defenders of³, our society and its core structures. and that they are able to do these awful things with impunity precisely because of their position in the structures that the conspiracists defend.

there is no secret group undermining our society. there is a loose constellation of people empowered by the unjust structures of our society, and deeply committed to maintaining those structures. they support each other because they have specific shared interests – in maintaining the structures that make them powerful, and in being able to do awful things with impunity.

there is no conspiracy because there does not need to be.

or, looked at another way: the conspiracy is the structures of our society.

and of those structures, the one that most concretely makes possible the things revealed in the Epstein Files – and in similar materials about a vast array of religious institutions and left organizations⁴ – is the state.

the state, whose violence workers (whether directly paid by the state or legitimated through state action or inaction) routinely carry out sexual violence against people of all ages.

the state, through the carceral institutions that are structurally inextricable from and central to every form of state, which channel any form of “legitimate” response to violence and exploitation through a system of “discretion” structured to protect those who hold social and economic power.

the state, which is, at heart, an assertion of the sole authority to legitimate or delegitimize forms of violence and of resource distribution.

the conspiracist vision is that the state will protect us.

the Epstein Files show that it both will not and cannot.

(3)

“the conspiracy theorists were right” gestures at a few truths:

there are far, far more people than is usually publicly acknowledged who participate in or knowingly help conceal sexual violence against children (and against grown people).

those people are, generally, concentrated more densely among the powerful than among the disempowered⁵.

these are important truths that many, many organizers have been shouting for years – in particular women of color (especially black and indigenous women), trans people (especially trans women), lesbians, and sex workers, but also many others.

but “the conspiracy theorists were right” also quietly endorses the conspiracists’ denial of the key lessons of the Epstein Files, evading the important strategic implications for any liberatory movement.

it allows for the substitution of a fictional evil shadowy cabal for the actual operation of structural power – both at the national scale and at the scale of the family – as the agent of violence.

it allows for denial of the concrete fact that there are lots of powerful abusers because more power provides more opportunity and impunity – and thus that changing who holds that abuse-enabling power cannot and will not prevent abuse.

it opens the door for making “common cause” with the conspiracists, whether by adopting their language (“pedos”, most widely so far), their framing (a “network” of evildoers⁶, for example), or their demands (for state action, above all). we know exactly where this leads: it is the path that led parts of the feminist movement from participating in autonomous women’s safety and health projects in the 1970s to pushing for expanded police powers (to “stop domestic violence”⁷) and censorship, anti-sex-work, and anti-protest laws in the 1980s-90s to taking a central role in anti-muslim and anti-trans organizing in the 2000s-10s – and now to a key position in the marketing of exactly this kind of conspiracism around sexual violence and children’s safety, usually with trans women as the Evil Cabal.

and it promotes evasion of the specific central role of the state as the perpetrator and enabler of both the specific acts of sexual violence in epstein’s circle and the millions more that take place in families (where the state upholds parents’ property rights over children⁸), in churches (in practice, and increasingly in law, exempted from state oversight), and of course in police stations, jails, prisons, concentration camps, military bases, airport interrogation rooms, “school safety” offices, and other sites of state-salaried violence work.

(4)

“the conspiracy theorists were right”, in all these ways, undermines meaningful strategic responses to the realities the Epstein Files reveal for our movements.

we need to be able to clearly see, and clearly say, that these documents show that no political party, no hierarchical institution, no state is, or can be, free from the structures that enable these kinds of abuse. because what enables it is structures of power not shadowy conspiracies or organized networks.

and from that, we need to stop looking to state action as a tool to “solve” or “prevent” it, and stop pretending that the state can be anything but our enemy in this struggle.

we need far more experimentation with autonomous responses to violence (and sexual violence in particular) and approaches to creating safety. not attempts to integrate Restorative Justice or Transformative Justice rhetoric (or even models) into the structures of states and institutions, but concrete work directly among and with people under threat and experiencing violence.

we need to abandon, and salt the intellectual ashes of, the idea of “scaling up” these experiments – even the most successful ones. those notions are, almost invariably, the fantasy of building new institutions in the image of the state, and, ultimately, of becoming the state. if we know anything, it is that this work depends on the particular people involved, that what works is not one thing, and that successes cannot be transplanted.

that doesn’t mean we have to start from zero every time – just the opposite. experimentation feeds experimentation. other projects, other experiments, can offer us promising tools, framings, things to adapt and try. they cannot simply be applied in another context, or hand us ready-made Answers. shortcuts are dead ends; the state is the best-marketed shortcut ever.

conspiracism is a dead end. it is a dead end because it preserves the structures that enable what it claims to oppose – the state above all.

conspiracism, like other state-preservationist approaches, seeks to defend existing society in the name of correcting or perfecting it. if we want liberation, that is not our goal. we are struggling to demolish this society, and the institutions and structures that enable it to continue. if there is a conspiracy to undermine the current order, it is us. and that’s a damn good thing.

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1. i suspect the attacks on worshipers of baal in the Tanakh, which take basically the same form, are part of the same tradition. the Tanakh is not a historical text in any sense, but its greek version (the Septuagint) dates from a century before sallust. ↩︎
2. elected officials from both sides of the u.s. duopoly; academics and journalists; corporate leaders and entrepreneurs; tech bros and venture capitalists; etc. ↩︎
3. in a wide variety of rhetorical forms, from trump’s nostalgic America First fascism to clinton’s forward-looking Third Way fascism to lessig’s technocratic reformist liberalism to nellie bowles’ far-right feminism to whatever you want to call chomsky’s increasingly incoherent (but lastingly open to genocide denialism) social democratic politics. ↩︎
4. the many essays, zines, and other writings that touch on this and give some useful analysis include Red Flags and Why Misogynists Make Great Informants. I’ve touched on the longer history and impact of these dynamics on the left here. ↩︎
5. at every level of power: within families, they are parents; at schools and universities, they are administrators and faculty; in religious institutions, they are clergy; in businesses and industries, they are executives and managers; in states, they are politicians and fixers; etc. ↩︎
6. imagined and described as something more coherent and organized than simply the extensive social world of a wealthy and influential man known to have even wealthier and more influential friends. ↩︎
7. leading directly to practices (and, often, requirements) of arresting and prosecuting people who report violence from family members or lovers, especially if they defend themselves. ↩︎
8. or/and steals children to give to other, often abusive, adult “guardians”. ↩︎