Latest news with #QAnon
The Independent
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Trump has ‘turned his back on the communities that voted for him,' 2028 hopeful Gov. Josh Shapiro says
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro slammed President Donald Trump for betraying his supporters in a fiery appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Thursday. Shapiro, a Democrat who represents the pivotal swing state narrowly won by Trump in last November's election, accused the Republican of only showing up to make promises to blue-collar communities when he needs their vote and neglecting their concerns since returning to power. Asked about his own appeal in a deep purple state, the governor answered: 'I think what they saw in me is someone who gives a damn about them, who treats them with respect – where they go to college, they go to the military, they go to a union apprenticeship program. They saw in me someone who can actually cut through it and solve their problems. 'And the difference between me and the president is – he shows up in those areas. He talks a good game. And then when he gets to govern, he does the exact opposite.' Pivoting to Trump's 'One Big, Beautiful Bill,' which was passed by Congress earlier this month despite widespread concerns about its impact on the national debt and welfare recipients, Shapiro invoked the Republican's promises on the campaign trail. 'I was showing up in rural areas where Donald Trump was showing up, and he was pledging to not cut people off of Medicaid. And what's the first big thing he does? He goes and he cuts 310,000 Pennsylvanians off of Medicaid with this bill they just passed, including 154,000 in communities that voted for him.' The governor continued: 'When I ran for office and he ran for office, we both ran with the support of local police. What have I done? I hired more police. We've gotten them more training. We brought crime down 38 percent in Pennsylvania. 'What did Donald Trump do? Literally, his first official action was to pardon people who assaulted cops on January 6 and sent some of those cops to their deaths. 'So what Donald Trump has done with the power is turned his back on those communities that voted for him. He's abandoned them, and he has made their lives worse. My focus is on making their lives better.' His comments were met with a surge of applause from the studio audience. Shapiro was considered by Democratic nominee Kamala Harris as a potential running mate when she succeeded Joe Biden on their party's ticket last summer, although she ultimately opted for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Colbert, whose show was recently cancelled, also trashed the president in his opening monologue, mocking him for denying ever having been briefed by Attorney General Pam Bondi about his name being mentioned in the Jeffrey Epstein files, only for The Wall Street Journal to allege that he had been told exactly that in May. The host also derided the president for losing the support of 'QAnon Shaman' Jacob Chansley, the poster boy for the Capitol riot, alluded to by Shapiro. Trump pardoned Chansley and hundreds of other rioters as soon as he returned to office in January, but the self-styled shaman appears to have become infuriated by the administration's more recent actions, writing on social media: 'F*** this stupid piece of s***... What a fraud.'
New York Times
5 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
The Conservative Crusade That's About So Much More Than Epstein
There is no cause on the American right quite like the quest to save children from sex abuse. The harming of children is at the center of Pizzagate, the wholly fake theory that began circulating around the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. It's the ultimate sin in the tales spun by QAnon followers, who believe that millions of children are going missing, their bodies harvested for a drug enjoyed by elites. The obsession can be found closer to the mainstream, too. Conservative activists have stoked fears that transgender adults are 'grooming' children for abuse. In the summer of 2023, the movie 'The Sound of Freedom,' a thriller about a swaggering federal agent who rescues children from sex trafficking, was an unexpected blockbuster, powered by loyal conservative fans. And now the great MAGA meltdown over Jeffrey Epstein. Unlike QAnon or Pizzagate, Mr. Epstein's abuse of minors has been proved in a court of law. Theories about his connections to powerful figures and the records of his crimes have been fodder for right-wing media for years. Now, Mr. Trump's insistence that the whole thing is a 'hoax' is being met with disbelieving anger from the MAGA base. Polling shows that the issue is the rare case where Trump supporters break from the president. 'Mr. President- Yes, we still care about Epstein,' the actress Roseanne Barr recently posted on X in a fit of frustration over the Justice Department's reluctance to release more Epstein documents. 'Is there a time to not care about child sex trafficking? Read the damn room.' 'It's a binary decision to stick to your guns and to say that we should not have any safe haven for child predators,' said the right-wing provocateur Benny Johnson on a recent episode of his podcast. And if you are enabling a child predator, he added, 'then you deserve to have your life destroyed, and it's something that we're not going to back down on.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Politico
5 days ago
- Politics
- Politico
The Epstein Conspiracy is the Horror Story of Our Age
In death, Epstein may be the only figure Trump cannot upstage, the one story more interesting than him. There's a reason the Epstein narrative — both what law enforcement and journalists have documented and the internet conspiracy theories it spawned — has become an immovable object in Americans' attention, even as Trump tries to force it aside. The disgraced financier was a rich and connected villain who flouted law and decency and, for decades, largely got away with it, confirming Americans' deepest anxieties about how power works. The conspiracy theory is that Epstein provided politicians and celebrities with underage girls for sex, and his clients had him killed in prison to keep him quiet. Epstein getting murdered is a more intriguing story than reports he hung himself in his cell, but otherwise the strictly factual version is lurid enough. He allegedly trafficked dozens of victims, many of whom were teenagers, and some of whom have said that powerful figures participated in their abuse. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump — who has sued the paper over its report that he wrote Epstein a lewd birthday note alluding to 'secrets' — appears in files related to the investigation, something Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly told him in May, a few weeks before he stopped demanding the files' release. Trump has denied the existence of the letter, and POLITICO has not independently verified it. He has also not been accused of any wrongdoing linked to Epstein. These events, which already sound like they should be connected by red string on a bulletin board, have been convincingly documented and widely accepted as true. If the conspiracy version of the story is more popular, that's because it puts the boring and sometimes convoluted details into terms everyone can understand, the same way QAnon and flat Earth theory fictionalize the basic truth that other people know things you don't and are not particularly concerned with your wellbeing. This sentiment contributed to Trump's unlikely ascent to the presidency, and ironically, it might prove to be his undoing. In this world, the law, public opinion and party politics have power over ordinary people, but money has the power to transcend all of them. As a vehicle for our worst fears about the 21st-century United States, Epstein is our Dracula. You are probably familiar with Count Dracula, the blood-drinking aristocrat with a taste for virgins who is vulnerable only to holy water and garlic. Bram Stoker's Dracula was published in the United Kingdom in 1897, but the vampire legends on which it was based emerged centuries earlier in Eastern Europe. It doesn't take a degree in folklore and mythology to notice that the count, who leaves his castle only to drain the life from peasants and corrupt young women, and who persists unnaturally from generation to generation until he is stopped by the power of the church, says something about how medieval Europeans saw their titled aristocracy. Dracula is what literary theorists call a big-time metaphor. His parasitic relationship with working people, his rivalry with priests, and his infamous horniness all reflect the anxieties of the late 19th century, when hereditary landowners vied with industrial capital and religious authority for control of Europe, and ordinary people exercised little power in proportion to their number. The conspiracy version of the Epstein story expresses similar anxieties about power and who wields it in the 21st-century United States. This conspiracy narrative diverges from the factual version in two ways: (1) Epstein didn't kill himself while awaiting trial; he was murdered, and (2) he kept a 'client list' of wealthy and powerful people to whom he had provided underage girls for sex, which he used to blackmail public figures. It is known that Epstein's social circle included Trump, Bill Clinton and Les Wexner, the billionaire and former CEO of Victoria's Secret. The reporter Julie Brown has identified more than 60 victims of a sex trafficking ring Epstein allegedly ran, some of whom named other public figures in their accounts. Epstein often traveled by private plane, and while celebrities from Clinton to attorney Alan Dershowitz have acknowledged that they flew on this plane, none has admitted to illicit sex. The various Epstein conspiracy theories fill in the gaps between these facts with plausible but unsupported speculation: that Epstein used his private plane to fly public figures to his island, where they engaged in the kind of illegal sex acts he and his clients were rich enough to get away with. The theory holds that along with his Renfield, the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein secretly videotaped these sexual encounters to use as leverage over his clients, giving them a shared interest in keeping him quiet that again trumped law and decency when they had him killed before his trial. It is the story of vampires, whose existence is defined by parasitism and exemption from the rules that determine the course of ordinary people's lives. This narrative, like the Dracula story, says some obvious things about how our culture understands its ruling class. The most powerful figure in it is not an elected politician or celebrity but rather a financial adviser, a guy whose money and connections make him the real force behind the facade of representative government and impartial law. Although he did business in the United States, his company was headquartered in the Virgin Islands for tax purposes, allowing him to avoid the obligations the rest of us owe our country and communities. The Epstein conspiracy theory describes two Americas, with two sets of laws and standards: the one most of us live in, where you have to go to work, abide by public morals and wait on hold when you call your congressional representative, and the one rich people live in, where statutory rape is an open secret and presidential candidates put aside their differences to hang out on tropical sex islands. In this world, the law, public opinion and party politics have power over ordinary people, but money has the power to transcend all of them. Financiers run the whole thing, literally and figuratively seducing political and cultural leaders in order to control them, while the various rules we democratically agreed on don't apply to anyone involved — as proven by their successful murder of the only guy with the secrets to bring them down. It's a compelling story, and it engages several valid concerns about the United States as it currently operates, but it has some holes. For one thing, why did the conspiracy of wealthy sex perverts wait until Epstein was in prison to kill him, when it presumably would have been easier to do it after he was convicted and released the first time, or after the second time a grand jury was convened against him but before he was in federal custody? If you believe a group of powerful people killed Epstein to keep him from revealing what he knew, you have to ask why he didn't die in a car accident, instead of during the three minutes that were cut from the camera recording near his cell, as many theorists believe. (That the three minutes were cut is reported, not rumored; what, if anything, the three minutes showed is not known.) The Epstein conspiracy theories are unproven, but you don't have to say the words 'hyoid bone' to read the Epstein story as a fable of how power works in the 21st-century United States. The non-conspiracy version of events says just as much. In this version, New York's Metropolitan Correctional Facility, the jail where Epstein died that a court ordered closed in 2021, simply didn't work very well. The plumbing was leaking, and the building was falling apart. The camera system didn't work right. The guards were overworked and understaffed and sat in the break room browsing the internet when they were supposed to be making their rounds. This story of institutional failure should be familiar to anyone who has been to a VA hospital or worked somewhere that got bought by a private equity fund. It's the story of a system that prioritizes low taxes and high profits over how well anything actually works, cutting costs and squeezing wages at the expense of long-term success. In other words, it's the story of a country that runs according to the interests of Epstein's clients: wealthy people who get their money from rents, investments and inheritances and therefore have a material interest in nothing changing, not this month, unless it's a lower tax rate. It's the story of finance taking over the economy and money taking over politics, the story of a system that doesn't do enough to restrain the power of those few Americans who live well without working, even as the rest of us are supposed to rule by majority. In other words, it is the story of vampires, whose existence is defined by exemption from the rules that determine the shape of ordinary people's lives. That is a story of the world we actually live in, and millions of Americans believe it. The conspiracy theory is just the simpler, more dramatic version, and if it gets the facts wrong — which it almost certainly does — the important parts are still true. The conspiracy theory is just the simpler, more dramatic version, and if it gets the facts wrong — which it almost certainly does — the important parts are still true. As of this writing, Democrats have joined with mutinous congressional Republicans to publicly demand that Trump release information related to the Epstein investigation. It is easy to identify a political motive among the Democrats, but Trump's failure to corral elected Republicans is unprecedented since 2016. If the money power Epstein represents transcended partisan divisions, so too has our fascination with his story. Should Trump prove unable to quash the public's interest, and it turns out he loses control of his own party over this issue, of all things, the Epstein legend will have a strong claim to be the defining story of our time.
Telegraph
5 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
The real reason Trump doesn't want to talk about Epstein
One of the many ways in which Donald Trump has defied the laws of political gravity has been by retaining the support of Americans who normally deplore sexual profligacy, while having a rich track record of such behaviour himself. Shortly before the 2016 election, when the notorious 'grab 'em by the pussy' tape emerged – tellingly, it is all but forgotten now – many commentators assumed that this would be the end of Trump's presidential ambitions. After all, his coalition of backers included not just evangelicals and conservative Christians, both of whom would ordinarily be appalled by such misogyny, but also wild devotees of the 'QAnon' conspiracy theory, which holds that Trump is secretly fighting a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles headquartered in a pizza parlour, including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks and the Dalai Lama. It is true that on the tape, Trump didn't mention the age of the women that he felt entitled to 'grab' in such a way; but you'd have thought that a tribe of fanatics obsessed with the fictional sexual indiscretions of the rich and famous might raise an eyebrow when their hero admitted to sexual indiscretions himself. The revelations made little difference. Trump entered the White House and history was made, reinforcing his belief that he could 'stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody' and he 'wouldn't lose voters'. Today's polls make that look pretty hubristic. After almost a decade of living by his own rules, it seems that the Donald is discovering the elastic limit of his followers the hard way. I speak, of course, of his alleged association with Jeffrey Epstein. Rumours had been swirling for months, exacerbated by Elon Musk, who in a moment of pique, suggested last month that the president was named in the FBI files concerning the disgraced financier. Trump has been on the defensive, stating: 'I don't understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. It's pretty boring stuff.' That represented a crack in the surface of Planet Trump, as the tectonic plates upon which his dominance rested started to pull apart. This week, after the administration suddenly abandoned its promises to reveal details of the investigation into Epstein, the chasm has become wider still. Figures connected to the Trump administration had long suggested that the files included a 'client list', while many of those involved in the case insisted that it was nothing but a rumour. In the turbulent wake of the government U-turn, as they absorbed the fact that the files, if they existed, would likely never see the light of day, some of Trump's most vocal cheerleaders branded it a cover-up. On Wednesday, Trump hit back, announcing on social media that his own 'PAST supporters' had fallen for the Epstein conspiracy theories 'hook, line, and sinker'. Everyone should move on, he insisted. The case is 'boring'. Not to the American public it isn't. According to a recent poll, 69 per cent of respondents now believe that the federal government is hiding details about Epstein's clients. Trump's personal approval ratings have fallen off a cliff. To the armies of the president's detractors, the schadenfreude is exquisitely sweet. For the many mainstream Republicans and moderate Trump supporters, however, it is a case of a big, fat 'I told you so'. Although the president has never openly endorsed conspiracy theories, segments of his Maga base live by these poisonous creeds and their idol has never fully disavowed them, to the chagrin of 'normies' in the party. QAnon devotees, for instance, believe in a 'coming storm', code for Trump's final victory, when his opponents will be tried and even executed live on television. According to some polls, about one in five Republicans now take this stuff seriously. Trump's attitude towards these eccentrics can be best described as flirtatious. On social media, he has posted a picture of himself wearing a 'Q' lapel pin with the slogan 'the storm is coming', and republished dozens of Q-related posts. One of his rallies in Pennsylvania ended with a QAnon song entitled 'WWG1WGA', or 'where we go one, we go all'. In a press briefing in 2022, when asked whether he was 'secretly saving the world from this satanic cult of paedophiles and cannibals',
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Just Lost One of His Most Famous Followers: the QAnon Shaman
Even Donald Trump's most sycophantic followers are turning on the president. Jacob Chansley—better known as the QAnon shaman—denounced the MAGA leader Wednesday morning, responding to a post of Trump's 2023 mugshot by decrying the president as a 'fraud.' 'Fuck this stupid piece of shit,' Chansley wrote in a since-deleted post that accrued more than 34,000 views. Chansley captured national attention when he stormed through the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an elaborate, horned fur headdress. In the aftermath of the attack, a face-painted Chansley emerged as one of the central figures of the revolt. Once at the Capitol building, Chansley was in the first group of rioters to break inside. Wielding a bullhorn, he worked to 'rile up the crowd and demand that lawmakers be brought out,' according to a sentencing memo. In late 2021, a federal judge sentenced Chansley to 41 months in prison for his role in the January 6 insurrection. But that was undone hours after Trump was inaugurated at the start of this year, when he included Chansley in a clemency order for some 1,600 of his supporters who were involved in the riot. Trump has held messiah-like status within QAnon's conspiratorial circle for years thanks to their principal belief that, despite being named and photographed as an associate of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Trump would rid the world of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run the government and media. In turn, Trump readily welcomed the cockeyed adoration. In 2020, he offered the movement plausible deniability at an executive level—claiming that while he didn't know much about QAnon, he couldn't disprove its theories. Just two years later, Trump was regularly circulating bits of the conspiracy on TruthSocial and reposting images of himself wearing Q pins emblazoned with the cult's messaging, 'A Storm Is Coming,' referring to Trump's supposed final victory, when QAnon supporters expect him to mass-execute his opponents. QAnon supporters turned out en masse in November to help Trump return to the Oval Office. But Trump's sudden backpedalling on unearthing records related to the Epstein investigation has left a bitter taste in those supporters' mouths. Their relationship was further strained when Trump referred to his Epstein-minded allies as 'stupid,' 'naive,' and 'foolish,' accusing them of being 'duped' by Democrats who he claimed invented the Epstein 'hoax.' But Trump has a well-documented history with the New York financier. Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump's 'closest friends.' The socialites were named and photographed together several times, Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile's 50th birthday, the real estate mogul reportedly flew on Epstein's jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein's plane, nicknamed the 'Lolita Express.' In a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a 'terrific guy.' 'It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,' Trump said at the time.
