Episode Transcript
18. Talking to Young People About the Epstein Files
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[00:00:06] Hello everyone. This is Matthew Remski with episode 18 of the Antifascist Dad Podcast: Talking to Young People About the Epstein Files.
[00:00:15] I’m dividing this audio essay into four topics. Two are in this main feed, and episode two is available now on Patreon, where it will be paywalled for a few weeks and then released to the wild.
[00:00:28] For housekeeping: you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I’m on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad.
[00:00:37] The Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, where subscribers get early access to every part two.
[00:00:45] I’m not running an interview this week because I wanted to take the time to address the issue of how many kids will become aware of the Epstein files, in bits and pieces, and through more or less sober sources.
[00:01:01] It seems to me that these accelerating mass cultural traumas that explode and then dissipate online must be laying down epistemological and affective pathways—or wounds—for everyone, including kids.
[00:01:19] My feeds are filled with horror, despondency, and exhaustion, and I know many of these folks are parents who are faced with the whiplash task of pulling it together, not only to get the normal things done, but also to hold the confusions and anxieties of kids as these stories leak down into their worlds.
[00:01:45] I believe that these waves of information can be destructive above and beyond what their content conveys, and I’ll get into the reasons for that. So I think it’s worth thinking hard about what kinds of breakwaters and lifeboats we need, because ultimately we’re talking about building habits of dissociation or resilience.
[00:02:07] As mentioned, I have four chapters prepared. Today I want to discuss some general thoughts about facilitating conversation about the Epstein network.
[00:02:19] Secondly, I want to give a warning about how kids—and the rest of us—might soon be exposed to another QAnon-style wave of conspiracy theorizing. In part two, I want to address what happens when you discover that a beloved figure is implicated in a network of harm. This is a meditation on the art-versus-the-artist problem.
[00:02:45] For young people, encountering that can be quite a shock: realizing there’s a chasm between how a person seems and what they actually do. Millennials have been through the wringer on this with J.K. Rowling, just to take a recent and very famous example, but it happens all the time.
[00:03:03] I should mention that these reflections are expansions on scripts for three-minute reels I’ve been posting to Instagram and TikTok. The fact that many of them went viral gave me the sense that they were connecting. This is not something I ever expected to be doing, and I feel lucky that I’ve been able to marshal a few skills together and figure out how to fit it into my schedule.
[00:03:26] Two things really pushed me into it. First, Derek and Julian, my colleagues at Conspirituality, have been bugging me to get over my allergy to algorithm-defined formats. I’m very suspicious of what the gamification of engagement does to people’s thinking, and I’ve always wanted to avoid it. But I also saw Jamelle Bouie—who’s about the only New York Times columnist I can tolerate, except for Masha Gessen—say that if you’re a journalist today and you’re not working in reel format, you’re not taking communication, or maybe even your own content, seriously.
[00:04:01] That really struck me, not only in professional terms, but in parenting terms too: you have to play with your kids to be fully in their world.
[00:04:11] I don’t mean to infantilize Gen Z with that metaphor. It’s just that if you stay away from a medium because it’s “not your thing,” or you feel you’re too good for it, you’re abdicating on the generations who live in that milieu. And as I’ll show in chapter two today, it’s actually really important to have more seasoned reporting available to Gen Z.
[00:04:44] Chapter 1: General thoughts on talking to kids about Epstein.
[00:04:49] Has it come up in your home yet?
[00:04:51] If so, how did it happen?
[00:04:53] Did your kid come to you with it? Did you hear them talking about it with friends? Did you introduce it preemptively?
[00:04:59] This moment hasn’t fully arrived for both kids around here yet. They’re boys, nine and thirteen. But it’s going to happen, so here’s how I’m thinking about it.
[00:05:10] My first instinct is to accept and prepare for the likelihood that they’ll hear some of the most abject details: the island, the ages of the victims, a baby in a lake, rumors of torture or cannibalism. I’ll get to that in chapter two today.
[00:05:26] It will come through soundbites, YouTube Shorts, YouTube comments.
[00:05:31] It will feel morbid, dangerous, and fragmentary, like shards of glass on the beach.
[00:05:37] The older kid could easily be fed longer-form commentary by millennial or older Gen Z creators who are generalists in their commentary.
[00:05:47] These are people who come out of the gaming world or particular fandoms, and that’s often their subscriber hook—like “watch me talk about this complicated news item while I play Dark Souls.”
[00:05:59] Some of these guys—and it’s more guys, in my experience—are perceptive, but I haven’t seen anyone comment on a news story with much method or citation.
[00:06:09] The kingpin of this genre is Hasan Piker. Overall, I think he’s a positive political influence because I agree with a lot of his analysis. But that only goes so far, because he works in a rapid-response streaming mode that leaves no time for consideration or corroboration.
[00:06:24] He has the right instinct in bringing historical leftist analysis to the mic every day for eight hours or whatever he does. But for parents, slowing down and shifting focus to good information resources—and to descriptions of how material conditions make systemic abuse inevitable—is really key. Ultimately, that’s what kids will be able to do something with someday.
[00:06:54] Downstream from Piker, I’ve found commentators who are mostly focused on farming engagement by exposing the most outrageous details, while bringing no political analysis to the table at all. They’re spectators in a spectacle, and I think that can have morbid and paralyzing effects. They’re there for the platform, not for the people.
[00:07:16] The platform loves spectacle, so the goriest details get bumped to the top of the algorithm. Every home and relationship will have its own sense of what’s age-appropriate to discuss, so I’ll leave that to the side.
[00:07:31] Some details will feel tolerable and others unsafe, depending on who you are. But the goriest details are nearly always uncorroborated or outright speculative.
[00:07:42] And what really sucks is that you may be forced to address them anyway.
[00:07:45] So maybe I’d start there. If there’s a question about whether Epstein was really a cannibal, or whether his operation survived through mass murder, or whether Pizzagate or the Wayfair conspiracy was real, the answer—and the redirect away from sensationalism—can be: we don’t really know from the available, verified evidence. But we do know that he abused countless girls and women, that some of them died by suicide, and that he did this while amassing a personal fortune.
[00:08:17] The known situation is bad enough without having to guess at anything.
[00:08:22] As a journalist, I’d also offer that the details of countless criminal acts will take years, if not decades, to report and corroborate. That process will be enshrouded in proceduralism and uncertainty.
[00:08:36] Not to mention the internet noise of hobbyist investigation and speculation, and wave after wave of fascist chaos that will obscure it all.
[00:08:46] By contrast, we already know the general material conditions of the Epstein story.
[00:08:52] It starts with the fact that history is dominated by men who have built and mastered a world of legalized exploitation, where there’s no line between appropriating the labor of others and controlling their bodies. That means whatever cruelty we can imagine in this realm is plausible, if not likely.
[00:09:11] In this history, governments and police exist to pretend there’s some line in place, protecting capital power while appearing to constrain and regulate it.
[00:09:21] Capitalist men were given—and gave themselves—no limits on accumulating power over, and extracting pleasure from, workers, women, children, and the global South. There were no rules for them, no borders, no comprehension of what a boundary even was.
[00:09:38] If such a system is enforced, rewarded, and even made sacred, it will select as leaders the men who feel most entitled to that power, and therefore most enthusiastic about the exploitation it demands.
[00:09:51] They are the princes of a world that has taught them to love exploiting others, and to believe that through exploitation they will feel love.
[00:09:58] So what would they not do?
[00:10:01] I want the focus on material conditions to disarm the idea that exceptionally evil people just spawn out of nowhere in villas and resorts. They don’t. They weren’t mods—they were in the base game.
[00:10:15] I want the conversation to be less about “how could those individuals be so evil?” and more about “what world can I help build in which sociopaths never gain power through capital?”
[00:10:27] I believe the long-term answer to the Epstein horror is the same as the answer to capitalism—something young people will have to struggle against for a long time. It’s learning how to envision and fight for a world of zero wealth, gender, or racial inequality; a world of mutual aid and direct democracy, worked out through the skills of friendship that can crush the machine that makes monsters.
[00:10:56] Chapter 2: Let’s not do QAnon again, okay?
[00:11:01] People who spent their lives researching QAnon posts and users—through granular details like trip codes and meme wars—concluded years ago that it was an antisemitic, nihilistic, irony-poisoned LARP, hosted and accelerated by the father–son duo of Jim and Ron Watkins out of the Philippines.
[00:11:20] It jumped the tracks into boomer Facebook in the early days of the pandemic and fueled the rising MAGA movement, taking on a life and credibility of its own with an anarchic cast of two-bit prophets, believers, and profiteers.
[00:11:36] Why did it catch on?
[00:11:38] One takeaway from my interview last week with Dale Baran is that research on the origins of QAnon shows that the 4chan petri dish it grew out of was steeped in cynicism, despair, and nihilism. But because people are endlessly creative, they turned that crust into a transgressive shitposting class identity, taking revenge on the normies by memeing Trump into office.
[00:12:08] Baran evokes what the late Marxist theorist Mark Fisher called the “cancellation of the future,” as pathways to survival under capitalism narrow.
[00:12:21] It’s a beautiful phrase, and I think it resonates widely. Fisher and Baran were talking about how capitalism—almost like an AI, though they don’t use that metaphor—has machine-learned how to derail any transgressive or generative social movement into another consumer phase, stranding people in passive, demoralized consumption while employment pathways narrow to nothing.
[00:12:52] So all they had left was a black pill of irony, absurdity, and cruelty to relieve the pressure.
[00:13:01] That was the 2010s.
[00:13:04] If we consider how much worse, more volatile, more fascistic, more climate-injured and burning the world is now—how much more fragmentation and despair Gen Z and Gen Alpha face—it’s disarming. As a Gen X parent, some days it’s unbearable to think about how to help.
[00:13:27] So it’s been vertiginous to watch, over the past few weeks, the Epstein files trigger reinterpretations of QAnon’s origins and mythology. I think the conditions are ripe for a new version of QAnon to emerge among Gen Z or even Gen Alpha. But I don’t think it’s inevitable.
[00:13:46] I think we’ll see an intuition-versus-evidence conflict over these reinterpretations, and it may pit disinformation researchers against the left rather than the right.
[00:13:59] In 2017, QAnon was compelling in a populist sense because sensing that there’s an untouchable cabal controlling reality is a common experience—and it’s not wrong.
[00:14:11] But it didn’t take long for QAnon to root itself in right-wing politics and begin motivating the Trump administration to new heights of paranoid aggression and smug triumphalism.
[00:14:23] I was part of a network of anti-disinformation researchers and writers who spent all our time treading water back then, trying to keep up.
[00:14:32] When Trump won his second term, he instructed the FBI to harass and intimidate more prominent members of this network, like Renée DiResta. We always knew that as anti-disinfo creators we’d be targeted by the right.
[00:14:48] But now, in the wake of the Epstein releases, some of the same paranoid conspiracism is filling the feeds of anarchist and communist accounts I follow.
[00:15:00] This goes well beyond Marxists affirming that we’ve been right about the ruling class for generations.
[00:15:07] This is Marxists taking Marx’s metaphor of capital as vampiric and literalizing it, individualizing it down to single players, and spreading the most abject speculation.
[00:15:20] These are accounts I follow because their antifascist politics are sharp, and now I’m watching them slide into incoherence.
[00:15:28] So what do we do? We have to provide good information, but we can’t ignore or dismiss the intuitive feelings that attach to bad information.
[00:15:38] The forensic analysis I contributed to—about who Q might be, where the mole children live, what adrenochrome is—was different from analyzing the cultural labor QAnon performed for its believers. In part, it created an ersatz critique of capitalist abuse.
[00:16:00] QAnon was a way of criticizing capitalism without naming it. Here I want to cite work by Erika Lagalisse, “The Occult Features of Anarchism,” where she describes conspiracy theorizing as a mode of folk wisdom for the working class. I’ll link to her essay, because verifying a conspiracy—lifting it out of theorizing—depends on intelligentsia, education, and resources.
[00:16:31] Conspiracy theory can function as a class-solidarity narrative, expressing shared knowledge that the game is rigged and the bosses will bleed you dry.
[00:16:42] When I first encountered this idea, I immediately thought of my mother.
[00:16:47] Born in working-class Windsor, she educated herself and became a high school teacher, but she never lost the felt sense that people in power were constitutionally obligated to exploit people like her whenever they could.
[00:17:03] The emotional price of that orientation is a life of hypervigilance.
[00:17:09] Eve Sedgwick coined the term “paranoid reading” to describe a basic leftist orientation to power: always scanning for the exploiter, predicting his moves so you won’t be humiliated.
[00:17:21] That can be hard on your relationships and your heart, but the reward is a kind of political clarity.
[00:17:30] This folk-wisdom function can’t simply be debunked. It’s a feeling in the bones.
[00:17:35] What I saw while working on anti-disinfo content was that exposing QAnon’s origins or its links to blood libel or the Satanic Panic didn’t soothe lived experiences of exploitation or systemic abuse, especially when there’s no accountability.
[00:17:55] Knowing how something happened doesn’t answer why it happened.
[00:18:00] Epstein seems to offer the why.
[00:18:03] He shows the intention of the capitalist elite: insatiable power.
[00:18:09] He shows the smug faces behind the masks in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
[00:18:15] But the torrent of information makes understanding the how even harder.
[00:18:21] Young people will encounter the files in fragments—decontextualized, sensationalized, minimized, exaggerated. This is exactly how most anons encountered the Q drops, then spent years “baking” them.
[00:18:37] Like the drops, the files contain holes and non sequiturs, and people will confabulate to fill them.
[00:18:46] This is already happening on Threads, where Gen Z accounts are conflating the Wayfair conspiracy with the Epstein files.
[00:18:57] Interpretations driven by feeling rather than forensics will reach for new connections that may not be stable.
[00:19:05] One version suggests an infinite regression of connections. A poster on Threads wrote, quote: “Pizzagate and QAnon were not onto something. They were orchestrated by pedophiles to make accusing people of pedophilia make you look insane so that they could continue doing pedophile shit.”
[00:19:28] This asserts that Epstein masterminded Pizzagate and QAnon to distract from his own crimes. But that, in itself, is a conspiracy theory.
[00:19:46] It might feel elegant or pleasurable, like staring at an Escher print or admiring how clever Keyser Söze was after the movie ends.
[00:19:59] But if you’re concerned about conspiracy theories distracting people, you won’t participate in this one.
[00:20:09] The worst part is that it locates the logic of capitalism and its chaos in one man and his cabal.
[00:20:17] Pizzagate and QAnon actually emerged from the downstream effects of fascism’s need for scapegoats and projections of depravity.
[00:20:28] These were cultural movements with far more noise than signal, full of internal battles over meaning and authority.
[00:20:36] QAnon influencers competed not by faithfully following an agenda, but by presenting themselves as uniquely connected to it. There was no single person controlling it from the top.
[00:20:57] Yes, there’s a small circle of oligarchs and tech tycoons who, with their political lapdogs, control much of our lives. But imagining them pulling every lever like the Wizard of Oz is simplistic—and as disempowering as believing in a harsh, controlling God.
[00:21:22] It ignores how deeply we’ve internalized capitalist logic and how we all contribute to its spectacle, unevenly and with varying awareness.
[00:21:34] One thing we can do, as parents or caregivers during periods of internet chaos and non-accountability, is to set aside our own despondency as best we can and make sure young people have solid, non-speculative sources of information about the Epstein files. Start with Julie Brown’s foundational reporting at the Miami Herald.
[00:21:58] Pair that with a structural analysis of capitalist power to show that Epstein isn’t extraordinary—he’s symptomatic.
[00:22:08] Young people should also know that wild speculation harms Epstein’s survivors by burying their signal in noise. And fascists love a world where truth feels impossible to find, or people are paralyzed trying.
[00:22:32] If you have the ability to communicate clearly, you can be a social and epistemological anchor for young people who have more reason than we can imagine to feel that nothing makes sense.
[00:22:47] These are young people vulnerable to being told they’re witnessing demonic evil they can’t do anything about, rather than the crises of capitalism—which they can do something about.
[00:23:01] Thanks for listening, everyone. Keep safe. Take care of each other.
