Trump has literally said in his 2016 campaign speech he could shoot someone in broad daylight and he wouldn't lose support and it still holds true. 40% of this country are ride or die with this man and no evidence of him r*ping kids is going to change that. Shit, we see it today with the execution in minneapolis, the 2A chuds who have been screaming their heads off for decades about Obama taking their guns are suddenly like "um, he was a violent criminal, sweetie". It's like that Sartre quote about antisemites "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies" these people believe in nothing outside of seeing the OTHER camp lose. So coming back to that, Trump is making the other camp lose, so all is forgiven, Epstein be damned.

Viewing current events through the prism of a single person (in the form of trump) is incorrect, however you pathologise it.

It's just greatman theory it's a core part of the reactionary liberal idealist viewpoint.

at this point, it might even be advantageous for Trump to release the Epstein files willingly to distract the media from all the other terrible shit he's currently doing by releasing proof of heinous shit he's already done and knows damn well he'll never be held accounted for

then again, that's assuming Trump is currently being held accountable by the media for shit he's doing 🙄

Thank you so much for saying this. There doesn't have to be some kind of conspiracy. Trump is a bad man who hurts people and he is doing what he's always done: bad things that hurt people.

Then "This is a distraction from the Epstein Files" feels SO 2018 Rachael Maddow. Like, yes, we know he's a pedo. He is also other things, some of which might actually be worse. But no, it literally doesn't matter.

Here's this guy who is actively stripping people of their rights and bringing full-on American Flavored Fascist Authoritarianism™ and somehow people are still looking for the smoking gun?

Even as a joke its grown extremely stale.

I feel like it’s a convergence of interests situation. The shit with ICE, Venezuela, and Greenland fits into the Trump administration’s neo-fascist agenda, it was in the playbook regardless. It also serves to keep the news cycle off Epstein. So at best, the Epstein Files accelerated the plan.

If the liberals had any loyalty to the structural integrity of their Rules-Based International Order they would have clapped the Bush administration in shackles and imprisoned them for war crimes, falsifying evidence, and yes, terrorism for what they did. But they didn’t. That was their moment. They could have probably propped up the corpse of the post Cold War world for another few decades, maybe the 2050s before the cracks start to show. But instead they chose “not to rock the boat”

All of this child trafficking and sexual assault is just a distraction from the Epstein Files

Liberals can only think about one thing at a time--a kind of extreme single action bias. If they thought about more than one thing at a time, they might start to draw connections between events and policies that would suggest the shape of deep systemic issues. Then they wouldn't be liberals anymore.

I think it's convenient enough for them when something distracts from something else, but I doubt that it's an explicit plan by the administration. It's a byproduct of so many bad things happening in quick succession

Yeah, it's lame, Trump would still be doing all this stuff if Epstein had never existed.

However, the Epstein issue has strong traction across the political board. He even lost MTG and Boobert over it, so there must be many many others who weren't nearly as committed.

So, as tiring as it is, we need to keep hammering it every day between now, and whenever we can truly take action on this issue, which will probably be a long time from now.

For me, it sits near the top of the pile, along with his Insurrection, his stolen classified documents, and the family separation policy. We'll get to them, eventually, one way or another.

you can distract someone from a fire in their wastebasket with a grease fire in the kitchen.