A section titled “Brooklyn” includes recollections of Epstein’s horrible sexual escapades, apparently including making a maid watch people have sex and holding a knife up while telling women to take off their swimsuits on a boat—a story told in the book under the heading “Girls on My Boat.”Warzel, who frequently writes about online culture, wonders how President Trump's followers will respond to documentary evidence that there really are elites who participate in pedophilia, or at least laugh it off, and that those elites include Trump himself:
... Another man, listed in the “friends” section of the book, refers to Epstein as “you very dear boy,” before disturbingly recounting a night in London that “had you howling with laughter.” In the story, a man named Toto “reached down and pulled [redacted] skirt up to her panties and put his hand on her pussy,” he writes, noting, “The old man smiling sweetly leaned over stuffed his hand into her pants.” The letter also chronicles the “good times that we had together,” the pair “inspecting the Royal School girls dorms.”
... Joel Pashcow, a real-estate executive and Mar-a-Lago Club member, offered a drawing of Epstein giving a lollipop to a group of young girls in 1983, juxtaposed with another drawing of Epstein in 2003 being fellated and massaged by another gaggle of women. The implication is that Epstein has groomed them from an early age.... But his most startling contribution is a photo of him holding a novelty check bearing what appears to be a doctored or rendered version of Trump’s signature. The photo appears alongside a handwritten note suggesting Epstein sold him a “fully depreciated” woman for $22,500.
Exposing depraved elites and bringing them to justice has been a core tenet of many Trump supporters’ politics, and those people have just been served more details of Trump’s association with Epstein.... The birthday book is ... a rare look at what happens when conspiracy theorists actually get what they want.But this isn't the car MAGA conspiratorialists were chasing. They don't just believe in the existence of a massive elite pedophile cabal -- they believe the members of that cabal are exclusively people they politically despise. They're ready to believe that the message from Trump in the birthday book is a hoax or a forgery because, to them, he's one of the good guys -- the good guy, in fact, the one sent by God to smash the cabal to bits -- and they also expected important Democrats to be among the most depraved members of Epstein's circle. (There are letters from Bill Clinton and former senator George Mitchell in the book, but they're among the tamer contributions. None of the GOP base's recent bêtes noires -- Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, George Soros -- are in the book.)
Images from the birthday book are littered across numerous threads on 4chan’s “politically incorrect” message board.... Overall, though, the reaction to the book feels somewhat muted, given its contents. Despite the volume of posts, the tone across social media feels disproportionately apathetic. “So what do you want to do about it?” one poster wrote in response to the Trump letter. Even in communities such as Reddit’s r/conspiracy, there seems to be a broad feeling of not knowing what exactly to do with this information. Some threads contain the usual amateur sleuthing and theorizing. There is also a good bit of anger toward Trump and Epstein. But among those who have engaged with the document, much of the reaction has a “dog that caught the car” vibe. The conversations aren’t spiraling in the ways I’ve witnessed before.
In July, Warzel wrote a piece titled "Nobody (Not Even Trump) Can Control the Epstein Story." He genuinely seems to believe that, even though, as he notes now, the Republican base is waving the story away.
So far, the right-wing media ecosystem appears to be doing a good job dismissing the story. MAGA pundits have avoided talking about the documents or outright denied what they seem to depict. Alex Jones, who has been so obsessed with the Epstein story for years that he broke down in tears when the administration said it wouldn’t produce the late financier’s client list, had no mention of the book on his Infowars website as of midday. Fox News’s article about the birthday book, which was on its front page earlier this evening, mentions Clinton in the headline but contains zero mention of Trump at all. MAGA pundits including Charlie Kirk are suggesting that Trump’s signature is fake. Benny Johnson, another MAGA personality, suggested on his YouTube show today that Epstein forged Trump’s signature.So apparently Trump and the Republican propaganda machine can control the Epstein story, at least within the right-wing bubble.
Curiously, Elon Musk’s X, which thrives on conspiracy theories, did not have any Epstein mention in its “Trending Topics” page this morning and early afternoon.
In that bubble, Epstein is yesterday's news. The most important story in the world is a murder that took place last month on the light rail system in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The Republican base prefers this story because, unlike the Epstein story as it has developed, this story has a narrative that matches up exactly with the base's prejudices: the female victim is blonde, the suspect is a Black male who's previously been freed on cashless bail, the crime took place on public transportation in a city with a Democratic mayor, in a state with a Democratic governor (who's now running for a Senate seat held by a Republican).
Republican voters didn't gravitate toward the Epstein story because they're inherently conspiratorial. They gravitated toward it because it offered them an opportunity to feel hatred toward a wide range of their enemies. The story isn't working for them in that way anymore, so they're no longer interested. The murder in North Carolina is giving them what they want.
No comments:
Post a Comment