Jeffrey Epstein’s 4chan Plan

The three million Epstein files recently released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) recast Jeffrey Epstein as more than a criminal sex trafficker, an intelligence asset, or a professional blackmailer. The files also suggest he had a role to play in the creation of today’s online far-right politics.

“Brexit, just the beginning,” he wrote to Palantir founder and post-liberal thinker Peter Thiel in 2016, celebrating the onset of “tribalism” and the unraveling of globalisation. Epstein appeared to view right-wing populism as an opportunity – and to understand very early how the internet could be used to accelerate it. Rather than simply watching this new ecosystem emerge, however, he seems to have played a part in its formation.

In October 2011, Jeffrey Epstein met with the creator of the anonymous message board 4chan. His conversation with Christopher “moot” Poole took place just days before the fateful relaunch of 4chan’s influential far-right imageboard, /pol/ (shorthand for “Politically Incorrect”). That board in particular, and the site more broadly, would come to serve as a breeding ground for the far-right’s online activism in the years to come. 

In an email to Epstein, the late sex-trafficker’s associate and former Bill Gates advisor Boris Nikolic (who introduced Poole and Epstein) cites a Washington Post article from 2010. It describes 4chan as a “hive mind” with a unique power to “understand and control traffic on the internet” and to create “mass disruptions.” “This article describes why I find moot [Poole] interesting,” Nikolic writes. “The potential for manipulation is huge.”

The files make clear that Epstein, not just Nikolic, was attentive to this kind of information control. In 2013, he drafted detailed instructions for controlling his digital footprint, intended for a “new SEO tech person,” and the following year invoices show him paying $1,000 monthly to “reinforce positive listings” in search results. Earlier correspondence points in the same direction: in 2010, visual artist Al Seckel emailed Epstein about his battles with Wikipedia editors over whether Epstein’s page should be classified under the site’s “sex offender” category, allegedly recording editors’ IP addresses and “hack[ing] the site.”

The files also clarify that, around this same time, Epstein was expressing a clear interest in social media giants and data analytics. The files show he requested investor Ian Osborne to set up meetings with Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook), Tim Cook (Apple) and Peter Thiel in 2012.

At the time of Epstein’s meeting with Poole, 4chan was reckoning with how – or whether – to contain the chaotic digital power of its anonymous mob. Poole had shut down previous iterations of /pol/ over concerns about the noxious far-right culture gestating there. When one version was shut down in January 2011, he told 4chan users that “anybody who used it knows exactly why it was removed… “I made a note that if it devolved into /stormfront/, I’d remove it,” he said – referring to the notorious Neo-Nazi website. But Poole’s concerns about his rowdy white supremacist user base gave way on October 23rd, 2011 when he launched /pol/. 

Through the years, files show that Epstein did not lose sight of 4chan. He tried repeatedly to pin Poole down for further meetings in 2012, encouraging him to bring more “smart people” from his network into the fold. Epstein was personally browsing the site to some extent as late as 2017, sending his then-girlfriend pornographic 4chan links, which portrayed characters from a popular children’s videogame.

Taken together, the documents indicate that Epstein viewed the mobilising power of 4chan and its white male-dominated ecosystem as a laboratory for scalable influence – where anonymous memes and conspiracies could be weaponised and laundered into the mainstream.

Of course, that’s precisely what happened. 

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Gamers and Bell Curves

The platform dynamics that so captivated Epstein and Nikolic would become visible at scale in 2014. Disgruntled and increasingly radicalised young men on 4chan and other anonymous forums began organising against what they perceived as an all-encompassing regime of “political correctness,” one they believed was enforced by “social justice warriors” embedded in media, academia, and culture. Their rage and anti-establishment energy also caught the attention of Breitbart executive and future Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

The Gamergate movement ignited on 4chan in August 2014, rapidly spreading across message boards and social media before spiralling out of control. Participants cast themselves as unorthodox advocates for “ethics in games journalism,” arguing that video games – and later film and television – were being degraded by “forced diversity.” In practice, Gamergate functioned as a decentralised harassment campaign coordinating death and rape threats against women, feminists, and minorities.

Having farmed virtual gold in World of Warcraft, Bannon recognised gamers as a recruitment pool for a new populist army. “These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power,” he later remarked. In 2014, he enlisted firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos to act as a bridge between fringe forums and mass audiences, translating the gamers’ outrage into viral, Facebook-optimised content for Breitbart and beyond. Cambridge Analytica’s data-driven content targeting would complete the pipeline. 

Notably, the DOJ’s files show that Epstein was a gamer himself. He maintained a World of Warcraft account as early as 2010, and files show an active Xbox live account was permanently banned in 2013 in accordance with New York rules banning sex offenders from gaming platforms.

As reported previously in Byline Times, Bannon and Epstein would be formally introduced later on in 2017. They would go on to develop a strategic and financial partnership, aiding the effort to build MAGA’s populist coalition and “stave off” the global #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. 

Epstein also appears to have quietly invested in a far-right neuroscience Youtuber who would later be described as a “standard bearer of the alt-right.” FBI files suggest he contributed $25,000 to Canadian YouTuber Jean-François Gariépy (who also boasted about the donation). Emails from 2015 show an Epstein intermediary corresponding with Gariépy and offering PR and marketing advice to “increase viewership,” along with suggestions for guests drawn from Epstein’s network.

“Jeffrey had defects like we all do, but he was a good man, an ambitious man, and a visionary in many ways,” Gariépy wrote on ‘X’ in 2026 after the files came out. “More people like him could improve the world. He died for our sins.”

The DOJ files also show that by 2018, Epstein was repeatedly seeking out a meeting with Charles Murray, the author of the influential and widely debunked race science book The Bell Curve. Previous Byline Times reporting has shown how concepts of “racial hierarchy, genetic “optimisation” and even climate-driven population culling” were circulating in Epstein’s orbit.

These ideas would come to be load-bearing pillars of the far-right’s broader philosophy, particularly in the dank online ecosystems Epstein and Bannon were so interested in.

From 4chan to Facebook to YouTube, the precise online “manipulation” that Nikolic described to Epstein back in 2011 was made manifest in 2014-2015. Ideas that correspond with the post-liberal, tribalist plan laid out to Thiel a year later were ushered into the real world via the internet, leveraging both the anonymous hate boards and the established forums of social media.

In these spaces, that scepticism naturally curdled into paranoia – and it was within this same digital milieu that more potent conspiratorial concoctions would soon flourish.

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Pizzas and Projected Panic

Following the release of this batch of Epstein files, social media users began to notice a bizarre trend: the word ‘pizza’ shows up more than 900 times. Epstein and his elite associates frequently deploy the term out of natural context in private correspondence, backing up long-standing internet theories that “pizza” is a secret code alluding to child pornography. It calls back to a MAGA-aligned online conspiracy that emerged on 4chan’s /pol/ board.

Right before the fateful 2016 Presidential election, Wikileaks published over 20,000 pages of emails belonging to Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Anonymous users on /pol/ obsessively began searching for patterns, key-word searching the emails and honing in on (almost certainly innocuous) references to pizza, pasta, and hot dogs. From there, a grand narrative was constructed, irony and sincerity bleeding together into a story about Democratic officials using the basement of a pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong, as a hub for paedophilia. 

It permeated into Reddit’s r/TheDonald (the influential subreddit for Trump supporters) and r/pizzagate, where the irony was lost and users began assembling graphics and so-called “evidence packs” ostensibly supporting the theory. From there the conspiracy was disseminated to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, where it was algorithmically amplified to oblivion and picked up by “citizen journalists” and influencers. 

The commonalities between Epstein’s real sex crimes (which implicate both Democrats and Republicans) and the Pizzagate conspiracy (which only involves Democrats) raises questions. Did Epstein help his myriad associates on the MAGA right propagate the theory? Was Pizzagate an obfuscation campaign that also served to weaponise 4chan-style paranoia?

On the 8th of October 2016 – just one day after Wikileaks first published Podesta’s emails, Epstein was sending their leaked files around to at least fourteen different recipients, including Peter Thiel, former Trump adviser Tom Barrack, and a host of redacted or unknown individuals. Epstein includes the link with no explanation, often out of context from the email thread he’s responding to. 

An email exchange from 2019, revealed in the DOJ documents, indicates that an FBI analyst believed a meeting may have taken place between Epstein and two “agent provocateurs”, James Damore and Kevin Cernekee. The author of the email states that the two known right-wing influencers were “believed to have been involved in the promotion of the Pizzagate narrative.” 

By the time Pizzagate went fully mainstream – when a North Carolina man opened fire in Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle – /pol/ users had long since moved on.

Over the course of the next year, during the first Trump administration, that one conspiratorial and yet now eerily familiar narrative mutated into a sweeping biblical doctrine, a cult-like religion with a unique ability to ingest and absorb all manner of previously existing conspiracy theories. At its core, it hallucinated a holy war between a cannibalistic and paedophilic cabal who had conquered the Government, and Donald Trump – the messiah who would bring it all down in a historic reckoning. In 2017, the QAnon era began. 

QAnon was powered by periodic “Qdrops”, blogs initially posted on /pol/, which offered cryptic bits of coded information for adherents to decipher and extrapolate. These were supposedly orchestrated by “Q,” an individual or group of individuals working inside the deep state to take them down. Like Pizzagate before it, it focuses intensely on the Democratic party and ocassionally moderate Republicans, while holding Donald Trump and his ‘MAGA’ associates in a permanent position of righteousness. 

Bannon, an associate of Epstein’s who likely knew about his activities, periodically used his War Room podcast to widen QAnon’s reach in 2019 and 2020. He described QAnon as “the elephant in the room,” and had Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on his show calling Democrats “the party of paedophiles.” He would later denounce it as a “psyop” (psychological operation) in 2021.

Michael Flynn, a retired Lieutenant General, Trump ally, and leading public supporter of the QAnon movement, was ostensibly caught privately deeming it “total nonsense.” “I have always believe[d] it is a set up and a disinformation campaign to make people look like a bunch of kooks,” he reportedly wrote in a text exchange in 2021.

With some irony, the latest batch of files show that there were very significant kernels of truth contained within their sprawling doctrine – including references to ‘pizza’ and Epstein’s elite paedophile ring itself. But QAnon’s adherents, who are still out there today, remain inexorably embedded in ‘MAGA’. It would seem they’ve been successfully misdirected, denying the conspiracy they spent years crafting because the files now implicate their messiah Donald Trump.

At critical junctures in the rise of the online far-right – it’s contagions and its conspiracies – Epstein’s shadow seems to loom in the background. The extent to which the financier and sex-trafficker was a hidden architect may never truly be known. Certainly not without the release of the remaining DOJ files.

But it’s hard to ignore the implication. Were 4chan users and other disgruntled young men on the internet in the 2010s merely the useful pawns of a real political conspiracy, one seeking to misdirect their anonymous anger away from Epstein’s real crimes and towards the enemies of their populist political project?