How America’s left and right are weaponising Epstein’s legacy

Democrats could also use a distraction. Nationally, they’ve made news for divisive choices. For example, far-left Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani became the Democrats’ nominee for New York City mayor. When Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin was asked about Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” Martin blithely said Democrats “are a big tent party.” Most recently, the nation’s largest teachers’ union – central to Democrats’ coalition – voted to marginalise the Anti-Defamation League for being insufficiently left-wing on Israel and antisemitism. (Union leaders have since rejected that move.)

When Musk tweeted on June 5 that Trump “is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public,” it was catnip for Congressional Democrats. They’ve since forced Epstein-related votes and want to “compel the release of the Epstein files,” The Hill reported.

By contrast, mentioning Epstein is increasingly about sowing division on the Right. Yes, there are plenty of regular Americans concerned about justice for Epstein’s victims, but journalist Daniel Bates, who’s “covered Jeffrey Epstein since 2011” rightly observed in The Free Press that Epstein “is the perfect wedge issue for the MAGA influencers who have been losing one policy fight after another inside the Trump administration.”

These influencers are isolationists, but more notable is their “increasingly casual antisemitism,” which Rebeccah Heinrichs, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, called “strategic” in The Free Press. “It has become the glue that binds the various strains of the insurgent ideology,” whose adherents are “on a collision course with the president himself.”

“The goal” of this movement, Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh Hammer wrote in The Free Press, “is to fracture the political right into pro-Trump MAGA and Trump-skeptical/anti-Trump ‘ultra-MAGA,’ in order to allow a new presidential lane to emerge in 2028.” Hammer sees Tucker Carlson running in that lane, but it’s at least as likely that Carlson backs Vice President J.D. Vance. After all, Carlson lobbied Trump to pick Vance, who now employs Carlson’s son.

So, how does this movement intend to split Trump’s base in their favor? By focusing on Israel and Jews. As Tablet editor Park MacDougald summarized in The Free Press, “it was Carlson who, at the [student conservative] Turning Point USA conference in Florida over the weekend, embraced the full Mossad-pedo-blackmail version of the Epstein story.”

Carlson was rewarded with “thunderous applause,” Moon told me. “Tucker gets massive engagement when he goes at Israel. He'll take any major news story and shoehorn Israel into it,” because it brings followers and cash.

None of this is auspicious for American Jews. This is the organisation of politics against Jews that Harvard Professor Emerita Ruth Wisse has described.

Further, “attention to this issue [Epstein] is bad for Jews regardless of what is said,” Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Jay Greene told me. “Conspiracy theories are always bad for Jews. Attending to those theories rewards the conspiracy theorists/antisemites.”

A widespread embrace of conspiratorial thinking would also signal poor societal health. Anti-Zionism has been destroying the Democratic party from within. If Republicans want to avoid a similar fate, they’ll need to start fighting back – because the attack from within their coalition is already underway.