Name: Why Politicians Love Conspiracy Theories
Uploaded: 2025-08-06T06:56:32.000Z
Duration: 9 min 4 s
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Let's talk about politicians, disinformation, Jeffrey Epstein, and conspiracy theories.

I'm not a political guy, but I love talking about disinformation.

And in a lot of ways, conspiracy theories are kind of like a controlled burn, right?

Politicians might set these conspiracy theories or agree with these conspiracy theories in order to further an agenda, right?

You do a controlled burn because it is something good.

But here's the deal, a controlled burn conspiracy theory might sometimes escape containment, come back and burn you.

And that's what we're kind of seeing with President Trump telling his followers who believe in the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories that he doesn't want their support anymore.

That's what we're seeing with Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said there was an Epstein client list.

And one of the things that you alluded to, and this is something Donald Trump has talked about, the DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients.

It's sitting on my desk right now to review.

Now, conspiracy theories are something that both sides do.

But no one ever actually listens to those guys.

And here's the deal, conspiracy theories are so popular because you don't have to provide proof, right?

You just have to provide enough doubt to get people to be convinced about your way of thinking.

And I've often likened it to Harry Potter.

Well, Harry Potter is popular because it's a very powerful idea for children to have agency.

They don't even get to decide what goes into their mouth.

But Harry Potter is a powerful fantasy because it allows them to imagine themselves as a wizard.

And only they know the truth about the real world.

And that's kind of how conspiracy theories work.

But then you get to come home and you get to learn the real truth about what's going on.

And that's a very, very powerful feeling for people.

Now, both sides have used Jeffrey Epstein here.

You have Democrats claiming that Trump was part of Epstein's inner circle.

And you have Republicans claiming that Epstein was on the cusp of releasing this global exploitation ring before he died mysteriously inside of jail.

But the deal here is that both sides are going after what I call emotional truth, which is different than real truth.

Emotional truth is what you feel in your heart to be true rather than what you can actually prove is true.

And that's how you end up with someone saying, oh, we're going to release the list.

And then all of a sudden, there is no list.

And this could be one of those situations where you're just using this conspiracy theory in order to get elected.

And then once you actually get elected and you get access to this information, you go, oh, crap, there actually isn't any kind of client list.

And that's actually something that's kind of believable because I'm old enough to remember Madam to the Stars Heidi Fleiss.

And Heidi Fleiss had a client list and it had like Mick Jagger and I think Jack Nicholson was in it as well.

That didn't work out so well for her and her clients.

So it's certainly assumed that people have used obfuscation or they've taken client lists and they've spread them across multiple documents or they just don't hold client lists at all anymore.

So it could be the case of there really is no client list or these client lists are spread across multiple documents so there is no actual list.

So I'm actually willing to give Attorney General Pam Bondi the benefit of the doubt.

She might not really have known what she was walking into or there might have certainly have been some files on her desk that she hadn't read yet and she had no idea what was in them.

Because, you know, just kind of flippantly making stuff up off the cuff just seemed to work when you're on Fox News talking to your supporters.

Now if you do light a controlled burn you better have a freaking fire break.

That's how you end up with stuff like QAnon, Pizza Gate, the Dominion voting machine scandal.

Those are three things off the top of my head that I think of that metastasized and got out of control.

And these things start off as like little rhetorical questions, right?

As talking points to kind of get the base excited.

But if you don't control these things that's how you end up with people going,

How come you haven't arrested Hillary yet?

Or, hey, if the Epstein list was real before you got elected, why is it fake now?

Now Democrats aren't really blameless here.

A good example is the Russia collusion hoax.

Now don't get me wrong, intelligence agencies and even I have said that Vladimir Putin would have supported anyone except Hillary Clinton getting elected in 2016 mainly because he didn't like Hillary Clinton.

So he did everything he could to make sure that she wasn't elected.

But people went and took that Russia support for Trump and ran with it all the way over to the other side of Trump's illiteral Russian asset.

Another example of conspiracy theory on the Democrat side comes from J.D. Vance and the Couch.

For those of you who don't know, there's this urban legend conspiracy theory that J.D. Vance had relations with a rubber glove and a couch and he talked about it in his book, Hillbilly Elegy.

Here's why this conspiracy theory worked.

Number two, nobody actually read Hillbilly Elegy, right?

But the interesting thing here is that nobody that I know of on the Democrat side said like, hey man, I actually looked at that chapter in Hillbilly Elegy and it wasn't true.

That's not how our system is supposed to work here.

When it comes to conspiracy theories, our adversaries, Russia, China, they know that we're really into these things.

They don't need to hack voting machines to influence elections.

They just need to hack your brain, right?

They just need to get you to mistrust all of our institutions and then they can kind of guide you into voting for whoever they want.

And that is the real danger here and the real conclusion of this.

Now we can't ban conspiracy theories because if you're an American, even lying or believing something that isn't true is free speech.

But one thing that we can do is hold our politicians accountable to not actually spreading the fire.

And one good example of this was John McCain.

I think it was in 2008 when he was running against President Obama.

He had a person in the audience who claimed that Obama was a Muslim and she didn't trust him.

I have read about him and he's not, he's not, he's a, he's an Arab.

And John McCain, to his credit, he kind of stood up and said, no, no, Obama isn't a Muslim.

Now they can disagree on policy, but John McCain didn't, didn't fan that conspiracy theory fire.

And that's, that's something that I can certainly credit him with.

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