QAnon helped hide the cabal in plain sight
How the Epstein files explain our current hellish reality
So it turns out the QAnon and #Pizzagate folks had a point. There was a global child trafficking cabal committing crimes and exploiting girls and young women across the globe. They also got almost all the details wrong.
Epstein and the powerful men he catered to had no need to use code words like “pizza” or be coy in any way about what was happening. When you look through the troves of files, emails, and photos, it’s striking how comfortable these folks were documenting their activities and communicating regularly with a convicted sex offender, on mediums that could easily be accessed via court order. And then there’s Donald Trump, cast as the hero of QAnon in particular, who, as it turns out, was just one of many creeps Jeffrey Epstein was doing heinous crimes with.
There’s a lot to unpack in the released materials, and I suspect that’s why the news has been a slow drip. The reach of Epstein’s network is a story that touches every sector. It’s politics, academia, royalty, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. Pick your flavor of elite person or institution, and Jeffrey Epstein probably had a connection. We knew many of the folks he was corresponding with already (and honestly, most of the new names aren’t a surprise when you think about it), but the scale is staggering.
As I’ve been wrapping my head around how to write about Epstein, Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter this week was really helpful. Broderick, who covers a lot of the same topics we do here, with a laser focus on meme culture, points out how what we learned from the documents, particularly Epstein’s relationship to the founder of 4chan’s /pol/ forum, changes and expands the narrative many of us believed about the last decade.
Broderick:
I had a front row seat to the collapse of the global order. And I believed at the time that I understood what was going on. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, far-right extremists, aided and amplified by Russia’s Internet Research Agency and funded by Republican dark money, infiltrated fringe online spaces. They weaponized disaffected young men, and used sites like Reddit and 4chan to organize a flood of content that influenced the unthinking algorithms on larger platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But there were always holes in that explanation that I could never quite account for. A feeling — one that can be quite dangerous for a journalist trying not fall into the void of conspiracy theories — that there was something bigger going on. And while I can’t say that we have the complete story yet, it does increasingly feel like I was actually, without knowing it, following Jeffrey Epstein around the world the whole time.
What breaks my brain is how many of the people propagating false QAnon and #Pizzagate conspiracy theories, winking and nodding to them, and sending true believers into a frenzy on a regular basis were interacting with Epstein, a convicted sex offender whose behavior was well known, the entire time. As I’ve said before, with MAGA, it’s always projection, but this is a level of projection even I hadn’t anticipated. There’s just something so sinister about using the global child trafficking ring to rile up MAGA while also being connected to a global child trafficking ring, even tangentially.
It also makes me understand some of the very public MAGA breakups – Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, perhaps whatever is going on with Nancy Mace – in a different way. I think in particular of Taylor Greene saying that she no longer believed in QAnon and claiming that she was a victim of social media disinformation. It’s clear that at some point she started to realize that Donald Trump wasn’t the man she thought he was, and his Epstein stonewalling seems to have been the breaking point. At a certain point, the evidence became so big that they couldn’t ignore it anymore. And while I don’t see MAGA collapsing anytime soon, I suspect there are a lot more folks in that movement quietly realizing that their God Emperor Trump has been the predator all along.
There’s a lot more I could get into, such as Epstein probably selling kompromat to Russia and Israel, and the fact that Epstein’s lawyers indicated he was ready to give up names less than two weeks before he was found dead in his cell. Or whatever his connection to Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell, was, and the various theories around that. Generally, I try to avoid conspiratorial thinking, but the more I read and absorb, the harder it is not to go down my own rabbit holes. At the same time, I’m not sure how much of it matters in the grand scheme of things.
The Epstein story has always been a story about corruption and how weak and corrupt institutions were easily exploited by him. I think a lot about the early days of conversations around disinformation and how every report and slide deck would have “decreased trust in institutions” as a reason people were susceptible to mis and disinformation. But I always thought that missed the point. Mis and disinformation weren’t causing people to trust institutions less. People no longer trusted institutions and were more susceptible to mis and disinformation because they already knew institutions had failed them. The corruption was obvious, and those at the top were rarely held accountable in meaningful ways. We could all see the corruption and lack of accountability in plain sight, so of course, some people started going down rabbit holes and coming up with the wildest possible theories to explain everything.
Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and everyone in their orbit were able to operate openly as long as they did because elites and institutions were willing to play ball. They knew who Epstein was, but were more than happy to take his money and ask for his assistance when they needed it. Epstein is the most depraved example of corruption, but we all know it’s far from the only one. And the vast majority of us, who aren’t billionaires or billionaire-adjacent, feel the impact of how institutions are failing us every day.
The people currently running America, who aim to run the world, seek to destroy and dismantle it piece by piece. The same people with enough money and power involved in or adjacent to the global child trafficking ring, without fear of consequences, are trying to ensure they have even more power over us all and that any institutions they don’t destroy serve only them and their interests. True believers of QAnon and #pizzagate thought they were onto the grand conspiracy, but missed that they were merely pawns in the game, another group to be exploited all along.
ICYMI
Ron Wyden Only Talks Like This When The Spies Do Something *Real* Bad (Forever Wars) If, like me, you’ve been curious about Senator Wyden’s public warning shot to the CIA, Spencer Ackerman has some helpful context about Wyden and the potential seriousness of this matter.
All About “Reactionary Centrism” (Volts) I really enjoyed this podcast interview of Michael Hobbes from David Roberts. I’m a fan of Hobbes and his take on reactionary centrism and intellectual elites generally, but this interview serves as a nice explainer of what it is and the harm it does to American political discourse.
The Power of Mocking Trump’s Pathetic Monsters (Mother Jones) Some examples of Alinsky’s 5th rule for radicals on the ground in Minneapolis.
Why Young State Lawmakers Are Weighing the Exit (Axios) I’m not especially surprised to learn that Millennial and Gen Z officeholders are considering whether it’s worth the trouble, but it’s concerning. Especially since if we have any hope of reviving electoral politics, we need more candidates with new ideas and energy from these generations.
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Coda
I hope everyone enjoys the Super Bowl (AKA Bad Bunny Bowl). I’m married to a lifelong Seahawks fan, so I’ll be rooting for the Hawks tonight. Thanks so much for reading and supporting the newsletter. I’ll see you again next week!
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