...Sorry, I got distracted.

Some Thoughts on Pizzagate, Qanon and Epstein

First, an apology on my long absence from Substack: I’m sorry. I got distracted. Sometimes the act of writing about American politics, which is basically just marinating in sewage, gets too dark for me, at which point I have to either disassociate or find something else to do for a little while, like watching TV or staring at the wall or eating a bag of candy.

Next, let me say that I think the story in American politics has radically changed in the time I’ve been gone. The status quo is markedly different than it was post-2025 election day.

All the discussion of Epstein right now has Trump on the defensive. This coverage from Politico really nails the moment when Trump flung out a legion of posts about the Epstein story on Truth Social this morning, including the claim that Democrats are “doing everything in their withering power to push the Epstein Hoax again.” Epstein “was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem,” Trump wrote.

“Trump also announced that he’s directing AG Pam Bondi to investigate Epstein’s ties to multiple high-profile Democrats — including former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, POLITICO’s Greg Svirnovskiy reports. Representatives for Clinton, Summers, and the investment firm in which Hoffman serves as a partner did not immediately reply to requests for comment from POLITICO.

“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” Trump wrote. (Laura Loomer was a fan of that framing.)”

The reason the Epstein story is so sticky and has so completely dominated the news cycle is because Trumpworld has been telling some version of it since 2016.

Pizzagate, the myth that Democrats are even worse than your worst imagination, may now be in the process of unraveling the MAGA coalition. The inception of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory occurred on October 7^th, 2016, about 30 minutes after the Access Hollywood tapes were published (where Trump quite candidly discusses groping women). Minutes after the erstwhile TV host was caught bragging that “when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” Wikileaks published John Podesta’s emails.

Wikileaks, as you may recall, is a company with somewhat dubious international interests. These emails were mainly pretty boring, featuring such controversial lines as “The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related. Is it yours?” and “But walnut sauce for the pasta? Mary, plz tell us the straight story, was the sauce actually very tasty?” And yet, a month later, users of a 4chan message board named the “so-called alt-right” decided these emails were not about pasta sauce and handkerchiefs—they were solid proof of Podesta and his brother being pedophiles involved in a sex trafficking ring.

From there, the conspiracy theorists wove other elements into the story, but the nuts and bolts of it, the center of it, was a group of wealthy elites abusing children. It was a type of conspiracy theory as old as time, a theory about an elite secret society that is both wildly wealthy and morally abhorrent. And it is a type of conspiracy theory that has real emotional power: it enrages people and inspires a sense of sacred mission in them. For Trump’s base, Pizzagate answered a deep emotional need. That base was all too ready to believe that the Podesta brothers were doing what Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were actually doing.

The mushy and poorly-formed Pizzagate narrative eventually morphed into the more elaborate Qanon narrative, which had hundreds of subplots and thousands of tantalizing codes and clues, like a novel by Thomas Pynchon or Don Delillo, if Pynchon or Delillo were writing for an audience of morons. Qanon’s clues made some of the stupidest people in America think they were the smartest. Qanon had the same fundamental premise as Pizzagate: a wealthy elite, a group of Roman empire types, were abusing children as if their wealth and power entitled them to do anything to anyone. Qanon was ‘revealed’ by a person (who really, totally existed). This not-at-all-made-up person had a mythological government clearance labeled “Q level” and, naturally, spent their time posting on an anonymous message board. As any government official might.

Qanon cast Trump as a fighter for the common man, a vigilante who was going to save America from a cabal of elite Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Everything that got reported in the news was part of the plan, even if it seemed to contradict earlier versions of the narrative. Just as liberals were supposed to trust Mueller (and later Jack Smith), these people were supposed to trust that Trump was acting behind the scenes, doing the necessary work to prosecute such archetypal villains of conspiracy theories as the Rothschild family and the Soros family.

Even MTG who rose to prominence on the wings of conspiracy theories, is one of the Republican house members breaking with Trump to sign the discharge petition. That’s because she promised her constituents that she would bring down the Cabal. After winning her primary in 2020, Greene said in a video on Twitter. “The fake news media hates me. Big Tech censors me … The DC Swamp fears me. And George Soros and the Democrats are trying to take me down.” Now, Greene is one of the loudest voices pushing for the discharge petition which will, at least theoretically, mean the release of the Epstein files. She even stated in September at a joint press conference with Ro Khanna, “If they want to give me a list, I will walk in that Capitol on the House floor and I’ll say every damn name that abused these women. I can do that for them and I’d be proud to do it.”

Meanwhile Trump is still calling the story “the Epstein hoax.” But this hoax is really of his own making. The MAGA base was trained to believe that these things were happening, that there was a hidden evil was bubbling under the surface of contemporary American life. The subtext was that the rich are not like you and I because they abuse children and that despite all they had, they were still horribly deficient when it came to morals and ethics and all the things that make us human.

Trump’s 2016 populism was based on him saying numerous times “the system is rigged,” and he was of course correct. The wealthy can make money on their money and largely avoid paying taxes as their businesses grow. Most of the billionaire class, like Trump, were born to fairly wealthy parents who helped them amass mega-wealth. Trump promised he would unrig the system, and bringing down the elite cabal was part of this populist message.

Now where Trump always got into trouble was that he was in fact part of the elite he railed against. Sure, he grew up in Queens, and his mother had a thick accent, and they weren’t cultured people. But Trump was no outsider. The now-dead pedophile Jeffery Epstein wrote to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers about Trump: “Trump – borderline insane. Dersh, a few feet further from the border but not by much.” It’s pretty clear that Larry Summers, Jeffery Epstein and Donald Trump all occupied the same world, the same upper tier of society that Qanon told its followers Trump was trying to bring down.

Of course the nuance of Trump is that while he might have had the money, real elites still (and always will) scorn him. Summers writes to Epstein of Trump “Of gross ignorance surely. Of being utterly without the intellect temperament for job surely. Of being over line on family profiting very likely. Of gross disregard for appearances almost surely.” There are other emails musing about Trump’s stupidity, because the courseness that made the base think he was like them is the thing that makes elites know he is not like us.

There are emails that are much more damning. Epstein wrote in an email to Michael Wolff, “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” And Epstein wrote that he might be “the one able to take him down.” It is unclear how far Epstein’s actual power over Trump extended and how much of what Epstein wrote is just bragging, just trying to spin a narrative into something more. Clearly, Epstein was desperate to have everyone continue to believe that he had power over Trump and perhaps he did? Epstein’s whole career had been built on persuading powerful people that other powerful people trusted him and relied on him.

The story of pizzagate and later qanon required believers to make certain jumps in belief, to think that a pizza recipe was really about abusing children, to make connections that were never there, never real. These myths created a narrative structure, created a story that explained an all too unfair universe, the problem is, the universe is unfair, just not in a way that is convenient to the president, or the republican party.