Do you think that the existence of human trafficking is nothing but a conspiracy theory?
I don’t. Neither does the US government, or any sane person. As I was taking a “comfort” break at the Minneapolis airport, I was treated to this poster:
Yet POLITICO wants you to believe it is all a conspiracy theory and that weirdo right-wingers are inventing this problem to get HRC and Bill Clinton and to blame the Jews.
Yeah, right. There has been an explosion of antisemitism on the Right, as the past few months have conclusively proven.
From Pizzagate to QAnon and now the “Epstein list,” an expert explains why sex trafficking conspiracy theories are so buzzy in MAGA circles👇 https://t.co/EtCm3FI0rM pic.twitter.com/xzD1WiJLVi
— POLITICO (@politico) January 9, 2024
There is one thing on which the author of the article and I agree: the release of the documents from the Epstein civil case didn’t tell us much that was new, except that Stephen Hawking had a strange liking for dwarves. Aside from that, the rest of the article was the equivalent of a fairy tale, although more of an old German one than a Disneyfied one.
As I have pointed out more than a few times, Q-Anon is not really a thing among conservatives, although I assume a few conservatives have read something related to it. It has no traction among us, and I am still unclear about what it is all about except a bizarre psyop on Reddit. I now believe it was invented by the Left to set up articles like this one to provide grist for the ridicule mill of the MSM.
What isn’t a conspiracy theory at all is that some very powerful people have been involved in sex trafficking, both of minors and young adults. Jeffrey Epstein was real. His connection to Harvard, prominent politicians, academics, and financiers is undisputed. However, we will never see the little black book with the names nor any of the blackmail material he undoubtedly had.
But Ghislain Maxwell is in jail for human trafficking, and yet the people to whom they were trafficked have not been named. This is not a conspiracy theory, whatever POLITICO says.
What is POLITICO’s spin?
To get a sense of why conspiracy theories centered on sex trafficking and pedophilia — and now the “Epstein list” — are so buzzy in MAGA circles, POLITICO Magazine called up Mike Rothschild, author of The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything and Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories.
Rothschild pointed to a toxic stew of age-old antisemitism; the worst incentives of today’s social media; and the right’s unending obsession with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
It certainly is true that a lot of conservatives hoped that the Epstein revelations would provide more information than we got, but that had to do with the nature of the documents coming out. A lot of people thought we would get the black book, not transcripts from a lawsuit. That was a mistake.
But that mistake has nothing to do with our concern with the elite’s ties to human trafficking, which is very real. Nobody serious disputes that Epstein flew a ton of very connected people to his island, or that underage girls serviced some unnamed people on that island–likely those very same connected people. Epstein was going to trial for the crimes before he died, and Maxwell is in jail for scheming to do it.
We just don’t have the names. But we certainly know it happened and that Joe and Jane Blow were not the clients.
Consider the attacks on Sound of Freedom, the movie about sex trafficking. The MSM went into overdrive to attack the movie, although the basic facts behind the movie were never seriously disputed. The media created a miasma of distrust in order to create the impression that sex trafficking doesn’t happen, but there is no serious dispute that it does.
There is plenty of evidence the elite is just fine with that. Pal around with Harvey Weinstein, party with Jeffrey Epstein AFTER he had been convicted of pedophilic acts. We have photos of Prince Andrew with his arms around his accusor. And, of course, my favorite: all the Hollywood elite giving Roman Polanski a standing ovation and an Oscar after he drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. That was what turned me into a culture warrior.
It’s not a myth, just insufficiently documented and a media obsessed with covering it up and ridiculing it.
You wrote a book on QAnon. Based on your research, why are conservatives so obsessed with the theory that prominent left-wing figures like the Clintons are running pedophile rings? Where does that conspiracy theory originate from?
There’s always been a certain amount of salaciousness in these conspiracy theories, and there are theories going back about the awful sexual depravity of the Catholics or later on of the Jews. So you’re always going to find a certain amount of attention paid to any kind of conspiracy theory involving sexual proclivity of trafficking. And if it involves children, people immediately just lose their mind — even if these children don’t exist. There are no children who have been trafficked because of Pizzagate because Pizzgate isn’t real.
But if you just put out the suggestion there, it grabs ahold in a way that is difficult to dislodge. I think a lot of it has to do with antisemitism. I think a lot of it has to do with fear of the occult and Satanic panic. So you get all of these things that are mixed together: the anti-Jewish sentiment, the fear of Satanism. And, of course, now it extends to social media. So you have these powerful figures, in media, in politics, in culture, academia. It’s very easy to kind of put these people together as part of this vast conspiracy. And if there’s a conspiracy of them, well, they’re probably doing horrible things to children, too, because that’s what evil people do.
Does this sound like your experience? Are you filled with antisemitism? Do you spend hours thinking about Pizzagate?
Not me. But I sure know that Jeffrey Epstein brought a lot of high-profile people to his island to have sex with children. That isn’t a “theory;” it is fact.
The media has created an industry dedicated to convincing non-conservatives that we are nuts and believe that the earth is flat, that pizza parlors are really prostitution centers, and that our leaders are actually lizards. It is a psyop, nothing more.
When the United States tried to extradite Roman Polanski to make him serve his prison term–he was convicted of that rape–the entire elite of the world came to his defense. Of particular note was the French Culture Minister, who has quite a history. From my earlier piece:
The world elite exploded in rage. Petitions were drawn up, gathering signatures from most of the cultural elite. The French Minister of Culture, himself an admitted pedophile (he had written an autobiography discussing his sex safaris to Asia to violate little boys), went to bat for him.
The French minister of Culture and Communication, Frédéric Mitterrand, was vehement in his support, all the while announcing his “very deep emotion” after the questioning of the director, “a French citizen” and “a film-maker of international dimension”: “the sight of him thrown to the lions for an old story which doesn’t make much sense, imprisoned while traveling to an event that was intending to honor him: caught, in short, in a trap, is absolutely dreadful.”These reactions resulted in political backlash in France.
Here’s a bit on Mitterrand himself: “in 2005, Mitterrand had published the book The Bad Life in which he wrote about having sex with male prostitutes in Thailand. In the book, Mitterrand was quoted, “I got into the habit of paying for boys … All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excite me enormously. One could judge this abominable spectacle from a moral standpoint but it pleases me beyond the reasonable.”
Mitterrand wrote this before he became a government minister, and did not hinder his political career one iota.
He admits to being a pedophile, and was appointed Minister of Culture.
It’s a conspiracy theory? Come on.
POLITICO has a need to ridicule the idea of sex trafficking because they know that many people in the elite have engaged in its fruits. Just who were those prostitutes with Hunter Biden? Were they all American, or were some imported from Europe or elsewhere? I don’t know, but he is a degenerate, and a lot of high-end prostitutes are imported into the US.
But it is the Epstein case that the Left is truly worried about because Epstein flew all those high-powered leftists to his island, and he used the island as a hub of sex trafficking.
Do we know the full truth of the extent of it? Obviously not. Do we have all the names? Certainly not.
But the Epstein case is real. It is not about QAnon, whatever that really is, or anything else.
Ridiculing us for noticing the obvious doesn’t make it go away.