In The Week, Matthew Walther uses the Epstein case to illustrate why many so-called “low information voters” tend to believe all sorts of odd things like Pizzagate:
The arrest of the apparent billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein at a New Jersey airport on Saturday on federal charges for crimes he was accused of during the Bush administration should not be surprising to anyone who has followed the news carefully. He may have escaped in 2008 with a ludicrous one-year stint in a county jail that he was allowed to leave six days a week, but his name has never quite been out of the headlines. Between 2008 and 2015 Epstein reportedly settled more than a dozen lawsuits from Jane Does alleging sexual assault; the youngest of his alleged victims was 14 years old.
Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.The only question is why did it take this long? Why was the ludicrous deal that gave Epstein and his fellow conspirators immunity in exchange for a slap-on-the-wrist jail sentence ever allowed to go through in the first place?
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We should keep all of this in mind the next time we feel inclined to sneer at so-called “low-information voters,” especially the kookier sort. You know the people I mean. Wackos. Gun nuts. 8channers. Conspiracy theorists in Middle America who watch InfoWars (one of the few journalistic outlets to discuss the issue of pedophilia regularly) and post about QAnon and “spirit cooking” and the lizard people. The news that a globalized cabal of billionaires and politicians and journalists and Hollywood bigwigs might be flying around the world raping teenaged girls will not surprise them in the least because it is what they have long suspected. For the rest of us it is like finding out that the Jersey Devil is real or turning on cable news and finding Anderson Cooper and his panel engaged in a matter-of-fact discussion of Elvis’s residence among the Zixls on the 19th moon of Dazotera.
Among other things, the Epstein case forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions about the real meaning of “fake” news. There is, or should be, more to being informed than fact-checking formalism. If you have spent the last few years earnestly consuming mainstream left-of-center media in this country you will be under the impression that the United States has fallen under the control of a spray-tanned Mussolini clone who is never more than five minutes away from making birth control illegal. If you watch Fox News and read conservative publications, you no doubt bemoan the fact that Ronald Reagan’s heir is being hamstrung by a bunch of avocado toast-eating feminist witches. Meanwhile, Alex Jones’s audience will tell you that America, like the rest of the world, is ruled by a depraved internationalist elite whose ultimate allegiance is not to countries or political parties or ideologies but to one another. These people believe in nothing. They will safeguard their wealth and privilege at any cost. They will never break rank. And they will commit unspeakable crimes with impunity, while anyone who dares to speculate openly is sued or hounded out of public life as a kook.
