The news last week that Prince Andrew had been taken off all royal duties will hit hardest for those who can imagine what those duties might have been, or remember which royal Andrew was. (Okay, we know who Prince Andrew is, but that’s only because he’s a screwup. I offer a prize to the reader who can name his little brother, the Earl of Wessex.) But it’s mainly the cause of his demotion that’s important, because it can be traced back to deceased sexual predator—and what: financial whiz? blackmailer? Mossad operative? murder victim?—Jeffrey Epstein. It’s been one more beat in a long sequence of news reports that touch on Epstein yet fail to get at anything people care about most. The big mysteries—who the hell this guy was, how he got his money, what dirt he might have had and on whom, why government officials went easy on him, why no one can find his associate Ghislaine Maxwell—remain as unsolved as they were months ago.

View more

All of this is perfect fodder for anyone with a paranoiac’s view of the world, but, increasingly, that’s all of us. Just this past month we could read that a Spanish security company managed to film and record Julian Assange in almost every room of Ecuador's embassy in London, allegedly passing on its files to the CIA via security officials employed by GOP kingmaker Sheldon Adelson at the Las Vegas Sands casino. We learned that Donald Trump and cronies were just the latest and crudest grifters in a cast of Republican and Democratic sleazeballs using Ukraine as everything from puppet to plunder buffet, all in a haze of disinformation as thick as Hunter Biden’s beard. We could read that two whistle-blowers from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons were claiming that the organization distorted its assessment that Syria’s government had carried out a chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma. We could see horrifying illustrations by prisoner Abu Zubaydah of the brutality he experienced in CIA black sites.

It’s no wonder that half of Americans think Epstein didn’t kill himself, leaving only the other half, who think the same thing but won’t say it. The outliers are journalists, who not only believe the official story but insist the rest of us do so, too. Okay, I exaggerate, both about my fellow journalists and about the likelihood that Epstein’s death involved foul play. (Given that no one was caught on camera coming or going, it’s frankly unlikely that Epstein was murdered, even if it’s not impossible.) But one of the sadder developments of our time is that journalists seem on the whole to be getting less skeptical of authorities—with half of MSNBC looking as if it’s staffed by retired spooks and legacy newspapers citing political activists as if they’re disinterested analysts—even as most Americans are going in the opposite direction. Rather than convincing the public to ease up on this growing wave of distrust, the prestige press has instead joined countless other institutions in reputational erosion.

I’m enough inside the tent of American journalism to know that hungry reporters have been drawn to the Epstein case. (The fact that British outlets are saying more is due mainly to nonchalance about standards. Sure, it’s juicy that Bill Clinton is reported by the Daily Mail to have visited Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico multiple times, but the source is one guy who says he was told about it by another guy. Pulitzer won’t come a-knocking.) At the same time, you have to wonder: Why has there still been no exhaustive unmasking by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Pro Publica, or for that matter this or another major magazine? Where’s the sense of urgency? When the right-wing outfit Project Veritas put out a leak of newscaster Amy Robach complaining that ABC had quashed her Epstein scoops for years, mentioning Alan Dershowitz and Bill Clinton and adding, “What we had was unreal,” outlets like the New York Times and CNN ignored it, and the few journalists who did bring it up concentrated most on whether ABC had been justified or craven. Fewer seemed to pursue the question that preoccupied much of Twitter and the comments sections: Well, what did Robach have? Can she tell us now?

So it is that more and more Americans are drawn to conspiracy theory, a term I do not use as a pejorative. After all, any incident of secret coordination is a conspiracy, and any story we tell about it is, at least implicitly, a theory. The trouble is that most conspiracy theories—at least of the sort that aren't universally accepted—are wrong, simply because of the nature of odds. Every good investigator tries on and discards countless theories in the course of work, but all of them, save one, will be incorrect. Anyone could have disbelieved (although few of us did) claims by George W. Bush’s White House that Saddam Hussein was hiding a large cache of WMDs and that the U.S. government knew where they were. But few were the minds who could have come up with the notion that Saddam Hussein’s regime had destroyed its WMDs while pretending that it hadn’t in order to scare Tehran. It’s a conspiracy theory that makes very little sense yet happens to have been true. In most cases, our conspiracy theories are wrong.

The other problem with our new predilections toward self-directed detective work, the tragic one, is that conspiracy theories are the product of lost trust. When you have reason to doubt the official story, or even the basic decency of those telling it, you’ll be hard-pressed to avoid formulating alternative possibilities. Because the reputation of our press has been as much in decline as that of any other authority, it can do little to quell even the stupidest ideas. Instead, our news outlets have done better at disseminating bad notions than debunking them. That’s one reason Americans continue to believe that Trump had secret channels to Moscow in 2016 and worked with Russian intelligence to steal the election, no matter how long and deeply federal investigators worked, without success, at finding evidence of it. It’s also why a smaller but still troubling number of Americans continue to believe that Trump is on a calculated mission to uproot a corrupt and malevolent deep state, no matter how high up his bumbling and screwups manage to pile.

When you lose faith in your institutions, the world looks sinister. Sometimes this leads to political revolution and the rise of a strongman. Fortunately, Donald Trump has more in common with Rufus T. Firefly than with effective dictators, who tend to be disciplined fanatics. The more prevalent response is apathy or cynicism, and both are tempting, especially amid an abundance of laugh-or-cry-style news. It’s altogether perfect that lawyer David Boies, famous lately for having done his best to bully anyone who got in the way of sociopaths like Harvey Weinstein and Elizabeth Holmes, has now switched into the reputation-washing lane for a spell and begun to represent some of Epstein’s accusers, albeit not without some ethical hiccups. The players switch sides, white hat or black hat, and the game continues. What’s next for Boies? One half expects to learn he has been a lawyer for Ghislaine Maxwell. And then he’ll have to pick an even better cause as penance.

There isn’t much evidence to suggest that lost faith gets restored or that paranoia fades away, at least not for the individual. It looks more like a new generation comes along and, in blissful obliviousness, sets a happier mood, at least until it, too, gets walloped by some ugly reality. In China, one generation felt betrayed by Mao Zedong and another felt betrayed by Deng Xiaoping, but both are now old, and they were superseded by a nationalistic cohort that’s far less resentful. Here in the United States, the 1970s saw an upsurge of paranoia in the wake of disillusionment over Vietnam, Watergate, and our intelligence services, but those who came of age in 1980s and 1990s and saw the triumph (it seemed) of the liberal world order were more trusting, at least until the post-9/11 era. In a decade about 30 million of our adults will be dead and 40 million kids will be on their way up to replace them, so maybe the mood will shift once more back to trust, at least of a modest sort.

For now, though, we adults are left to cope with the daily glimpses of darkness, whether those take the form of Russian skullduggery or deep state malfeasance or Wall Street predation or sexual blackmailers or any number of other phenomena that could be less or more serious than we fear. As long as Americans feel out of control, caught in the grip of malevolent forces operating out of view, paranoia will remain a besetting and debilitating component of our public life. Even before his confinement this year, Jeffrey Epstein had surpassed any individual in persuading Americans our elites were not only interlinked but also depraved. The surprise, with his death and its aftermath, is that he managed to outdo himself.

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair

— Here’s why Kellyanne Conway is caught in the cross fire of the West Wing

— Why do Dubai’s princesses keep trying to escape from their families?

— Republicans’ attempt to smear a decorated war veteran promptly blew up in their faces

— After the collapse of WeWork, Adam Neumann talks of himself as a martyr

— Trump continues losing his mind as impeachment witnesses reveal more details

— From the Archive: Going behind Bernie Madoff’s affable façade to reveal his most intimate betrayals

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.