The Epstein files reveal that a vast global conspiracy actually exists – sort ofNEWS | 07 February 2026The millions of Jeffrey Epstein files dumped last Friday by the US Department of Justice will provide journalists, conspiracy theorists and interested members of the public with months of reading. And what they will read is enraging.
What makes these files so infuriating, however, is not just Epstein’s horrific predatory behavior, which is well-known, but the more mundane examples of elite conduct that the documents continue to expose. They vividly illustrate a world whose existence many everyday people, whether fevered with visions of the Illuminati or just jaundiced by banal anti-establishment cynicism, already suspected exists: an informal global club of powerful, ultra-rich people who all seemingly know each other, help one another out, and protect each other from the consequences of their depravity.
The new files will probably not provide satisfying answers to questions about, say, whether any of Epstein’s famous friends participated in his sex trafficking, or if his death in custody in 2019 was truly a suicide, as authorities have said. But conspiracy theorists may still feel vindicated – and to some extent they should, Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, said.
View image in fullscreen Melania Trump, Prince Andrew, Gwendolyn Beck and Jeffrey Epstein at a party at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Florida, on 12 February 2000. Photograph: Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images
Although the documents may not expose an actual criminal conspiracy, he said, they confirm the belief behind most conspiracy theories: that elites “get special treatment, that they’re shielded from the rules that are supposed to apply to everyone equally, and that there is a kind of corruption in the broadest sense of the word”.
The new material is the largest, and possibly last, tranche of the so-called Epstein files, though the government is keeping as many as 3m more pages under wraps. Yet even the initial revelations of these files deepen the astonishing constellation of ties between Epstein and members of the global elite – including tech billionaires; a former US president; British, Norwegian and Saudi royalty or royal courtiers; current and former US cabinet secretaries and governors; and prominent business executives and academics.
The fact that someone is mentioned in the files does not automatically implicate that person in wrongdoing, of course, or mean that they were aware of Epstein’s wrongdoing. The documents include uncorroborated allegations collected by the Department of Justice. Epstein was also a shameless wheeler-dealer who made it his mission to make the acquaintance, however tenuous, of every powerful person he could.
Yet the files, especially Epstein’s typo-filled email and text-message correspondences, are fascinating – and ultimately grim – in what they show of how elites act in private, among themselves. At the least, many of Epstein’s powerful acquaintances remained friendly with him years after the notoriously lenient sweetheart bargain, in 2008, in which he pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, and as survivors continued to accuse Epstein of further crimes.
Donald Trump’s own decades-long friendship with Epstein is already well known, and seems to have ended in a falling-out sometime around 2004; the new files do not appear so far to implicate him in wrongdoing. But they do highlight Epstein’s social ties with other members of the US president’s coterie, including the current US secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick. According to the files, Lutnick may have visited Epstein’s private island in 2012. (Lutnick disputes this, and recently told the New York Times: “I spent zero time with him.”)
The files are an unflattering glimpse into the real ways that wealth is accumulated and power is brokered. Epstein, a private individual accountable to no voters, government authorities, or shareholders, was engaged in a near-constant stream of back-channel interventions in the political or business spheres: advising former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak on how to make money post-premiership; helping an Indian businessman try to get a meeting with Jared Kushner; communicating with high-ranking Kremlin officials in an effort (apparently unsuccessful) to meet Vladimir Putin; and generally conducting the sort of “diplomacy” that does not require an ambassadorial appointment or a foreign-service exam.
Certain surnames favored by conspiracy theorists – Rothschild, Rockefeller, Soros – also pop up occasionally in the files, in contexts that are banal but would certainly buttress a conspiracist’s belief that powerful people all know each other.
If anything, the files make a mockery of public political commitments of all kinds; above a certain stratosphere of wealth or fame, it would seem, ideological and other differences are subsumed by far more motivating forms of elite self-interest. To read the files is to realize that class solidarity is real – just not within the class where Marxists might hope to find it.
Epstein may have been a convicted sex criminal and a Democratic donor, but that did not stop Steve Bannon, a self-described crusader against a decadent liberal elite, from offering Epstein “media training” to help rehabilitate his public image. Epstein may have been a convicted sex criminal and a lavishly hedonistic financier, but that did not stop the leftwing academic Noam Chomsky, beloved critic of capitalism, from joining Epstein on a private plane or trading friendly advice. It turns out that some of society’s most famous populist outsiders are, in fact, very much inside.
(Neither Chomsky nor Bannon have so far publicly commented on the new files; Chomsky suffered a debilitating stroke in 2023.)
The vast international conspiracy does sort of exist, it turns out, but far more prosaically than conspiracy theorists have fantasized. Epstein was actually a member of an elite nongovernmental organization that has been the center of countless conspiracy theories – the Trilateral Commission, founded by David Rockefeller in 1973 to promote international cooperation. Yet his induction involved no rituals of blood sacrifice: he was invited to join in the 1990s in appreciation, it appears, of some generous donations.
View image in fullscreen Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Florida, on 22 February 1997. Photograph: Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images
In fact, money – plus intra-elite social trust – were usually more than enough to gain Epstein entry into whichever room he desired to be in next. Tech companies happily accepted investments from a convicted sex criminal, and investment banks gladly moved his funds around. Peter Thiel gave him advice on potentially investing in Palantir. (Thiel did not respond to a recent request from the New York Times for comment; Palantir told the newspaper that the company “was not aware of Epstein ever investing in or being a shareholder in Palantir”.)
Epstein was an investment manager by profession, and his expertise was tax avoidance. In other words, he helped rich people hide – albeit sometimes legally – their money, making them even richer, and they repaid him by making him rich as well.
That itself is a rather on-the-nose encapsulation of the world that these files depict, but has not completely satisfied the many Americans who remain understandably skeptical of how a college dropout and failed math teacher from Coney Island somehow achieved the kind of wealth that is accompanied by butlers and private helipads. Not unreasonably, many of those same Americans have wondered, in message boards, social media posts and article comment sections, if his wealth was actually made by sexual blackmail of other elites.
The hypothesis remains possible but ignores the simpler, and in some ways more outrageous, explanation: blackmail might not have been necessary. As detailed in a meticulous, 8,000-word New York Times investigation, Epstein was a charismatic operator who was adept at identifying and seducing useful elites and manipulating their insecurities. He thrived on the largesse of wealthy patrons, and sometimes outright stole from them. In other words, he was a conman like any other, just on an unusually ambitious scale. He knew how to manipulate a world set up for people like him to manipulate.
The American right’s reaction to the latest developments has been muted – ironically so, given that it was the right that helped to keep the story alive in the public eye for so long. After Epstein’s death, rightwing influencers stoked anger about the government’s lack of transparency and speculated about which Democratic elites might have partaken of Epstein’s harem of exploited women and girls. Trump himself, running for president in 2024, repeatedly vowed to open the files to the public.
After he took office and did not do so – and as it became apparent that Trump and many people in his orbit might be named in the files or face conflicts of interest – the rightwing ecosystem became confused and angry. Now, however, interest seems to be fading, except to the extent that the files concern Bill and Hillary Clinton, who recently agreed to testify to Congress about Epstein. On the most powerful conspiracy theory of all, and the one that they actually turned out to be partly correct about, the pundits of the rightwing conspiracy universe have fallen largely silent.
“The way that rightwing media functions today is creating conditions under which it’s very hard for these folks to even comment on the Epstein files,” Matthew D Taylor, a scholar of contemporary Christian nationalism, said.
This is partly for fear of antagonizing the administration, he believes, but also because of audience capture: “The audience just doesn’t want bad news about Trump Republicans.”
It is a shame that the Maga movement’s anger has moved on from the Epstein files. Whatever the motivations of that ire, it focused briefly on a world that deserves more scrutiny. Yet the men at its center turned out not to be cunning New World Order ideologues but elite gladhanders, con artists, back-scratchers, and hedonists, in a world whose special rules they assumed, quite rationally, that they would never need to explain to the outside.Author: J Oliver Conroy. Source
