In an unsigned memorandum, the department declared that there was no evidence that Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced deceased convicted sexual predator, maintained a client list or that he blackmailed prominent individuals for various misdeeds. The memorandum also declared that Epstein committed suicide.

Most Americans saw this news (if they saw it at all) and barely raised an eyebrow. The Epstein story was part of the past; he died in 2019. But it detonated like a bomb in the MAGA universe. Pro-Trump influencers with vast audiences couldn’t believe what they were reading.

After all, they’d been told for years that there was an Epstein client list. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, told Fox News in February that the client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” (She later claimed that she was referring to the Epstein case file, not a specific client list.)

In October 2024, JD Vance, then a candidate for vice president, said, “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing.”

Before he was Trump’s director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel told Glenn Beck, a right-wing radio host, that the F.B.I. had Epstein’s “black book” and that it was “under direct control of the director of the F.B.I.” In 2023, Patel told Benny Johnson, a MAGA podcaster, that members of Congress should “put on your big-boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.”

In September 2024, Dan Bongino, now the deputy director of the F.B.I., told his listeners, “Folks, the Epstein client list is a huge deal” that would “rock the Democrat Party.”

These quotations are a small fraction of the right-wing discourse about Epstein. During the Trump era, references to Epstein have been ubiquitous in MAGA circles. And the statement “Epstein didn’t kill himself” was so popular that it leaked out into the wider American culture.

The Epstein story mattered so much in MAGA circles because it was a key element in their indictment of America’s so-called ruling class. Trump’s appeal to the Republican base isn’t just rooted in his supporters’ extraordinary affection for the man; it’s also rooted in their almost indescribably dark view of the American government.

Why are they so keen to burn it all down? Well, if you believe your government is populated by people so depraved that they’d participate in and cover up the systematic sexual abuse of children, then you wouldn’t just want them out of office; you’d want them prosecuted, imprisoned and maybe even executed. And you’d want all the power you’d need to make that happen.

And if you believe that the ruling elites would abuse children, then they’d certainly be the kind of people who’d gin up a Russia hoax or try to steal an election in 2020. People who are that terrible are capable of anything. And if you wonder why MAGA turned on the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice, well, it’s not just about the Russia investigation or the F.B.I. search of Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago. MAGA America also believed the F.B.I. was protecting pedophiles to preserve the status quo.

On the right, the Epstein story became the thinking man’s version of the QAnon conspiracy theory — the idea that American society was led by a gang of cannibalistic pedophiles. Whereas QAnon was rooted in the imaginary revelations of a shadowy figure who claimed Q security clearance, at least the Epstein story was rooted in some very grim, very real facts.

Epstein was a monstrous and grotesque sexual predator. Along with his convicted confederate, Ghislaine Maxwell, he systematically groomed and sexually abused (and enabled the sexual abuse of) hundreds and hundreds of young women and girls.

He was also one of the most well-connected people in the world. A host of powerful people attended his parties and rode on his jet.

Oddly enough — considering MAGA’s obsession with Epstein — one of his most powerful friends was Trump. They flew together, they partied together, and in 2002, Trump told New York magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.” But Trump also made this ominous observation, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” After Maxwell’s arrest, Trump said: “I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly.”

This was the man that MAGA trusted to fully expose Epstein and all his misdeeds?

Make no mistake: MAGA is very angry. After the Department of Justice released its memo, MAGA influencers exploded. Tucker Carlson was furious. “The whole thing that this tape shows that he didn’t kill himself is, like, a joke, but worse than that, it’s a joke that we all get,” he said. “I feel like we’re at a dangerous point now.”

Alex Jones said the Trump administration was now “part of the cover-up.” On X, Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote, “RELEASE THE EPSTEIN CLIENT LIST!!!!”

This moment is significant for another reason: It allows us to peer into the future of MAGA and see its potential crackup. After Trump is gone, this movement could tear itself apart. Its very existence is premised on a series of fantastical assertions about America and American government.

This means that MAGA influencers are constantly deceiving themselves, one another and the right-wing public. It’s an ecosystem that operates in a constant state of crisis and grievance, and MAGA supporters are so convinced that the worst possible stories are real that they’ll turn on anyone not named Donald Trump who dares to tell them the truth — or who deviates in the slightest bit from the stories they tell themselves.

Once Trump leaves office, there will be no one left to end the internal arguments and direct everyone to fall in line. If the Democrats have a problem of too many purity tests, Republicans will soon experience the consequences of putting together a coalition that may have too few. In red America, you can believe anything so long as you support Trump.

Remove that man, and only the grievances remain, and many of MAGA’s grievances are against other Republicans. The G.O.P. coalition contains pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine factions, internationalists and isolationists, normie Republicans and wild conspiracy theorists.

Republican ideological diversity is its temporary strength. It could build a tent big enough to win very close to a majority of the popular vote. But by pulling a critical mass of disgruntled Americans into one party, Republicans have created a culture of constant conflict, and those conflicts are often rooted in completely false beliefs about American life.

Those internal conflicts are fully underway. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported on Friday that “it’s hard to overstate the infighting” in MAGA over the Epstein case. Also on Friday, Axios reported that Bongino took the day off work after clashing with Bondi at the White House, and CNN is reporting that he’s considering resigning from the F.B.I. In fact, we can see a consensus hardening against Bondi: “She’s the culprit. She’s the one who pulled the bait and switch. She told us that the list was on her desk.”

Trump himself isn’t immune from attack. As part of his divorce from the MAGA movement, Elon Musk has claimed that Trump and his longtime ally Steve Bannon are in the Epstein files. “How,” Musk posted on Tuesday, “can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”

By Saturday evening, Trump had enough. He posted a long screed on Truth Social that declared his support for Bondi — he said she was doing a “FANTASTIC JOB!” — and then bizarrely claimed that the Epstein files were written by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the losers and criminals of the Biden administration.” In a pointed reference to Patel, he said that the F.B.I. should be focused on investigating “Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, the Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting thugs and criminals,” rather than “spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein.”

Judging from the early response online, MAGA is not satisfied. The usually faithful Benny Johnson was shaken. “By admitting that the Epstein Files are real,” he said, “and that you’ve read them, and you don’t like their contents, and they were written by your enemies, it doesn’t make the most compelling case as far as I’m concerned. Holy moly.”

The Epstein case remains a bit of a black box to most Americans. We still don’t know all the details of Epstein’s relationships with the rich and powerful, and in the absence of knowledge, wild allegations spread unhindered by hard facts.

This much we do know: Some of MAGA’s most trusted voices — including Patel, Bondi, Bongino and Trump himself — are suddenly telling their movement: Move along, there’s nothing to see here. But MAGA does not want to hear what they have to say.

The post MAGA Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Jeffrey Epstein appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

One good thing about my assignments is that I get to see different schools in our local districts from the inside. I know I’m not supposed to reveal their secrets; that’s the first part of my contract with them. But, due to President Trump outing our schools for their heinous acts, I feel compelled to confirm that I’ve seen with my very own eyes, to my extreme dismay, the presence of operating rooms in all the schools.

There is a very inconspicuous door, just around the corner in every school cafeteria, which leads students down a corridor right into a room full of overhead lights, an operating table, an anesthesia cart, a table full of surgical instruments, an oxygen tank, and additional tanks for some mysterious gases. There’s also a huge closet full of clothes of all sizes, for both boys and girls.

You could say that I’ve acted as a spy for Trump, and I’ve seen for myself how school kids are being led to that room by school officials, only to emerge as the opposite sex. Trump is right. It’s true that kids go to school as one gender, the school performs a gender-affirming surgery without the parents’ knowledge or consent, and then the kids go home as another gender. You should see the confused looks on the parents’ faces. In the morning, they say to their son, “Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school,” only to find out in the afternoon that Jimmy is now Janine.

Now, I hope you all know I’m just being facetious. There are no special operating rooms in schools. You need surgeons, doctors, nurses, and the rest to “operate” an operating room. Trump is full of [S-word], mocking us, his loyal supporters, making goofy sounds and weird faces when he lies about something so absurd anyone can see through it. That’s the problem, though: not everyone sees through it. There are people who actually believe him.

Our schools exist to educate our kids. There are laws to protect them and the rights of their parents. We don’t live in Nazi Germany—though maybe we would if Trump had his way—where people were treated horribly. We live in California, where individual rights are paramount. You have to ask yourself why Trump would fabricate such an obvious lie. He’s not worried because he has such gullible followers who swallow these blatant falsehoods. I mean, look at his utterly absurd, preposterous lies about “Migrants Eating Dogs.”

Although, that might explain the “mystery meat” we used to find in school cafeterias during lunch. With the influx of migrant children into our local schools, maybe that mystery meat is no longer mysterious. Remember Trump’s words during the debate: “They are eating dogs!” Maybe they’re eating dogs, cats, and, as an amazing coincidence, I don’t see any squirrels around the school trees anymore. There used to be plenty of them, but now, I hardly see any. Go figure.

We should all call our senators, just like the residents of Springfield, Ohio, called their senator, J.D. Vance—so he says—to report the “Dog Eating Migrants” story. Why should that city get so much attention when we have the same issue here? Why isn’t someone here posting such a claim on Facebook, getting it amplified by the Republican Party, and endorsed by our past, present, and future president, Trump? Why aren’t our lunatic influencers and grifters trying to cash in on this fringe idea?

Many say that Trump and Vance are telling this “truth” about migrants eating pets as a dog whistle (no pun intended) to their base. Some argue that this political messaging is racist, meant to rile up white supremacists against these migrants, and, by extension, against Kamala Harris. But I disagree. We all know that Trump is not racist. He has told us that many times. He doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. He did have racist bone spurs once, but that was a long time ago.

Politicians have used similar stories about migrants throughout history. It used to be Asians accused of eating dogs and cats. Now it’s the Haitians. Trump is using the same fear-mongering, but this time targeting migrants of color. It’s sheer coincidence (or is it?) that his opponent happens to be a woman of color, and he’s deliberately using this falsehood to achieve the same results as his predecessors.

I think Trump and Vance got the idea when Robert Kennedy Jr. joined their team. We all know that man loves to eat dogs and bears. They must have discussed his culinary tastes and decided to apply it to the migrants.

The post Eating Dogs and Cats appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.