I was watching the Benny Johnson show the other day, which I often do for my job, not my pleasure, when I caught an interview with Mike Benz, the former alt-right vlogger–turned–GOP conspiracy theory constructor. He’d been brought on the show to make sense of the bomb that had just been dropped on the MAGA base by Trump’s Justice Department: The long-promised Epstein files weren’t coming.
There was no client list, the DOJ had announced in a memo a day earlier. Further, it said, Epstein had not blackmailed anyone and there was nothing suspicious about his death, case closed.
There will never be enough information to satiate the need for more clues.”
Joan Donovan, conspiracy theory researcher
Benz, like the rest of his MAGA cohort, was livid.
“Where’s our WikiLeaks? Where’s our Twitter Files?” Benz demanded.
It was a telling admission — and offered a kind of warning about what might ultimately come from the release of thousands of pages of records, documents, and audio and video recordings related to the Epstein investigation and indictment. There’s currently a strange moment of agreement between MAGA influencers like Benz, Democratic lawmakers and much of the mainstream public over publishing the Epstein files, but what each faction wants from them — and what they’ll do next should they be published as a bipartisan group of lawmakers are calling for, on a “publicly accessible website” — will probably ignite a whole new wave of conspiracy-mongering.
For many on the far right and far left, it won’t matter what’s actually in those files. What will matter is what people want to find in them, and how fast they can spin it into content.
The most red-pilled in the MAGA base want proof of a secret world order: one run by powerful (and often, in these fever dreams, progressive, Jewish) elites who prey on — and in the internet’s worst corners, literally feed on — children. In this version, Epstein wasn’t just a predator, he was a secret agent in a global blackmail network controlled by billionaires, the media and the so-called deep state. At the Turning Point USA summit last week, after an earlier Q&A included MAGA activists openly criticizing Trump over the handling of the Epstein files, Steve Bannon appealed to these conspiracy theorists when he told an uncharacteristically riled-up crowd that the release would answer a “very simple” question: “Who governs this country? The American people or the deep state?”
Conspiracy theorists on the left, branded “BlueAnon” by critics, have their own false fixations. Among them, an allegation — stemming from a now-dismissed lawsuit against the president — that he raped a girl procured by Epstein. (There is no evidence to support such a claim, and the story behind that 2016 allegation is more complicated.)
This is the crowd of bipartisan conspiracy consumers that MAGA influencers like Benz are speaking to. And it’s an audience researchers say can never be satisfied.
Stephen Prochaska, a doctoral candidate who studies what’s known in academia as collective sensemaking at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, told me how it works: Conspiracy theories in the digital age thrive on a process where communities collaborate to interpret ambiguous evidence and create narratives. Sometimes known as participatory misinformation, the goal isn’t necessarily to uncover truths, but to create content that resonates with the community’s existing beliefs and to transform complex, sometimes totally unrelated information into pertinent, digestible and often misleading lines that can move the story along.
To gut-check my unease with a public repository of the Epstein files, I called Joan Donovan, a researcher at Boston University who researches conspiracy theories and media manipulation.
“There will never be enough information to satiate the need for more clues for the next episode of this online conspiracy theory,” Donovan said.
And we’ve seen how that ends.
Conspiracy theories in the digital age thrive on a process where communities collaborate to interpret ambiguous evidence and create narratives.
WikiLeaks published hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016 on a searchable website, which conspiracy consumers and opportunistic online creators mined to fuel a narrative that birthed “Pizzagate,” the false belief that a pedophile ring was being run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza joint, and ultimately led to QAnon, a mass delusion that posited that these pedophiles ruled the world and that Donald Trump would stop them — a theory linked to multiple murders, kidnappings and various attempts to overthrow the government.
With the Twitter Files, internal documents were selectively framed to stoke an irrational panic over censorship that sparked harassment campaigns against researchers and congressional show trials. In 2022, Elon Musk handed cherry-picked emails and records from his newly acquired company to ideologically aligned writers, who twisted internal debates over content moderation into claims of widespread censorship. As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel noted, the result was “a drawn-out, continuously teased social-media spectacle framed as a series of smoking guns.” Ultimately, the Twitter Files led to the shuttering of academic institutions that tracked misinformation and to a flood of harassment and threats directed at researchers who studied the phenomenon.
Within both WikiLeaks and the Twitter Files, there was newsworthy content. They revealed a real plot against then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and the messy inner workings of a social media platform grappling with how to govern in an age of misinformation. But the actual facts got lost in a flood of conspiracy theories, fermented by a group project of people digging through documents, finding crumbs and spinning them into whatever story they wanted. Real people were hurt by these conspiracy theories, which traveled further and have remained in the public consciousness longer than any of the factual reporting.
Similarly the Epstein files could address real questions in the public interest. About the source of Epstein’s wealth (Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has been investigating these financial records for the last three years). About the full scope of Epstein’s social circle — made somewhat public by Gawker’s 2015 publication of his little black book — and what they knew. About the “poor judgment” that led to a sweetheart deal by federal prosecutors that treated Epstein’s victims as an afterthought. About how, exactly, a man in federal custody managed to kill himself in a facility so plagued by security failures that it was eventually shut down.








