It’s an old saw, but for good reason - conspiracy theories tend to flourish because they are in some strange sense comforting. They create the appearance of order in a universe filled with chaos. If a lone nutcase can kill John F. Kennedy, then there’s a certain inextinguishable randomness to the violence that governs human affairs. But if it was all a conspiracy, one involving the CIA and the FBI and the KGB and the mafia and the Freemasons and the Knights Templar and Opus Dei and - if it’s all a vast and magisterial conspiracy, well, then in a deep sense the world is governed by rules. Cruel and unjust rules, maybe, the kind that rob the country of their telegenic leader. But still, there is a logic to that injustice, a cold sort of stepwise purpose. No wonder even a president can be killed, if the most powerful forces in the world were conspiring to end his life! And that’s a lot more comforting, isn’t it? If Lee Harvey Oswald was just some guy with a gun, well… who among us is safe?

It happens that I don’t reject JFK conspiracy theories out of hand; there’s enough smoke there that skepticism towards the official narrative is justified. And I’m on record saying that there’s a circularity to the term “conspiracy theory” that renders these conversations difficult. It’s also simply the case that many conspiracy theories have been proven true over time. After all, the idea that the United States orchestrated the coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, or lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or aided the Indonesian army in slaughtering half a million people, or deliberately looked the other way as Nicaragua supercharged the crack trade in Southern California - these were all once “conspiracy theories.” Still and all, I recognize that the desire for order is a major driver of this tendency in modern politics. In a cacophony of limitless information, in a world of irreducible complexity, the tendency of these theories to introduce even more complexity and information paradoxically makes our era seem more comprehensible, more subject to human understanding. Conspiracy theories involve some extremely complex historical math, the endless multiplication of variables, the injection of unnecessary operations - but it’s still math. It still appears rule-bound. It suggests that, if we’re only smart enough, there’s a solution waiting. And that’s exactly what I think of when I see all of this fixation on Jeffrey Epstein; it’s a record of our desire to force the most disturbing crime of all to make sense.

Epstein was a true monster and I wish he had not successfully avoided jail, even though he did so through suicide. I’m glad Ghislaine Maxwell will likely die in prison. I don’t doubt that powerful people were involved in their systematic abuse of underage women, and in a perfect world we’d be able to name them, shame them, and prosecute them. I want whatever was true of his death to come to light, and if there was a coverup, I want whoever was involved to face consequences. (But this is the United States so lol.) I have no idea if he was connected to the Mossad, though stranger things have happened, and maybe we could get some sort of deeper understanding of how criminal prosecution is routinely obstructed by intelligence agencies. (If a foreign spy org really is obstructing investigations into child rape, my God.) There are secrets to be unearthed and more justice to be done. But fundamentally, the fixation on Jeffrey Epstein seems like a classic matter of displacement to me - where a person redirects a negative emotion from its original source to a target that is in some way more palatable to target. Jeffrey Epstein, a single human, and his potential conspirators, a limited number of specific miscreants, are easier to hate that a whole world of quietly evil anonymous child predators. These theories may be more or less true but they are always conspiracies of convenience.

The truth is that child sexual abuse and exploitation is common and it is mundane. Its horror is unique, its pain unfathomable, its injustice incalculable. But the crime itself is ordinary, utterly ordinary. It’s very often committed by a family member, sometimes an immediate family member, and almost never by a stranger. It’s a crime of opportunity, more or less, not one that requires extensive orchestration. It’s one that’s difficult to prove, and we have good reason to believe that most incidents are never reported, let alone result in arrest or conviction. The physical and emotional toll can be devastating and often lingers for life. And at the same time, it’s also a type of crime uniquely likely to result in unjust prosecution, as the Satanic child abuse hysteria shows; the fallibility of memory, the suggestibility of children, and the tendency of adults in positions of authority to unduly influence potential victims has led to many incidents of false accusation, often with terrible personal consequences. (You see, my friends, it’s entirely possible for a particular crime to be both under-punished and the cause of malicious accusation and prosecution.) And of course there’s very few things in human experience that are more viscerally horrific than child sexual abuse. It’s a problem from hell for which there can be no obvious single cure, a vast disease of human evil that has no internal coherence or easy moral. It’s as bleak as it gets.

And, yes, I think that’s why the public has been so doggedly invested in finding some deeper logic in Jeffrey Epstein, some way to connect all the dots, and why this phenomenon has been so bipartisan. I think people need to believe that there’s a conspiracy because it makes this unique horror more digestible, more understandable. This kind of allegation brings a certain kind of dark sense to the most senseless of human crimes. If Hillary and the globalists are meeting at Comet Ping Pong to rape and eat children, well, the good guys may be able to stop them. That’s why that guy showed up there with an assault rifle, because his addled mind was sufficiently influenced by the internet that he came to sincerely believe that he was going to storm the basement of a pizzeria and rescue children. You can fantasize about stopping that kind of bad guy. But how do you stop that random uncle, that elementary school gym teacher, that mother’s new boyfriend who has every opportunity to slip through the cracks, never to be punished? Far more comforting to think of child rape as a problem straight out of a 1970s thriller, with a real tangible conspiracy of villainous elites to blame, who can be arrested or killed. Far more comforting.