Jeffrey Epstein’s name is being screamed into the headlines again. The late and former self-described best-friend of Donald Trump's highly suspicious 2019 death following his arrest for child sex trafficking has been a loose thread for both rabid conspiracists and the reality-based community.
Now that prominent conspiracy personalities are in the highest positions in America's law enforcement agencies, the QAnon faithful have been expecting all the damning details about the Democrat cabal to emerge. But that's not what's happened.
Now Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino are in the collective hot seat as MAGA demand answers, while some appear to be colluding with Donald Trump in their own Deep State cover-up.
Show Notes
Why is MAGA so obsessed with the Epstein files?
Trump can't stop MAGA from obsessing about the Epstein files
Why do Trump's MAGA followers care so much about the Epstein files?
Republicans are split over the Trump administration’s handling of Epstein files
How Trump spent years stoking dark theories, and why he’s facing Epstein case blowback now
'We want justice done': Christianity Today calls to see the Epstein files
146: The Reality of Online Child Abuse (w/Håkon Høydal) — Conspirituality
Online child sexual exploitation: A statistical profile of police-reported incidents in Canada, 2014 to 2022
Woman who accused Donald Trump of raping her at 13 drops lawsuit
Perversion of Justice: Jeffrey Epstein | Miami Herald
Perversion of Justice – HarperCollins
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She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.
She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people.
Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't.
I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real?
Is this real?
I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying.
This is a story all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh.
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right?
And I maximized that while I was lying.
Listen to DeepCover, The Truth About Sarah, wherever you get your podcasts.
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story, because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, wherever you get your podcasts.
MUSIC Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspirituality 267.
Epstein never died.
The late and former self-described best friend of Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein's name, has screamed into the headlines again over the last few weeks, in case you didn't notice.
His highly suspicious 2019 death, officially by suicide, following his arrest for child sex trafficking, has been a loose thread for both rabid conspiracists and the reality-based community.
Now that prominent conspiracy personalities are in the highest positions in America's law enforcement agencies, the QAnon faithful have been expecting all of the damning details about just what kinds of dirt the elite pedophile was supposedly holding over the Democrat cabal to blackmail them, who flew on the private jet to his Caribbean island.
But the twists and turns of the last seven months of Trump 2.0 have been self-contradictory, confusing, and enraging to many on the right.
A staged release of Epstein binders that contained nothing new.
Claims of having the client list and then of it not existing.
Tens of thousands of videos purported to be of his sex crimes, then reframed as child porn downloaded from the internet that will never see the light of day.
The surveillance video from outside his jail cell that was released with three missing minutes.
Now, newly minted Attorney General Pam Bondi, an FBI director, and his second-in-command, Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, are in the collective hot seat as MAGA demand answers.
And they appear, while in some cases feuding with one another, to be colluding with Donald Trump in their own deep state cover-up.
Okay, so we know a lot, and then we don't know a lot.
We know that Epstein was a sex criminal and a pedophile with an ungodly amount of wealth, $560 million estimated at the time of his death in 2019, either in real estate or in offshore accounts divided up between the two, but we still don't know how he made it all.
Managing Les Wexner's accounts was lucrative, but probably not that lucrative.
We also know that Trump was his close friend for 15 years, starting in 1987.
They partied, hobnobbed, flew together on Epstein's jet, usually between New York and Palm Beach, seven times in the 1990s.
Now, a lot of people were on that plane, as we know.
Bill Clinton, for instance, took 26 trips on a so-called Lolita Express, which was kitted out with an orgy bed.
Recent reporting in the New York Times, echoing reports in The Guardian going back to 2019, recount how on one occasion in 1992, Trump and Epstein were the only true male attendees of a calendar girl party at Mar-a-Lago, with one of Trump's handlers being quoted as saying, hey, I thought there was going to be more sort of VIPs here.
Where's everybody else?
And they're like, eh, it's just us.
And that was the night that Trump logged one of the 25 separate allegations of sexual assault.
Every one of them he has dodged, except the civil suit rape allegation brought by Gene Carroll, adjudicated against him with a penalty of $5 million in 2023, but then $83 million more in a defamation ruling the following year because he talked shit about her.
Of course, he hasn't paid a dime.
Now, another important, very well-documented story is that in 2002, Ghelane Maxwell hired Virginia Juffray, then 16, out of the hallway at Mar-a-Lago to massage Epstein, who, of course, assaulted her.
She went on, she claimed, to be trafficked to high-roller associates like Prince Philip, who of course denies it.
Passed around like a platter of fruit, she said.
She died by suicide this past April.
Yeah, and then the 2005 testimony of a 14-year-old girl who said she'd been paid to undress and massage Epstein led to his arrest and trial.
His subsequent 2008 lenient sentencing on soliciting prostitution from a minor has long been the subject of controversy and conspiracy theories because Epstein was given a sweetheart plea deal despite three dozen more victims being discovered.
He was ordered to pay restitution to those victims and then serve 18 months, which he did in an uncharacteristically cushy Palm Beach stockade, from which he was given 12 hours a day of work release, six days a week.
And after just 13 months of that, he was released under a definition of house arrest that somehow included leeway to fly to New York and the Caribbean at will.
Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney who agreed to this plea deal, later said he was instructed from above to, quote, leave it alone because Epstein was, quote, above his pay grade and belonged to intelligence.
Acosta would end up being appointed as labor secretary under Trump.
And the labor secretary plays a big role in enforcing trafficking laws, of course.
Now, there's no full accounting of Epstein's crimes.
That black hole is at the heart of the problem.
But the best archive we have was compiled between 2017 and 2018 when Julie K. Brown, an incredible investigative journalist for the Miami Herald, identified 80 previously unknown Epstein victims, interviewed them, platformed their stories, which often were accounts of being cruised by Ghillain or by other trafficking victims from the poor side of Palm Beach to offer massage jobs, quote unquote, to Epstein.
She wrote eight sweeping bulletproof articles that reopened what had become the Epstein cold case.
And she's updated it all for a 2023 book, which is excellent and also quite sober because, you know, she never really says more than she knows, which is very hard with this stuff.
As the preeminent reporter on this material, she says she doesn't see enough clear evidence that Epstein was literally acting as a pimp or extorting his wealthy friends.
For her, the story is much more about greased palms than guns to the head in the alleyway.
It's less about zero-sum transactions and more about shared lifestyles of impunity that allowed Epstein to leverage connections to his advantage.
And then in 2019, when Epstein was arrested for a second time, now on sex trafficking charges, his previous evasion of accountability was put under a microscope and Alex Acosta would then resign from the Trump administration.
And along with that, the conspiracy theories began, which only were boosted by Epstein's supposed suicide on August 9th of 2019, discovered dead in his cell, both of his guards having fallen asleep with two surveillance cameras apparently malfunctioning, all of which, of course, is objectively very suspicious.
Including the fact that the initial autopsy showed that he didn't kill himself, that actually it must have been foul play.
Yeah, there were some strange anatomical anomalies that didn't seem to be possible in the normal course of self-hanging, right?
Right.
Epstein's case, therefore, has long been a feature of QAnon adjacent conspiracy theories, and the spreaders of these theories, which has a near Venn overlap with MAGA, have been waiting for years for justice to be done to the elites aboard Epstein's infamous plane.
Die-hard MAGAs are calling for the release of the full Epstein files, believing the action will decimate the corrupt Democrat establishment.
Yet, here's how their hero recently replied about the very case he spent years championing as a way to expose the elites.
Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?
This guy's been talked about for years.
You're asking, we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things.
And are people still talking about this guy, this creep?
That is unbelievable.
I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this where we're having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas.
It just seems like a desecration, but you go ahead.
I call all of my best friends creeps.
I just can't believe.
He's so close to pulling off the performance of moral outrage, but then his narcissism creeps and he has to say, well, we're achieving such amazing things.
But look, we're here for the desecration, guys.
And that, of course, was Donald Trump sitting in a cabinet meeting beside his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and appealing to good taste.
I mean, with the tragedy in Texas, which we don't want to make light of.
Yeah, do you notice, too, though, that like, according to the rule of three, he's trying to go there with that phrase.
He says, what with the thing in Texas?
And he kind of gets caught up and he can't really think of the next two things because his brain is mush.
Anyway, he's going to do whatever he can in his neo-Kayfabe style to deflect, redirect, go on the offensive, flip the psychology like Darvo style, which is very QAnon because the reporter then is suddenly desecrating or perverting things by pinging his own perversion, right?
Like that's the strategy.
And the thing about Neo-Kayfabe allah Josie Reisman is that because the only thing that matters is the present moment on stage, it allows for the strong possibility that he has very little memory, actually, of the crimes he committed with this guy, because that was a game too.
It was a normal, fluid, common ground of his everyday life.
If you read Brown's reporting on the original case opened in Palm Beach against Epstein in 2004, she describes neighbors spotting cabs and limousines bringing girls to his mansion several times a day, four or five times.
Epstein was not somebody who worked a job.
Like, this is a guy who lived in a perpetual bender haze of criminal sex.
And anyone who was his friend or hung out in that would have probably been in that haze of oblivion as well in some sort of like id fugue state.
And so this is what we're asking about, or rather, this is what the MAGA faithful are demanding transparency about, along with, as it turns out, a lot of Democrat lawmakers.
But more about that in a bit.
What you heard was a clip from a cabinet press conference on July 8th.
And that's the day after Pam Bondi had said she'd looked at the file, and there was no evidence Epstein kept a client list after all or had been murdered.
Yeah, and this comes a few Months after she told Fox that the client list was on her desk waiting to be reviewed.
As normally happens with MAGA, the exact wording or phrasing has been of endless debate, and they were able to try to wiggle their way out of it.
But in this case, it seems like a lot of the MAGA faithful are not letting her go on that one.
Yeah, yeah.
And so then, you know, we're going back to February, then right after that, she invited 15 MAGA influencers to the White House for photo ops, clutching binders labeled Epstein files, phase one.
So yeah, Jack Pasobiak, DC Draino, Libs of TikTok, I.E., Chaya, Raychek, Liz Wheeler.
Every time I read a list of these names, I feel like I'm reading a cast list for like a Looney Tunes movie on IMDb or something.
Yeah, they all had their moment in the sun, but then after digging through their binders, they were like, all of this has been public for a long time.
Where's the beef?
Well, that's the sleight of hand at the heart of QAnon baking, right?
Like the dopamine hit is that they're getting access, but it's to the open internet, like binders with printouts of the redacted files that are posted to FBI.gov.
But that's what QAnon always was, right?
It was the invention of a more secret internet within the internet.
And meanwhile, like Julie Brown and Will Summer and all these actual people know what a FOIA request is.
Yeah.
And the thing is, like the whole, the whole mythology around Q is that he had Q-level security clearance, right?
That he was he was an insider and he knew all the dirt.
And so this has been the fantasy that when we can get enough people into the inside, then we're going to find out the truth that Q has been telling us about all along.
And so once Pam Bondi became the object of this derision and sort of, you know, fury that like, what are you giving us this random stuff for?
She then turns around and dramatically sends a letter to the new FBI head, Cash Patel, who's even more of a flagrant conspiracy theorist.
And that letter, of course, available in this theatrical style on the Department of Justice server for anyone to read of Pam Bondi very sternly demanding all of the withheld documents be sent to her by 8 a.m. the following morning, or else you're going to bed without supper.
No idea if that happened.
But the following month, she reiterated the client list reference that Derek mentioned, saying it's under review.
Then in May, she told reporters at the White House that there were tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or of child porn.
Yeah, and that was something she'd already said on a hidden camera to a random woman in a restaurant.
So when that got exposed, then she said the exact same words to the press.
That same month, Cash Patel and his sidekick deputy, Dan Bongino, went on Fox News and said, no doubt, Epstein killed himself.
But one of the wild subplots in this whole thing is that Patel and Bongino, who are perhaps the least qualified of all of the Trump 2025 appointees.
Hey, that's not fair to RFK Jr.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Yeah, he does a really good job of selling himself.
You're right.
You're right.
He's much less qualified.
These guys were both rabid conspiracy theories on the MAGA podcast circuit for years, and they were baying for the adrenochrome-rich Democrat elite blood to be spilled on the Jeffrey Epstein case.
So here's Bongino from back in 2023.
And then we'll contrast that in the clip with he and Patel on Fox News in 2025, this past May.
That Jeffrey Epstein story is a big deal.
Please do not let that story go.
Keep your eye on this.
Catherine Rummler, I want you, we need to keep the heat on this case, folks.
There are a lot of people who are knee-deep in the Washington swamp who are not telling you the truth about serious allegations out there that Epstein may have had video and audio of people out there doing things they shouldn't have been doing.
And you should be asking yourself the question, how is it that all these people, the CIA director, the Obama fixer, Bill Clinton, all intersected pasts with Jeffrey Epstein?
Jeffrey Epstein isn't with us anymore, and nobody seems to want to talk about it.
You know a suicide when you see one, and that's what that was.
He killed himself.
Again, you want me to get?
I've seen the whole file.
He killed himself.
Okay, I just want to ask, like, what does Bongino mean in telling his listeners to turn up the heat?
Like, this is where I really sort of remember that so much of the rhetoric of QAnon is actually sort of religious in nature because it's kind of like believe harder and believe harder by holding the line and posting more or maybe buy the merch.
He never really says, you know, phone your reps to, you know, get something happening democratically.
So the way they try to sort of like democratize the gamification of the government, which they have nothing to do with, but now the joke's on Bongino, is at the heart of the backlash.
So then June 5th, Elon Musk, he has been publicly feuding with Trump, and then he tweets the following.
Time to drop the really big bomb.
Donald Trump is in the Epstein files.
That's the real decision.
They haven't been released.
That's the real reason they haven't been released.
Have a nice day, DTJ.
And the following day, Cash went on to Rogan, where I think he's been on a few times.
He contradicted Bondi there by saying that no videos of anyone committing felonies exist.
And if there were, of course he would share them, but he also would never re-victimize the women, which is the real reason he won't share them because he's such a stand-up guy.
Yeah, there's a contradiction in there, which is it?
There are no videos or there are, but he wants to protect the women who are in them.
Well, the contradiction is also just a typically dumb QAnon misfire because what's missing from the whole thing is that it's impossible to release child sex abuse materials.
None of these people would have the clearance to even examine them.
Like the legal forensics around that stuff are locked down.
Like when I interviewed Haken Heudel about his dark web CSA reporting, he described how law enforcement has to view and identify CSA through filters that don't even allow them to see the full images.
And then reporters are only allowed access to computer generated reports.
Like they're presenting it to the public as though they're like, I don't know, file folders on a table that people can like open up and there's Polaroids in them or something like that.
It has nothing to do with that whatsoever.
Yeah, they're just looking at the discs on a DVD Player in a room with the blinds drawn, right?
Yeah, right.
Yeah, so no, no, seeming familiarity with procedure or the technical details of how this stuff works.
They have no idea what they're doing.
So, cut now to July 5th, and the DOJ quietly releases a memo that basically says Epstein died by suicide in his cell back in August of 2019, and there is no client list.
The memo included 11 hours of surveillance video footage that was meant to show that no one had gone in or out of his of Epstein's jail cell and killed him.
So, Wired, which I have to say, along with Rolling Stone and a couple of other independent or more independent publications, is doing some of the top gumshoe reporting on Trump 2.0, reported that the raw prison surveillance video released by the DOJ was not a direct export from the original surveillance system, but it was edited using Adobe Premiere Pro software, and it was saved four times.
So, metadata analysis revealed that the footage was stitched together from two separate clips, and that approximately two minutes, 53 seconds were cut out from one of the source files.
So it's kind of piling up.
Like everybody knows that Epstein is a monster who is wildly connected, mysteriously wealthy, best friends with Trump, personal banker of Les Wexner.
He basically was pardoned of sex crimes by a future Trump cabinet minister.
And then there's media pieces dating back over 20 years in which Trump implicates himself as a pedophile sex partier.
And on the eve Epstein will have to stand trial, he commits suicide, apparently, with a blanket or maybe his CPAP machine, which is pretty hard to do.
But someone has edited the surveillance tape and the original autopsy ruled it a murder.
And Ghelane Maxwell is convicted in a very narrowly focused case through the testimony of four women victims.
But Julie K. Brown interviewed 80.
But no, there's no more information available from the DOJ.
Everybody knows, but nobody can really know.
That's where we're at.
Yeah.
And so given everything, the case you just laid out, Matthew, Bongino seems to have threatened to resign at some point here unless Bondi gets fired, leaving Cash Patel to be the reasonable one.
He said in a tweet.
Yeah, he puts it to rest by saying, conspiracies just aren't true, never have been.
It's an honor to serve the president of the United States, Donald Trump, and I'll continue to do so for as long as he calls on me.
I love how they always have to name him after they say the president of the United States as if we fucking forget.
Anyway, he also misspoke there because it's conspiracy theories that just aren't true, not conspiracies, dude.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Yeah, the sort of flattery of the dear leader is just so shameless.
So here we are.
We're kind of all caught up.
This thing keeps developing and there's always these new tensions, some of which are surprising.
On July 8th, Pam Bondi and Trump had the moment that started off this segment in the clip.
And I just loved him saying, it seems like a desecration, but go ahead.
And here's how she then went ahead and just totally like cleared everything up, thankfully.
It seems like a desecration, but you go ahead.
Sure, sure.
First, to back up on that, in February, I did an interview on Fox, and it's been getting a lot of attention because I said, I was asked a question about the client list, and my response was, it's sitting on my desk to be reviewed, meaning the file, along with the JFK, MLK files as well.
That's what I meant by that.
Also, to the tens of thousands of video, they turned out to be child porn downloaded by that disgusting Jeffrey Epstein.
Child porn is what they were.
Never going to be released, never going to see the light of day.
To him being an agent, I have no knowledge about that.
We can get back to you on that.
And the minute missing from the video, we released the video showing definitively, the video was not conclusive, but the evidence prior to it was showing he committed suicide.
And what was on that, there was a minute that was off the counter.
And what we learned from Bureau of Prisons was every year, every night, they redo that video.
It's old from like 1999.
So every night the video is reset and every night should have the same minute missing.
So we're looking for that video to release that as well, showing that a minute is missing every night.
Wow.
So anyone who wants to Ocean's 11 their way into that facility and assassinate a prisoner with wonderful secrets should know that the same minute is available every day when the cameras are resetting, which is wild.
I guess the later assessment of three missing minutes hadn't broken yet, but this just really sounds like a likely story.
Plus, my speculation is that Cash and Pam's shared conviction that the videos of sex crimes will never be released is perhaps the thing that has Dan Bongino going through such a crisis of conscience.
Brown says that there's nothing on Pam Bonbi's desk.
It's not like that.
It's not in a cardboard box.
We're talking about rooms full of files and digital media.
And with regard to countless tapes, everybody knows there's no such thing as a collection like that without accomplices, camera people, fellow traffickers, enormous networks of victims and their family members.
If they've done anywhere near their jobs with that data, there is a ton of network details.
Like part of the QAnon panic is this notion that child sex abuse materials are being produced at rates that no one can keep track of or prosecute.
Now, that's not entirely untrue because the track record is poor, but it's not like nothing happens.
In Canada, for example, here between 2014, 2022, police recorded 50,000 online child sexual exploitation cases and cleared 23% of them, resulting in charges or other outcomes.
So we're supposed to believe in this case that the DOJ has thousands of instances they haven't followed up on or can't.
And if they can't release any of that because it would prejudice legal proceedings or violate rights, Bondi could say that.
But it honestly sounds like she doesn't know what she's talking about.
And for some reason, this is what MAGA sniffs out, you know, really with a really strong nose.
And it's ironic, I think, that misogyny is playing a role in choosing who the fall guy is going to be here so far.
So, Bongino is not the only one.
The MAGA commentariat has been losing their mind and, quite frankly, turning on these cabinet members and even on Trump.
President Trump, if you think that all of this good is happening because of you, that's crazy.
You think you're in control?
No, God is in control.
So I have to say at this point, if you look at the scales here, whether it happened a year ago or six months ago or a month ago, stuff really started to change when Elon left with what he discovered.
And I think it has a lot of credibility to what he said.
Crumb's implicated here.
I'm not saying it's sex abuse of kids, but definitely somehow, maybe somebody close to him.
That's what I've been told.
He says, if you're not on board with the Epstein cover-up, oh, I don't want your support.
You're a weakling.
You.
You.
You suck.
You are fat.
You are a joke.
You are stupid.
You are not funny.
You are not as smart as you think you are.
And if you watched my show, you know, I've been very critical.
I've never been this far.
This just goes to show this entire thing has been a scam.
When we look back on the history of populism in America, we are going to look back on the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in American history.
Right.
Your conclusion is that they're covering something up.
And my conclusion is that there's wild incompetence happening at the level of the Attorney General.
And that's the reason why Dan is upset.
I think you're trusting the conclusions of that memo and a decision made by our administration to move past this far too much.
I mean, I'm pro-Trump.
I'm a Trump supporter.
But I think they've made a decision that they want to put this in the rear view.
You think it's because there's absolutely no there there and you're crediting that claim.
And I have doubts about whether that's true.
All right.
So that was Alex Jones, in case you didn't recognize his gravelly voice, followed by Nick Fuentes, who was the one uttering all the expletives.
And then Ben Shapiro talking to Megan Kelly and Megan Kelly, you know, being more skeptical, actually, than Ben Shapiro is about Trump's motives.
And this was after Donald Trump on July 16th had lashed out at his own supporters on social media.
He called those who were focused on the case weaklings and that their demands for the file's release was bullshit and said he didn't want their support anymore.
Yeah, he hates his followers because he has to keep deceiving them and failing them and hiding from the fact that he's fucking them over.
And he believes they're too stupid for him to bother with, but he resents needing them at the same time.
So it's kind of a remarkable moment because the whole tone he takes is exactly the tone he takes towards every other political enemies.
And it happens suddenly.
And we're not diagnosing here, but that is a very borderline moment, right?
That flip.
He's definitely flipped into demonizing all of the people who he previously loved.
The rest of that post was this jumbled bingo card of references to the radical left and crooked Hillary and the Russia probe and the Steel dossier and the Jeffrey Epstein scam, as he's calling it now.
And then after their reactive outbursts, some of which we just played for you, many of those same prominent MAGA pundits, including Charlie Kirk, by the way, just turned around and said, you know, I've decided on this one, I can just trust my friends in the government.
There's nothing to see here.
Let's all move along and start talking about something else.
And then, of course, you start having all of the resurrection of the accusations that the Obama administration somehow, you know, did something nefarious with the Russia probe.
In a whiplash-inducing move, right after this, Big Daddy Trump turns around on July 17th and tells Pam Bondi to seek the public release of the grand jury documents on the case that he's been saying is a scam cooked up by the Democrats.
Earlier that day, the Wall Street Journal article he apparently tried very hard to suppress was published.
And that contained revelations about a letter and a lewd sketch that Trump had included in a special 50th birthday gift compilation of messages bound in a book for Jeffrey Epstein.
The letter seems to imply that the presidents and the now-dead pedophile had some shared interests.
And it ends with the words, may every day be another wonderful secret.
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself, now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, wherever you get your podcasts.
We know that conspiracy theories often emerge due to gaps in knowledge.
This isn't always true because plenty of conspiracy theories persist even though contradictory evidence is presented.
But our brains fill in gaps when information isn't available, that is an evolutionary trait.
And this is particularly interesting in the field of conspiracy theories and why they flourish, because child sex abuse is a very old phenomenon, both real and imagined.
And because in this instance, there really was, it seems, a lot of abuse going on.
The gaps in this case occur because the public isn't sure who was or wasn't on the island.
And that has left a lot of room for speculation, hearsay, and accusations.
Yeah, so gaps of knowledge for sure, and they intersect with like social and political needs and grievances that come from every direction.
And so we've got MAGA influencers realizing they got played and probably helped elect a pedophile.
The QAnon hangers on, they realize their myth was true, but it was inside out and misdirected.
Mainstream Democrats are having these gnawing questions come up again about what kind of men Bill Clinton and Bill Gates are really like.
Joe Q Public folks have their own stories of betrayal and distrust.
They may not connect them together into an overall picture, but there's people who, like in their own sort of demographics, know separately about MKUltra or the Catholic Church, veterans who have to live with what they were ordered to do in Iraq, people who remember residential schools or the Panama papers, women who sought accountability during Me Too and got a Manosphere backlash instead.
And then we have leftists who are like perennially depressed by the overall picture they can't stop seeing, but also know that the contradictions of wealth and power can never ultimately be contained.
And so, yeah, all of that stuff flows into the absence of knowledge.
That's a good rundown.
Let's look specifically at some of the claims.
And I'm just going broad here because if you spend any amount of time on Twitter and I spent too much just going through comments, it goes in every possible direction.
But obviously, a lot of them believe that the pressure has to be coming from the left.
Some conspiracy theorists are claiming the Biden administration is working behind the scenes to take down Trump, which is just fucking amazing.
They also believe the Epstein files are actually forged files by Obama-Clinton-Biden complex.
Somewhat related.
There's a resurgence in Q-style thinking.
We mentioned this.
The deep state is actively preventing Trump from releasing the files and undermining his presidency from within.
I'm just boggled by this one because Trump is in the office.
Where does this deep state actually exist?
So you have one of Q's biggest proponents, Michael Flynn, who claims that the DOJ is hiding the client list, the same one that was on Bondi's desk.
That's all to take down the president.
And then some others are saying that Trump is actually doing the Democrats' work, going so far to say that Trump is protecting the elites, including himself.
Now, this accusation is no longer coming just from the left for whom, let's be honest, this doesn't sound like much of a conspiracy theory.
This includes people like Steve Bannon.
He said that Trump is going to lose 10% of his base if he's not transparent.
We mentioned earlier, Libs of TikTok and Liz Wheeler.
They both said that the government is stonewalling and undermining trust.
Now, again, these were the people at the White House kind of show and tell, which would they realize what was shown didn't tell very much.
I'm not putting amnesia just on the right because I think everyone across the spectrum can have it given the social media environment we are brokering in here.
But the right has been especially forgiving of the many contradictions that have come from Trump, both in the last term and in this term.
Now, Julian and I will be covering some of that from a different angle on this Saturday's brief where we return to compare two recent Jubilee episodes.
One includes 20 hardcore MAGA stands.
Given how much some of their brands were built on the foundation of an elite cover-up of child sex trafficking, they're not going to be able to slip out of this one so easily.
Can I just make a comment about amnesia impacting everybody?
Because one of the things that has kind of appalled me about my own brain in, you know, looking at this material and preparing for this episode is that I have known most of the details of this case, available details through Julie Brown.
And, you know, there's an amazing Wondery podcast.
There's a Netflix special.
There's all kinds of really good reporting out there, excellent stuff in The Guardian.
The Times has done good work over the years.
I have committed most of that to my memory somewhere.
And yet, it seems like I'm remembering something out of the distant, distant past.
And I think that's because it's very difficult to, given everything that we know about Trump as a political force and his cabinet and the destruction of Project 2025 and rising fascism, it seems to be additionally difficult to just remember that, oh, this is a guy who is like incredibly intimately abusive to young children, right?
To young people.
And I can't really, I don't know.
I have a hard time sort of keeping that on board and like putting that in the center and saying, oh, yeah, that's the leader of the free world.
That's who we have.
Well, if you were to read Nicholas Carr's work about trying to process information on a screen as compared to an actual physical book, I mean, he wrote an entire book about this and the whole book came from the fact that he could no longer read a book because he was always looking at screens.
And I think that plays some role in this because you're taking it to the utmost, the most powerful person in the planet, arguably.
But we do this with everything now.
We just forget all of the time and the medium has to play a role in that.
One other angle of this story that interests me is the religious element.
Last week, Christianity Today's editor-in-chief, Russell Moore, he joined Morning Joe to discuss the fallout with Christians.
Now, he was pretty diplomatic given that different brands of Christianity haven't done so well with pedophiles in the past.
Moore brought up the moral element of atrocity as a North Star for Christians not letting up on this story, which I kind of get.
But he's also talking about a base that has overlooked so many other moral atrocities because Trump is the guy who led to the overturning of Roe v.
Wade.
And so now they have to grapple with a savior figure who delivered their wildest dream, but they're seeing that he's not protecting the children that are born.
And that's another level of dissonance that the base has to contend with now.
Yeah, it's a great point.
And the closest parallel I can see is the Catholic Church organized crime syndicate part of their child sexual abuse history, which unfolded over 50 years, but probably also had roots in missionary history and likely the monastic cultures from long ago.
And this is an opaque, cloistered black box institution.
They were able to hide things for a long time, but they are not a government.
And unlike Trump's administration, especially in a secularizing world, they can be investigated.
And they have to rely on good relations with the state.
And so at some point, they're going to let the inspectors in and they're going to go through a long accountability arc as the result Of it.
It's too little and too late.
But I know from friends and family that it's happening.
Like they've set up offices, they've empowered officers to manage testimony and legal filings.
So if you're a Catholic today and you need to tell them and the state that you were abused long ago, it's not like you're going to be trying to talk to Cash Patel.
Like these days, no one is going to tell you that it didn't happen.
And I think that's what is so, that's the, that's the sort of other model that is providing this sort of contrast for what's happening with the Epstein files in the Trump administration.
Well, stepping back for a moment, when I was preparing for this episode and thinking big picture about how to deal with the fact that someone that you trust isn't telling you the whole truth or any of the truth, it reminded me of Sam Harris's Kindle single short book called Lying from 2013.
And it turns over lying as a philosophical and social construct.
He says that telling the truth requires nothing to keep track of, while lies must continually be protected against for they will collide with reality.
And he goes on, quote, the liar must remember what he said and to whom and must take care to maintain his falsehoods in the future.
This can require an extraordinary amount of work, all of which comes at the expense of authentic communication and free attention.
The liar must weigh each new disclosure to see whether it might damage the facade that he has built.
And all of these stresses accrue whether or not anyone discovers that he has been lying.
And I think this is all a bit deep for Trump's strategy.
I don't think he's playing any sort of chest.
And his base has proven not to care about hypocrisies in the past.
How many times has Trump contradicted himself in the same sentence and his stands just not along?
This has been one of the most baffling aspects of his entire presidency to those of us who care about logical consistencies.
How can you not hear what he's literally saying to everyone?
A few paragraphs later, though, Harris hits upon something that's very telling for this moment, one in which Trump space actually does care about the facade because it's a facade they're constructed, they've constructed to represent the totality of their political reality, that a deep state is pulling the strings of everything.
And to them, if you just expose this one injustice, the rest of the jigsaw puzzle falls into place.
What his base has never realized is what's on the other side of the lie.
So Harris goes on, quote, research indicates that liars trust those they deceive less than they otherwise might.
And the more damaging their lies, the less they trust or even like their victims.
It seems that in protecting their egos and interpreting their own behavior as justified, liars tend to deprecate the people they lie to.
And for me, this becomes apparent when Trump writes, my past supporters have bought into this bullshit hook, line, and sinker.
They haven't learned their lesson and probably never will.
Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work.
While we can never be certain what Trump is actually saying in that jumble of words, I'm going to guess by past supporters, he means people who are pressuring him about this topic now.
So MAGA up until a week ago or two weeks ago at this point, it's quite a display of flailing.
And in many ways, he always shits on his base, right?
I love the uneducated anyone.
But they've always laughed along as if they were in on some kind of inside joke.
Now that Trump's avoiding a topic that they're actually really existentially invested in, the joke isn't so funny anymore.
And Trump seems genuinely stunned that his Jedi mind tricks aren't working.
Thank you.
Okay, so my contribution to all of this is like in a cultural theory op-ed vein, but I've got the late Leonard Cohen riding sidecar.
So the punchline in this 50th birthday letter that Julian referenced, written by Trump to Epstein, included in the book of birthday letters compiled by Ghillan Maxwell and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, is this, quote, and may every day be another wonderful secret.
And the letter reportedly features a sharpie-drawn cartoon of a nude woman with Trump's signature squiggles, which are now famous on executive orders that deny the existence of trans people.
They starve millions in the global south.
They empower ICE, mimicking pubic hair.
So he can use his signature to sign death warrants or doodle pubes.
And I think that sentence might define Trumpian fascism just on the face of it.
All of it, it's like a Paul Verhoeven film.
And my 12-year-old regularly says to me, bruh, America is not a real place.
And so we have these guys attempting again to keep the secret a secret, to bury the zombie.
They're failing.
And it makes me think incessantly about the song Everybody Knows by the late Leonard Cohen.
So he says, everybody knows the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows the war is over.
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor.
The rich get rich.
That's how it goes.
Everybody knows.
So who is the everybody?
I just gave a list of like all of the stakeholders of information seekers, like meaning seekers actually, who are pouring themselves into this vacuum of knowledge.
But what are all of the things we know?
We know that powerful people can do anything.
Often they do terrible things.
We know powerful people protect each other to prevent accountability.
And that's like the most durable form of class solidarity in a socially fragmented world.
We know criminal behavior will hide behind piety, dignity, the disguises of meritocracy.
And at the same time, as the Anons know and say, quote, they rub our faces in it, unquote, that was one of their key refrains.
They're talking about the crimes that they can't quite prove, but they can feel.
The line is about the humiliation of being a nobody and of being alienated from knowledge about what's ultimately happening while also knowing that something is really off.
And so Matthew, you're giving this great rundown of all of the sort of valid reasons why people can end up in a paranoid position where they're very susceptible to conspiracy theories, whether or not those are well evidenced.
And then there's this meta thing going on here, too, where the whole period that we've been in, the whole period that started this podcast off or got us commenting on what's happening in the world, is that all of those justifiable grievances and perceptions of how power really functions have been used against people by actually a very corrupt,
lying, powerful group who does not have their best interests at heart, but wanted to lie to them about where the real evil actually is, right?
Yeah, I think that one of the most difficult things for me to think about is the line between paranoia and the reasonable intuition, right?
And I think that's, I don't think that's going to be resolved anytime soon.
But also what I'm commenting on is how that's been very effectively weaponized.
Absolutely.
Right.
Because there's all sorts of valid grievances, but they're not the things that the QAnon and MAGA folks have become passionate believers in with this cognitive style that then says, you know, the lab leak has proven to be true.
COVID actually was a way of taking away our civil liberties, et cetera, et cetera.
So with regard to that line, they rub our faces in it.
I believe that that particular sentiment is what drives, you know, portions of the culture mad.
And I don't think it's going to be resolved by any further revelations about Epstein's network because there is a sort of a cognitive dissonance or series of contradictions that seem to always be present.
And the anons are right about they rub our faces in it, but their they is misdirected or it might be or it might be too narrowly focused.
So what's the contradiction?
It comes back to, you know, we could use Trump's doodle where he spells out the secret.
The year before that doodle, he gave the famous quote to New York magazine.
I've known Jeff for 15 years, terrific guy.
He's a lot of fun to be with.
It's even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.
No doubt about it.
Jeffrey enjoys his social life.
And that's framed as a secret as well.
It's an allusion to something.
It's a tease.
He's pointing openly to a crime.
And this is a very common mode, like consistently referring obliquely to his criminality or his potential for it.
And then we have the manfluencers sort of doubling down on that on the cultural level, saying, hey, you know what we need is dangerous men.
So one contradiction of power and wealth in our system that I consistently see is that the tycoon has to both conceal and reveal what they're doing.
And they have to strike the right balance.
They have to conceal it because, you know, whether it's pedophilia or wage theft or tax fraud or trying to frame five black boys for a murder in Central Park or brokering a deal to turn Gaza into a destination holiday resort, it's morally wrong.
It's probably illegal.
But then they also have to flash the power around to show what is possible and to convert their lawlessness into social capital.
Because if people don't want what they have, it won't mean anything to them.
If they don't manufacture envy, it's not worth anything.
They have to embody the allure of outrageous fortune while concealing the shame of how it's accumulated.
And there's a way that this has played out, you know, just purely on the political level as well, where the MAGA takeover, the MAGA hollowing out of the Republican Party and the kind of takeover they've been able to achieve, it rides in a parade of now we're finally able to get shit done.
All the stuff that we've been stopped from doing actually by how the process of the House and the Senate functions, the Constitution, the legal system, all of the things that were limiting us before because we actually had checks and balance and some semblance of democracy has been cleared away so that now we can really go on the rampage and get the things done we want to get done, regardless of whether or not they're just completely illegal and cruel and devastating to everything, including the environment.
Yeah.
And as Derek, you were referring to about the notion of clearing out the swamp when you actually become the swamp monster.
It's like you get to the heart of the deep state and that's who you are.
But then there's something else.
There's supposed to be something else that is behind it all.
Like no wonder people go insane.
So there's this really long, boring, nearly impossible to read book from 1972 on all of this.
It's called Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia.
It's by Jill Deleuze and Felix Gattari.
If you can possibly like somehow get through the jargon, it's about how contradictions like this create mass psychosis, which they characterize as schizophrenic because they point out how the powerful must both conceal their sins, but also rub our faces in them.
They point out this bait and switch of the free market promise that we're encouraged to pursue wealth within a framework that ensures most of us will not achieve what is promised.
Now, this is not an original idea.
It's a psychologization that was typical in the 70s of a similar description of contradictions and dissonances that lead to crises that have been talked about for over a century on the left.
And the basic one is that our system socializes production by organizing labor collectively, but then it privatizes the profits.
So there's a mismatch between collective effort and individual ownership, and that fuels class conflict and eventually crisis.
And then there's a contradiction between competition and monopoly and the fact that if you continually depress wages, you create products that your own workers can't afford in cities they get priced out of, and then they get pissed off and the pitchforks come out.
So what is the outcry from the MAGA faithful at this moment other than the crisis of realizing that the boss socialized his support but privatized the profits?
That he pretended to be concerned about American workers while having his neckties and high tops and MAGA hats made in China.
And then when he got them all wearing his hats, he stole their Medicaid.
That he used like Theo Vaughan and Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson and Candace Owens and Marjorie Taylor Greene and all these boobs in the same way that Epstein used everyone around him to draw attention and gather power and say, hey, we can all be transgressive together while always like maintaining this level of etiquette and etiquette and never quite saying the worst things out loud.
And like, don't get me wrong, on the basic level of things, the Epstein case is about pedophilia and sex abuse with hundreds of real victims.
That's why Ghillane is in prison.
It's probably why Virginia Guffrey died by suicide.
It's why there's a dead-end lawsuit.
This is probably the most disturbing thing that I've come across in this entire thing.
I don't know if you know the Katie Johnson lawsuit.
This is a pseudonym.
It was brought in 2016.
It alleged that Epstein trafficked her to Trump when she was 13, another girl with her was 12, and that they both raped her and beat her.
We don't know why her lawyers withdrew the suit.
It just disappeared.
But of course, it's just sitting there on the internet because everybody knows, but nobody can really know.
So the potential collapse of the Trump regime is about the abuse of children, because somehow for MAGA, you know, CSA is now a bridge too far.
But I don't think it would be tearing MAGA and beyond apart if it didn't resonate in the same way as QAnon itself did, as a general metaphor for what the powerful do to the less powerful, even when we can't see it directly.
I think that Q was mesmerizing because it turned an intimate taboo reality, systematic child abuse, into a metaphor for a normalized, banal reality, which is the powerful sucking energy from the bodies of innocents.
Like that's what a dream achrome was.
It's not just in children.
I think it's in everybody.
So I don't think it was just about children.
I think it was about extraction in general.
It was about adults knowing that every man characters like Tom Hanks and normie elites like the Clintons seem to have won the prize of this chronically like unbalanced society.
Terrible things happen and they're at the top and they remain unscathed, but their day should come.
And then there's no tunnel under comic pin pon.
There's no dungeon under the White House.
No mole children in the subway shafts in Manhattan.
No frazzled drip video, no bodies in Wayfair cabinets.
And in relation to those absurdities and the storm, they were left with, you know, maybe Q is the friends we made along the way.
And Trump and his cabinet are now telling them that the one criminal network that was obviously real with evidence under lock and key and ready for the world's eyes is similarly fake.
And that not only that, but they are losers for continuing to care, for not being a nihilist like himself.
Like he's telling them that nothing matters in life.
But I think a lot of them have not given up their humanity fully.
So they're using words like bullshit and gaslighting, the influencers are.
But I think Deleuze and Guattari would say they're suffering from a schizotypal experience.
And this is really funny because there's this Marxist messianic portion of their theory that goes way out into outer space in which they suggest that this whole thing can be a transformative experience if a person feels and integrates it fully.
Like people stay stuck in the thrall of exploitation and abuse so long as they try to manage it, to believe that the conflicts can be resolved or the forces that created Trump can be healed.
But if they somehow recognize that none of these contradictions could ever be sustainable, they might experience, and these are the actual words they use, which is funny.
They can experience a breakthrough and a journey through ego loss that can lead to true sanity.
And I'm really skeptical about that because it's not likely to happen, certainly for the influencer set and for, I think, most people.
I can imagine some of the rank and file being shaken deeply enough for something new to happen.
But, you know, when I think about this Leonard Cohen song in my head is that it has these two parts to it, that there's a description of the corrupt, contradictory world, and it's laid out in the verses that have this pulsing minor chord dirge.
But then the chorus with Sharon Robinson singing backup like soars into this major key.
So everybody knows in the chorus becomes a hymn of solidarity because the relief doesn't come from solving the conflict.
