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Despite the famous poster in his office, Special Agent Fox Mulder didn’t want to believe.

The “X-Files” protagonist was driven by his hunt for the extraterrestrial, paranormal and covert, no doubt. But “want” is too weak a word for the single-mindedness brought to life via the smoldering looks and cut-glass cheekbones of David Duchovny. A traumatic childhood disappearance and the sunk-cost fallacy worked together in Mulder’s psyche, making it so he needed to believe in a greater conspiracy to make sense of his life.

Dr. Dana Scully, his cool-headed and analytical partner, offered a better example of wanting to believe. Her confidence in Mulder, and many eventual confrontations with the unexplainable, allowed her to credit new, strange conspiracy theories without giving herself over to them entirely. It’s nowhere near as exciting to ask for the explanation and wait for the evidence, but someone has to do it. 

We see these archetypes in the real world all the time. There’s the newspaper’s version of events (a crime has occurred and the facts are being sorted) and the local television news version of events (a crime wave is ongoing and coming for your children). The U.S. is rife with hot-blooded conspiracists, reached at a formative age by talk radio and evening news, who have hold of perhaps three-fourths of the truth and are more than willing to let their own desires and prejudices fill in the blanks.

It’s the difference between the QAnon vision of the world, where a cabal of elite pedophiles is committing dreadful sex crimes in the service of occult rituals and replacing dissident celebrities with obedient clones, and the story laid out in the Epstein files. Those releases do point toward a conspiracy, stripped of satanists and coming storms, and all the less exciting for it. The crimes committed by Jeffrey Epstein and his associates are horrific, and the details frequently lurid, but focusing on who’s a pedophile and who’s not misses the forest for the trees. 

The story told in the Epstein files is the same one we’ve heard before in the Paradise Papers and Panama Papers. There’s a small group of elite politicians and billionaires who feel that their extreme wealth and power grants them immunity from the law. In this, they’ve largely been right. 

Former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton pointed out as much in the opening statement of her deposition on Epstein Thursday, noting that the Trump administration is focusing its efforts on teasing out the misdeeds of its enemies,  not on the underlying rot that allowed a ring like Epstein’s to flourish in the first place. (Clinton is no impartial observer, of course. Her husband Bill appears several times in the case files that have been released.) 

Trump’s Department of Justice has released the files as an incoherent mess, full of repetition and littered with unverified tips. They’ve done this seemingly on purpose, as missing files related to Trump show that the DOJ can be careful when it wants to be. The glut of useless information is chaff, meant to scramble the search for the facts and lead more impulsive readers off on wild goose chases. As Scully famously put it, “The truth is out there, but so are lies.” 

Any real reckoning with the Epstein files will require moving beyond the “gotcha” stage of searching Jmail for political opponents and rival sports team owners. To avoid the next Epstein, we’ll need to keep a clear head. That’s the first step in figuring out a way to undermine the collective impunity the sex trafficker and his associates carried through the world.

What do you think? Are we missing the real story of the Epstein files? Will we ever have accountability for Epstein’s named associates? Sound off in the comments.

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