Hello Smarty: Time for Your Weekly Reads!The Skepticism Desk on Modern Myths. Plus: Books from Honor Jones, Yiyun Li, Gardiner Harris, and More....
The “there” you’re looking for is not there. Dear Wags, Here’s a persistent myth about conspiracy thinking: that it only infects the yo-yos we oppose. Another: that facts can snap someone out of it. A third: that progress makes conspiracism obsolete. If any of that were true, we wouldn’t be losing ground to delusions in this technologically sophisticated but badly misinformed age. People have a habit of swallowing anything that confirms something more elemental in their worldview. Don’t bother trying to reason them out of it; it’s a gut thing. This one slipped in amid headlines about former President Biden’s health: Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, now FBI Director and Deputy Director, sat down with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo to try to convince her that Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide, despite more than five years of knotty Deep State murder theorizing. “You say he killed himself,” said Bartiromo, who over the years has slid down the scale from Money Honey to grand dame of the preposterous. “People don’t believe it.” Of course they don’t. People like Bartiromo have been paid millions to make sure of it. Patel waded in: “As someone who’s been a public defender, a prosecutor, who’s worked in the prison system—you know a suicide when you see one. And that’s what that was.” Bongino—who in his old career as a talking head used to darkly hint that They must be hiding something about Epstein’s sudden exit—seemed exasperated. “I have seen the whole file. He killed himself,” he said. “The ‘there’ you’re looking for is not there.” Let’s be maximally generous and say that some people who’ve spent years peddling innuendo about Epstein genuinely believe it. The idea that the creepy financier and sex offender was taken out by a cabal of powerful pervs worried he’d expose them has a certain jazzy symmetry. It’s lurid but plausible—even skeptics find it hard to accept that his exit was so pathetically mundane. But when Attorney General Pam Bondi dispatched investigators—only because she’s a sober-minded public servant, of course—they didn’t turn up proof of a Hillary Clinton–led Satanic jamboree. Show’s over, folks. We can all go home now, right? Please. The Epstein legend will never die—just like JFK assassination obsessives will never buy that there was a lone gunman. It pushes too many buttons in the dark American psyche: riches, power, prostituted children, and clandestine networks. Alas, Jeffrey Epstein—an awful person—gets to linger at this party forever, not because of his crimes, but because of all the bizarre fantasies we project upon him. Epstein was tailor-made for warped mythology. An outsider from Coney Island, he used his spreadsheet brain to make millions, buy several mansions and a private island, charm royalty, and wriggle out of prosecution for sex trafficking—for years. It almost certainly helps that he taps into some eternal, ugly prejudices. Would anyone care if the villain in this misadventure was named Jeffrey Evans? When Epstein hung himself in jail, it looked fishy—but that doesn’t mean it was fishy. This is where solid reporting is supposed to come in. But if that’s the way it ever worked, it certainly doesn’t work that way now. In a mistrustful society with a shattered news media, counternarratives have filled the void left by the vanishing mainstream. America—huge, individualistic, decentralized, diverse, not so big on book learnin’—was a conspiracist’s rumpus room long before the internet. Legacy media did little to tamp that instinct down, and the globalized platforms that devoured it have only supercharged our worst habits. Are people more conspiracy-minded than they used to be? Maybe. What’s clear is that digital mischief spreads faster than ever—and reaches enormous audiences. And now here comes AI, because your uncle’s memes weren’t persuasive enough. Epstein’s saga is idea meth for a deeply mistrustful society. Plenty of liberals indulge in conspiracies about his death, but it quickly became a totem of MAGA belief—folded into the stew of QAnon delirium and thirty years of Bill & Hillary Hate Fiction, going back to the death of Vince Foster. A day after Patel and Bongino tried to shoot down murder theories, some oddling from the fringe site ZeroHedge was in the White House briefing room, asking press secretary Karoline Leavitt about Epstein, “the most famous Clinton-related death.” Instead of calling security, she referred him to Bondi’s Justice Department: “I know the attorney general has committed to releasing those files.” Why humor derangement in this way? Because the savory symbolism—Us against a shadowy Them—is too delicious to spit out. No matter their MAGA bona fides, Patel and Bongino are getting raked over the coals by the base for supposedly suppressing the truth, as if they were Paul Wolfowitz (who, like Epstein, has one of those shifty pawnbroker names). You don’t argue with an article of faith. And there’s something else: conspiracies are fun for the people who peddle them. They let members of a tribe signal to one another, reinforcing a secret clubhouse code of symbols, code words, and in-jokes. Their traffickers don’t want them verified; they resonate with deeper suspicions and cultural reflexes. Obama is a crypto-Muslim. Hillary is a lesbian harpy. Democrats wouldn’t let go of the canard about JD Vance humping a couch—not because it was remotely true, but because it captured their withering sense of him: sweaty, try-hard, sexually repellent. Donald Trump doesn’t merely get how urban legends work—he is one. He’ll never let the truth get in the way of a viral story, especially if it involves something grotesque supposedly orchestrated by George Soros (check the name). Not that it matters, but he was actually friends with Jeffrey Epstein! To his diehards, Trump—a guy who ogled girls with the high-society predator—is somehow a Galahad slaying the Deep State’s baby-eating octopus. But that’s the beauty of a hallucinatory fable: it doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to spread. Like all great conspiracies, this one pops up like a zombie no matter how many truth bullets are aimed at its heart. It’s too rich, too symbolic, and too politically useful to be extinguished. It thrives in an era when shared governance and civic responsibility have been torched. It would be a humdinger of a tale even without embellishment—but that’s not enough for the imagination. It has to mean something more than the fact that life is routinely cruel and unfair. Winky “just asking questions” conspiracism thrives in this second Gilded Age, amped up by social media and contrarian podcasters. It helps that real conspiracies have always been with us. Politicians are sleazy. Corporations steal. Outrageous graft—here’s a private jet with no strings, Mr. President—is everywhere. When people feel betrayed, humiliated, or left behind, they reach for stories that assign blame and anoint them as truth-knowers. The heterodox podcasting boom—spurred by mythmaking on the elite Left—is now navigating its adolescence, where reflexive contrarianism routinely plunges down every rabbit hole. Last month, conservative commentator Douglas Murray found himself debating Joe Rogan and comic Dave Smith about Israel, Hamas, Ukraine, and whether Winston Churchill was a great villain of history (spoiler: he wasn’t). “I said then, and have said often, we have lived through a period when the ‘experts’ have gotten an awful lot of things wrong,” Murray wrote in the New York Post. “Yet that doesn’t mean expertise doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean a comedian can simply hold himself out as a Middle East expert and be listened to as if he has any body of work.” That lit up the comments section. Why ruin all the fun by suggesting that actual knowledge should get in the way of a good story? How dare some pencil neck imply that reporting from a dangerous place is better than blowing smoke from the couch! But just because a yarn is titillating—just because it’s the amen chorus your fragile ego demands—doesn’t make it true. Spinning fairy tales for your own amusement is one thing, but Rogan and his peers command audiences far larger than those of the withering traditional press. That’s informational power. And it might just come with some responsibility. Mythmaking about enemies isn’t exclusive to the Right—but the sprawling, anarchic ecosystem of “conservative” media functions as a world-class rumor mill. Liberals brew their own concoctions. Opponents of Trump trafficked in years of Russia conspiracies, many of them elaborate fantasies. They gained traction because Trump’s strange and visible affinity for Vladimir Putin was real. The truth didn’t need dressing up—but the human drive to invent is irrepressible. Pizzagate is bananas. So is the notion that the U.S. government invented AIDS to wipe out Black Americans. Wild-eyed seekers will hunt for the Trump pee tape until the end of time. We did make it to the moon in 1969—but there are still those who insist it was a hoax, and somehow they’re the same people who think aliens take regular tours of the desert Southwest. Also? Fluoride is fine. And sadly, lizard men only inhabit the land of metaphor. These are expressions of screwy emotional logic: the government did experiment on Black men in the Tuskegee syphilis study. The CIA did run mind control programs. There isn’t lethal mercury in vaccines—but suspicion of pharmaceutical companies, given their track record, is rooted in unhappy realities. The conduct of public health officials during the pandemic deserves criticism—it hardly needs to be fictionalized. Confabulation often emanates from genuine anxiety and grievance. To pretend it’s only tinfoil-hat-wearing cranks who fall for this stuff is to underestimate the human imagination. Defusing conspiracies isn’t about scoring debate points but about addressing what powers them. The disintegrations of the Trump years—a willful war on the notion of noble, unifying American values—have made finding common ground—and common sense—harder than ever. The Epstein case was investigated during the first Trump administration. Attorney General Bill Barr called it “a perfect storm of screw-ups.” Some heads rolled. The official story—unsexy as it is—never changed. How it got retooled into MAGA lore and aimed back at Democrats is just another symptom of an information ecosystem addicted to scandal, allergic to closure, and increasingly hostile to the tedious business of finding the truth. Now that Trump’s most avid backers are part of the dread establishment, they’re discovering there’s no satisfying people who’ve traded reality for an addictive sideshow. What Bongino struggles to grasp is something his boss knows only too well: wherever the truth lies, people will always imagine a there there. Yours Ever, Thomas Stockmann
Autocorrect by Etgar Keret Keret is a Thurber for the digital age—a master miniaturist draining the high-tech swamp to expose the perennial absurdities of human life. This collection offers 33 epigrammatic darts, featuring characters stumbling through a world both surreal and unsettling. In “Soulo,” the head of the Loneliness Department at a German university builds a robot friend to be her soulmate. “A Hypothetical Question” asks whether cannibalism could be the ultimate romantic gesture. In “Cherry Garcia Memories with M&Ms on Top,” two soldiers face off with jammed rifles, embodying the violence and helplessness of people at war. One of Israel’s most acclaimed writers, Keret captures societies caught between sleek futurism and brutal realities. His stories are packed with wry humor, anodyne boredom, and an undercurrent of menace—making this a timely and evocative collection that feels both urgently intimate and global. — Yael Danon... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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Hello Smarty: Time for Your Weekly Reads!
May 21, 2025
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