“Jeff Epstein: not a pedophile,” the far-right streamer Nick Fuentes said on a recent episode of his internet talk show “America First.” After months of criticizing the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files — and promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories about Epstein’s role in a global cabal of “organized Jewry” — Fuentes’s unprompted comments about the sex offender stood out as a particularly depraved and puzzling turn. Pedophiles preyed on children, he reasoned, whereas Epstein targeted girls of marriageable age under Catholic canon law. This made Epstein “probably the coldest, coolest guy you know,” a “Bruce Wayne type.”
Even for a Hitler-idolizing Holocaust denier who is wont to fantasize about a “paradise” where Black people are rounded up and imprisoned and “women are either mothers, whores or nuns,” this seemed like a confusing position to take. When Fuentes later appeared on his show wearing a navy quarter-zip that closely resembled one Epstein was known to wear — the monogram “JEE” was replaced with “USA” — he seemed to be digging in. He directed viewers to his website, where they could purchase the sweatshirt for $69.99. Fuentes said it was already his best-selling merch item of the year.
Was Fuentes’s admiration for Epstein a ruse? A bit of trolling? Or did a more odious subtext linger beneath the praise? Was he, say, market-testing a potential Republican Party talking point to save President Trump from whatever might yet emerge from the Epstein files? The political right spent much of the past decade spewing conspiracy theories about shadowy child sex-trafficking rings that, if exposed, would implicate powerful Democratic politicians and liberal elites. Still, many Republicans have been willing to stay quiet about the president’s resistance to releasing the unredacted files. Fuentes, meanwhile, has recently responded with a disturbing glee. Was it ever even about the pedophiles, anyway?
Fuentes’s ravings were once fringe, but his star has risen dramatically during Trump’s tumultuous second term — with the MAGA coalition splintering into various factions, each lobbying for different degrees of demagoguery. He presents as the unvarnished id of the American right, seemingly eager to state the obvious subtext behind a Republican policy or ideological position. “Conservatives who don’t know they’re far right are like, ‘We’re against illegal immigration,’ and what they’re implying is that, ‘We want a white country,’” he said as a guest on the “Red Scare” podcast. It’s chilling to hear Fuentes so plainly articulate right-wing political motives without any pretense or playacting. After years of not-so-privately meeting with Republican leaders, the 27-year-old streamer has successfully ingratiated himself into the ultraconservative movement’s highest ranks, a feat typified by his much ballyhooed appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast last October. Carlson sat in deferential wonderment as Fuentes described his intellectual journey from “normie” conservative to extremist ethnonationalist. After the interview, Carlson acknowledged that there was “obvious truth behind some of what” Fuentes said. OK — but which part? His belief in the “great replacement” theory? His disdain for minorities, gay people and Jews?
Even an extremist like Fuentes, however, had previously drawn a line in the sand at Epstein. He viewed the scandal as a skeleton key for understanding how the media, the government and the corporate world coordinated cover-ups for powerful people, especially those who were Jewish. Manosphere figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate expressed some similar sentiments, sharing unverified claims that the U.S. government was protecting politicians and wealthy donors. Popular conservative pundits like Candace Owens and Carlson took these criticisms a step further, echoing Fuentes’s position that Epstein was a “Jewish patriot” who worked as a spy for Israel and weaponized his power to push a Zionist agenda. In these narratives, the sex crimes seemed almost incidental to the scale of the federal cover-up, a version of events both Trump and Vice President JD Vance seemed to buy. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he was open to declassifying the files; Vance said, on Theo Von’s podcast, that to “release the Epstein list” would be an “important thing.”
Trump’s tone changed after he took office in January 2025. The Epstein files were apparently a thing “nobody cares about” and a Democratic “hoax” to distract Americans from the real issues, like how the 2020 election had been rigged. MAGA influencers and Republican politicians, often willing to be guided by Trump’s post-truth whims, were not so ready to abandon the Epstein scandal as mere triviality. Speaker Mike Johnson, following the White House’s lead, said he would support a vote to release the files. Prominent right-wing activists including Alex Jones and Charlie Kirk struggled to square their undying Trump worship with their Epstein conspiracy obsessions, while more recent MAGA converts, like Rogan, threatened to break with the president entirely over the issue.
At first, Fuentes lashed out against the president’s lies. Not only had Trump not released the Epstein files, Fuentes argued, but he also had failed to fulfill the nationalist, hard-right platform he promised his supporters in 2016. “Trump sold us out,” Fuentes exclaimed in November. “He is the problem. He’s cooked.” A far-right, Christian nationalist revolution in the United States, he claimed, was never going to be led by a billionaire con man enriching himself under the guise of conservative populism. “Trumpism,” he conceded, is “a cult. The liberals were right.”
Finally, after a decade of controversy, a situation proved serious enough to shake Trump’s grip on the right and reveal something resembling truth. But to the conspiracist mind, truth exists only as fodder for suspicion. When a conspiracy theory transitions from an abstracted concept into a real-world event, something that can be confirmed or denied by evidence and investigation and testimony, it becomes trickier for a theorist to stay in control of the story. Once the Epstein files became open-source documentation, and the people implicated in them began experiencing repercussions, the conspiracy’s magic waned. Hence the transformation of Epstein into a meme. Tate wrote on X last month that “the evil Epstein lived his life with near unlimited financial excess and luxury” and “is now immortalised in internet culture forever.” In other words: “He beat you in every single metric.” Other influencers began posting A.I.-generated images of themselves sitting beside Epstein on his jet. (“Using AI to put yourself on Epstein’s jet goes so hard,” one user wrote.) Perhaps obsessing over the Epstein saga was less about wanting the truth, and more about following a rabbit hole as far down as it could feasibly go. By turning Epstein into a meme, the hole only deepens, as people like Fuentes and Tate pump out new conspiracies and new content — the more rogue and incoherent, the better.
When Trump speculates that the left is falsifying documents to implicate him in the Epstein files, and distracting the American public from the actual crises, like trans women in sports, he, too, is engaging in this endlessly iterative conspiratorial process: There are things behind things behind things, and if you follow me, we will unveil them together. Fuentes, ever the acolyte, is engaged in a similar project — willing to say or do anything to sow chaos, drum up attention and broaden his political power. He can delegitimize institutions of authority with something as simple as a snarl, a meme, even a monogrammed quarter-zip. There will never be a truth as pleasurable for his followers, or as powerful, as whatever spin he manages to put on it.
Source photographs for illustration above: Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times; Davidoff Studios/Getty Images.
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