Pizzagate Will Never Die

“In 2016 almost all social media banned people from talking about pizzagate. They don't need to ban things that are a lie,” said former Mixed Martial Arts star Jake Shields in an X post viewed nearly 46,000 times. This claim was ordinary for Shields, now famous for outlandish antisemitic conspiracy theories. Few were surprised he has become a Pizzagate true believer, but he’s not the only one.

In the weeks and months since the primary dump of the Epstein Files at the end of January, the three million emails, documents, and reports released by the federal government to comply with the broad demand to reveal everything we know about convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a shift occurred. Conspiracy theories are nothing new since the modern right, Trumpism in particular, holds them as the foundation of its populism. But the Epstein Files have become a pretext to revive the most baroque conspiracy theories of the 21st century, including those alleging a global cabal of Satanic pedophiles is torturing babies and harvesting their hormones from the basement of a popular Washington D.C. pizza parlor.

This theory, called Pizzagate when it was first spread in 2016, was a flashpoint example of America’s descent into unreality. It was a gothic fantasy so lurid that most people immediately saw it for what it was: a sign of our own decline. It launched the career of far-right celebrity Jack Posobiec, but quickly disappeared, a cautionary tale of where unchecked rabbit holes lead. That was until people decided the Epstein Files validated their worst fears.

Because this new conspiracy world is based on independent researchers, people without expertise who scour the internet looking for clues, the most damning piece of evidence was that the new documents mentioned the word “pizza” over 900 times, which they roundly believe to be a code word for “child.” Every word was scrutinized. They say pizza's better than Chinese cookies. Are they trafficking Chinese kids? Why would they drink grape soda?

And while conspiracy influencers like Shields were easily swept back into their dreams, it wasn’t only the fringe.

“There are rituals involving children underway in the United States and the West," asserts Ian Carroll to a nodding Tucker Carlson on a February 2nd episode of his popular YouTube show, which Carlson accepts as a given. Tucker has spent the last two years of his post-Fox broadcasts reviving a type of Satanic Panic: he purports occultic rings are run by the world’s elite, that they traffic and torment children, and that they do it to gain a malevolent spiritual energy.

“Maybe the long debunked conspiracy theory about Pizzagate wasn’t actually debunked," says Carlson with his trademark credulity. “Turns out there was probably a lot more there than a lot of us perceived at the time.”

And while Carlson’s work has created fractures in the mainstream conservative movement for hosting white nationalists like Nick Fuentes and Peter Brimelow, it’s not just him that fears there was something to the Pizzagate speculation. He is joined by former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, current Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, former Congressman (and current One America News host) Matt Gaetz, and former Special Advisor to the President Steve Bannon, who have all shown belief in Pizzagate or related “Democrat-cum-Satanist child trafficking” myths. It is easy to dismiss them as cranks, but they are not just the party’s celebrities, in some cases they run the government. And it’s not just them.

“[When] it comes to U.F.O.s, when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, I think there’s some conspiracy theories that we need to dive into,” said Rod Dreher in a piece for his Substack about his empathy for the hordes of conspiracy theorists coming out of the woodwork.

Pizzagate is on the upswing, but only because fertile ground was hit by a perfect storm. Some of the most pressing social issues, particularly criminal human trafficking, have been explained for so long in such conspiratorial terms that it has allowed what scholar of conspiracy theories Michael Barkun called “superconspiracies.” These are conspiracy theories that propose to explain everything, the entire world of power and misery, just like Pizzagate sewed together everything from income inequality to child sexual abuse and even End Times prophecy. In a world bereft of concrete answers to looming problems, superconspiracies become easy answers for issues that spark particularly extreme emotion.

The theory continues to ebb and flow, returning to public conversation recently when Trump named Pizzagate promoter Katie Zacharia to the position of White House press secretary, and Matthew N. Hannah published an analysis of government documents showing how Pizzagate and QAnon rhetoric is becoming par for the course inside Trump's federal administration. November 2016, during Trump's initial election, was when Pizzagate first emerged, and as we head into its tenth anniversary, set against critical midterm elections, we once again have to reckon with why Pizzagate has gained the traction it has.

What stood in the way of their advancement were cultural safeguards: a center-left that refused to play those games, an institutional apparatus that rejected frank conspiracism, and a strong taboo against the antisemitism that is at the heart of almost all major conspiracy theories.

But in 2026, with Democrats just as willing to descend into Epstein conspiracy theories as Republicans are, and with the taboo on antisemitism hanging on by only a thread, the barriers to unchecked fabulism have all but evaporated for a country desperately trying to understand the meaning of Epstein’s life and death.

An Answer Without a Question

Pizzagate was, more than anything, a critique of the powerful. Antisemitic conspiracy theories were named by German social democrat August Bebel the “socialism of fools”: a criticism of the elites without understanding how power and exploitation actually work. Conspiracy theories about malicious rulers hold a certain emotional resonance because they capture a figurative truth. The world is overwhelmingly dominated by the wealthy and world leaders who live unaccountable lifestyles and who exploit the working class to extract our wealth.

The question is how we understand those structures, and whether or not we have a political solution that redistributes the economy towards a more just and democratic arrangement. For a Right that is increasingly suspicious of social programs, social uplift or labor unions, it’s easier to simply channel class rage into vapid populism than offer a material answer to a very real question.

Within a crisis with no obvious easy solution, self-directed research has often been valorized as the last frontier of resistance for the average person. And since Epstein has remained rather elusive, particularly when it comes to his political relationships, the files become what scholars of conspiracy theory call "stigmatized knowledge.” Its significance is proven by just how insane people assume it to be. And so as journalists and politicians pored through the newly released Epstein Files, the rather mundane nature of Epstein’s dealings needed a narrative applied to them to match the significance people expected to find.

The Epstein Files are revealing, just not in the ways most people wrote. Epstein took a deeply exploitative role in academia, often stringing along academics in ways that show just how impoverished scientific research has become and how beholden universities are to their financiers. Epstein pushed eugenic ideas and theories that normalize and naturalize the wealthy elite class he moved in. His treatment of women also seemed to be valorized by many of his incredibly wealthy associates, with people like former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers seeking advice for cheating on his wife, or Elon Musk turning to Epstein when looking for the party.

Powerful men accused in various “Me Too” scandals sought out Epstein’s counsel and friendship, where he became a go-to voice of male solidarity. The files revealed how people in their lives supported them, such as when Woody Allen’s partner, his ex-wife’s daughter Soon-Yi Previn, blamed the 15-year-old who received sexually explicit texts from former Congressman Anthony Weiner for taking advantage of such a "vulnerable" person like Weiner. "[She reeled him in like bait,” said Previn in an email exchange with Epstein. What is her excuse for being a despicable and disgusting person who preys on the [weak]?”

The Epstein Files are a road map for how the powerful think about the rest of us, how they seek to escape accountability and blame their accusers, and just how many elite media, political, and journalism professionals were in this orbit of aristocratic autocrats. This included many people in what could be identified as the circle around Bari Weiss and her new publication The Free Press, which has received heavy funding and support from many people named in the files, like Weiss' wife Nellie Bowles, Weiss' new hire at CBS Peter Attia, Free Press columnist Jed Rubenfeld, as well as now well-known consorts like Alan Dershowitz, Kevin Spacey, and even anarchist-linguist Noam Chomsky.

But when it comes to the crimes he has been charged with, the trafficking of children for sex, it is rather simple, small-scale, and upfront: it is, as my wife often says, simply "misogyny with money.” Epstein never relied on some global system of private human distribution or something that matched the sophistication of drug cartels. There was no Amazon.com for purchasing child sex slaves, and instead he had his assistants lingering outside of high schools attempting to bribe children who have few options. Poor girls, into the hundreds, were paid to act as party favors for him and his fraternity brothers, an arrangement just as base and guttural as it sounds. This is how most sex trafficking works, not through vast financial networks, but rather obvious situations where men exploit those with fewer resources than them. It’s not a cartel of human smuggling, but a series of individually cruel incidents that stack up into a system that gives the ruling class a blank check for their desires.

There certainly is a scandal here, but Shields, or Dreher, can’t name it. It is the scandal of capitalism, of the collusion rich men offer to each other, and of the inability of the justice system to do anything for the hundreds of affected children, not to mention what has become a visible coverup from the Trump administration.

A Bipartisan Consensus

There remains a question as to why the Epstein conspiracy theories had the purchase they did, and the answer may be that it had a bipartisan appeal at a moment when nothing else could. Discussing the Epstein Files is a shibboleth on both right and left, and no matter who is naming them it comes at a cost for Trump. And while we could look at them as simply another piece of evidence of the crimes income inequality and patriarchy generate, the outsized attention paid to it requires an answer with just as much resonance.

A substantial part of what has normalized conspiracy theories around the trafficking of children is that mainstream anti-trafficking NGOs use rhetoric not categorically different than that found on Save the Children forums. The term itself, trafficking, often conceals what we are talking about: people often forced into sex work for everyday reasons such as intimate partner abuse, unsupportive families, or the poverty associated with recent immigrants. One of the most shared experiences of child trafficking victims is that they are queer and come from unaccepting homes, forcing them to figure out their own tools of survival.

But when we look at language and claims made by anti-trafficking organizations like Operation Underground Railroad we often see a suggestion that the primary threat is a global cabal that is selling human bodies at a scale requiring a POS system. For example, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has consistently said that one in seven runaways are likely victims of child sex trafficking. That claim comes from a study of runaway reports where they say there were "indicators consistent with possible trafficking," which is why they added the word "likely" after this was pointed out by reporters. The organization Shared Hope International put out a guide for parents and teachers to watch for students who might be trafficked by smugglers, which included common teenage behavior like mood swings, sexualized behavior, or being tired and withdrawn in class. More recently, some NGOs said that having a barcode tattoo might be a sign of human trafficking, which would only make sense if there is a human transport operation occurring on a scale comparable to the world’s largest retailers. This is why when conspiracy theories like the popular 2018 claim that the budget furniture retailer Wayfair was actually a cover for selling kidnapped children, large portions of the public believe it: they were primed to by our largest anti-trafficking organizations.

When we look at the reality of human trafficking, most people involved in the sex trade are runaways who engage in sex work for survival, are manipulated by a partner, or they have seen it as a more stable alternative to other forms of exploitative work, and rarely are actual sex workers consulted in this messaging. The panic is part of the moral policing that sat underneath earlier “white slavery” panic that framed interracial relationships as inherently criminal and ignored the structural reasons many engage in sex work (and invisibilize people who have chosen those professions voluntarily). It also erases other forms of compulsive labor, such as day laborers who have ICE called on them to avoid paying wages or domestic workers who go months without pay and who stay silent for fear of retribution. With the realities of human trafficking misunderstood, perhaps it's not unreasonable to assume that someone as loathsome as Epstein, with such elite relationships and an unattainable lifestyle, really was selling children on the international market for a customer base of equally corrosive world leaders.

For the Worship of Baal

While Epstein would always have caused consternation, a sign of how wealth can disguise predators, there is something in his name as well. With a recognizably Jewish name, and a connection to Israeli and Jewish organizations, his story more easily slots into a well-worn groove in the Western imagination: the myth of Jewish power and influence.

“This is the synagogue of Satan… you will continue to kill and sacrifice children” said Candace Owens in a February 2nd show where she alleges these Jews actually worship the demonic Levantine god Baal and who run a child sacrifice ring fueled by hatred of “Goyim,” the Hebrew word for non-Jews. Owens is sounding the alarm that the world is run by kabbalists who molest or murder children because of Jewish supremacy or money or eldritch power, depending on the day.

For Owens, Pizzagate is simply another name for what she suggests is a consistent expression of Jewish malevolence and Satanic ritual abuse, the beating heart of our cruel, modern world. “The FBI has already formally acknowledged that pizza is used as a code word amongst pedophiles,” she says, pointing to the frequency of the word pizza in the Epstein Files.

Conspiracy theories were part of what Richard Hofstadter called “paranoid style in American politics” in Harper’s in 1964. He meant the John Birch Society in particular, who believed social progress was driven by communist infiltration and accused Republican leaders of being closet Soviets (this sounded similar to “Republicans in Name Only,” or RINOs). But conservatives like National Review founder William F. Buckley pushed conspiracists and antisemites out of the movement. It wasn’t that Buckley always disagreed with them, but the country wouldn’t abide Judenhaus any longer.

Antisemitism is, and was, a story about how power works and who wields it. It acknowledges a ruling class of sorts, but counter to Karl Marx, it alleges Jews are the true power caste. But things had changed as the Holocaust’s bloody consequences became known, the State of Israel became a Western ally, and few wanted to taint their politics with the stench of neo-Nazism.

When we arrived in 2016 with Pizzagate, it immediately failed the smell test. Both Pizzagate and QAnon allege a Satanic cabal was capturing children and extracting blood to harvest adrenochrome, a fictional hormone that is produced through fear and makes those who consume it euphoric.

In 1144 an English boy, William of Norwich, was found dead by a Christian monk. The city’s Jews were quickly blamed in what eventually became known as the Blood Libel: the belief that Jews murder and exsanguinate the blood from Gentile children as a part of their savage, occultic rituals. This became one of the most significant motivating ideas leading to centuries of pogroms and expulsions, up through Nazi propaganda and still echoed in white nationalist literature today. Pizzagate, QAnon, and the like, just like the earlier Satanic Panic and a whole host of conspiracy theories, revived the blood libel, this time only hinting at Jews, and yet it was quickly identified for what it was and its exposure was part of its original undoing.

Since the prohibition on antisemitism has lifted, it’s no longer enough to simply prove their antisemitic claims as what they are. This cultural shift has multiple causes: overuse of claims of antisemitism to defend Israel, the overwhelming adoption of right-wing conspiracism, return of anti-pluralist Christian nationalism, and spiking antisemitism around Israel’s genocide in Gaza. All of this means that Pizzagate now encounters less resistance than its first incarnation. And in 2026, where Epstein is the primary totem for the decadence of the rich, it’s easier than ever to descend into the “socialism of fools” than to fight for actual socialism.

“Antisemitic theories are always used to fill a void in an explanation of a troubling phenomenon,” scholar of the blood libel, Magda Teter, told me.

Epstein’s alleged connections to Israel have acted as a transition point between his personal crimes and the violence wracking the globe. The claim that Epstein was some Mossad asset, the Israeli equivalent of the CIA, has circulated wildly, suggesting he is the beneficiary of some perfidious Israeli influence. The problem is that Epstein’s Israel relationships, while real, are so insignificant that they act as a diversion to the reality of the crimes.

Epstein seems to have been friends with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Drop Site recently reported that Israeli intelligence outfitted Epstein's home to protect Barak on his visits (not uncommon for Israeli politicians). Epstein had relationships with figures like billionaire retail mogul Leslie Wexner, though Wexner says Epstein stole money and their relationship dissolved long before Epstein’s arrest. Beyond this, there is little to suggest Epstein had meaningful connections to Israel, and his frequent trips, friendships, and discussions of Israeli politics are frankly common at a time when Israel works hard to court rich and influential American Jews. American Jews have, overwhelmingly (until recently), been pro-Israel the past five decades, and many have made financial or otherwise supportive gestures to the country and have relationships with Israelis. The difference is Epstein’s wealth and the circles in which he runs, which are just as elite in Israel as they were in Manhattan.

All of this is happening at a moment when Israel’s genocide has shattered the Zionist consensus. Carlson offers the Right a type of anti-Zionism, one not driven by the liberatory values often professed by anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, but instead birthed of Christian nationalism, isolationism, and frank antisemitism. For the Right, anti-Israelism is the logical conclusion of conspiratorial American Christian nationalism, with a possible Epstein connection treated as proof positive, even as a segment of evangelicals drifts away from traditional Christian Zionism toward a darker, conspiratorial eschatology populated by fantasies of industrial-scale human trafficking, blood harvesting, a spiritual elite motivated by Christ-hatred.

Pizzagate matches the emotional register of instability that the crisis of global democracy has allowed. It acknowledges the corruption and inequality eroding the lives of working people. It names sexual violence as the virus it is. It identifies the unaccountable tyranny of those in power, the astounding violence of the Israeli state, and the immorality of a system of commerce that protects the wealthy men who laugh over the suffering of the women they abuse. The problem is that it’s untrue, and because of that it actually confuses any attempt to actually confront the enemies that actually lurk behind power and privilege.

Conspiracy theories are the ultimate form of disempowerment, a way of taking very real anxiety and anger and spinning it around itself to the point of impotence. And as the conservative movement looks to harness the energy their widening income inequality causes, their benefactors materially benefit from a thoroughly demobilized American public. The perfect storm has amassed, accelerating all of these trends in a country with no history of union membership, community engagement, or activism of any type. The only option for this crisis is to make bluntly clear how power and capital work, and show people a pathway to confront it. There are no surprises here. It means amassing large numbers of regular people to tip the balance of power and force those who have hoarded wealth and authority to share. It’s like any story, every story, where the rest of us can take control of our history.

The Epstein Files have shown us a lot: how men conspire against their accusers, the wealthy valorize their plunder, and people aid and abet them in a desperate attempt to follow in their wake. But we will forget all that, just as we will forget the hundreds of women who faced real-life sexual abuse, if we let Lovecraftian tales overtake the real, concrete, and astoundingly ordinary, everyday nature of the exploitation that occurred.