A concerted effort between Donald Trump’s White House and the right-wing media ecosystem it effectively controls to distract the public’s attention from the Epstein files appears by pushing a baseless conspiracy theory appears to be a flop.
After a 427-1 vote in the House, on Tuesday the Republican-controlled Senate passed legislation to compel the Justice Department to release any remaining files it has on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The votes came after the president’s opposition to releasing the documents and recent sudden reversal left many in his MAGA coalition disillusioned. The damage appears to be substantial, as evidenced by how little traction the administration’s fear-mongering — a tried-and-true tactic — has received.
MAGA influencer Tucker Carlson kicked off the attempted head fake on Friday after Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released emails from Epstein’s estate, which included hundreds of references to Trump. Carlson attempted to draw attention back to the president’s would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks, who died after shooting Trump in the ear at a Butler, Pennsylvania campaign rally in July 2024. The 20-year-old also wounded two other Trump supporters at the rally and killed firefighter Corey Comperatore.
Since the assassination attempt, Republicans have accused the FBI of withholding information about the investigation. Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress after the shooting that the agency could not find any online history that pointed to an ideological motive on the part of Crooks. Wray’s deputy also angered the right when he said that comments from the shooter’s social media accounts “appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.” Crooks reportedly went from being a pro-Trump to an anti-Trump ideologue, but appeared to go dark online afterward.
“It was an amazing transformation,” Carlson said on his show. The podcaster, who claimed to have access to Crooks’ Google Drive account and a trove of violent comments the gunman left on YouTube between 2019 and 2020, accused the FBI of concealing his “online footprint” and downplaying potential radical motives. Remarkably, the FBI, which is under the leadership of MAGA stalwart Kash Patel, created a rapid response account to immediately deny Carlson’s claims.
On Monday, as Epstein survivors traveled to Capitol Hill to lobby for the release of the files, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt sat with the New York Post’s Miranda Devine to roll out the paper’s “bombshell” report revealing Crooks’ account on the art social-network site DeviantArt, and suggesting he might have had a “furry fetish.” Crooks, the Post reported, “used they/them pronouns.” (They/them appear to be the default settings on DeviantArt.) Several other right-wing media outlets quickly followed suit on Monday, framing the shooter’s reported exploration as a deeply destabilizing factor: A window into a “secret life” that could explain the shooting.
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Conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec (of Pizzagate infamy) wrote that “young white men who have experienced the sharpest, most psychologically disorienting fall from grace in modern American history—and that precipitous drop is the single biggest driver of the online perversion-to-political-violence pipeline we’re watching in real time.”
According to Posobiec, “The same message board that hosts ‘furry’ threads also hosts threads about ‘dismantling white supremacy.’ The same Discord server trading furry cub art is where Antifa plans real-world violence. Sexual humiliation and racial/political humiliation become indistinguishable.”
The allegations became even more outrageous. Megyn Kelly, who is currently under fire for appearing to minimize Epstein’s abuse, claimed Monday that the furry information revealed by Leavitt was actually an FBI false flag meant to distract from Carlson’s claims: “This whole thing stinks.” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson that Crooks was likely “groomed” as part of a CIA mind-control experiment.
This strategy has become commonplace. Mass shooters who make front-page news are often depicted as transgender by the right as part of their campaign to stigmatize trans Americans and strip them of their rights. Seconds before Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on Sept. 10, someone in the crowd at Utah Valley University asked if he knew how many mass shooters over the last decade had identified as trans. “Too many,” the right-wing activist replied. It’s a myth designed to promote divisive far-right ideologies.
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Research data shows that trans and nonbinary people, a group that is estimated to be about 1% of the population aged 13 and older, are more likely to be victims — rather than perpetrators — of gun violence. Additionally, a 2025 report from the Violence Prevention Project found that 98% of mass shooters were male. Less than 1% identified as transgender.
Trump, who came into office promising to “stop the transgender lunacy,” sees inciting a trans panic following shootings as a way to dismantle so-called “gender ideology.” In this case, though, MAGA’s outrageous attempts to distract attention from the president’s long-standing connections to Epstein have fallen flat.
Few are talking this week about the possibility that Thomas Matthew Crooks was a furry. National attention remains firmly fixed on Jeffrey Epstein — and on revelations that “dirty Donald,” as the deceased sex offender called the president of the United States, “knew about the girls.”
