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I think the article is a bit lazy. It's not that there's some magical connection between climate denial and Epstein denial. It's that denial is Donald Trump's go-to tactic when faced with inconvenient facts (or, more specifically, DARVO ).
The DARVO has permeated into government now, because of Trump. If you ask a Republican an inconvenient question, they not only deny it, but accuse you of bad faith for even asking the question.
Denialism of all forms is something really quite fundamental to the Republican/conservative movement, and has been for a long time, too. It's not like Taco invented any of this. It's bedrock in their memeplex.
I've spent a fair amount of time debating things like evolution with cons, and they'd get butthurt and feign shock at being called denialists. They want to be called "skeptics". In all of their tactics - whether they are denying the Holocaust, denying the moon landing, denying vaccines, HIV caused AIDS, or denying the very basics of biology, they don't behave anything at all like skeptics, and so they don't get that term.
But this is probably why they formed their own parallel universe of media - they don't want to even agree to basic FACTS and that will allow them to continue to engage in denialism for their base. The qons never really got over the fact that Nixon was rightly run out of the WH and some of them vowed to never allow something like that again. They were not worried about the corruption; they wanted no consequences for Republicans and conservatives. Now that they have seized so much of the media, the end state of Watergate would be to just shrug it off. In fact, they achieved any earlier win with Iran/Contra - they paid almost no political cost for a crime that was WAY worse than Watergate even back then.
The qons never really got over the fact that Nixon was rightly run out of the WH and some of them vowed to never allow something like that again.
Roger Ailes was one of Nixon's media advisors during Watergate. The lesson he learned was that if the media had been in Nixon's pocket, Nixon never would have had to resign. Years later, Ailes would be CEO of Fox News....
DARVO (an acronym for "deny, attack, reverse victim and offender") is a reaction that perpetrators of wrongdoing, such as sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. Some researchers indicate that it is a common manipulation strategy of psychological abusers.
-Wikipedia
I'm sure he'll repeat it enough times that at least some portion of his base buys it, too. Just like he and all his apparatchiks talk about the "Russia hoax" as if it was in ANY way established that HIS TIES to Russia are somehow a "hoax".
Of course, lots of centrists and even leftists like those on The Useful Idiots podcast keep acting as if it was a nothingburger. The same helpful sort that now say, "well, the Democrats were in charge for 4 years under Biden, why didn't they release the Epstein files then?" - when it's the unhinged, foaming-at-the-mouth right that has made nonsense like "pizzagate" and qanon almost their single issue all this time...it was THEY who talked about "The Storm", not Democrats. The Democrats are just now saying to Taco and their base - hey, you guys were obsessed with this shit, why not do the easy thing and just release everything you have, with PPI related to victims redacted?
FFS.
this specific line of attack—in which he claims that those demanding more documents on Epstein are “weaklings” falsely convinced of a plot cooked up by Democrats to advance radical leftist goals—follows a familiar playbook: namely, that of climate denial, which claims (among other things) that climate change is a plot cooked up by Democrats to advance radical leftist goals. Let’s call Trump’s new position Epstein Denial.
I think it's saying that large groups wanted to deny climate change because they profited, and that no one wants to deny Epstein because no one profits off it.