06.03.2025

Searching for the master key

Trump’s administration promises to release files on John F Kennedy, Jeffrey Epstein and others - but so far substance is lacking. Paul Demarty delves into the role of pseudo-disclosures in the American mind

On February 27, history was made - or was it?

Several individuals were spotted leaving the White House - mostly rightwing internet celebrities, proffering binders plainly labelled “The Epstein files: phase 1”. Among them were alt-right old-timer Mike Cernovich and Chaya Raichik, the Floridian woman who operates the infamous ‘Libs of TikTok’ rage-bait social media empire.

The Jeffrey Epstein case has bubbled along in the background of American politics for a long time, and especially since 2019, when he was arrested in New York to face fresh charges of child sex trafficking, and later died in custody, apparently by his own hand. Epstein was a billionaire financier, but the origins of his money are obscure. What he spent it on is not: assembling an army of underage sex slaves with the aid of his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, and cultivating his friendships with the great and the good. The extent of his friends’ participation in his extra-curricular activities is contested, most vociferously by their various lawyers. He seems to have had connections with intelligence agencies, including the CIA and Israel’s Mossad.

That his friends included so many power-brokers on both sides of the aisle - in America and abroad - has rather tempered the ability of anyone to make political capital out of it. He knew Bill Clinton and Donald Trump; Andrew Windsor and Peter Mandelson. All were names in his famous ‘little black book’. Speculation abounds on both the far left and far right as to what we are not being told.

Damp squib

One of the less widely trumpeted of Trump’s proposals on the campaign trail was to declassify any documents on Epstein, along with those on the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. (These latter promises were claimed by Robert F Kennedy Jr to be his price for throwing his support behind Trump.) The result, since Trump’s second term began, is the formation of a congressional task force on declassification - run by Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida congresswoman of impeccable ‘Make America Great Again’ credentials and a conspiracy and UFO nut - and now the release of these Epstein files.

Yet it has not been plain sailing. After being stonewalled by attorney general Pam Bondi, Luna resorted to chasing her down on Twitter. That secured this tranche of Epstein documents; but there is as yet no sign of anything related to the Kennedys. Perhaps RFK Jr is too busy giving Texan children measles to pursue these great causes of his life …

The Epstein files themselves, meanwhile, turned out to be a damp squib. They are largely documents already in the public domain - flight records divulged during the trial of Maxwell, for example - and in some cases so heavily redacted as to be essentially a waste of the paper they are printed on. If we ever see anything connected to the Kennedy assassinations, a similar fate seems likely. It may seem peculiar - what relevance could they possibly have now, when almost all purported conspirators are dead, is hard to see. The same could be said of Luther King: if the FBI was involved in his death somehow, it would hardly be the most surprising revelation in history, but this was J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Things, we are endlessly assured, have changed at the agency since then.

At the various three-letter agencies, however, the culture of secrecy runs bone-deep. It is a structural matter, rather than a particular pathology of American culture. The British state still, absurdly, refuses to acknowledge that the IRA double agent codenamed Stakeknife was in fact the Provos’ one-time internal security boss, Freddie Scappaticci, even now he is no longer alive. This is not because there is any more embarrassment in waiting for the army and MI5, but simply as a matter of policy: you do not confirm the identities of any assets, living or dead. Secrecy is the foundation of espionage and counter-espionage; one does not allow the habit to drop at any cost.

This is in fact a contradiction at the heart of the secret state. This ostentatiously opaque behaviour does not allay, but rather heightens, the paranoia with which sections of the population view the spooks and feds. Every denial is taken as an admission of guilt; every confession ridiculed as a “limited hangout”, designed to direct attention away from the real dirt. This mistrust is, as we noted, one of the few real examples of “horseshoe theory” out there: the radical left and the radical right both have long memories of state infiltration to draw on, after all. JFK conspiracy theories are politically heteroclite in the extreme - was it anti-communist fanatics in the CIA who did it, or communist infiltrators? The mob or George HW Bush?

The same goes for Epstein: sceptics can all agree he was murdered, and bicker over whether it was on the orders of Donald Trump or John Podesta. The spectre of paedophilia and ‘grooming’ animates much far-right agitation today - from the deadly-earnest silliness of Pizzagate and QAnon to the malignant stereotypes of transgender people and Muslims presently in circulation. These clearly enough inherit from the ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ hysteria of the 1980s and 90s. On the other hand, the greatest recent fictional presentation of a power elite as a paedophile ring came from a man of the left, in David Peace’s ‘Red Riding quartet’ novels.

Narrative

Whence this mindset? It is probably impossible to extirpate entirely. Sergei Eisenstein drew up plans to adapt Marx’s Capital for the cinema, but the project exceeded even his bold genius. Films need characters: formulas for the circuit of capital will not do, and nor in the end will the innumerable faceless protagonists of the battle over the working day or the extension of mechanisation. Journalists know that they need some individual life story to animate their investigations. It is not enough, say, to list statistics of opioid overdoses in America to indict the pharmaceutical industry - you must interview the wife or the son of someone who died that way. Ours is a storytelling species; our language deals easily with the proximate and immediately-concrete events of individual human lives, and rises to the abstract and systematic levels required to see the moving parts of the whole only with very great difficulty.

Anyone pushed towards political engagement of any sort other than the most trivial, then, faces a choice - whether or not to undertake that difficult ascent into the systematic, of which Marxism is the greatest modern exemplar, if hardly the only one. This is, in an important respect, a moral choice, touching on the nature of our mutual commitments as a society of human beings. Like all moral choices, it is undertaken in a general atmosphere of confusion and indirection: what Marxists usually call ideology.

Under such circumstances, people are pushed into one or another worldview based merely on readily-digestible human-scale narratives, which are then cathected with the general anxieties that led those people to the threshold of politics in the first place. This process takes many forms in modern culture: ‘throw away the key’ law-and-order politics is not driven by the best of human knowledge about how best to ensure public safety, for example, but largely by gruesome tabloid tales of appalling crimes. The raped and murdered child smiles at us from the front page of The Sun; the answer, naturally, is to bring back hanging, or chemical castration. It is certainly not to worry about the fact that the vast majority of child abuse is committed not ‘out there’, by strangers or by grooming gangs, but in the family home, and therefore to ask what the hell is wrong with the family as an institution.

The conspiracy theory is a special case of this general dynamic. Its peculiarity, at least until relatively recently in the west, is its marginality with respect to the ordinary centres of power. UFOlogists and JFK-obsessives wrote in scruffy small-run periodicals and formed correspondence societies and support groups. With the advent of the internet, it became easier for such subcultures to thrive. Their concerns were not wholly separate from the general public mind, of course. Oliver Stone could crank out a Hollywood epic based on the ‘second shooter’ theory of the JFK assassination; he was not the only celebrity to express doubts, and most Americans believe the official narrative to be false, and have done by greater and lesser majorities since the late 1960s. There is a difference, however, between this passive support and the enthusiasm of the core subculture.

These subcultures have become remarkably like cultural fandoms; or perhaps one should put it the other way around, and note that once benign subcultures obsessed with comic books or science fiction have tended to become more paranoid, chippy and rebarbative. The vast casts of characters supposedly involved in the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center expand until they become somewhat analogous to the baroque constructions of the Marvel Comics intellectual properties. The relentless speculative ‘research’ of the conspiracy cultures mirrors fan debates over easter eggs in the Marvel films, and the elaborate predictions of future storylines.

Bonapartist

The form of politics that ‘naturally’ falls out of this mindset is Bonapartist. There are villains abroad - supervillains, even - and therefore the world cries out for a hero. That might be Jim Garrison, the crusading lawyer played by Kevin Costner in Stone’s movie; or it might be a demagogue who promises to “drain the swamp”, like the current US president. The hero is, after all, going into enemy territory - the very lair of the villain. He must subordinate the surrounding institutional apparatuses to himself, and ordinary citizens must offer their unquestioning loyalty. What would, within a healthy political culture, be a virtue - mistrust of the state and capitalist elite - is inverted into the most shameful credulousness. (It is therefore no surprise, also, to find in conspiracy-world a whole ecosystem of predatory grifters and charlatans.)

Marxists, so far as we gain influence in these milieux, must return people to that original point of decision. Our first duty is, as best as we can, to see things as a whole - not as a contest of hero and villain, but of historical forces working themselves out over generations. That is not to say that it is of no concern that, say, Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplices have largely escaped justice, or that powerful men with expensive lawyers tend to get away with criminal acts, as opposed to the likes of you or me. It is not even to say that no part of the conspiracy lore is true; for there are, after all, conspiracies (think of Operation Gladio in Italy, which saw CIA-backed fascist terror cells committing false-flag attacks with funding from the Vatican and operational control by a rogue Masonic lodge …). It is to put things in proper perspective.

We cannot very easily get rid of conspiratorialism from the rightwing mind. Yet we have been altogether too indulgent of this thinking on the left. The anti-war movement in particular has been disfigured and misled by the influence of 9/11 truthers and the like; the influence of these fantasies is an obstacle to effective combat against imperialist adventurism, which demands instead political clarity and cold-eyed realism.

There is no ream of documents whose exposure will cause the security state to collapse - and, if there were, Donald Trump would not hand them over to Mike Cernovich!