What is Israel Derangement Syndrome?

From the September 15, 2025 edition of the Candace Owens show. YouTube version currently has 8.8 million views

A lot of people have asked me recently why I’ve gotten so immersed in the Epstein story, and it’s forced me to come up with a bit of a stock answer. First, the story itself is legitimately fascinating on a variety of levels — not least how it’s come to function in the public imagination, despite the overwhelming dearth of evidence that would substantiate people’s most wild fantasies. Then, there’s the collapse of journalistic standards. I’ve documented instance after instance of basic factual rigor simply being flushed down the toilet, both among the more “mainstream” media chroniclers of Epstein, as well as the increasingly lobotomized Podcast Creature media.

In fact, I just happened to see that Julie K. Brown was lavished with yet another Prestigious Journalism Award, this time by the outfit “Investigative Reporters & Editors,” despite having fabricated quotes in her 2021 book, Perversion of Justice, and only responding with a “No Comment” when I emailed her about it. (I have also now emailed the IRE’s Executive Director to ask if she was aware of Brown’s quote-fabricating habits before they decided to bestow her with this great institutional honor — no reply yet.) Even aside from the quotes, though, all Julie K. Brown ever really did was serve as a useful media conduit for Bradley Edwards and David Boies, the extortionist lawyers who have made an absolute killing on their Epstein “victim” chicanery. Edwards even brags that his collusion with Brown was “impeccable” in its timing, as her November 2018 article in the Miami Herald falsely convinced Epstein and his lawyers that the Feds were re-investigating him because of the fallout from the article, rather than because he, Edwards, had already been colluding with the Feds to re-prosecute Epstein. Mission accomplished. Does it really take that much “investigative journalism” skill to passively receive a bunch of material (and “victim” interviewees) from a cabal of lawyers trying to orchestrate a self-serving PR strategy?

Anyway, this rampant and almost entirely unexamined journalistic malfeasance is one of the factors I always cite when people ask why I’ve gotten so involved with the Epstein saga. Another factor is my general aversion to mindless mass hysteria and moral panic, which never produces anything good, and in fact has a tendency to erode civil liberties, while everyone’s attention is trained on the thing they’re supposed to be morally panicking about.

The other factor I’ve come to cite is how the Epstein saga has led to the widespread misdiagnosis of genuine political problems. If you subscribe to the Whitney Webb Worldview, you’re supposed to believe that every political problem in America (or the world?) can be fundamentally explained by the existence of a sprawling elite Pedo Trafficking Ring, which continues to be covered up, and is enforced by ruthless blackmail. The ubiquity of these blackmail ops is said to fundamentally dictate how the USA is governed. It controls everything that goes on in Washington, DC, we’re told.

If you believe this, it doesn’t take much of a leap to conclude that the problem of the US-Israel relationship can also be fundamentally explained by the existence of an all-encompassing sexual blackmail scheme, likely engineered by Israel, which is what so much of the online lore around Epstein has assumed with such unwavering, inviolable certitude. Epstein was ensnaring all these prominent people from the political, business, and academic worlds because he was working at the behest of his Israeli intel benefactors — who also probably supplied him with his mysterious wealth, although how exactly this financial arrangement was supposed to have worked is never quite explained. Epstein had surreptitiously recorded a dazzling array of powerful people in sexually compromising situations, with enslaved underage girls, and thus had a giant bounty of material to hold over their heads to ensure they did the bidding of Israel. That’s basically how the theory goes.

This is truly an extreme, harebrained misdiagnosis of the US-Israel relationship. Entire tomes could be written, and have been written, elucidating the nature of that relationship, which is no doubt unique and ahistorical in all manner of respects. As I wrote in July 2024, “the Republican Party’s unanimous and rapturously ecstatic servitude to Israel is a truly bizarre phenomenon that seems to have no real analog in world history.” Israel’s influence on the Democratic Party is of an appreciably different character, but there’s plenty to examine there as well in terms of how the upper-echelons of the Democratic donor class are comprised disproportionately of older secular (-ish) Jews who still unflinchingly support Israel — as perhaps best embodied by the personage of Chuck Schumer. Some of these dynamics, especially on the Left, have been in significant flux over the past two years, with the ongoing obliteration of Gaza scrambling political attitudes and shaking up many longstanding assumptions. Zohran Mamdani’s rise in New York City is but one jarring manifestation of this accelerating rupture. On a smaller scale, comparable upheavals can also be embryonically observed on the Right. So that’s all very interesting, and worth examining.

However, the “Sexual Blackmail” stuff only detracts from putting forward a rational analysis of what’s going on with the US-Israel relationship. It certainly distorts perceptions of US foreign policy — which is something I’ve put a priority on covering for years, and therefore resent that it’s become such a popular online trope to reduce all US foreign policy developments to the supposed existence of Mossad pedo rings, as if that’s the only plausible explanation for why Donald Trump’s administration is currently subsidizing and enabling the protracted annihilation of Gaza, just as Joe Biden’s administration did before him, albeit with less unrepentant tenacity.

Trump openly ran in 2024 on what could only be described as the most hardcore pro-Israel platform of all time; he still constantly boasts about this. While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were dutifully provisioning Israel with the most wartime armaments of any US administration ever, Trump and the GOP — aligning with both Christian and Jewish religious fanatics — were denouncing the Dems as somehow in hock to Hamas, and harboring anti-Semites. Trump then came into office and made good on his pledges, unleashing even more unrestricted arms shipments to Israel, conniving with Benjamin Netanyahu to instigate a war with Iran, and fully backing the nightmarish Gaza pulverization, with a facade of phony diplomatic efforts to “end the war.” The latest instantiation of this was Trump appearing for his fourth White House press conference alongside Netanyahu on Monday, in which he announced that he, Trump, would be the new ruler of Gaza — with Tony Blair as his viceroy — should his new “Peace Plan” come into effect. The plan was cooked up by Jared Kushner, who plenty of people on the Dissident Right had once assured me would play no role in a Second Trump Administration, as well as Steve Witkoff, whose alleged diplomatic initiatives since January have been bizarrely hailed in much of the media as an establishment-defying breath of fresh air, but have turned out to be an unmitigated disaster across every major theater to which he’s been deployed, especially the Middle East and Europe.

So that’s plenty to chew on as to the current status of the US-Israeli relationship. I could go on for countless more paragraphs outlining many more dimensions that could be rightly examined.

But instead, what we mostly get on the internet nowadays is what I have no choice but to call Israel Derangement Syndrome. That is, a proliferation of delirious Israel-related theories, most of which have no connection to any actual facts or evidence — much less predicated on any rational assessment of anything. This stuff gets insanely algorithmically boosted, so there’s clearly a big audience out there for such fever-brained slop. Sure, it’s understandable that people would be aimlessly groping for answers, no matter how hallucinatory or unsubstantiated, given the extraordinary magnitude of the US complicity in what’s been happening with Gaza — the carnage from which is incessantly streamed into our social media feeds. So that’s how you get the automatic ascription of Israel as the prime mover of the Epstein saga, based on a handful of scattershot factoids that can be easily dot-connected by those who have the pre-existing, confirmation-biased inclination to do so. But it’s just so strange and arbitrary that to be critical of Israel, or US foreign policy toward Israel, is now expected to go hand-in-hand with being a maximalist Pedo Panic believer. Nothing about these issues makes them at all inherently commingled, but that’s the emerging dopey consensus. At least on the internet.

About a month ago somebody recommended that I send in a pitch to the Washington Post about this maddening dynamic. I’m not usually disposed to send pitches anymore, but I thought this one might be a worthwhile exception:

I’ve been unexpectedly immersed in the Epstein saga lately, because so much of what’s popularly believed about it is just demonstrably wrong, and there’s such a wealth of under-examined material.

Anyway, one angle that’s occurred to me is how political attitudes toward Israel are being grafted onto the Epstein issue, especially on social media.

So if you are generally critical of Israel, you are therefore expected to subscribe to maximalist theories around Epstein, because Epstein is assumed to have orchestrated a child-sex trafficking and blackmail operation at the behest of Israeli intelligence agencies.

Conversely, if you are generally supportive of Israel, you are presumed to be more leery of these theories.

This is just insane. There’s really no good reason for the Epstein issue and Israel issue to have gotten as commingled as they arbitrarily are.

I am generally more Israel-critical, particularly in relation to US foreign policy — and yet I have treated the Epstein issue mostly as an epistemological one. There is no necessary reason whatsoever why objecting to Israel’s conduct in Gaza must compel subscribing to blinkered. empirically unsupportable Epstein theories. But I may be the only person on the internet who has this view.

It reminds me of Russiagate, which I also covered in great depth. All kinds of extraneous political and ideological beliefs got grafted onto that story — pro Trump, anti Trump, liberal internationalism vs. ‘isolationism,’ “norms” vs. “populism” etc. — when at core it was really just an epistemological question: does the evidence show Trump colluded with Russia to subvert the 2016 election, or not? I was never “pro-Trump,” but I was simultaneously highly critical of Russiagate from the outset. Similarly, the facts and evidence underlying the fevered Epstein theories simply do not survive rational scrutiny. Nothing about that conclusion impairs me from retaining a critical posture toward the US-Israeli relationship. But again, I think I’m the only person on the internet who takes this position.

So, it could make for a slightly against-the-grain commentary piece if you’re interested.

The editor politely turned down the pitch, so whatever. Waste of time I guess. But you get the idea.

Then on September 10, Charlie Kirk gets killed, and the same Israel Derangement Syndrome explodes once more. There is a direct through-line from Epstein IDS to Charlie Kirk IDS. People wanting to believe, based on essentially nothing, that Israel must’ve been behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk — and they wanted to believe this instantaneously, before a shred of actual evidence could corroborate even the beginnings of the theories they were desperately yearning to pump out. Charlie was becoming increasingly Israel-skeptical, they insisted — therefore we can just connect the dots and understand he had to be “taken out,” lest he continue his dangerous trajectory as a born-again Israel dissenter. This “narrative,” on its face, was already impossibly stupid from the moment it started to circulate. Charlie Kirk was a communications functionary of the Trump Administration, which is why they gave him a quasi-state funeral in Arizona. The Trump Administration is aggressively and unashamedly pro-Israel. One of their first priorities coming into office was to launch a whole-of-government crackdown on speech critical of Israel, punishing Green Card-holders for writing tepid op-eds. As federal judge William Young wrote in a scathing opinion yesterday, they have launched a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment across the board under the cover of an unconstitutionally broad definition of Anti-Semitism.”

Thus, to the extent that Charlie Kirk had any “criticisms” he might’ve been increasingly voicing about Israel, it was from the standpoint of a concerned surrogate for Israel, who was worried that Israel might be losing the “information war” online, and who wanted to provide recommendations for how Israel could rectify this. That’s literally how Charlie Kirk described what he was doing in a May 2025 letter he personally sent to Netanyahu, the full copy of which has now been published. He literally described himself as a “pro-Israel surrogate,” who had such “deep love” for Israel that he was willing to personally “assist” Netanyahu with his “communications strategy,” which Charlie felt needed an urgent revamp, because according to his recent observations, Israel was losing the online “information war” — including on the youthful Right. So he was giving advice as to how Israel should set about reversing this trend, and asking what he could personally do to help. That’s just what Charlie Kirk was — notwithstanding the paranoid delusions of those afflicted with Israel Derangement Syndrome, who wanted to believe something totally inapposite, and then somehow imputed their rambling theories as the cause of Charlie’s death. (I’m sure they’ll also claim the Netanyahu letter was a fake.)

So, in short, what is Israel Derangement Syndrome? It’s 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. I have remarked that if I were advising Netanyahu, as one of his top hasbara operatives, I’d probably tell him it’s actually great that the online hordes are so obsessed with this nonstop ridiculousness, because it makes Israel’s most visible public critics look like a bunch of addled clowns. (No, of course I’m not really advising Netanyahu — or taking money from Israel — in case IDS sufferers get any crackpot ideas.)

Also, while the blinkered internet masses pour their energies into rabidly speculating about Israel running a global pedo ring, or forensically analyzing video footage to show how Israel must’ve killed Charlie Kirk, it curiously seems that they’re slightly less energized about the actual policy giving rise to the intensifying immiseration of Gaza. A lot of these people, especially of the Rightoid variety, would rather theorize breathlessly about tangential Israel-related nonsense, instead of training their focus on Donald Trump — who they still need to believe lacks agency on some level, and is always metaphysically hostage to nefarious external forces, such as Israel. It couldn’t be that he’s implementing the policies that most align with the preferences he’s consistently espoused for as long as he’s been a nationally dominant political figure, and which happen to align with Israel. It couldn’t be that to the extent he’s being influenced by pro-Israel donors or religious fanatics, he’s fundamentally fine with that, and his transactional approach to most things tells him it’s been a fruitful transaction. Nope — better to go down endless rabbit holes to nowhere, rather than do any sustained critique of the Man at the Top, who the Rightoid media landscape still must on some level revere, lest they alienate and enrage most of their audiences.

So that’s my working definition of Israel Derangement Syndrome: a whirlwind of nutcase stupidity, that’s actually counter-productive, insofar as it popularizes a woefully deluded misdiagnosis of a real political problem.

---