No, The Epstein Files Are Not Proof That The Pizzagate/QAnon People Were Right All Along
Please, do not let us become these people.
One of the better things that has come out of the last decade is that pretty much the entire “believing in absurd, unsubstantiated bullshit” contingent has been absorbed by the Right. But things haven’t always been this way. We used to have our own share of anti-vaxxers, chemtrail idiots, anti-fluoride nutters, and even people who fell for the Satanic Ritual Abuse crap of the 1980s and ‘90s. To my great dismay, Joan Baez wrote a song about it that I will never be able to bring myself to listen to. Gloria Steinem, frankly, spearheaded a whole lot of it, even going so far as to fund the excavation of the land surrounding the McMartin preschool in a search for secret underground tunnels that, obviously, did not exist.
In reaction to the Right’s embrace of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, we have positioned ourselves as believers in science and facts, and steadfast opposers of disinformation, and thank goodness for that.
Unfortunately, since the Epstein files dropped, I’ve seen variations of “Who had ‘the QAnon people were right all along?’ on their 2026 bingo cards?” and “Pizzagate turned out to be real but they got the parties wrong!” popping up. It’s generally coming from people who have read the more fantastical (and unsubstantiated) stories that came from the tipline, or from interviews with people who ended up being clearly mentally ill, and took them at face value as true.
It’s not that I don’t get the temptation, given how fucking awful these people are, but it’s not a temptation anyone should indulge. I don’t say this out of a desire to protect anyone, I say it because I don’t want us to be stupid. I’ve always felt that a good rule of thumb is to be more suspicious of the things you want to be true than of the things you don’t, and that instinct has yet to fail me.
While we may be learning more about some specific people and their interactions with Jeffrey Epstein, it’s very important to remember that this is nothing so far off from what we have always known about him. That was never a wild conspiracy that only QAnon people believed in, because we’ve known about it for years. He went to prison for it, twice. The existence of the sex trafficking of minors is not a wild conspiracy, unlike, say, harvesting adrenochrome from the adrenal glands of terrified children in Satanic rituals. We know it happens and there is an abundance of concrete evidence that it happens. There is a very big difference between believing something for which there is such evidence and believing something that you or someone else made up or decided might be true.
Indeed, one person I got into it with about this over on Bluesky (who would later show me video of Roseanne telling Tucker Carlson about how all of the celebrities eat babies as “evidence”) asked me:
So you don’t think that’s true? Yet you think Epstein Island is? What’s the stretch for your imagination?
Yes. I obviously think Epstein Island is true, because it is true. I don’t require the use of my imagination to believe that, and I don’t “stretch” my imagination to believe things for which there is no evidence. This is not hard. In fact, I would argue that one’s “imagination” should never be a factor in belief.
This person also told me that, when “the real story” comes out, one of us would feel incredibly naïve for having not believed the other. Except I wouldn’t, because there is a difference between believing things once there is proof and believing things before there is proof. No one gets credit for believing things before there is proof, even if those things later turn out to be true.
Also, people who believe things without evidence will never be convinced by evidence that those things are not true. You can’t actually prove that no one eats babies to people who do not require proof to believe that people eat babies.
We should not need to believe that Jeffrey Epstein ate babies in order to believe he was a bad person who did horrific things to young women and underage girls. That is not a lily that needs to be gilded. I would even go so far as to say that making absurd claims diminishes what he and others actually did, by implying it was somehow not bad enough. Call me crazy, but I think sexually abusing and trafficking teenage girls is sufficiently evil. This is also why I find myself confused when people suggest that an “ephebophile” who rapes or sexually abuses post-pubescent minors is somehow less categorically evil than a pedophile who rapes or sexually abuses prepubescent children. They’re both bad! Two things can be bad! There is no need to equivocate.
There is a difference between emails between Epstein and his associates and interviews with confirmed victims, vs. random people calling into a tipline to say they saw people eating baby intestines filled with feces.
Not only are these tips unsubstantiated, but they came in post-Pizzagate and post-QAnon, mostly during 2020, a time during which people were alleging that Wayfair was trafficking children in overpriced cabinets and COVID was just a plot to keep people in their houses so that legions of sexually trafficked mole children could be released from captivity without causing a stir.
What’s almost worse than people believing unsubstantiated claims has been the people who have been out here literally making up their own versions of said unsubstantiated claims. For instance, one woman claimed that at 13, her freemason uncle brought her on an Epstein boat in Lake Michigan from June 1984 to September 1984, whereupon she was raped by “over 176 men” and had a baby that said uncle promptly threw off the side of the boat (a murder she claimed was witnessed by Donald Trump).
Imagine! The first baby to ever survive at 18 weeks gestation (at best), just straight up murdered in front of a cabal of evil celebrities!
Not only are people taking this random tip that was never followed up on at face value, but I have since seen multiple people claim that it was Trump himself who threw the extremely, extremely premature baby off the side of the boat, or that it was his personal “rape baby” and he ordered it thrown off the side of the boat. So not only are we believing stupid things, we are failing at reading comprehension or just making things up.
Do I think Donald Trump is a monster? Yes. Do I believe he threw his rape baby over the side of a boat? Not without a whole lot of evidence beyond the testimony of someone who doesn’t know how long it takes for a baby to gestate.
Similarly, I hate both George Bushes, but feel quite confident assuming that the guy who said he saw elites eating feces out of baby intestines probably was not telling the truth about being raped by one of the George Bushes. If there were evidence, sure, maybe. There’s not.
This is embarrassing. We all know that people call or write into tiplines with absurd claims. That is part of the problem with tiplines, and it is the job of those who monitor them to discern the possibly real from the definitely fake. We know that we have seen centuries of people claiming (frequently in an anti-Semitic fashion) that “elites” eat babies, and yet there has never been any evidence for it. They say it because it’s the worst thing they can possibly imagine and it feels good and satisfying to imagine those they hate being capable of such a horrendous crime.
I get that there are perhaps a lot of people out there who are not aware of the history of these accusations, who don’t know about blood libel, who don’t know about nonsense like Michelle Remembers or the McMartin trial or what Pizzagate and QAnon were actually about (i.e. Not previously confirmed incidents of sex trafficking minors). Who don’t know that there is a storied history of people making this shit up. But there is, and believing those people has ruined the lives of people who, unlike Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, actually were innocent folks who never hurt anyone.
This is not a habit we want to get into, no matter how satisfying or schadenfreude-y it may feel. We have to continue believing only in things for which there is sufficient evidence, or we lose all standing when it comes to criticizing the Right for the dumbass things they believe. And I don’t think any of us wants that.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Thanks, Robyn, for the most stirring defense of common sense and logical thinking I've read since the last time I read anything by Carl Sagan or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. As Neil famously said, "keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out."&
Some of our conspiracy nuts became their conspiracy nuts.