This article was originally published on Carter Moon’s Substack. Support Carter’s work by subscribing here!

I have to confess that I’ve spent the last few months getting utterly obsessed with the Epstein story. I listen to every new episode of the podcast TrueAnon, a podcast that’s been covering the Epstein case from the left since 2019, as soon as it airs. I read every piece of coverage about the case that comes up in my socials feed. It’s an awful thing to be so engrossed by, but the more you dig in, the more you realize how thoroughly our entire elite class is implicated in these files. It feels like the raw, naked truth of what our society is really built on is being revealed.

I’ve followed the journalist and academic Sarah Kendzior on Bluesky for awhile and saw her commenting that she had written about Epstein extensively in her 2022 book They Knew. I inhaled it this week, shocked at what a clarion call it is from the recent past. Kendzior assembled all of the available reporting and information about Epstein at the time and very clearly lays out how thoroughly implicated Trump and his closest associates are in their associations with him. She explicitly states that many power brokers within the United States, Democrats and Republicans alike, were heavily tied up with Epstein even after his 2005 indictment for sex trafficking in Palm Beach. All of these connections were straightforward enough for Kendzior to report on based on the available news articles and court documents at the time, and they’ve been affirmed by the recent release of the Epstein files. She correctly identifies that Epstein was almost certainly an intelligence asset, another thing that Drop Site news has been able to confirm, showing that Epstein was working with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to advance Israel’s interests around the world.

The book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, but it seems as though it didn’t make enough of an impact to stop Trump from getting elected again. That’s not remotely on Kendzior, it’s on the wider media culture for not taking her reporting seriously enough. Last July, The New York Times published a very lengthy article revisiting all of the known connections between Trump and Epstein. The article was infuriating, because there was absolutely no reason it couldn’t have been written in the fall of 2024 in the lead-up to the election. Elite media like The Times have utterly failed to give the Epstein story the thorough coverage it very obviously deserved. By constantly downplaying implications of the Epstein case, by taking powerful men at their word that they may have known Epstein but never indulged in his crimes with him, the press has directly been complicit in allowing this crime to continue to fester in plain sight.

That’s what makes They Knew so effective. It demonstrates why conspiracies, the very real phenomenon of people in power plotting behind the scenes to manipulate reality for the rest of us, are so alluring. There are many, many things that were initially dismissed as far-fetched conspiracies which later turned out to be true. MKUltra by the CIA and COINTELPRO by the FBI were treated as insane rumors by crazed activists until they were eventually revealed to be true. We were lied to about the causes of 9/11, to the horrific result of invading Iraq while Saudi Arabia, an actual 9/11 conspirator, remained a US ally. Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change well before the general public, and tobacco companies knew they were selling poison for decades. Kendzior points out that the reluctance to take the COVID vaccine by many people wasn’t an irrational distrust of science, but an extremely reasonable skepticism of pharmaceutical companies after the opioid crisis had been allowed to ravage their communities.

She makes the case that the culmination of all of these very real conspiracies against the general public creates the conditions for total distrust in our society at large. This has been exploited by the people in Trump’s circle to tremendous success. Kendzior points out that QAnon wasn’t just fostered by random suburbanites who accidentally discovered 4chan. Michael Flynn, the former lieutenant general and close Trump ally, pushed QAnon and gave it a lot of legitimacy. Flynn wasn’t just a random lieutenant general who suddenly went crazy, his background was specifically in intelligence operations: He knew he was helping to spread a distortion of reality. By pushing the idea that elite Democrats were trafficking, torturing, and drinking the adrenochrome of children, MAGA has been able to obscure the truth of what Epstein was really doing and how much Trump and many people in his cadre were closely associated with him. This insane distortion of the crimes of the deep state wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t live in a world where elites constantly get away with horrific crimes. This theory that Kendzior posited in 2022 seems to be affirmed by the more recent Epstein file releases; Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan, is confirmed to have met with Epstein exactly when he founded the /pol/ board, where QAnon originated from.

There’s an adage on the left that says: “Being on the left in America means being correct before it’s socially acceptable to be so.” That’s precisely how it feels to be a critic of capitalism and imperialism in this culture. I’ve been trying to tell anyone I can for my entire adult life that we can’t keep living in a world where the powerful are able to exert such violence over the rest of the world; both the direct violence of military aggression and gender-based sexual violence, but also the indirect violence of economic exploitation. Simply pointing out that elites in this country belong to a very tight network of social control over the rest of us has long been seen as delusional paranoia.

Kendzior brings up the very evocative art of Mark Lombardi, who spent the last part of his career making detailed, elegant pencil drawings demonstrating the connections between powerful politicians and their corporate allies. He said of his diagrams: “There’s nothing in them that wasn’t already in The New York Times or Washington Post. I let those big newspapers vet the material first in their articles.” Simply synthesizing the information in these newspapers is enough to make you seem crazy, to seem like Charlie at the cork board yelling about Pepe Sylva. Lombardi died by suicide by mysterious circumstances, making it impossible not to speculate if what he was doing made some shadowy someone take him out.

Since I’m already soaking in these paranoid feelings all the time, I rewatched Michael Clayton, maybe the best American corporate conspiracy thriller of all time. In the opening of the film, Arthur Edens, the lead attorney defending the corporation UNorth that has poisoned and killed hundreds of small farmers, is having a mental and spiritual breakdown. He calls his close friend, professional fixer for their law firm, and titular character, Michael Clayton. He says of his role defending this indefensible corporation: “I realized, Michael, that I had emerged not from the doors of Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen, not through the portals of our vast and powerful law firm, but from the asshole of an organism whose sole function is to excrete the … the-the-the poison, the ammo, the defoliant necessary for other, larger, more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity.”

We are now living in a world where we are being forced to become aware of our place in this horrific organism, our role in serving this awful entity that is actively trying to destroy the miracle of humanity. The Epstein files feel like a long-overdue, revelatory moment where everyone can come into consensus that this has to stop. No matter your party affiliation, anyone who looks into this case can agree that these sickos closely tied to Epstein need to at the very least be removed from public life and criminally prosecuted to the fullest extent possible. Kendzior points out that perhaps the only thing that can still unite most Americans is a hatred for elite impunity. If there’s any hope of unity coming back for the majority of us, it might be delivering some semblance of justice to all the men connected to Epstein. We may be too far gone, we may be too deeply tied up in the division that powerful elites have wanted in order to accumulate their power. But if there’s any slight sliver of hope for anything positive to come out of this horrific story, it’s that it may be the last thing we can reach true consensus on. Here’s hoping.