The Epstein Files, QAnon, and Psychological Warfare
How unverified FBI tips became “confirmed facts”, and who benefits from the confusion
We now survey the political landscape from a vantage point where 3.5 million pages of unvetted documents have been dumped into the public sphere and where people from all political perspectives are questioning what is well known and established.
Then, Melania Trump stood at the White House podium on April 9th and read what was written for her.
“The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today.”
Everyone was taken off-guard why she would do this, but it seems that a 20-year friend, Amanda Ungaro, knows the full story and is threatening to go public. So, someone thought Melania should try to get ahead of the information. It didn’t work out well, however.
In Melania’s statement, she said her contact with Epstein was casual, a product of overlapping social circles in New York. It was a rare public statement from a woman who has spent years avoiding the press about Epstein.
And what initially struck me was why she would bring up Epstein at all? Trump must be furious. More and more MAGA devotees are publicly speaking out about Trump being unfit to be President, and 70 politicians are calling for the use of the 25th Amendment.
However, both the political left and right have adopted similar conspiratorial thinking. There is mass confusion, and the American population is left wondering, “What does any of this mean?”
We are watching a psychological warfare operation (psyop) unfold in real time that is contributing to more chaos and confusion.
A Conspiracy Versus a Conspiracy Theory
Before we jump in, let us draw a distinction that much of the public discourse is failing to make. A conspiracy is a real event, documented by evidence, proven through investigation, and subject to legal accountability.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell ran a sex trafficking operation for many years. Prince Andrew was arrested in February 2026. Former UK politician Peter Mandelson was arrested days later. Their actions were criminal conspiracies and criminal conduct, proven by the facts.
A conspiracy theory is something different. It is a framework for interpreting complex events that offers emotional certainty in place of evidence. It takes the truth (that Epstein really did traffic minors) and constructs an unfalsifiable mythology on top of it.
The QAnon movement claimed that a global Satanic cabal of Democratic elites ran a global child sex trafficking ring that included harvesting adrenochrome from children who were murdered. MAGA eventually expanded the conspiracy theory to include the Epstein files, with the MAGA base largely expecting the plot to be confirmed in the files.
Once the files were released, QAnon theories experienced a revival, with some on the political left asking, “Does this confirm what they were saying?” It does not.
What we see from the release of the files and investigation of the facts is that this was not a Democratic elite conspiracy. The files appear to demonstrate that Trump himself, along with many other men, had sex with underage girls and boys, including many prominent Republicans, Democrats, billionaires, libertarians, independents, and business people, acting criminally.
Rather than being a specific political trafficking conspiracy, this was a massive operation that included powerful people beyond just politicians.
The Original Conspiracy Theory
The origin story of QAnon is worth revisiting because it has direct relevance to what is happening now.
Gregg Housh, one of the founders of Anonymous, once told me he knew the three men who started QAnon and that they had originally intended it as a joke, a goof, a trolling attempt, whatever you want to call it.
It was only when the creators realized they could sell merchandise and make money that they expanded it. Then, he said, the Russians got involved. We now know that there is forensic evidence that Michael Flynn, a former US national security advisor, was involved from nearly the beginning of the psyop. He is an expert on 4th and 5th generation psychological warfare and was fired from the Trump White House for taking money from the Russians.
By 2020, QAnon merchandise had flooded Amazon and Etsy. Michael Flynn trademarked the phrase “digital soldiers” and built a network of organizations around QAnon, even though in a private call with attorney Lin Wood, he called QAnon “a disinformation campaign.”
QAnon was not organic grassroots outrage about child trafficking, but rather a manufactured belief system that both monetized and galvanized people’s legitimate fear for children.
The Russians amplified it dramatically, with Russian accounts posting #QAnon within two weeks of the first “Q drop”, using the hashtag tens of thousands of times, accounting for over 44% of foreign QAnon activity on Facebook in 2020.
As discussed in my interview with intelligence expert Dr. James Scaminaci III, fourth-generation warfare is a strategy written up by William S. Lind, who later teamed up with Christian Right strategist Paul Weyrich.
It is used to demoralize populations of citizens by attacking experts, science, and to de-legitimize democratic institutions. It means to attack the very concept of shared truth. It intentionally creates stories designed to break down social trust.
The core misunderstanding about “active measures,” the term used to describe Russian psychological warfare, was that the use of QAnon was never to convince Americans of one particular thing, but to polarize Americans through emotional manipulation and make them unable to agree on anything. If you erode trust in the facts about reality so thoroughly, democratic functioning will become truly impossible.
The Projection Playbook and The Motivations
One of the core techniques the Trump machine used to gain power is projection. I describe this technique in The Cult of Trump, the practice of accusing your opponents of precisely what you are doing. Trump claimed Hillary Clinton was involved in trafficking, that Democrats were pedophiles, and that the American government “deep state” was running a criminal conspiracy.
This framing accomplished something insidious, in that it preemptively discredited anyone who might point out that Trump himself had a documented relationship with Jeffrey Epstein spanning the 1990s, that victim Virginia Giuffre was recruited from Mar-a-Lago, and that Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side.”
Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, had documented ties to multiple intelligence services. The UK Foreign Office classified him as loyal only to Israel. His connections to the KGB through business channels are also documented, though less extensively. Craig Unger wrote about the connections in his books, House of Trump, House of Putin, and American Kompromat. I interviewed Unger several times and blogged and videotaped these efforts.
Epstein’s properties contained extensive surveillance infrastructure. In emails confirmed by credit card records, he directed the purchase of hidden cameras concealed inside Kleenex boxes.
Whether Epstein was formally directed by an intelligence agency remains unproven. Former U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta reportedly said he “was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone”, but Acosta later denied it under oath. An FBI field office memo describes an informant claiming Epstein was a co-opted Mossad agent, but the document itself notes the claims are “not independently corroborated.”
Regardless of who or what Epstein actually was, the intelligence technique at work here appears to be the collection of kompromat, the Russian term for often sexually compromising material obtained covertly and used for leverage. The pattern of hidden cameras, mysterious wealth, and Epstein’s frequent communication with agents of foreign intelligence is certainly consistent.
Enter “BlueAnon” and a Crisis of Interpretation
When the Department of Justice released approximately 3.5 million pages of Epstein documents through early 2026 under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, it offered never-before-seen emails, images, videos, and a vast range of shocking allegations. This was something that the public had waited years for.
However, the DOJ itself warned that these materials may include “fake or falsely submitted images, documents, or videos, as everything that was sent to the FBI by the public was included.” Raw, unvetted public tips sit alongside genuine investigative material with no clear system to distinguish them.
This sparked a kind of public hysteria over the files, creating an information environment ripe for conspiracy theories. For instance, the word “cannibal” appears over 50 times across the files. According to Snopes and CBS News, none of the mentions substantiate claims of actual cannibalism.
The most sensational allegation of “ritualistic sacrifice” and babies being dismembered comes from a 2019 FBI interview with an anonymous individual who also claimed their feet were “cut with a scimitar but left no scarring.” This makes no sense, and there is no evidence whatsoever.
And yet millions of people, many of them on the political left, are now circulating these claims as confirmed facts. I heard a colleague mention the term “BlueAnon” recently, an epiphenomenon of conspiratorial thinking pioneered by QAnon, and it seems to be an apt description.
There are, of course, structural differences. QAnon had a single anonymous leader (Q) who Jim Stewartson has been proclaiming was Flynn, and he can prove it. Flynn sued him and then dropped the lawsuit when he had to give discovery and be deposed. The QAnon psyop hawked merchandise, did conferences, and could clearly be identified as a destructive cult movement that was purposefully utilized. So, what should we make of the emerging conspiratorial left?
