Since late last year, when the Justice Department began releasing millions of documents from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the well-connected financier and sex trafficker, each day seems to bring news of yet another luminary who had a relationship with Epstein. The fallout — high-profile resignations at prestigious employers including Goldman Sachs, the law firm Paul Weiss and Hyatt Hotels — is only just beginning. 

The revelations of Epstein’s ties to elite power brokers on both the political left and right has contributed to a deepening conspiratorial mindset among the public, as people understandably question why influencers and titans of finance stayed in close touch with a man who had been convicted of sex crimes. 

But the legitimate outrage at the powerful people who ignored and at times enabled Epstein’s crimes has spread beyond just those who appear in the chummy emails he exchanged with longtime Trump advisor Steve Bannon, former Harvard President Larry Summers, far-left linguist Noam Chomsky and many others. It has now, in some corners, bled into conspiratorial finger-pointing on issues that have nothing to do with the ethical concerns raised in the document dump. 

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a Silicon Valley progressive, has begun referring to this hodgepodge of people as the “Epstein class.” But usage of the term is not precise. It’s an anti-elite message, and Khanna is applying it more widely than just the people with whom Epstein had a relationship.

“These people were at the Davos conferences together, they were financing the same politicians together,” Khanna said in a recent interview. “It’s all the same club. It’s a club. And they don’t want that club to be broken.” 

Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), who faces a competitive reelection campaign this year, invoked the phrase during a recent campaign rally, using “Epstein class” to refer to what he described as President Donald Trump’s wealthy, out-of-touch administration.

“We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. Remember that? But this is a government of, by and for the ultra-rich. It is the wealthiest Cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class, ruling our country,” Ossoff said. 

“Epstein class” is a moniker that confers guilt by association: Lots of wealthy people were connected to Epstein, and perhaps those individuals’ associates are at fault for Epstein’s sins, even if they were not themselves in the files. 

“This is about the Epstein class,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), an anti-Trump Republican who worked with Khanna on the legislation that forced the release of the files, said last week when asked about Trump’s efforts to unseat him in this year’s midterm election. “The people who are funding the attacks, they may or may not be implicated in these files. But they were certainly rubbing shoulders with the people who are in these files. They’re billionaires who are friends with these people.” 

Others are taking the term outside of even any nominal connection to Epstein, using it instead as a catch-all to refer to global policymakers deemed out of touch with the masses. Matt Duss, who has served as a foreign policy advisor to far-left lawmakers Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), accused the “Epstein class” of being warmongers seeking a confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. 

“There is no popular support for war with Iran. It’s being entirely driven by the Epstein class. And once again, American workers will be stuck with the bill,” Duss said on X last week, in response to a Fox News clip of former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley calling for Trump to take a more hawkish approach to the Islamic Republic. 

Never mind the fact that Haley does not appear in the Epstein files at all, except for in a couple news articles sent to Epstein by others. There is no evidence Haley ever met Epstein. 

So what could “Epstein class” mean, then, but another euphemism for the shadowy group purportedly pulling the strings of foreign policy behind the scenes?

More radical voices have explicitly blamed the “Epstein class” for Israel’s actions in Gaza. Carrie Prejean Boller, a conservative activist and former member of the White House Religious Liberty Commission — who was removed from the body last week after her hostile questioning of Jewish witnesses at a hearing on antisemitism — had authored an Instagram post advancing this view.

“The politicians who refuse to condemn the Israeli government’s starvation and genocide on the Palestinians are the same ones unmoved by the Epstein crime files,” Prejean Boller wrote in a post that was also shared by Sameerah Munshi, a member of the commission’s advisory board. “Gaza was a precursor to the release of the Epstein files. Their goal: normalize and justify the torture and killing of innocent children … Arrest these monsters. Drain the evil swamp. End Palestinian genocide. Defund Israel.”

Follow the language to its most extreme end and what emerges is straightforward antisemitism. 

“Yes, we are ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” the far-right podcaster Candace Owens posted on X in reference to the Epstein files. “This is the synagogue of Satan we are up against.”