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How an ‘all-American boy’ became a Mississippi synagogue arson suspect
JACKSON, Mississippi — Parishioners pass under large banners reading “Embrace Diversity” and “Serve Others” as they file into Sunday mass at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church just north of town.
The church is where Stephen Spencer Pittman, the 19-year-old arrested for starting a fire at Beth Israel Congregation, was confirmed and where his parents and younger brother still belong.
“Nobody had any idea what was going on or what would happen,” Monsignor Elvin Suds said during his sermon a week after the attack on Beth Israel. “He and his family were altar servers and very normal in all respects.”
That sentiment — that the arson against Jackson’s only synagogue came out of nowhere — has been prevalent among the city’s Jews, who say they’ve experienced little antisemitism and that the crime did not seem to fit neatly into the white supremacist violence that has historically afflicted Jews in Mississippi.
Sarah Thomas, a vice president at Beth Israel, said she was shaken by Pittman’s everyman appearance. “When I first saw his picture, I did start to cry because I was like, ‘This could be anyone,’” Thomas recalled as she stood outside the synagogue library where Pittman allegedly broke through a window with a hatchet. “People can be radicalized in so many ways — but knowing it could be anyone is really scary.”
Even as a team of investigators have pieced together Pittman’s drive from his home in a gated community in nearby Madison to a run-down gas station where he purchased the fuel and removed the license plate, the question of why someone would try to burn down the city’s lone synagogue has remained murkier.
That was the main question Rachel Myers’s Hebrew school students at Beth Israel had the day following the attack; she encouraged them to wait for more information.
The details that trickled out in the days that followed suggested Pittman was driven by antisemitism, telling police that Beth Israel was “the synagogue of Satan.”
But that didn’t explain how a white honor roll student from the local Catholic high school, who had just finished his first baseball season at one of the state’s historically Black colleges, had landed on the antisemitic slogan, decided to strike and found himself in federal court Tuesday clutching a Bible in his heavily bandaged hands after allegedly spilling gasoline on himself while starting the fire.
“Anybody who’s in this area will tell you that if he belonged to a Klan branch and did all that, then you got it, right?” Rep. Bennie Thompson, who has represented Jackson in Congress for the past 30 years, mused during a tour of the damaged synagogue. “But if he played baseball? Went to St. Joe’s? I mean for all intents and purposes that’s an all-American boy.”
A ‘spiritual psychosis’
Most perpetrators of major violence against Jews in recent years have been guided by at least a loose ideology. The shooter at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 had long kept a shotgun by his front door that he trained to aim at the government jackboots he feared would bust down his door, before eventually embracing white supremacist views that blamed Jews for mass immigration. And the man who shot four people at a Chabad in southern California the next year had been radicalized more quickly, but his extremism began with visiting fringe online forums and setting a local mosque on fire after being inspired by the white nationalist who massacred Muslims in New Zealand.
Less is known about the perpetrators of last year’s deadly attacks in Colorado and Washington, D.C., but both suspects allegedly shouted anti-Zionist slogans during the incidents and the suspect charged in the Capital Jewish Museum shooting posted a manifesto justifying violence against supporters of the Israeli government.
Investigators have released little information about Pittman, and law enforcement did not respond to interview requests. But a review of Pittman’s social media presence and conversations with those who know him suggest an extremely rapid turn toward extremism sparked by a mental health crisis that had led him down an erratic online path that included attempts to sell a Bible-inspired fitness plan.
“It just seemed like he had started to go into spiritual psychosis,” said a friend who met Pittman during high school at St. Joseph’s Catholic Academy. “He was a really normal person until a few months ago.”
It’s a profile that defies the simplest political explanations offered by figures like Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar, who initially said the attack was “another step in the globalization of the intifada,” or Derrick Johnson, the NAACP president who said during a prayer vigil in Jackson after the attack that the White House had enabled Pittman’s violence by “other-izing our communities.”
Pittman, though, expressed little interest in politics, according to both his high school friend and his social media activity, which until recently was almost exclusively focused on baseball and hanging out with friends.
“He was actually a really great guy, very genuine, honest,” the high school friend said. “Guy you could talk to about anything and he would listen.”
But another friend told Mississippi Today that Pittman had started to change over the course of several years, beginning to post 10-15 times per day on social media, including images of him speeding down the highway in a Porsche and injecting steroids.
Pittman’s parents first noticed a change at the start of winter break in early December when he arrived home from community college and began behaving in “erratic” ways, according to interviews they gave to the FBI.
Tricia, Pittman’s mother, told police that her son had been scaring the family pets and that she and her husband, Steve, were considering starting to lock their bedroom door at night because they were afraid of their son.
But it wasn’t until around a week before the arson that Pittman began making antisemitic comments, according to FBI Special Agent Ariel Williams, who testified at a court hearing Tuesday during which Pittman pleaded not guilty to the arson.
One friend who worked out with Pittman at a local gym called police after seeing news of the fire at Beth Israel to say that Pittman had said he “wanted to burn down a synagogue” the day before the attack.
A new kind of violence
Shortly after Beth Israel opened a new synagogue building in 1967, with two long wings and an elevated roof at the center meant to evoke the Israelites’ tents, it was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan as part of a violent campaign against school integration.
As antisemitic violence in Mississippi mounted the following year, the Jewish community raised funds at the behest of the FBI to pay Klan informants, which ultimately helped successfully break up the ring of nighttime bombers.
The 1967 bombing, and a subsequent attack on the rabbi’s house, have become an integral part of Beth Israel’s history and are memorialized on a plaque outside the synagogue that describes Jewish support for the Civil Rights Movement.
But today Jews in Jackson say they experience little to no antisemitism and, at least locally, there’s no organized political movement aligned against them like there was in the 1960s, making the arson especially bewildering.
The members of Beth Israel are committed to rendering the arsonist’s attack irrelevant. The fire, fueled by five gallons of gasoline, destroyed the library and caused structural damage to one wing of the building. And yet W. Abram Orlansky, a former synagogue president, said that no services had been scheduled the Saturday when the fire took place and a local church quickly offered space to hold all of Beth Israel’s scheduled programming while repairs took place. “This guy succeeded at canceling literally zero planned events,” said Orlansky, who grew up in Jackson. “I’m pretty proud of that.”
Some have pondered what Pittman’s motives may have been, though, and they generally figure that whatever drove Pittman to violence must have come from elsewhere — and people had a good hunch as to where.
“It’s that damn phone,” said Vivienne Diaz, a teacher who belongs to Beth Israel.
Pittman certainly spent a lot of time on his phone. He was a prolific social media user with accounts on X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube. According to a Forward review of his public posts, he did not share any antisemitic content until hours before police say he started the fire at Beth Israel, when he reposted a meme of a cartoon character shoving a Jew into a swimming pool.
His high school friend said that Pittman had never discussed Jews or Judaism until the week leading up to his arrest.
But Pittman followed several Instagram accounts that promoted a forceful brand of Christianity, including The Christianity Pill, which declares “CHRIST IS KING” in its bio — Pittman told the judge “Jesus Christ is Lord” during his initial court hearing — and claims that “Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.”
He followed another account called The Final Stand that boasts it is “spreading what is labeled ‘misinformation’” and warns against a plot by an unnamed group seeking to wipe out Christians. “But we are HEALING,” the account posted in July. “We are waking up from this deep coma we’ve been in since WW2.”
(Pittman’s father told police that he “finally got them” after being confronted about the burns on his hands and ankles the morning after the fire.)
In court Tuesday, Pittman carried a jailhouse Bible and crossed himself several times during the proceeding and bit his nails.
In addition to the Christian content, Pittman engaged with accounts promoting conspiracy theories, like Conspiracy Theories, Inc. and Whispers of Truth, which shares claims that NASA faked the moon landing alongside a defense of Mel Gibson and critique of the World Trade Center’s Jewish owner.
It’s not clear exactly when Pittman began following these accounts or engaging with more overt antisemitic content, like the meme he shared shortly before the attack, but friends and acquaintances say the change appeared to happen sometime over the summer after his first year at college.
During that time, he created a new social media account focused on fitness that he populated with shirtless videos and pleas to help his followers “get shredded” and earn $7,000 per week. He abandoned the account a couple weeks later, around the time he started his second year at Coahoma Community College, a school in the Mississippi Delta where 92% of the students are Black.
On the last day of classes at Coahoma, he registered One Purpose, a website advertising “scripture-backed fitness” that mixed Hebrew terms with advice to limit your diet to “God-made fats.”
Pittman told police that around the same time he began earning money through day trading stocks, though his lawyer dispelled that this was generating any income for his client in court Tuesday: “There is no income.”
An unnamed family friend told a local radio station that Pittman had started struggling with mental health during his third semester at Coahoma this fall and was not planning to return after winter break, a break that his parents — who both work at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson — hoped to use to get him psychiatric help.
“They condemn the terrible sin of this incident,” Suds, the priest, said in his sermon. “They’ve lost the son that they knew and loved.”
Pittman’s parents were not at Tuesday’s hearing and did not respond to a request for comment sent to the lawyers representing their son, who goes by Spencer, or to a call at the entrance to their gated community in Madison.
Pittman’s trial is set for Feb. 23. Until then, he was remanded to federal custody.
A difficult crime to prevent
Lone offenders, as investigators have described Pittman, are especially difficult to thwart. But other antisemitic perpetrators have left longer trails that offered the possibility of an earlier intervention. John T. Earnest’s 18-month timeline from his initial radicalization to the shooting at Poway Chabad appears to be common.
The Anti-Defamation League recently traced the radicalization of two school shooters and found that both had followed almost identical online paths leading up to the shooting. One took 18 months, the other 19 months.
Pittman appeared to move faster, although his attack on Beth Israel was limited to property damage.
“We thought it took 19 months,” Lindsay Baach Friedman, the ADL’s regional director covering Mississippi, said in an interview. “But it’s not a far cry to go from 19 months to three months.”
The contraction in time from when a perpetrator of violent extremism starts becoming radicalized to when they act has been shrinking for decades, which can make it harder for the network of organizations that seek to monitor antisemitic threats and prevent them.
“We need to move faster, and we need to be smarter about how we move,” said Michael Masterson, CEO of Secure Community Network. He said one of the most reliable ways to prevent attacks like the Beth Israel arson was for people to report friends or family making suspicious comments or threats, but that can be harder to do when a suspect attacks less than 24 hours after telling someone their plan — in Pittman’s case, telling a workout buddy that he wanted to burn a synagogue.
Masters added that there are growing attempts by online actors to encourage vulnerable people, especially those suffering from mental health issues, to commit violence. “The material we see online increasingly is designed to reach those individuals and motivate them to act,” he said.
Organized antisemitism in Mississippi is much lower than it was the last time Beth Israel was burned in the 1960s, when elements of the state’s powerful white supremacist movement of the era often blamed Jews for desegregation; the ADL tallied just a few dozen incidents in the state over the past few years, mostly stickers placed by a white nationalist organization.
The more diffuse path Pittman took toward allegedly striking the synagogue does not seem to have centered on the kinds of specific arguments about Jews that often animate antisemitic perpetrators — instead it drew more loosely on what Masters described as a “salad bar” of misinformation and conspiracy theories that often includes antisemitism but is much harder to pin down than the ideologies that motivate organized hate groups.
Orlansky, Beth Israel’s former president, said the synagogue had close ties with law enforcement and had been alerted in the past when the FBI noticed warning signs that might have signaled a threat to the congregation.
But Pittman, whose antisemitism only broke into the open in the days before the attack, never seemed to be on their radar.
“I think we did everything that a congregation can reasonably do,” said Orlansky, the former Beth Israel president. “Hate can come from anywhere — that’s my main takeaway.”
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He saved dozens of kids in Auschwitz — he kept it a secret for nearly the rest of his life
Growing up in Israel as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Judith Richter was taught not to discuss the Shoah. While her mother was very open about her experiences, Richter’s father was more reserved, and Israeli society at the time looked down on European Jews for, as they wrongly assumed, not fighting back. It wasn’t until Richter was an adult that she learned her father had played a critical role in protecting children at Auschwitz-Birkenau — a secret she gleaned not from her father himself but from an article on Josef Mengele in a LIFE magazine that her husband happened to spot in a grocery store.
Erno “Zvi” Spiegel was 29 years old when he was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz along with other members of his family, including his twin sister Magda. As a twin, Spiegel was selected to be a subject for Mengele’s scientific experiments, where he injected subjects with diseases and cancer cells to study their effects on the human body; due to their shared genetics, one twin could serve as a control for the experiment. If one died from the procedure and the other didn’t, the surviving twin would still be killed and subject to an autopsy to understand why they lived.
Mengele also charged Spiegel with looking after the other kids he was experimenting on, whose lives Spiegel would end up saving multiple times. The PBS documentary The Last Twins, directed by Perri Peltz and Matt O’Neill, captures the deep and unexpected relationship Spiegel had with his charges through interviews with the surviving sets of twins from Mengele’s lab along with Spiegel’s family. Uncle Spiegel, as the twins called him, was the only adult that many of the kids trusted during their imprisonment.
When SS physician Heinz Thilo ordered the extermination of all sets of twins, Spiegel was able to intervene by telling Mengele that his subjects were at risk. Sometimes siblings were mistakenly brought in as twins, but Spiegel lied about their birth days so they wouldn’t be sent to the gas chambers. Many recounted how he would teach them math and geography to distract them from their horrific conditions.
When she heard these stories for the first time, Richter told me, she was not surprised her father had put such an emphasis on education, even in the camps.
“My father taught me since I was very young that while your material possessions, home, even your freedom can be taken away from you, the single asset that cannot be taken away from you is your knowledge,” she said.
After Auschwitz was liberated, Spiegel led the kids on an arduous journey through Eastern Europe helping them return to their homes — or at least, to what was left of them.
Although Spiegel, who died in 1993, never told his own children what he had done during the war, he spoke with LIFE Magazine for their 1981 article on Mengele’s experiments. The LIFE piece didn’t just cause revelations for Spiegel’s family; one of the survivors, Peter Somogyi, saw the issue, prompting him to contact Spiegel. The two reunited for the first time in almost four decades in Boston, and after that, Spiegel arranged meetings with a number of the other surviving twins.
Richter began researching her father’s story and the lives of those he had saved for an academic project. However, when director Peltz’s mom, who had known Richter for years, connected the two women, Richter realized the importance of turning her father’s story into a movie.
Directors O’Neill and Peltz, who had previously worked together on the documentary Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media, knew the project was time sensitive given how few living survivors are left. Since they first started shooting the film almost a decade ago, all but one of their interview subjects has died. O’Neill added that today’s political climate contributed to the urgency of getting the film to the public.
“At a time of rising antisemitism, of misinformation of the Holocaust,” O’Neill said, “it’s an essential time for journalistic work based entirely on indisputable truths to come out.”
Peltz noted that Spiegel’s heroism wasn’t embodied in one grand act, but “in the step by step, day by day.” Although Mengele’s horrific experiments get a brief mention, the filmmakers chose to focus on the uplifting story of how people came together and protected each other in the midst of tragedy.
“Right now, many of us feel overwhelmed by world events, by things that feel out of control,” O’Neill added. “This is a story of hope in a time of horror and of a man who took the small space that he could control and did good within it.”
In 2017, Richter organized a reunion of the survivors in Israel, where they dedicated a plaque to Spiegel and the twins in Jerusalem. Richter said her father’s strong sense of social responsibility had a profound effect on her life. She noted that in the homes of some Holocaust survivors, the “children grow up with a very strong sense of revenge.” Instead, her father taught her that the best response to hatred was to ask herself how she could help other people.
“Erno was a fighter in his own way,” O’Neill said. “He fought the Nazis by teaching the kids to call each other by their names. He fought the Nazis by teaching them geography. He fought the Nazis by giving them humanity in darkness.”
The Last Twins will be available to stream on pbs.org on April 13 and have a broadcast premiere on Monday, June 15 at 10/9c.
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I’m probably going to be on the government’s list of Jews at UPenn
When I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024, tensions on campus about Israel and Gaza felt hotter than ever. Nearly every week of my senior year, another student or faculty member was being doxxed online for their politics. In the middle of spring finals, police forcibly disbanded the pro-Palestinian encampment in the center of campus. A week later, and four days before graduation, pro-Palestinian activists occupied a campus building, leading to another confrontation with law enforcement and arrests. At graduation, several students whipped out Palestinian flags and signs about justice for Palestine as they walked the stage.
I will once again be a Penn student come fall, having been accepted to the school’s sociology Ph.D. program. Last month, when I returned to campus for the department’s open house, I was surprised that I didn’t notice even a trace of the conflict I had left behind. The fences that had been erected around College Green to prevent a second encampment were gone. There were no cardboard signs about Palestine or Israel on Locust Walk. Talking with my professors and friends still at Penn, they confirmed that pro-Palestinian activism on campus had died down, likely due to a mix of intimidation on the part of the school administration — which only got more intense after the federal government got involved — and a loss of energy in activist spaces.
It’s not that students became completely disconnected: The university still offers clubs for students with a wide range of political perspectives, and courses on Israel and Gaza. But it seemed like the Penn I would be returning to in August had established some semblance of calm, albeit in part due to the university restricting open expression.
Now, the recent ruling that Penn must comply with the federal government’s demand for a list of students and faculty affiliated with Jewish groups and organizations — a sweeping categorization that could include anyone involved in Jewish Studies or Jewish associations regardless of their actual identity — could threaten to bring back the campus wide anxieties when doxxing and harassment were at their highest.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s investigation began in December of 2023, with a stated goal of determining if the university was failing to properly protect Jewish employees from discrimination and harassment. In March 2025, the EEOC asked Penn for membership lists of Jewish campus groups and names of Jewish Studies employees. Penn refused, instead offering to inform all employees about the investigation and how to contact the EEOC if they felt like they had an incident to report. This didn’t satisfy the EEOC, leading to subpoenas, lawsuits and countersuits. And it’s not over yet: Penn has indicated the school plans to appeal the decision forcing the handover of student and faculty names.
Although the EEOC’s jurisdiction is workplace discrimination, some of the lists the EEOC are asking for include students. One such group is those who were involved in confidential listening sessions conducted by the university’s antisemitism task force where Jewish students shared their experiences on campus.
I’ll go ahead and get ahead of the EEOC and make it known that I attended one of these listening sessions. Their confidentiality made them one of the few places on campus where Jewish students could feel comfortable openly discussing their feelings about the situation in Israel and Gaza as well as events at Penn. It was the administration’s way of giving Jews room to be vulnerable — and now the government is weaponizing it against the university.
The irony is stark. Under the auspices of protecting the interests of Jewish students and faculty, the EEOC is threatening the sanctity of the spaces where Jewish students and faculty feel safe.
For me, it’s hard not to feel like part of how we got here is that different political camps of the Jewish community could never seem to figure out how to speak to one another after Oct. 7. There was never really a clear idea of what Jewish students wanted political activity on campus to look like, with some advocating for a complete ban of encampments and anti-Israel referendums and others fully supporting them. Ultimately, I think what most people wanted on campus was a sense of civility, the feeling that screaming matches between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students wouldn’t constantly erupt in the middle of campus, but different factions were too busy arguing with each other to make a well-thought-out plan for how to achieve that.
The faculty who originally complained to the EEOC clearly thought getting the federal government involved was the catch-all solution. But instead, after two of the four classes of undergraduate students who lived through the conflict have graduated, and students are talking to each other in organized dialogue, the EEOC wants to revisit old wounds. The EEOC has discretion when it comes to what steps they choose to take, including issuing a subpoena and determining how to gather information they believe is necessary to their investigation. They have decided to use that discretion to gather information in a way that resurfaces generational trauma for Jews.
After such a period of divisiveness at Penn, it’s telling that an unidentified professor told the student paper The Daily Pennsylvanian that “a remarkably ideologically, religiously, and politically diverse array of organizations and individuals have united” against the subpoena. I didn’t always see eye to eye with the Penn Hillel leadership while I was an undergraduate student, but I agree with their assertion, in the statement they released last week that, “accountability in the face of discrimination is essential, but it must not be achieved by compromising the security of any minority community.”
Despite all the anxiety and frustration this development has provoked, I am choosing to look on the bright side: It seems like Penn’s Jews have finally found something they can unite over.
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Iran’s regime is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein
In the hours leading up to the recent ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, pro-regime AI-generated videos flooded social media. In one widely circulated clip, a Lego version of Donald Trump is shown desperately pleading with Iran for a ceasefire. The response comes in the form of a ballistic missile with the words “in memory of the victims of Epstein’s Island” written on it, hurling toward U.S. allies in the region.
Another video shows a terrified Trump in bed with young girls, having a nightmare of an Iranian missile barrage before waking and agreeing to ceasefire terms while eating a taco — a reference to the acronym “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”).
These videos are just some of the dozens released by media organizations affiliated with the Iranian regime that invoke pedophile sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein in its anti-Western propaganda.
“The IRGC is very happy to use him in every venue they have—in media, newspapers, speeches,” said Saeid Golkar, an Iranian-born expert on the Iran regime’s propaganda, using the acronym for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Everything they are talking about, especially right now, goes back to the corruption of the West and Epstein.”
Golkar, who grew up exposed to regime messaging, said the fixation on Epstein reflects a broader ideological goal: convincing Iranians that the West is a place of moral decay.
“From the beginning, one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic’s ideology was anti-Westernism and portraying the West as a corrupt place,” he said. “There is no respect for families or values … no limitation for sexual interaction. I remember the phrase ‘living like pigs’ — that they are living together like animals. That was a big concept.”
Golkar says the Epstein files released by the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year have been a “gift” to the regime, offering a concrete example of the Western immorality it hopes to present to its people. When Iranians express a desire for a “normal life” without Sharia law or morality police, the regime invokes Epstein.
“They say, ‘You don’t want a normal life — you want a corrupted life…. These people don’t care about your freedom. They are a group of pedophiles.’” This, despite the fact that girls can be legally married in Iran at the age of 13, and even younger with the approval of a male guardian and judge.
The Baal game
One of the most prominent features of pro-regime rallies in Iran is the burning of Baal statues. The figure of Baal — meaning “lord” in ancient Semitic languages — is referenced in the Old Testament as a rival to the God of the Israelites. Historically, Baal was a fertility deity associated with rain and agricultural prosperity. Later interpretations and conspiracy theorists came to portray the worship of Baal as tied to sexual deviance and child sacrifice.
A popular online conspiracy theory ties Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators to Baal, pointing to a viral document from the Epstein files that appears to show bank transfer details with the name “Baal.name” listed where a financial institution would typically appear. They interpret this as evidence that Epstein maintained an account connected to the deity, suggesting he may have worshiped Baal or been involved in ritual abuse. Popular right-wing influencer Candace Owens weighed in with a video titled, “BAAL SO HARD: The Epstein Files,” where she referred to Jews as “pagan gypsies.” It has almost 3 million views.
Fact-checkers have disputed the interpretation of the bank document, noting that “Baal.name” is likely a misreading or formatting artifact of “Bank Name,” and that the actual account name — Clearlake Centre, LLC — is clearly identified elsewhere in the record.
On numerous occasions, the Iranian regime has staged the burning of Baal statues in major cities during pro-regime rallies, sometimes even coordinating multiple burnings across the country. Mehr News Agency, a state-owned Iranian news network, reported on one such rally in early February, writing: “Participants set fire to the symbolic Baal idol, describing the act as a representation of condemnation over crimes linked to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, where children were abused.”
These events are often accompanied by chants of “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” or “God is Great.” In some cases, the statues have been marked with a painted Star of David.
The Baal figure has also appeared in many of the AI-generated videos circulating online amidst the war. In one, created by pro-regime media organization Explosive Media, Lego versions of a drunken Pete Hegseth and Trump are paired with a rap track: “We hitting the Baal-worshipping Epstein Island crew, the ones who hurt the kids. Revenge for every American soul you and Trump’s dirty crew oppressed and did. We taking payback for the girls you broke.”
Though Explosive Media claims it is not directly affiliated with the Iranian government, Golkar said he has seen evidence suggesting it operates as part of the IRGC’s media apparatus. The regime has also acknowledged granting tiered internet access to select individuals tasked with amplifying official messaging. In early March, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said full internet access had been given to those “who can carry the voice of the government further.” Explosive Media, which says it has 2.5 million followers across Iranian messaging platforms, has cited its status as a media organization to explain its continued access. This has prompted experts like Moustafa Ayad, a researcher with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, to raise questions about how closely it is connected with the state.
Another video, played on Iranian state TV, depicts figures the regime frames as victims of the West — a Native American man, a Gazan child, an Epstein victim, and former Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US strike in 2019 — gazing skyward as an Iranian missile strikes the Statue of Liberty. In this version, the statue is reimagined as Baal holding a Talmud. Upon impact, both sink into the Hudson River.
The Epstein fixation extends beyond rallies and social media. Golkar said Epstein is frequently referenced in official Basij (a plainclothes paramilitary volunteer militia in Iran) and IRGC materials, as well as in speeches by Iranian officials. Just two days before his assassination, Ali Larijani, Iran’s top security official, posted on X, “It has been reported that what remains of Epstein’s network is working to prepare a conspiracy aimed at fabricating an incident similar to the September 11 attacks, in preparation for accusing Iran of being behind it.”
In another post in response to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Laranjani posted on X, “Mr. Hegseth! Our leaders have been, and still are, among the people. But your leaders? On Epstein’s island!”
The Epstein War?
These propaganda videos are largely made in English. With Iran still in a media blackout, the Iranian people may not be their intended audience.
Shaping global perception through media is a key part of the Iranian war strategy. In a meeting with a group of Iranian poets in 2024, Ayatollah Khamenei, who was assassinated on the first day of the war, stated, “All war is a media war. Whichever actor has greater media influence will achieve their goals.”
The IRGC has spent years building a media apparatus designed to do just that. IRGC-affiliated production studios, media-focused university programs, and cultural centers are dedicated to training and refining propaganda content. Iran also outsources some of its media production to countries more attuned to Western cultural cues, particularly Pakistan.
A key element of the regime’s narrative is the claim that the Trump administration initiated the war to distract from the Epstein files. This theory has also circulated on both the left and the right in the United States.
In Washington D.C., posters cover the streets referring to the War in Iran, formally titled Operation Epic Fury, as Operation Epstein Fury.
U.S. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted on X shortly after the war began, garnering over 250 thousand likes, “Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away, any more than the Dow going above 50,000 will.”
The popular podcaster Joe Rogan espoused the theory on a recent episode, stating, “Look, the Epstein files comes out — we go to war with Iran. It’s a good way to get people to stop talking about certain things.”
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