#pizzagate

Melissa Ryan at Ctrl Alt Right Delete:

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.

[...] 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.