It’s a political base problem few are willing to admit.
Republicans are imploding over Jeffrey Epstein, and the evidence is hard to miss. The panic among GOP lawmakers is unlike anything I’ve seen in a decade of reporting on Congress.
Republicans can’t keep their heads down and trust that the base will keep holding them up, because the Republican base is what’s causing the current panic.
Far-right lawmakers are anxiously trying to navigate around the Scylla of Trump and congressional leadership pushing them to hold off on the Epstein issue, and the Charybdis of the hot-headed multitudes who lifted them into office after getting them to promise to reveal every dark secret of the Epstein case.
The whole ‘Q’ mythos is based around the premise that liberals must be pedos because, lacking a religion-based straitjacket of a moral code, there’s nothing to keep them from doing anything.
The reality is that, while there are certainly instances of bad sexual behavior across the political spectrum, it is the authoritarian MAGA culture in which child sexual abuse is a systemic problem— a natural consequence of deference to power and the entitlement felt by those given that power.
I know it’s wishful thinking, but the Epstein obsession of the MAGA base may end up crumbling more than just the current GOP.
Holy shit, what a great way of putting it! Every side is capable of evil, but one side thrives even more on the very thing (power) that corrupts and leads to dissociation from the masses.
I have heard some variation of this countless times over the last 20 years, especially since Trump was a relevant politician. The only consistent thread connecting those incidents has been that they’ve never turned out to be anything of consequence. Republican voters vote for Republicans. They always have and they always will. This will not change that fact.
There was a time before MAGA and there will be a time after MAGA. Not everyone who voted Republican in 2024 is going to vote Republican in 2026 or 2028… But surely you know all that, and still you decided to write some self-defeating fatalistic text. Strange.
Which version of Republican voters decided to vote for someone less awful than the candidate before?
Sometimes Republican voters don’t come out, though.
In all previous instances, the agents of the ruling class were totally in control of the media landscape. Mainstream media has finally ceded enough to the internet, and the influencers they rely on to deliver a single message are all off their leashes, with fully half of them unwilling to get back in line.
I’ll concede that it’s probably still wishful thinking on my part, but the current situation is significantly different that what has happened before.