After the start of President Trump’s second term, the connections between capitalism, white supremacy, and imperial domination became increasingly apparent. These have been highlighted through ICE raids as modern-day slave patrols, global criminal operations such as the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and US support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an American bipartisan and multinational corporate experiment.
The growing understanding that people in the Global South, along with black, indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) at the heart of empire, face a common enemy has galvanized revolutionary anti-colonial movements for fundamental change.
And the release of the Epstein files sparked a flood of public debate.
Jeffrey Epstein was an investor convicted of sex crimes involving minors. He died in prison in 2019 after being re-indicted by the federal government (officially ruled a suicide). The incident sparked public outrage at the impunity of the ruling class, and the media focused on the unsavory relationship between the political and business classes, as well as a plethora of conspiracy theories about a cover-up.
The Epstein case has become much more than a criminal case. It reflects the symbolic exposure of the impunity and concentrated power of the ruling class, and the spectacle of corruption within an empire plunged into deep crisis and decline.
The Epstein scandal exposed the criminality of the ruling class and at the same time undermined structural responsibility.
Importantly, “spectacle” does not mean “fake.” It means organizing politics through symbolic drama that replaces structural political analysis. Through spectacle, social contradictions (inequality, social crisis, instability) are dramatized rather than structurally challenged.
The media’s and public’s obsession with the Epstein files, especially as they have been released with little accountability and a narrative that discredits and isolates survivors, has functioned less as accountability and more as a political departure from the systemic injustices of racism, capitalism, the growth of the police state, and ongoing international impunity.
More troublingly, it marks another step in the erosion of democracy and the strengthening of expansionist, war-driven fascism.
fascist sight
In the works of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Guy Debord, and Umberto Eco, the fascist spectacle involves an anti-intellectual, emotionally driven mass mobilization around a simple moral binary (pure people versus a corrupt ruling class), where actions are honored and ideas are condemned. replacing institutional processes with symbolic images and drama; and mythic stories of national decline and rebirth. Political theorist Roger Griffin calls this rebirth “ancient supranationalism,” or destruction as a precondition for rebirth.
Conspiracy theories are the narrative engine of the spectacle. They transform systemic crisis and social instability into simple, emotionally gripping stories of social taboo-breaking centered around a hidden untouchable enemy, laying the groundwork for authoritarian solutions to be peddled and even redemptive as needed.
When structural violence is visible but accountability is lacking, public outrage often seeks explanation through personalized and conspiratorial narratives rather than systemic analysis.
Such theories, whether completely correct, partially correct or incorrect, are not new. Fascist movements have historically mobilized around the idea that the state is secretly corrupted by a corrupt ruling class and needs thorough cleansing to get back on track.
Epstein’s criminality and the powerful men who surrounded him and perpetrated his abuses came to symbolize a corrupt ruling class with identifiable names and faces, targets who could be exposed and imprisoned, thereby clearing narrative space for a heroic white knight to ride in with the promise of redemption.
As Hannah Arendt warned, when trust in institutions breaks down, conspiracy theories flourish. The Epstein scandal reinforced the sense that the ruling class operates above the law and that the judicial system is there to protect it. By claiming that the justice system is irredeemably rigged and that only a strong leader can defeat it, these are ideal conditions for authoritarian movements to exploit.
The spectacle of the Epstein scandal thus has the potential to absorb and manipulate public anger, redirecting it away from necessary structural responsibility in the form of decolonization and wealth redistribution, and ultimately reinforcing the very system it is supposed to be challenging.
In doing so, it promotes the aesthetics of politics, the spectacle, rather than a grounded critique of capitalism and imperial power. Moreover, it also helps distract from the failures that ultimately fuel repression and war. According to Federico Caprotti, fascist spectacle in its various forms creates a “collage” that both expresses and obscures the mixed ideology of the regime.
Spectacular Spectacle: War
When politics becomes a theater rather than a collective progress dependent on accountability, change, and reform, crises become emotional dramas that demand liberation (internal solutions) or escalation, and escalation is inevitably expressed in externalized wars in which nations enact grand spectacles of unity and sacrifice on the biggest possible stage.
When collective mobilization cannot resolve domestic contradictions, war functions as a stabilizing force. War, through its uniforms and marches, induces discontent by uniting a divided and enraged population against an externalized enemy, transforming righteous anger against the violence, oppression, and greed of the ruling class into unity, heroism, and meaning manufactured through violence against the “other.”
These dynamics outlined by Benjamin decades ago feel surprisingly familiar in the current moment, including the spectacle surrounding the Epstein scandal.
In this context, external conflict functions not only as a policy but also as an emotional synthesis, redirecting internal disillusionment towards collective national objectives.
Fascist forces have and are deploying such spectacles to distract and mobilize. The dismantling of American democracy and the remnants of the postwar international order will accelerate and be replaced by a system dominated by force and naked self-interest.
Spectacle politics demands loyalty not to particular leaders but to the emotional narratives they embody, and individuals are ultimately rendered disposable.
By this logic, especially if Trump’s baggage with Epstein proves politically, even Trump could be jettisoned and sacrificed to make way for a “purer” white male strongman (Vance? Pence? Carlson?) who promises to purge the ruling class, and by extension its foreign so-called “handlers” (enemies such as Russia, China, Iran, or even allies such as Israel and Europe, the latter already threatened by Trump) of its unsavory elements. There’s no way to save it.
In contrast, liberation and reconciliation, and the end to capitalist oppression with its attendant genocidal violence and planetary destruction, requires a solid structural framework aligned with broader leftist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial principles. Such a framework prioritizes systemic change over spectacle. In this view, the Epstein scandal is treated not as a disease in itself, but as a symptom of the corruption inherent in capitalism.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
