Paul Blumenthal writes:

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to [AG Pam] Bondi on Friday claiming that “approximately 1,000 personnel” from the FBI were put on round-the-clock duty to review “approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records” and “instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”

Of all the stories, scandals and policies that have followed Trump since he entered politics, why has this one, above all others, caused such enormous blowback from Trump’s own supporters? And why is this scandal not a “distraction,” as some Democrats seem to reflexively claim?

To understand the conservative blowup around Epstein, one must first understand the heart of Trumpist politics. These politics have been routinely labeled as populist over the past decade. But this populism is not centered on populist policies designed to help the masses — universal health care, crackdowns on corporations, higher taxes on the wealthy, limits on money in politics or closing offshore tax shelters. Instead of policy, Trump’s right-wing populism provides the masses with attacks on alien others — immigrants, LGBTQ, Black people — and conspiracy narratives of secret elite perfidy, whether it be the Deep State or global elite criminal operations.

These narratives of secret elite wrongdoing are, at their heart, stories about inequality and the power of the rich and politically connected at the expense of the ordinary man and woman. But they carry no promise of fixing societal inequalities or raising up those ordinary people. Instead, they promise vengeance and a twisted justice. They effectively enabled the right to co-opt populist anti-elite sentiment in the wake of the wave of events that undermined elite authority like the Great Recession, the mortgage crisis and the Iraq War.

The most potent of these narratives to emerge during the Trump era was QAnon. QAnon grew out of the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy that claimed (falsely, obviously) that Bill and Hillary Clinton operated a child sex ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., for themselves and their Democratic Party friends.

QAnon posits that Trump is an avenging archangel sent by God to investigate, bring to justice and put on trial and execute the cosmopolitan elites who rule the world through a global Satanic pedophile conspiracy. This coming justice is referred to as “the storm.” Polls in 2022 have shown that about 25% of Republicans were QAnon believers and only 48% fully rejected QAnon ideology, and conservative influencers have made their careers or played footsie with QAnon beliefs in the Trump era.

That such an absurd story, which has parallels with antisemitic theories like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and blood libel, has taken root and plays a key role in American politics may seem nuts, but the QAnon narrative has a long pedigree back to the first written narratives among English settlers in America. [Continue reading…]