Last week, a number of prominent posters from right-wing social media were invited to the White House for the release of files from the investigation into the crimes of financier Jeffrey Epstein. They were given binders of material, lists of names with blacked-out contact information. They posed for photos outside the executive mansion, binders in one hand and Trump campaign swag in the other.
The event was the putative culmination of years of agitation from the right for more information about Epstein’s death, the demand for which was rooted in QAnon-adjacent theories about predatory Democrats who’d be exposed by the information. (That Donald Trump himself was a known associate of Epstein’s was generally avoided in these conversations, including by Trump.) When Attorney General Pam Bondi arrived at the Justice Department, there was enormous pressure for her to act quickly to offer more details. So she did.
Well, she tried to , anyway. There does exist material from the Epstein investigation that hasn’t been made public, but there’s no evidence that other prominent individuals will be implicated by its release. There is a belief that it will, just as there was a belief that, with enough paper in hand, Joe Biden would be directly implicated in his son’s business interests.
What Bondi offered wasn’t that. It wasn’t even new. The list of contacts from Epstein’s address book was published by Gawker a decade ago. It was the Fyre Festival of document dumps, a cryptocurrency-esque rug pull.emphasized text
In another era, an online conspiracy theory would not percolate to the highest echelons of the federal government and so there would be no need to mollify the conspiracy theorists by giving them some sign of action. But this is 2025, a point at which the president and, increasingly, the entire federal bureaucracy have been driven by whatever crud manages to capture the right’s collective attention. Such as a random blog post praising Trump’s handling of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or a baseless accusation about Zelensky interacting with former government officials — to name just two examples from the past few days.
Professor Kate Starbird, co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, compared the process of elevating information by the online right to improvisational theater.
“As influencers perform, they do call outs to a shared and engaged audience, which has the power to profoundly shape the performance,” she wrote in a recent essay. “The audience cheers, jeers and steers the actor-influencers as the show unfolds. Influencers stay intensely tuned in, ready to give the audience more of what they want. From this perspective, ‘influence’ on the populist right doesn’t just flow from the influencers up on the stage out to the audience, but from the audience back to the influencers.”