On Feb. 27, 2025, fifteen online MAGA influencers walked out of the West Wing holding white binders stamped “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” Rogan O’Handley, AKA “DC Draino,” held his high for the cameras. Liz Wheeler went live on X and flipped through the pages. Jessica Reed Kraus described the scene as though she’d been handed the Pentagon Papers. Attorney General Pam Bondi had personally delivered the documents, with President Donald Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel in attendance.
It was terrific political theater, but aged terribly. The binders contained flight logs and address book pages already in the public domain. Wheeler admitted on her livestream that the files contained nothing new. By July, the DOJ released a memo acknowledging that Epstein did not maintain a “client list,” the very document Bondi had suggested was sitting on her desk. Patel told the House that no investigative leads warranted further action. Elon Musk posted clown-makeup memes mocking Bondi. Laura Loomer called for her resignation. The MAGA faithful felt betrayed. Trump took to Truth Social to call the whole thing a “Witch Hunt” and urged everyone to move on.
This is crucial context for what happened next, because it was into this void of broken promises that progressives eagerly rushed, driven by the same paranoid certainty that motivated the very conspiracy theorists they’d spent years mocking. Yet they emerged with no better information than those they ridiculed had.
The term “BlueAnon” was coined around 2021, a riff on QAnon that swapped red for blue. Philip Bump of the Washington Post, in a ham-fisted way, once argued the comparison was more phonetic than substantive because QAnon was an elaborate mythological architecture, whereas BlueAnon described scattered, short-lived speculation. That distinction is no longer valid.
Since the Epstein Files Transparency Act forced the release of over 3 million pages of documents, the progressive Left has developed its own self-reinforcing Epstein mythology. It operates on several overlapping premises, each more conspiratorial than the last, each enjoying increasing respectability among people who should know better. It is also flush with the “just asking questions” phraseology that conspiracy theorists rely on to cast doubt on an issue.
The first premise is that the Trump administration is engaged in a massive cover-up. And based on some of its actions, this has a quasi-factual basis, making it particularly pernicious. The administration’s mishandling of the files has been disastrous, including refusing to release them, pushing hard against a discharge petition to block a vote on release, missing the deadline, and screwing up redactions and failing to release files that should have been included. These are real failures.
But the progressive view doesn’t accept incompetence in this instance. It jumps to the conclusion that Trump, Bondi, Patel, and the entire Department of Justice and FBI are secretly working to protect Trump personally, but from what they will not say. When asked what exactly is being covered up, the answer is always just out of reach, just behind the next redaction or the file mistakenly marked as a duplicate. It’s a conspiracy theory that defends itself against proof by treating the lack of evidence as the strongest evidence of all.
The second is the idea that the current war with Iran was launched to serve as a distraction to the Epstein files. When the U.S. and Israel struck Iran on Feb. 28, it took about forty-five minutes for that to go viral. “Operation Epstein Fury” generated over 90,000 mentions on X within 48 hours. The left-leaning Data for Progress conducted a poll that showed a whopping 81% of Democrats believed Trump was at least partly motivated by the Epstein scandal. Progressive online influencers have run with the theory.
The claim flattens years of proxy wars, Iran-funded terror attacks, the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel, the collapse of the Iran nuclear deal, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions into a single, digestible motive: Trump is a pervert bombing Tehran to save himself. This isn’t an analysis or a level-headed conclusion. It’s fan fiction wearing the costume of political commentary. The Washington Post documented how pro-Iran propaganda networks were amplifying exactly this narrative using AI deepfakes and generic “news” accounts. That progressives found themselves sharing talking points with Iranian state media should have given them pause. It did not.
The third is a real doozy, and it was once a MAGA signature bumper sticker: the theory that Epstein was murdered and did not commit suicide. Now it’s gaining mainstream traction on the Left and in the legacy press.
Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter whose work led to Epstein’s 2019 arrest, and once one of the most credible journalists on this beat, has expressed doubt about the official suicide ruling. Brown wrote a story that made the front page of the Miami Herald regarding an FBI interview in which an inmate claimed to have overheard guards discussing a cover-up the morning Epstein died. The inmate identified a guard, Tova Noel, who was later charged with falsifying reports — the story noted suspicious cash deposits in her bank account. But the article itself acknowledged that the inmate’s account has not been substantiated. Three inmates with a direct line of sight to Epstein’s cell told investigators no one entered or exited that night. The Medical Examiner and the DOJ both concluded it was suicide. None of this stopped the story from racing across progressive social media as near-confirmation of murder. No one even stopped to consider the absurdity of prison guards announcing, “We’re going to cover it up” out loud in front of inmates.
There is a key flaw in the Left’s conspiracy theory that its supporters ignore, and it destroys their argument: the Biden administration had four years to address these files and prosecute more people, and it didn’t. Remember, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were charged and indicted during the first Trump administration. If there was evidence in these documents of a vast worldwide child sex trafficking ring operated by and for the powerful, that evidence existed during the entirety of Biden’s presidency.
An Associated Press review of internal Justice Department records found that while investigators collected ample proof Epstein sexually abused underage girls, they found scant evidence he ran a trafficking operation serving powerful men. Seized videos and photos did not depict victims being abused or implicate anyone else. Financial records showed no connection between Epstein’s payments to influential figures and criminal activity. An FBI supervisory agent wrote in February 2025 that investigators never located a “client list.” Four or five accusers claimed other individuals had abused them, but agents concluded there was not enough evidence to bring federal charges and referred those cases to local law enforcement.
This is not a satisfying answer. It is not the answer people want. But it is the answer that career prosecutors and FBI agents arrived at. For progressives to accept the Biden-era FBI and DOJ conclusions on every other matter while simultaneously waving off its inaction in this matter requires a level of cognitive dissonance that would embarrass a QAnon adherent. You cannot spend four years defending the institutional integrity of the FBI and DOJ against Trump’s attacks and then, when those same institutions produce a conclusion you find politically inconvenient, decide it doesn’t matter or point to political grandstanding in the 2024 campaign by Trump and his adherents about the files as an excuse to pretend the country skipped over four years of another administration in an odd time warp.
If progressives are now deluged with conspiracy theories, Trump and MAGA are not blameless. Donald Trump and his allies spent years claiming the Epstein files would reveal a vast criminal conspiracy at the core of the Democratic establishment and ran on it during the 2024 campaign. Bondi said in an interview that a client list was on her desk (she later said she meant a case file). However, when the files proved more complex and damaging to Trump than expected, the administration reversed course and spent the rest of 2025 trying to shut it down. Trump’s name appears in the files, including an unverified FBI tip claiming he witnessed horrific crimes, including murder, and an unproven accusation of sexual assault. The shift from “release everything” to “time to move on” was so obvious it practically invited conspiracy theories. Trump and MAGA lit the match. They shouldn’t be surprised that the Left came back with marshmallows.
That said, understanding how we got here does not excuse what the progressive Left is doing with the opportunity. There is a difference between holding the Trump administration accountable for its handling of the Epstein files, which is legitimate, and creating an elaborate fantasy in which a war with Iran is really about Jeffrey Epstein, where every redaction or missing file is proof of a criminal conspiracy, and where the official cause of death of a man facing life in prison who had attempted suicide weeks earlier becomes a reason to “ask questions” about now that it serves a political narrative.
The people doing this are the same people who spent years lecturing others to trust institutions, follow the science, and resist disinformation. They are the people who watched QAnon with horror and smugness, confident their side was immune. Now, some are sharing Iranian state propaganda about Epstein on social media and calling it “resistance.”
The Epstein case involves real crimes against real victims — young girls who were exploited, trafficked, and abused. Those victims deserve justice, not political theater in which their suffering becomes raw material for content creators, online influencers, bad-faith peddlers, and Signal chat warriors.
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The adults in the room, if any remain, might start by acknowledging a few uncomfortable truths: The files are both important and overly hyped; the administration’s handling has been cynical and incompetent without necessarily being a criminal conspiracy; Epstein almost certainly killed himself, even though the circumstances may seem suspicious; and the most productive way to approach these documents is through careful, boring investigative work rather than the frantic, tinfoil hat theories of those who have tried to make their political and social media activities appear as a quest for the truth.
The Left could choose to be the adults in this story. So far, they have chosen to be the audience.
Jay Caruso (@JayCaruso) is a writer living in West Virginia.
