The MAGA world is abuzz with fresh demands that the Donald Trump administration declassify federal records regarding the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the serial pedophile and sex trafficker who was imprisoned in 2019 and died in prison under suspicious circumstances. Epstein’s monstrous crimes continue to draw intense fascination because they took place against a backdrop of sprawling, bipartisan networks of the global elite, with political leaders like Trump and Bill Clinton, Britain’s Prince Andrew, business tycoons, media moguls, prominent scientists and countless others in his orbit.
Combining tabloid scandal, murder mystery and horrific abuse in a searing indictment of the highest echelons of the social order, the Epstein saga will elicit speculation and demand accountability for years to come. But today, vocal segments of the Make America Great Again base are livid as Trump himself seems to be actively suppressing the records he once promised to release, a move that many observers chalk up to his own close connection to Epstein. Leading MAGA voices like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon put the demand front and center at the recent Turning Point USA student summit in Tampa, Florida, a hub of the Gen Z right, to roaring applause. Bannon implored “the Pepes [a reference to a popular avatar of the anonymous, online radical right] and the hardcores, many of whom are in this audience” to “just say ‘I’ve had enough of it.’ The Epstein situation gets down to one basic question — who governs this country?”
In the MAGA world, one particular charge has surfaced with intensity — that Epstein may have been an asset of Israeli intelligence. “It’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government,” Carlson said in a widely circulated clip of his Turning Point USA speech. “No one’s allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty. There is nothing wrong with saying that.”
This comes as many MAGA figures, especially Carlson and Bannon, have emerged as staunch critics of U.S. intervention in Israel’s 12-day war on Iran in June. In the nearly two years since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the start of the Gaza war, many young MAGA voters have grown increasingly skeptical of U.S. support for Israel, as its annihilatory destruction of Gaza has continued with no end in sight. A March survey conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that 50% of Republican voters aged 18-49 held an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 35% in 2022.
Now, anger over Trump’s Epstein cover-up and his support for Israel have converged. Alongside frustration over Trump’s willingness to send weaponry to Ukraine and his administration’s proposals to issue visas for temporary migrant workers, the brewing conflict seems to pit the most energized portions of the MAGA base against the entrenched conservative establishment. And while Trump has long fashioned himself as an avatar of that revolt, now he appears as its target.
As figures like Carlson have challenged Israeli impunity and the interventionist U.S. foreign policy establishment, they have faced fervent accusations of antisemitism from Israel’s defenders in the conservative movement. These accusations have grown louder still as Carlson has called for an investigation into Epstein’s possible ties to Israel.
Progressives are instinctively skeptical of statements like former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s that “there’s a vicious wave of slander and lies against my country and my people” because they have faced similar accusations. But progressives are also well aware that antisemitism is indeed rampant on the nationalist right. Scratch the surface of any right-wing critique of Israel or Epstein on the conspiracy-infested fever swamps of X, and it isn’t hard to find lurid tales of sinister Jewish cabals preying on children as they enact an age-old occult plot for world domination outlined in the Talmud. Even the Sesame Street character Elmo’s account was briefly hacked to scream: “DONALD TRUMP IS NETANYAHU’S PUPPET BECAUSE HE IS IN THE EPSTEIN FILES. JEWS CONTROL THE WORLD AND NEED TO BE EXTERMINATED” and “RELEASE THE FILES.”
How should we make sense of this emerging MAGA civil war, and the place of antisemitism within it? A disorienting vertigo can result when people on the right advance critiques of plutocrats and disastrous foreign policies that look from some angles, if one squints, like progressive ones.
Last week, Carlson hosted the popular far-right podcaster Darryl Cooper for a sprawling, three-hour live interview on Epstein and his purported ties to Israeli intelligence. Cooper has built a large audience across the extremely online MAGA right under the moniker “MartyrMade” by producing in-depth “alternative histories” with an authoritarian and conspiracist bent. This was Cooper’s second appearance on Carlson’s show; last September he was widely criticized after stating to Carlson’s audience that Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was essentially the “chief villain” of World War II.
Cooper’s popular podcast series, which offers a revisionist account of WWII and the Holocaust, has boosted his profile in the world of the online right. Like many far-right ideologues, he claims to be “just asking questions.” But many of his posts on X — where he recently called a rabbi a pig and seemed to openly identify as a national socialist (the ideology of Hitler’s Nazi Party) — complicate his claim to disinterested objectivity, to put it mildly.
Carlson calls Cooper “America’s most honest and best-informed historian.” In his interview, which garnered over 4 million views across YouTube and X by the weekend, Carlson entrusted Cooper with the weighty task of uncovering the hidden heights of absolute power. “The question that all of this bears on,” Carlson said, “the purpose of this interview, the purpose of all questions that I’ve ever raised with Epstein, goes back to one central question — who runs the world? Who’s making the decisions, and on whose behalf?” Cooper answered him with a deep sigh.
The answers he gave that night dwelled mostly on the sordid details of Epstein’s purported decades-long arc of global business, crime, arms and intelligence dealings. But just one week prior, Cooper took a broader approach to Carlson’s big question, one which may explain his fascination with Epstein. On July 10, Cooper sat down for a lengthy interview on the “Jewish question” on a smaller far-right YouTube channel. Cooper argued that, for 2,000 years, Jewish diaspora communities around the world have acted as a hostile foreign elite within what he called “host societies.” Since biblical times, he said, Jews have infiltrated, subverted and ultimately dominated gentile civilizations in order to ensure their group survival and cohesion, primarily by “getting close to the powerful people in the local society through their wit or charm … and then using the positions and privileges they have gained to help their own people.”
American Jews, Cooper said, have “tried to get the American government to bend to their ethnic interest” while holding a “deep-seated hostility to the society that [they’re] ruling over” — that is to say, a majority-Christian, gentile America. Today, the outcome of half a century of Jewish dominance in America — seen in slavish U.S. support for Israel — has created an “unavoidable problem that has to be dealt with,” one which is “global in scope,” he said.
Cooper tried to frame his views as reasonable, even moderate — a critique not of Jews, as such, but merely “organized Jewish power.” He claims that, unlike other far-right commentators, he doesn’t begrudge the Jews their hostility. He’s a “softie,” he explained, and hopes that promoting open discussion of Jewish bad behavior can help society correct course without the need for harder-edged solutions.
But his nerdy, disarming affect masks the vicious, derogatory core of his argument. And while he didn’t answer Carlson’s question — “who runs the world?” — by launching into his theories of innate Jewish hostility and dominance, Cooper sprinkled the conversation with meditations on the Jewish identities and connections of Epstein and several of his associates. A glimpse at the comments section during the live broadcast — replete with charges against “the jewish MENACE” and “Jew donors” — showed that many could fill in the blanks.
Antisemitic narratives have long claimed to peel back the curtain of an unjust and alienating world and uncover the grotesque rot of absolute power underneath, concealed in its most diabolical inner sanctum. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a popular antisemitic forgery first circulated in tsarist Russia in the early 20th century, claimed to reveal the transcription of a secret meeting of an all-powerful Jewish cabal lurking at the hidden heights of capitalism and communism, government, finance, media, the culture industry and all the other machinery of the modern world. The reader felt privy to the innermost core of total domination, where the “Elders’” reign was all the more terrifying for the calm certainty and cool detachment with which they laid out their plan.
“There is almost the tone of a tradition or a religion in it all,” marveled the author of “The International Jew,” a series of pamphlets on the “Protocols” distributed across America by the automaker Henry Ford in the 1920s. Taking this red pill, to borrow contemporary far-right lingo, gave “a clue to the modern maze” for a general public convinced that “distrust and division are everywhere. And in the midst of the confusion everyone is dimly aware that there is a higher group that is not divided at all, but is getting exactly what it wants by means of the confusion that obtains all around.”
The myth of the “Judeo-Bolshevik” cabal drew on centuries of European tropes that demonized Jews as satanic tricksters, occult and preternaturally powerful predators of Christian children. As Europe entered the modern era, Jews were cast as a disloyal, subversive, transnational element, “rootless cosmopolitans” undermining the emerging nation-state system. Amid Victorian gender and sexual norms, Jews were cast as sexual deviants, and Jewish men as perverse predators. With the rise of “scientific” racism, Jews were depicted as a quintessentially foreign, unassimilable race.
Today, all these shades of othering converge in the specter of Epstein and the pedophile cabal. From Epstein to QAnon and Pizzagate, it is the shadowy perversity of the elite cabal that renders it literally demonic in the far-right imagination. After all, as the worship of Trump demonstrates, wealth and power in themselves need not be despised, but may provoke envy and admiration. MAGA populists incessantly underline that the sex cabal is not like us — it is disloyal to the national body and foreign to the community of the good, the virtuous, the Christian. Never mind that sex crimes run rampant throughout society, including among authoritarian and Christian conservative realms within MAGA’s own ranks.
The revolt against the predator cabal preserves the contours of class antagonism but, tellingly, it never translates into a concrete plan to improve society. It reconfigures the class war as a moral crusade to “save the children” but, rather than building power to transform our economic system and patriarchal, predatory social order, trusting Trump to uncover and prosecute the cabal will suffice.
Indeed, antisemitism was called “the socialism of fools” by the late 19th-century Austrian left-liberal Ferdinand Kronawetter and many social democrats in his wake, and a “foreshortened anticapitalism” by the late 20th- and early 21st-century historian Moishe Postone, because it offers a revolt against a projected and partial image of the elite, real or imagined, while leaving broader systems of power intact. Conspiracy theories are so useful for authoritarian movements precisely because, in times of widespread crisis and discontent, they are profoundly disempowering: They substitute hermetic caricatures for rigorous analysis of material conditions and promise distant revolt against a larger-than-life cabal, in place of a concrete agenda to make life better in the home, workplace, neighborhood and beyond.
Industrialists like Ford or allies of the Russian tsar hoped that spreading the “Protocols” would protect the status quo by dissuading working people from joining labor and socialist movements, instead enlisting them in revolt against the “Jewish cabal.” Antisemitism, the Puerto Rican Jewish poet Aurora Levins Morales wrote in “Understanding Antisemitism: An Offering to Our Movement” (a 2017 publication of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice), is “a conjuring trick, a pressure valve, a shunt that redirects the rage of working people away from the 1%, a hidden mechanism, a set up that works through misdirection, that uses privilege to hide the gears. Unlike racism, at least some of its targets must be seen to prosper, must be well paid and highly visible.”
For the right, the specter of Epstein picks up where that of the hedge fund manager George Soros leaves off. Conspiracy theories targeting Soros punch up to punch down: They demonize racial justice, immigrant rights and other social movements by portraying them as fronts of the hidden hand of Jewish finance capital, in a sinister networked conspiracy to undermine the West. But with Epstein, no punching down is involved; his networks implicate both political parties (what the right calls the “uniparty”), the CIA, the Pentagon and other entrenched federal bureaucracies (the “deep state”), global weapons and intelligence industries, the media and culture industries, and practically every other elite corner of the modern world.
A thousand bizarre and sordid details — Epstein’s documented obsessions with transhumanism and eugenics, his blue-striped temple on his remote sex island — epitomize the gratuitous depravity, the smug supremacism of today’s oligarchs better than any novelist could. As the scholar Benjamin Balthaser put it in a social media post, “Epstein is to biopolitical conspiracy theory what the Soros family is for political-economic conspiracy theory” — a cabal centered on sex crimes extends its claim to total domination beyond Wall Street and the White House, to the intimate realm of the body itself.
But while the Elders of Zion did not exist — and the funding portfolio of the Open Society Foundations is far from a demonic plot to undermine the West — Epstein really was a monstrous sexual predator, and his case really does appear to implicate some of the most powerful people on the planet, who were seemingly convinced that their monstrous wealth and power would shield their monstrous acts from accountability. Epstein moved in a dizzying array of elite circles over the decades, and his Rolodex certainly included prominent American and Israeli Jews.
Cooper and others highlight Epstein’s close financial and personal partnership with the billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner, who helped form the Mega Group, a loosely organized consortium of influential American Jewish businesspeople whose biannual meetings, beginning in 1991, birthed Jewish philanthropic initiatives as well as pro-Israel lobbying efforts. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak reportedly met with Epstein over two dozen times.
Epstein’s ties also included the famed Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who worked closely with U.S. and Israeli officials to help launder covert arms deals and financial transactions during the 1980s Iran-Contra affair. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s accomplice, is the daughter of the media mogul and onetime British politician Robert Maxwell, who one biographer deemed “Israel’s superspy” for the credible allegations that he worked with Israeli intelligence. In 2019, when a reporter asked Alexander Acosta, who then served in the first Trump administration, why he granted Epstein a ludicrously light plea deal for his first sex trafficking conviction in 2008 while serving as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Acosta reportedly responded that “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”
There is circumstantial evidence, in short, to support speculation that Epstein was an asset of Israeli, American, Russian or other intelligence agencies, whether to furnish blackmail on global VIPs or to launder money. Too often, the connections between intelligence agencies, global arms industries and the ultrarich never see the light of day, and it is precisely this concealment, and the sense of helplessness it provokes, that feed into a steady reservoir of populist anger on both the right and the left.
They also provide endless fodder for conspiracy theorists to weave tales of the many-tentacled cabal into an unfalsifiable tapestry that reinforces their own solipsistic logic. Any denial is cast as further proof of the cover-up, as with Bennett’s assertion that “the accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false.” Any evidence debunking the accusation is branded another layer of sinister deception.
“You pull the fabric there, and it implicates so many countries, and you realize that none of these characters are real,” the far-right podcaster Candace Owens told her millions of followers recently, picking through the breadcrumbs of the Epstein story. “These characters are just being inserted into places to serve Israel. Israel is the master of the universe. And that’s troubling.” Owens continued by claiming that the Star of David at the center of the Israeli flag is an occult hexagram, symbolizing the demonic forces driving the Jewish state.
But while the Elmo account hackers shout “Kill the Jews” from the rooftops and Owens dives down the rabbit hole of occult magic, narrators like Cooper and Carlson are adept at making antisemitism into a quieter subtext around the core axioms of MAGA nationalism. For a movement intent on shoring up American innocence, defending national honor and glorifying civilizational rebirth, any problems must be blamed on sinister foreign enemies and shadowy fifth columns. This is why nationalist Israel-skeptics tend to fixate on examples or allegations of Israel spying on the U.S. and instances like Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, an American warship, during the 1967 Six-Day War (the circumstances of which remain contested), or advance fevered speculation that a wide range of pro-Israel American Jewish political and cultural leaders are dual citizens of the U.S. and Israel, covertly working with the Israeli government or otherwise disloyal to America. Not every such assertion, by itself, is necessarily antisemitic or even false; but within a nationalist framework, they can easily reinforce a broader antisemitic worldview, which helps them stick and gives them their staying power.
To explain the strength of the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel, far-right nationalists pass over important factors like the sense of exceptionalism at the heart of both national identities, nourished by the image of the expanding frontier, with its ironclad boundary between civilized and “savage,” which shaped the mythmaking of both countries from their origins. They ignore the Christian Zionist theology held by tens of millions of Americans — also present, in incipient form, from the earliest days of Puritan settlement — as well as the anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry endemic across American society, and strongest in the MAGA base. They downplay the relentless push for profit, resource extraction and dominance driving decades of mostly non-Jewish elites to pursue American hegemony in the Middle East.
Rather than challenge American nationalism, they insist that American elites have been hoodwinked by world Zionism, imagined as a tight-knit elite Jewish network, loyal to no nationalist project save their own, exerting a singular collective will across national borders. In the nationalist theory of human behavior — defined by perennial competition between nations, races and tribes — no other meta-explanation really fits. “Everything seems impossible or terribly difficult without the providential appearance of antisemitism,” the French nationalist leader Charles Maurras noted in 1911. “It enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over and simplified.”
These motifs can appear on the left as well; progressives shouldn’t uncritically cheer these developments and voices on the right simply because they appear at points to support their own views. Progressives, at their best, offer a materialist analysis of power: There is a small minority of elites, in effect a criminal gang, who enrich themselves and immiserate the many with sadistic impunity. But it’s not “the Jews” — it’s the ruling class. There are elite concentrations and assemblages of power in our world, and sometimes they conspire to hide their actions from view.
But power itself is not conspiratorial on this view; its logic can be understood through structural analysis of capitalism, imperialism and other forces and relationships shaping our world. And most importantly, those structures and relationships can be transformed through collective action. Nationalist theories of change promise only to vanquish the opposing tribe, while neoliberal fantasies imagine that individual heroes will save us from individual villains. Neither of these can transform the core inequalities at the root of capitalism, sexual violence or other forms of oppression.
While Trump’s reluctance to release records on Epstein may not immediately break the MAGA coalition, it stands to cause long-term damage. Alongside grievances fueled by economic dislocation and myriad forms of racial, gender-based and other resentments, the id of MAGA is a revolt against a corrupt establishment, the “deep state” Trump has promised to unseat since his first campaign. From Pizzagate to QAnon, the crusade against elite pedophile cabals has been at the beating heart of MAGA populism.
Trump has managed to channel this populist fervor by successfully positioning himself as its avatar but, by necessity, it must transcend and outlive him, and no shortage of demagogues are eager to wield it for even more authoritarian ends. Trump was “always going to be a stepping stone for what comes next,” Andrew Torba, CEO of the radical-right social media site Gab, intoned on X amid outrage over the Epstein cover-up. “Thank you for your service,” he continued, expressing his hope that an “American Franco awaits” to take the reins after Trump.
While progressives may welcome disunity and infighting in the MAGA camp, they should be wary of cheering this populist crusade on its own terms, even if some of its declared enemies overlap with their own. There is potential for a broad, popular movement against predatory plutocracy and endless war that does not lapse into vulgar nationalism and conspiracism, but actually empowers the majority under the expansive vision of a bigger “We, the people.” There is a better plan to beat the elites — it’s time it was acted upon.
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