No war for pedos?

Spotted in Washington, DC — March 15, 2026

“Why did Trump go to war with Iran on February 28, 2026” is not an unimportant question. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of question that could easily be pondered, researched, and debated for many decades to come — not unlike “Why did Hitler invade Poland on September 1, 1939” or “Why did Putin invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022.” As is often the case for seismic historical events, there’s unlikely to ever be a single satisfying answer — much less any universally agreed consensus. Ask a hundred different people why George W. Bush invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, and you’ll probably get at least a dozen different answers, whether you asked them contemporaneously or today. In the 20+ years that have elapsed, a limitless supply of journal articles, symposiums, books, etc. have been generated expounding a huge multiplicity of theories for what gave rise to the Iraq invasion, and by the very nature of the subject matter, it’s essentially impossible that any particular theory will ever be crowned as definitively “true.”

“No war for oil!” was perhaps the slogan most frequently shouted by war opponents in 2003. Even if one might dispute the explanatory power of “oil” as the war’s casus belli, at least the slogan was anchored in some semblance of observable reality: Iraq really did have significant oil reserves the US could theoretically plunder after toppling its government. (I personally always regarded the Iraq war as having mainly been driven by “neocon” ideological mania, but it’s certainly a complex question, and open for reasonable debate.) In 2026, however, as another major Middle East war unfolds, something noticeable has shifted in the political cosmos. To the extent that the Iran war has engendered any rough equivalent of a “No war for oil!” slogan, it’s one that could only be described as totally, sensationally divorced from observable reality. Because that slogan would unfortunately have to be: “No war for pedos!”

One of the (many) ironies here is that “No war for oil!” would likely be more apt today for sloganeering purposes than it was circa 2003. Trump always framed his opposition to the Iraq war primarily in terms of his annoyance that Bush hadn’t done enough to “take the oil” — because to Trump, this underscored how screwed over the US had gotten on the whole deal. Sure, the death and destruction might’ve been regrettable, but it all could’ve potentially been worthwhile if Bush ever had the guts to take Trump’s commonsense advice and unapologetically seize Iraq’s natural resources, instead of fretting so much about “democracy” and so forth.

“Take the oil” ultimately became one of the central themes animating Trump’s larger approach to foreign policy. He is always remarkably blunt in declaring that forcible resource extraction is among his chief motivators for ordering military action. During the first term, Trump explained that the reason he wound up leaving US troops in Syria — after initially claiming he wanted to pull them out — was specifically to “take the oil.” And he never minced words about it: “We’re keeping the oil,” he said. “We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil.” Then as he barreled into his second term, embarked on a megalomaniacal global conquest mission — one he strangely never quite previewed in his multi-year 2024 presidential campaign — Trump’s long-established passion for violent expropriation only became more and more pronounced. When he bombed Venezuela earlier this year and abducted its president, he wasted no time declaring “we’re going to run the country… and we’re going to get the oil flowing the way it should be.” He then swiftly convened a gathering of oil company executives at the White House, informing them: “You’re dealing with us directly, you’re not dealing with Venezuela at all. We don’t want you to deal with Venezuela.” This strongly suggested Trump’s stated intention to personally “run” Venezuela was not metaphorical, as some had meekly speculated — he literally did view himself as the ultimate governing authority of Venezuela. In light of this, as well as similar ideations he’s had around Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Cuba, there’s no reason to think his “take the oil” ethos — now expanded to include outright territorial conquest — wouldn’t be one of the salient factors guiding his “excursion” to Iran. He’s already said that any future Iranian political leadership will have to be personally selected and/or approved by him, thereby appointing himself ultimate governing authority of that country, and possessor of its ultimate sovereignty — aspirationally, anyway — just as he’s already done with Venezuela (and Gaza). Opportunities for resource extraction will also surely be plentiful whenever he gets around to “taking Cuba,” a vow he’s recently begun repeating with greater frequency.

Unless you’d want to contend, for some completely inexplicable reason, that Trump is just going to sideline his clear and oft-expressed prerogative with respect to Iran, “No war for oil” is even more befitting of the current Middle East war than it was in 2003. And you may not have to wait long for confirmatory evidence, since Trump appears to have sent a Marine expeditionary force to the Persian Gulf for the purpose of “securing” Iran’s biggest oil export facility, located on the island he just bombed.

And yet, what are huge sections of the war-critical public chanting? That’s right: “No war for pedos!”

Protesters might not literally be chanting that exact phrase (although I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if it does crop up somewhere verbatim.) The point is that millions of people — and a shockingly outsized proportion of social media users, across every major platform — instantly and vehemently decided that the Iran war was launched, one way or another, because of Jeffrey Epstein. And as such, their answer to that aforementioned question of historical pertinence — “Why did Trump go to war with Iran on February 28, 2026?” — will henceforth necessitate some sort of spiel about “Epstein.”

Before anyone interjects with nitpicking outbursts, yes, I’m all too aware that different proponents of the “War for Epstein” thesis hold to differing variations of the semi-coherent argument. Some variants are more extreme than others. One is that Trump launched the war merely to “distract” from the most recent production of Epstein Files, for straightforwardly self-serving political reasons — a slightly dramatized version of the classic “wag the dog” theory, which has also been attributed in the past to Bill Clinton, albeit for a much smaller-scale military operation. Evidence for this less-extravagant twist on the “War for Epstein” theme appears to hinge on the notion that Google searches for “Epstein Files” fell off dramatically after the war was launched on February 28, which isn’t even true — but that’s neither nor there, since truth-value plays very little role in the giddy promulgation of these theories.

Still other “War for Epstein” promoters have half-trollingly settled on just blurting out “Operation Epstein Fury” as often as they can, because they take this to be a clever play on “Operation Epic Fury.” And sure, the operation’s actual name is definitely obnoxious enough to be ripe for some well-deserved ridicule. But it’s difficult to tell what any given person shouting “OPERATION EPSTEIN FURY” in all-caps precisely believes: that Trump started the war to deflect public attention from the Epstein Files? Or something more drastic: that the war is fundamentally being waged by the “Epstein regime” or “Epstein coalition” to protect pedophilic sex-trafficking interests? Ultimately, there is no stable meaning to be deciphered from any of these catchphrases. They just happened to enter wide circulation by way of an instant algorithmic slop consensus that somehow, someway, the most decisive and proximate cause of the war was something related to Jeffrey Epstein. From there, everybody’s free to add their own personalized spin — the more garish the better.

The day the war was launched, Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) somehow concluded that Trump was orchestrating a “calculated distraction” from “the unreleased Epstein Files.” It would be illuminating to know how many of the several million Epstein Files currently available for public consumption Sen. Hickenlooper has gotten a chance to read, since he’s desperately pining for millions more to satisfy his dark curiosities, and has determined that Trump must be so desperate to conceal the remaining files that he’d randomly trigger a giant war in the Middle East. (To the extent that any “files” really are outstanding, I want them released too, but the supposition that “millions” have been maliciously hidden seems to be a conflation and/or misunderstanding of various things; the vast majority are likely to be duplicates of already-released files.)

Miles Taylor, the guy who authored, with great fanfare, the “anonymous” 2018 letter to the New York Times in which he declared himself “Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” has made the case that Trump launched the war to “distract” from newly-uncovered accusations that he personally “molested 13-year old girls.” As such, Trump is covering his own hide by waging war on Iran, which is part and parcel of his wider complicity in what Taylor postulates is the ongoing coverup of a “secret, alleged pedophile ring.” Naturally, proclaiming these “war for Epstein” theories, whatever precise variant one prefers, reliably lights up the slopaganda algorithm, adding ever-more incentive to keep the fevered conjecture going. (More on the “13-year-old girl” allegation in a subsequent article.)

There are other “War for Epstein” proponents who go quite a bit further with their speculative frenzy, especially if they’ve already been marinating in Israel-blinkered myopia, defined (by me) as:

A babbling fixation with Israel, to the point of total absurdity, as the only possible cause of every conceivable political misfortune — whether it’s the concealment of “Epstein Files,” or the murder of Charlie Kirk. This ironically has the effect of crowding out legitimate criticism of Israel, or of US foreign policy, by populating social media with an avalanche of abject buffoonery.

For the clinically Israel-demented, “Epstein” has already been manna from heaven, given the purported “intelligence” ties they love to ceaselessly foreground. But now with the dawn of the Iran war, they get to inflate their wild manias even larger — with a handy excuse baked in for those who had previously been staunch supporters of Trump. Claiming that the war is fundamentally explainable by Trump being fatally compromised by Israel, or puppeteered by Israel, or otherwise subverted by Israel, goes nicely hand-in-hand with the theory that Epstein was first and foremost some sort of clandestine agent for the Israeli state, and therefore masterminded a globe-spanning Israeli pedo-sex blackmail op.

Tucker Carlson doesn’t accuse Trump directly of any Epstein-related pedo malfeasance, as far as I’m aware, but he’s been pushing the idea that what best explains the war is that “forces were forcing” Trump into it. And those “forces” emanated from Israel, naturally. As a result, according to Tucker, the Presidency itself no longer has any sovereign decision-making power. This bolsters Tucker’s broader effort to absolve Trump of any meaningful culpability for starting the war, by displacing total cosmic agency onto an overwrought cartoon of Israel. As I wrote earlier this week: “Slopagandists and podcast creatures who convinced millions of impressionable young men that Trump was on an epic hero’s journey to crush the Deep State, restore Free Speech, and end all wars, have now pivoted to the President not actually being in control of anything; true power resides with occult pedo rings and Israel.”

Given the self-imposed constraints Tucker is laboring under that preclude him from ever directly going after Trump, he won’t come out and explicitly say that Trump went to war with Iran because of the pedo-rape blackmail Israel must surely have on him. At bottom, though, his presentation is only a few steps removed from the Whitney Webb worldview — basically the default interpretive paradigm on so much of the brain-addled internet. Whitney Webb has argued for years, with great algorithmic success, that what Jeffrey Epstein ultimately did was preside over a “pedo rape ring” that blackmailed the whole of Washington, DC at Israel’s behest. As a consequence, Israel enjoys illicit and insurmountable control of US government policy, having brutally seized it through “the mass rape of American children.”

Depending on one’s preexisting political allegiances and sensibilities, this basic theory can be extended at will, with ample allowances for idiosyncratic personal flair. George Galloway, the perennial British politician and latter-day media figure, now with an astonishingly large YouTube following, declared that the current war must be understood as “The War of Jeffrey Epstein.” In a recent installment of his nightly program, Galloway hosted fellow Epstein fanatic Chris Hedges, who was fresh off denouncing his erstwhile colleague Noam Chomsky for presumed pedo-trafficking offenses. Displaying similar analytical rigor when it comes to the Iran issue, Hedges endorses the theory that Trump was deviously “tricked” by Israel. Because everybody knows the Israelis have got the goods on Trump, and those goods are very bad indeed. So bad, in fact, that Trump is prepared to risk the end of humanity in order to keep his revolting sex crimes concealed. Galloway thus implores: “If there’s anyone out there who can access, or who has access, to the truth about Trump and Epstein, now is the time to drop it. And if you drop it, you might stop the dropping of a nuclear bomb itself!”

Telling people that their best (or only) hope to prevent further escalation of the war, or even avert a nuclear nightmare that could wipe out all of mankind, is to sit around in idle anticipation of “the truth about Trump and Epstein” finally being dramatically exposed, is not only ridiculous, but keeps war-opponents squarely in some kind of crazed alternate-universe stupor — except insofar as they can play along in this interactive online Epstein adventure, waiting for the big war-stopping bombshell that there’s no rational grounds to think will ever arrive, or even exists in the first place. What does Galloway imagine will happen, exactly? A smoking gun “Epstein File” gets unearthed (from where, exactly?) proving once and for all that Donald and Jeffrey conspired to rape a bunch of preteens, at the command of Israel (?), and when this heinous truth is finally disclosed by some imaginary whistleblower, Trump will be humiliated into ending the war? Or perhaps he’ll resign in shame? Whereupon JD Vance will promptly withdraw all US military assets from the Middle East? None of it makes any sense, even as a fantastical speculative scenario. It only makes sense as cheap entertainment, which would seem inconsistent with legitimate fear that nuclear cataclysm could be on the horizon. Because if that was a real worry of yours, would your first instinct really be to peddle hucksterish entertainment?

Then again, no one could be watching George Galloway with the expectation that they’ll receive any rational insights into anything. I was once on Galloway’s program myself, before the audience-capture apocalypse drove everyone bonkers. My appearance was in 2022; in 2026, I imagine I’d have a hard time nodding politely as George fulminated things like “the War of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s poisonous pricks will never be forgotten.” Which nowadays is just standard rhetorical fare on the online media circuit. “This is not for Jesus,” Galloway elaborates, synthesizing the war’s genesis for the edification of listeners. “This is for the Anti-Christ.” So at least we’ve got confirmation that Galloway is now broadcasting from some florid otherworldly realm, replete with phantasmagorical pedo-sex fantasies and paranoid religious nuttery. The modern online media runs on a steady supply of such haywire demonology; Galloway is perfectly content to proclaim “the truth is that Trump and Netanyahu are working on the satanic side of history.” As if the discovery of that “truth” will ever improve anyone’s apprehension of US foreign policy, Donald Trump, Israel, or anything else of time-sensitive import.

“They are allowing us to be dragged into a global war to distract from Epstein,” declared one bizarrely popular and widely-cited “geopolitical analyst,” Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, who describes the combatants in the current war as “Team Epstein-Genocide” versus Iran. His “geopolitical analysis” led him to the unshakeable conclusion that attacking Iran “was always to distract from Epstein and help Israel.” Offering supposed geopolitical expertise to a variety of international media, including Al Jazeera, this person informs us that “if you look at searches on Google for the Epstein Files, they’ve plummeted since this started.” Again, that isn’t even true — it’s just another dumb viral meme that was incubated on social media, and of course eventually drew the attention of Ro Khanna, who promptly shared it, without bothering to do the slightest checking.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim’s larger thesis is that the tale of Jeffrey Epstein is ultimately a tale of how a “satanic pedophile who worked for Israel through a former Israeli Prime Minister controlled the current pro-Israel President.” Likewise, this “geopolitical analyst” previously argued that the Venezuela incursion on January 3 was fundamentally about Trump needing to “distract from the fact that he is a pedophile who repeatedly went to an island to rape children.” Awesome “geopolitical analysis” you got there. That’s why these “analysts” get paid the big bucks.

Dennis Kucinich, otherwise one of the rare politicians I always personally liked, has started bewailing that the Iran war must be viewed in the context of “elites who legitimize child rape, child murder, cannibalism,” and other unthinkable depravities, because the natural result of their disdain for humanity is “aggressive war” — thus making the Iran war “an extension of the Epstein saga.” It’s certainly true that the Iran war is an “aggressive war” by any reasonable definition of that term, and in flagrant violation of international law, insofar as anybody still cares about appealing to international law anymore. (Which seems worse than a waste of time at this point.) Regardless, aren’t the cases one might make against “aggressive war” already adequate enough without having to lard them up with this sheer extraneous nonsense, for which there is no credible evidence whatsoever? Cannibalistic child rape? Really? So many war opponents simply can’t resist cluttering their critiques with these loony-tunes Epstein screeds. If you’re unable to formulate an “anti-war” narrative grounded in empirical reality, and instead have to concoct a bunch of loopy pedo-panicked conjecture, you’re only doing a disservice to sincere war opponents! It’s really not difficult to make a sanity-based argument against the war in Iran!

Nevertheless, “War for Epstein” advocates have succeeded in convincing a majority of Americans that the war was indeed launched for Epstein, at least if we go off a poll that was questionably commissioned by the likes of Ryan Grim and Mehdi Hassan. Some will argue that this state of public opinion is totally fine, because when people like Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) or a leader of the “Progressive International” activist consortium talk about the “Epstein Class,” they’re not necessarily talking about pedophiles, per se — they’re making a softer point about elite decadence, using an incendiary catchphrase that inspires rightful rage against the war-profiteers, self-dealing politicians, and corporate shareholders who really stand to benefit from setting the Middle East on fire, at the expense of everyone else.

It’s a nice try — but please, stop playing coy. You know full well that when 99% of the general public hears the word “Epstein,” the first thing they think of — obviously and incontrovertibly — is “pedophiles.” Like if you polled North America and Europe and asked respondents to do a little word-association exercise, what’s the first word 99% of respondents would associate with “Epstein”? No, it’s not “capitalistic warmongering” or “imperialism” — it’s “pedophiles.” No amount of willfully obtuse mental gymnastics is going to change that.

“Epstein’s War for the Epstein Class,” as the lawyer and podcast personality Robert Barnes puts it, is not exactly subtle. It’s a way of opportunistically leveraging the unfettered Pedo Panic that’s been allowed to proliferate, in order to reinforce one’s pre-existing political imperatives. When it comes to encouraging a war-averse outlook on the current Iran situation, I don’t even personally disagree with that imperative. What I do emphatically disagree with is the idea that it’s totally cool and no problem to blithely foment groundless child rape hysteria — so long as this would seem to be in service of turning people more antipathetic about the war. For one thing: A RATIONAL CASE CAN EASILY BE MADE ABOUT THIS WAR without blathering forays into braindead Epstein mythology. You are crowding out that rational case by amplifying a critique that is not just vapid and idiotic, but actively harmful, I’d argue, insofar as it popularizes a brazenly fictitious understanding of the war’s origins and nature, and further perpetuates a Mass Hysteria and Moral Panic that wreaks so many commensurate damages — to civil liberties, journalistic standards, and public sanity writ large.

It’s notable that the only coherent case anyone can seem to make for framing the war in terms of Jeffrey Epstein is on pure propagandistic grounds. Meaning, people will argue this stuff is effective propaganda, and therefore perfectly swell. That’s fine, I guess, if you’re… a propagandist. But if you style yourself anything else — especially a journalist, but even just an ordinary citizen who’d ordinarily recoil at crass propaganda— it would be strange to make that kind of pro-propaganda argument.

As best I can tell, the most enthusiastic shouters of “Operation Epstein Fury” and similar offshoots seem to be a weird combination of 1) hardcore Democratic partisans, who’d latch onto anything that most abrasively taunts Trump 2) a segment of hardcore Epstein mythologists whose distorted cognition makes them detect tantalizing mystical patterns in everything anyway, and so are more than happy to do another round of spurious dot-connecting when it comes to Trump/Epstein/Iran, and 3) PR operatives for the actual Iranian government, who quickly settled on “War for Epstein” as their most potent messaging option to disseminate for English-speaking audiences. This has in turn meant lots of regular people who dislike the war, and perhaps have some sympathy with Iran against their American and Israeli aggressors, are also eagerly adopting the “War for Epstein” perspective.

But at least the Iranian government partisans aren’t needlessly coy about the message they’re trying to convey. One of their most ubiquitous government apparatchiks, Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi, who appears constantly in “Western” media, both “mainstream” and “alternative,” has been extremely forthright in his rationale for constantly churning out Epstein-related epithets. It’s to frame the Iran conflict as a confrontation between the “Axis of Pedophilia” (US and Israel) versus the “Axis of Resistance” (Iran and regional auxiliaries.) It’s to call Trump the “pedophile-in-chief,” so as many people as possible believe Trump is waging the war to protect sick pedo interests. It’s to persuade the broad public that “the West” is fundamentally “ruled by pedophiles and the Epstein Class,” and that’s what fundamentally explains why the war was launched. “Pedophiles will be defeated,” he assures us, with the military victory of Iran. (The most powerful Iranian state official, Ali Larijani, tauntingly declared on March 13 that Trump and his confederates were directing their war effort from some sort of bunker on “Epstein’s island.” By March 17, Larijani was killed in a US-Israeli airstrike.)

You can rationalize this stuff all you want as a savvy bit of war propaganda. But at least recognize that’s what you’re doing — rationalizing war propaganda — not intrepidly enlightening the masses about what’s actually happening in the world. Because you’re also actively impairing the public’s collective ability to process events with any measure of rational thought, which is kind of a big deal in the midst of an escalating military conflagration.

Not to toot my own horn, given the perilous circumstances, but this is exactly the kind of thing I always said had impelled me to get so immersed in the Epstein issue to begin with: that the mythological mania was encouraging a disturbingly pervasive misdiagnosis of real political problems, particularly having to do with US foreign policy. But I’ll admit, even I did not anticipate it would come to a head quite so quickly and catastrophically.

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