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FILE - Documents that were included in the U.S. Department of Justice release of the Jeffrey Epstein files are photographed Friday, Jan. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick, File)Article contentTo see into the abyss, go on to X and search for the words “Epstein” and “Jews.”

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You will be confronted by a tidal wave of Jew hatred. You will witness an antisemitic feeding frenzy. Across social media, the cry goes up: the Epstein scandal proves Jews are demonic.

It’s all there. Jews control world affairs. They are the puppet-masters of the powerful. They use sexual corruption and blackmail to dominate governments.

Advertisement 1 Story continues below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() { const template = document.getElementById('oop-ad-template'); if (template && !template.dataset.adInjected) { const clone = template.content.cloneNode(true); template.replaceWith(clone); if (template.parentElement) { template.parentElement.dataset.adInjected = "true"; } } });Article contentJeffrey Epstein has been turned from an iffy businessman who committed terrible crimes against young women into the archetypal Jew: venal, power-mad, possibly cannibalistic.

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It feels like a rehashing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — ancient hatreds reheated for the algorithm age.

No sooner had the U.S. Department of Justice released the latest batch of Epstein files than the Jews were being fingered as the cause of the West’s moral rot.

As a Jerusalem Post headline described it, there was an almost instant “wave of antisemitic conspiracy theories”.

Even searching for news reports about the files will lead you into a hellish maze of Jewphobic speculation.

So when the New York Post posted a story on X about Epstein’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, it found itself bombarded with racially-charged ridicule.

Said one irate poster: “Epstein was Jewish, Ghislaine was Jewish, Ghislaine’s father was an Israeli spy, Epstein’s financiers were Jewish, his lawyers were Jewish, most of his friends were Jewish… Must be Russia!”

Close to 50,000 people hit the like button for that Jew-baiting dolled up as a “correction”.

The comment thread is a sewer of medieval-like loathing. The New York Post is defending Jews because who else will “fund (our) child sex rings?” says one post.

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And these are not small accounts. Social-media accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers have christened Epstein a “Talmudic Jewish supremacist” for whom non-Jews were “cattle to be used and abused”.

Posts claiming that our Epstein-bought elites are packed with “Christ-hating, Gentile-hating Jews” are spreading like wildfire.

The conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll told his 1.3m followers that Epstein operated a vast “Israeli blackmail ring,” designed to let that dastardly state “gain control” over our societies. Oh, those wily Jews.

He was rewarded with an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, where he told Carlson’s millions of listeners that we now know “Pizzagate” was real.

And it’s been given a new lease of life following the latest dump of Epstein files. That there is nothing in the files — literally nothing — that proves the existence of a Jew-controlled pedo ring hasn’t stopped the frantic chatter. Since when did loons let a lack of evidence get in the way of their hollow theorizing?

The truth is this: the FBI has found not so much a sliver of evidence that Epstein was blackmailing powerful men with surreptitiously filmed clips of them abusing girls.

An extensive search of his homes, his emails and his bank accounts turned up nothing to suggest he was engaged in sex-linked extortion with the rich and powerful.

Ample evidence has been found for his own crimes, for which he was convicted in 2008: the procurement of underage “prostitutes” and the trafficking of young women. But that Jew-ruled pedo ring exists solely in the minds of the Very Online.

The lunacy of the Epstein obsessives is confirmed in the fact that they are dragging up even patently untrue claims from the Epstein files and preaching them as gospel to their digital armies.

For example, one person contacted the FBI to say he’d heard a rumour that George H.W. Bush partook in an orgy on one of Epstein’s yachts, and even sacrificed babies before devouring their intestines.

It should go without saying that such unhinged claims are in the files not because they are true but because the Department of Justice logged everything it ever heard about Epstein.

And yet that hasn’t stopped the conspiracy nuts. They’re all over social media claiming the files prove the super-rich kill children and eat their flesh.

The Satanic panic of the 1980s meshes with the Jew hatred of the 1200s, giving rise to unhinged cries about how that most warped people have a cannibalistic urge to sacrifice the innocent. The blood libel reborn.

Among the woke left, meanwhile, a more polite antisemitism has taken hold. For them, Epstein’s crimes are proof less of the fallen, depraved nature of the Jewish people than of the fallen, depraved nature of the Jewish State.

They brand Epstein a Mossad agent. He was doing Israel’s bidding, they say. Yet as the British writer Jake Wallis Simons says, if Epstein was an Israeli agent, he was a “terribly incompetent one.”

Yossi Cohen, the former Mossad chief who spearheaded the pagers operation against Hezbollah, says it’s utterly untrue Epstein was doing Mossad’s bidding.

Furthermore, Epstein’s friendship with former Israeli PM Ehud Barak — which the left cites as proof of his twisted link to the Jewish state — in fact suggests he was far from Israel-friendly.

As Benjamin Netanyahu says, Barak was pretty bitter following his election loss two decades ago. And since then he has cosied up to “the anti-Zionist radical left” in an effort to undermine various Israeli governments. Perhaps Epstein was closer to the Israelphobia of our own bourgeois left than he was to Israel itself.

What all this Epstein conspiracism confirms is that the line between the antisemitism of the lunatic right and the anti-Zionism of the woke left is thin indeed.

Both sides believe that some terrible Jewish thing — whether the Jewish people or the Jewish homeland — is responsible for the disarray of our societies and even of their own lives.

Conspiratorial cranks say it’s the Jews who are uniquely crooked, to the point of lusting after the blood of children. Progressives say it’s the Jewish nation that is uniquely wicked, to the extent of intentionally killing Palestinian kids.

And both see Epstein as proof of their prejudices. Proof that the Jews or the Jewish homeland are demonic forces. You could not fit a cigarette paper between these two positions.

This latest stage of the Epstein scandal confirms conspiratorial thinking is back, and that Jews are once more the prime target of its lies and hysteria.

Epstein was a nasty piece of work, and in my view he should have been punished even harder for what he did. This Jew-taunting, though? That’s nasty too. It confirms the descent of our societies into a new Dark Age in which rumour has defeated reason, and bigotry has slain truth.

Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer at spiked and the author of After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilization.

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