This article is reposted from Carter Moon’s Substack. Check out more of his work here.

I resent having to think about pedophiles this much. Don’t you? Wouldn’t it be so much nicer to not constantly be stewing in that uniquely grimy feeling that comes from having to think about one of the most heinous, but shockingly common, acts human beings do? I want to apologize for being one more person making you think about this stuff this week, but really what else is there to talk about?

For the last decade, it’s been difficult to pay attention to American politics and not have the haze of pedophile scandals coloring the edges of everything. Since 2016, the online alt-right has been rabidly fixated on little else besides creating their elaborate, ever-expanding universe of pedophilic elites at the top of the cabal that controls the world government. Everything else they hate, LGBT people, immigrants, Hollywood, Democrats, are all deserved targets of their bloodlust because they are all connected to pedophilia. They have been able to maintain the momentum for their campaign to root out the sickos thanks to the ongoing failure to prosecute any of the many, many powerful men connected to Jeffrey Epstein. It’s pretty hard to dissuade people that a shadowy pedophile cabal doesn’t control global politics when none of the men named by Epstein’s victims have been brought to justice. If you don’t follow the online right closely, it’s hard to explain just how much Epstein is a load-bearing point upholding the entire fascist narrative.

Which is exactly why it’s been so wild to watch Trump spectacularly crash out as he refuses to release the Epstein files. Trump himself may have demured on the campaign trail last year about the specifics of what his administration was going to do, but Kash Patel and Dan Bongino couldn’t shut the fuck up about how much they were going to blow the Epstein case wide open the second they took over at the FBI. This was always a pretty ludicrous sentiment, considering the degree to which Trump was close friends with Epstein, and there’s an affidavit plainly spelling out horrific crimes Trump almost certainly committed with Epstein. Pam Bondi had to come out and say the Epstein files don’t exist and released 11 hours of footage from outside Epstein’s prison cell that was very obviously edited. Hell, literally as I was typing this, the Wall Street Journal published a batshit letter Trump wrote to Epstein that concludes: “And may every day be another wonderful secret.” It is frankly a testament to how powerful the fascist propaganda machine is that they’ve been able to successfully keep these pieces of information from reaching the base. The MAGA right is so delusional, living in such an upside-down mirror world, that they seemingly believed Teflon Don could come out unscathed even if they tore open the rat’s nest still hidden in Epstein’s penthouse walls. Now it’s obvious that no, actually, there is no way to cleanly expose just the elite Democrats connected with Epstein without also exposing our big, wet, rapist president.

The failures to stop Epstein were endemic across the political and legal system; any serious examination of the known facts around the case exposes a whole infrastructure of elites who either protected Epstein or refused to prosecute him. In the wake of this latest explosion in interest in the case, Ron Wyden started to demand that Congress look into Epstein’s financial records through Suspicious Activity Reports. These transactions total $1.5 billion and were routed through JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, and Deutsche Bank. It is believed that these funds were directly used to finance Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. At a certain point, one has to question how these banks themselves are not criminally liable for these transactions. Maybe even more absurdly, back in 2020, Trump’s labor secretary Alex Acosta had to apologize for giving Epstein a sweetheart plea deal in the original Florida case from 2008 which prevented Epstein from being prosecuted and the extent of his crimes being fully exposed. The longer you stare at it, the whole story becomes emblematic of how there are two entirely separate justice systems in this country; the ultra-wealthy simply never face meaningful consequences for all the harm they cause and the rest of us are expected to simply accept it.

You can justify anything else Trump has done if you sincerely believe he’s going to exterminate the elite deep state pedos. Anything else, any authoritarian overreach or a concentration camp built in a swamp, is permissible. When Nazis like Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes are frantically distancing themselves from Trump and correctly identifying that this cover-up wrecks their narrative. Ben Shapiro is sniping at Steve Bannon for trying to make a documentary rehabbing Epstein’s image shortly before he died. Nothing holds, nothing is solid for their cult of personality if Trump is also an elite pedo sicko.

I think it’s important to consider why reactionaries fixate on pedophilia so much. As an abstraction, accusing your political enemies of ritualistically engaging in one of the worst crimes humans can engage in means anything you do to them is permissible. But on a deeper level, I think it’s a reaction to conservative institutions being exposed for their own systemic child abuse and cover-ups. The Catholic church, the Baptist church, and the Mormon church have all been exposed as having endemic abuse problems, along with the Boy Scouts. MeToo may not have strictly focused on pedophilia, but it similarly besmirched the legacies of a lot of powerful conservative men (along with liberal men, to be clear). The cultural dialectic around Trump the entire time he’s been at the center of politics has been a tension between what we’re going to continue to tolerate when it comes to patriarchal sexual violence. As we’ve been forced to think about sexual abuse constantly over the last decade, the inevitable conclusion you draw is that we live in a culture that permits men to abuse women and children so long as they’re in some position of authority over them. When you call into question powerful men’s right to women’s bodies and their agency, you call into question the hierarchical domination structure that is the bedrock of conservative politics. To truly learn from the Epstein debacle would require completely changing our social fabric, changing our attitudes around consent and what we allow powerful men to get away with, and conservatives don’t want to deal with that reality. They want to feel like heroes executing bad guys.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this firestorm dominating the conversation this week is how it feels like it’s had a knock-on effect of making other conspiracy theories more permissible. Everyone’s been posting pictures of Trump’s swollen ankles and bruised hand, speculating that his heart might be failing. We also just hit the first anniversary of the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally; I’ve seen a video making the rounds that purports to show how the shooting was staged. It doesn’t help that CBS released a lengthy piece about Trump’s would-be assassin and it essentially boiled down to “he did everything behind a VPN and we can’t tell what he was up to,” leaving endless room to imagine scenarios where Crooks was being directed to act by some nefarious force. When you’re living under an authoritarian regime sending masked thugs to kidnap innocent people in broad daylight, there’s no amount of paranoia that feels unjustified. The administration lies about everything, is very plainly tied to shadowy dark money from around the world, and has been trying to establish a military occupation of the second largest city in America. It’s completely rational in one sense to be maximally paranoid about them.

But ultimately, I think this is a time for being grounded in reality as best we can. The details of the Epstein case are lurid and insane, it’s easy to let your imagination run wild. But there’s absolutely a balance to be struck in not overspeculating on what might be exposed if more details from Epstein’s cases are brought to light and just talking about what’s been documented and well-reported. Demanding greater transparency and legal consequences for everyone connected to Epstein is good, and frankly should’ve been the default position of the Democrats this entire time. That’s not paranoid or delusional, it’s just wanting to exist in a democratic society with meaningful consequences for socially abhorrent behavior. We need to be the people who say “the stories about Epstein and Maxwell procuring teenage girls from Mar-A-Lago are bad enough, we don’t need anything else.” We need to point out that the right’s fixation on the blood-drinking cabal (let’s be real, the Jewish cabal) is freakish behavior that detracts from the very real actual harm that exists in the world, the very real young women who were abused by Epstein.

One of the core things MAGA has been able to exploit during the Trump era has been the reality that powerful people are genuinely above the law. We let them create their warped fantasies of violent revenge because we do thoroughly have a culture where elites act with impunity. We don’t prosecute fossil fuel companies for knowingly destroying the earth, we don’t prosecute insurance companies for letting people die to save money, we didn’t imprison the Sacklers for addicting the country to opiates, and we didn’t prosecute the Bush administration for lying and leading us into Iraq. When a country’s social fabric is already this hollowed-out, is it any surprise that a band of fascist psychos can seize power and start stripping the copper out of the walls of the federal government? And never forget that MAGA are the real criminal degenerates. Remember when Madison Cawthorne was stomped out of the GOP because he wouldn’t shut up about senate Republicans throwing drug-fueled orgies? Remember how Matt Gaetz definitely paid underage girls for sex? RJ May was a Trump-endorsed South Carolina State senator who was just arrested for horrific levels of child sexual abuse. Anytime you find yourself arguing with a conservative over the next few years, you need to bring up these examples.

Their whole justification for their movement falls apart once you start to probe this shit. We should use any tool we have to crush them we should use, and they’ve handed us a sledgehammer.