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The following analysis was authored by Tablet Magazine columnist and CAM editorial advisor Lee Smith:
What was at the top of the agenda for Russian officials this week at the UN General Assembly in New York? Winning global support for Vladimir Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine? Defending its partner Iran against the Donald Trump administration’s campaign in the Gulf. No, social media accounts showed Russian diplomats using their allotted speaking time to talk about Jeffrey Epstein.
Why is Epstein, a convicted sex offender who killed himself in a Manhattan jail cell more than seven years ago, so important to Moscow? Because he’s the instrument in a propaganda campaign employing antisemitic narratives meant to portray America as a fallen nation ruled by a decadent and corrupt elite that prioritizes the interests of a foreign country, Israel, over its own people.
And by alleging there’s a secret cabal of Jews and their gentile associates who run the world, the Russians have weaponized a conspiracy theory that bears traces of the world’s most famous propaganda piece. And like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Epstein narrative has been so successful that it jumped borders with advocates here even in America, where populists on the Right and Left have adopted Moscow’s view, referring to the U.S. corporate and political establishment as “the Epstein class.”
Epstein’s crimes were real. He pled guilty to state charges in Florida in 2008 after Justice Department prosecutors declined to bring a federal case. But in the summer of 2019, the U.S. Attorney in New York’s Southern District took another shot, claiming that new evidence in the case against Epstein had surfaced.
Within days of Epstein’s arrest on July 6, 2019, U.S. media reports based on anonymous, second-hand sources alleged that the government had previously cut Epstein loose because of his ties to “intelligence.” It was only a matter of time before the fever swamps of the internet settled on which intelligence service he belonged to — Israel’s.
Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi was first out of the gate with his July 11 story “Did Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein Work for Mossad?” The article appeared in The Unz Review, a publication known for anti-Israel invective and a large archive of material it’s reprinted from the Strategic Culture Foundation, which the U.S. government has identified as an outlet tied to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
A week after Giraldi’s article, English-language Russian media stepped in directly. On July 18, RT America aired a segment asking, “Is Epstein MOSSAD”? Yes, according to the show’s talking head Ben Swann, a longtime RT America host and producer whose production company later received more than $6 million for work tied to Russian-state media.
Nearly a year after Epstein’s arrest, RT featured an interview with Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli military intelligence officer with a reputation for promoting conspiracy theories. He claimed that Epstein and Maxwell were part of an Israeli intelligence operation that used sex and blackmail to compromise politicians, officials, and media figures.
The Epstein-Mossad thesis was built on obviously shaky ground. According to its promoters, Epstein must have been an Israeli spy because no one could really explain how he became rich, aside from the fact his main client was Leslie Wexner, a Jewish billionaire who donates lots of money to pro-Israel causes. Moreover, Epstein, who was Jewish, had dated Ghislaine Maxwell, also Jewish and the daughter of Jewish media mogul Robert Maxwell, also alleged by conspiracy theorists to have been an Israeli spy. In other words, it was an antisemitic conspiracy theory supported only by antisemitic conspiracy theories.
And antisemitism is the poisoned sewer where Russian propagandists feel most at home. According to a 2024 State Department report, for more than a century Tsarist, Soviet, and Russian authorities have used antisemitism “to discredit, divide, and weaken their perceived adversaries at home and abroad.” During the Cold War, Moscow’s campaign against Zionism portrayed Jews and Israel as instruments of capitalism, imperialism, and hidden transnational power.
The Russians used the Epstein narrative not simply to smear American Jews but primarily to undermine the U.S.-Israel alliance by characterizing it as a channel through which malign — i.e. Jewish — forces control America. In this light, Americans can only be free once they’ve broken the shackles of Zionism. That is, Washington has to dump the partner that helped win the Cold War and now shares technology and intelligence that will help America win the future and dominate its foes, namely Russia as well as China and Iran.
Moscow’s efforts to make the American government that supposedly defended Epstein repulsive to Americans hit home with MAGA, a domestic political constituency deeply distrustful of the U.S. political establishment. Between 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump voters watched as the FBI, Justice Department, intelligence agencies, and establishment media ganged up to topple the president they’d supported precisely because he promised to “drain the swamp.”
In the period between Trump’s two terms, MAGA social media influencers and podcasters were focused mostly on getting hold of a document believed to be in the possession of U.S. law enforcement, an undisclosed list of wealthy and famous clients to whom Epstein had supposedly trafficked scores of teenagers. The problem was that there was no hidden “client list.”
So when Trump’s own law enforcement officials failed to produce evidence of something that had never existed, MAGA social media influencers reasoned that if the people who had promised to release it were now hiding it, there must be other forces at play. And this is how the Epstein-Mossad theory moved into the MAGA mainstream, thanks largely to Tucker Carlson.
On May 19, 2025, Carlson interviewed podcaster Shawn Ryan, who said he believed Epstein’s enterprise was “a blackmail operation.” Carlson agreed and said he thought it involved “the CIA and the Israeli intel services and probably others.” In an interview with Glenn Greenwald eleven days later, Carlson again pushed the Epstein-Mossad narrative.
Months later, Carlson told a Turning Point USA audience that it was “extremely obvious” Epstein had “direct connections to a foreign government.” Which one? “No one’s allowed to say that the foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty.” Americans, said Carlson, had a right to ask whether Epstein was “running a blackmail operation on behalf of a foreign government.” And, he continued, “The longer we play along with it, the more subterranean and creepy and hateful the conversation becomes. So, I think it’s better just to say it right out loud.”
Carlson’s many trips to Moscow, where he’s interviewed, among others, Vladimir Putin, have made him a useful vehicle for official Russian messaging. But that doesn’t mean there’s necessarily an operational link between him and Russian intelligence operatives.
The point is rather that the podcaster’s obsessions intersect with Russian propaganda, like the dark portrait of a decadent, dysfunctional America, dominated by “the Epstein class.” If Western liberalism has entered its terminal phase, as Carlson argues, why shouldn’t America abandon its dominant international role, and opt instead for a “multipolar” world by settling into a peaceful arrangement with rivals, like Russia.
Polls showing that Israel’s reputation has taken a beating with young Republican voters is evidence not only of Carlson’s influence — but also the success of Russian propaganda, designed to divide America against itself and split us from our chief Middle East ally.
Read more:
From the ‘Protocols’ to Podcasts: How Russia Turned Antisemitism Into a Weapon Against America
