I am the least informed person about Jeffrey Epstein in the country. I know he liked two things very much: doing horrible things to teenage girls and amassing powerful friends, assuming you use that word very loosely. I do not believe that if Jeffrey Epstein called Bill Clinton, the former president would help him move apartments. Unless the new apartment was in Teen Girl Towers. I also know that he had a first edition of Lolita in his New York apartment, which seems like a poor decision for a pedophile. If I were luring people to my house in order to eat them, I wouldn’t have my living room TV looping The Silence of the Lambs. To care any more than that about Jeffrey Epstein implies that you think that powerful men sexually abuse children more than other men. Which is very stupid. Around third grade, I started walking alone to my elementary school. This was so normal in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s that there was a professional crossing guard at the intersection. She was a kindly older woman who misheard “Josh” when she first asked me my name. This led to three years of vowing, “I’m going to tell her my name is Joel tomorrow.” She was crossing us twice between two wide streets with heavy traffic. In the area between those streets, we’d walk past a Hess gas station. A tall, bald, heavy-set man worked there. One day, as I was crossing after school, he invited me to his house. My heart started beating wildly. I had a few things going for me. First, I had never been abused. Second, he looked a lot like Gordon Jump, whose character molested Dudley in the two-part, very special episode of Diff’rent Strokes called The Bicycle Man.  Third, his salesmanship was so weak it explains why there are no more Hess stations. He probably offered me something that most kids liked instead of what I was into, which was sitting alone and reading. We were simply too different. I liked C.S. Lewis novels, he loved anally penetrating prepubescents. It was never going to work. Decades later, I was driving through Edison, New Jersey to show my lovely wife Cassandra my hometown. We stopped at an Exxon to fill up and, though I would have passed a lie detector test saying I could never recognize my would-be child molester, and even though he had aged 20 years – and those are hard, child-molester years – I instantly knew it was him. My heart started beating wildly. And - this is the weirdest part - I didn’t tell Cassandra for weeks. I was not-molested by a man with far less power than I now had and I still felt shame. The point I’m trying to make is that if I didn’t have such absent parents, I could have been a child model. But also, that there’s no elite cabal of child molesters. Sure, a couple of Middle Eastern princes and rappers abused teen girls, but the guidance counselors at my high school weren’t getting invited to Davos. Neither do coaches, priests, scoutmasters, stepfathers, or uncles. A large percentage of the men who type “teens” into porn site search bars do not have a billion dollars. The Epstein conspiracy theory was pushed by QAnon, a poster on 8chan, which is a message board for people who think 4chan is too tame. 4chan is a message board for people who think photos that don’t make you vomit are too tame. QAnon claims to be a military intelligence officer with access to the most secret documents in the Department of Energy. He wrote in riddles, like all high-level military intelligence officers in children’s books. Here’s one of his posts: Possible Epstein was a puppet [not the main person(s) of interest]?
The core of the QAnon conspiracy theory is that a secret military faction enlisted Donald Trump to run for president so he could overthrow the Cabal, a group of elite child molestors who control the world. This would happen though The Storm, in which Trump would send people such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Tom Hanks, George Soros, Oprah Winfrey, Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Lady Gaga, and Chrissy Teigen to prison at Guantanamo Bay for running a Satan-worshipping pedophilia ring. Many QAnon followers also believed that elites kill children and drink their blood to extend their lives. This is the most ridiculous part of the conspiracy theory, other than the part where Trump gets something done. QAnon’s most often used hashtag was #SaveTheChildren. Whenever the family social structure changes, we panic about our children’s safety. In the late 19th Century, waves of people moved to cities, where the parents weren’t at home all day watching them die of tuberculosis. This was destabilizing enough, but then when women started fighting for the vote. So a panic broke out about “white slavery.” Conspiracy theories spread about innocent white girls being kidnapped from department stores after being drugged by perfume samples developed by pimps, likely with names such as “Instagram.”
In 1980, half of American women worked, which was way up from 37 percent 20 years earlier. Kids were going to day care. And people freaked out. In the Satanic Panic, there were a slew of teachers falsely accused of child abuse and satanic rituals. Seven people were arrested at the McMartin Preschool in 1983 for supposedly flying children to an undisclosed location where they used them for child porn. The case against North Carolina’s Little Rascals Day Care Center was the most expensive trial ever in North Carolina. Children accused the guy who ran the day care center of abusing children on hot air balloons and using boats to feed babies to sharks. There was a great misunderstanding about how much preschool teachers are paid. Even sadder, many Americans regularly watched To Catch a Predator. Even Oprah regularly interviewed the Satanically abused, including this one who said she witnessed actual Blood Libel, the Medieval conspiracy theory that Jews sacrifice babies.  With women now outnumbering men in colleges and many choosing to stay single, plus gay marriage and trans rights, there’s a new panic. Hungary’s far-right prime minister Viktor Orban tried to ban a gay pride parade explicitly because he said that exposing children to this event was child abuse. It’s hard to admit feeling scared about changes. It’s easy to say we’re worried about our kids. Worrying about one rich, dead predator is a lot easier than figuring out how to solve all the real problems we’ve been causing lately. And if you’re talking about Epstein instead of the actual disasters we’re experiencing, then the conspiracy theory is working. Thank you for paying to read my column. Wait: This is for the people who didn’t pay? Then I owe you nothing. You are the ones contributing to the end of my career. If you want to pay an exorbitant amount of money to get one extra post a month – which often won’t even be that good – upgrade to a paid subscription here:
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Friday, August 8, 2025
I Don't Care About Jeffery Epstein
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