Epstein's Island and Frankenstein's Monster

Maybe this MAGA civil war is real

Jeffery Epstein won’t die. Well, he is dead. He killed himself, or he didn’t. We don’t know all that much about his death, and now the video released by the White House from a surveillance camera outside his cell has nearly three minutes missing. More importantly, in many ways, MAGA refuses to let the billionaire child trafficker and sex criminal rest in peace. And there’s nothing Donald Trump wants more than to lay Epstein to rest.

Trump has typically been Teflon Don, at least in the eyes of his base. Corruption, scandals, and legal trouble has all washed off. The 24-hour news cycle continues, the base never cared in the first place, his immunity to negative press of any kind has been remarkable. But this is different. MAGA politicians latched onto Epstein at the highest level. JD Vance was talking about the need to release the Epstein files just a few months ago. Some GOP politicians ran in part on a commitment to release the list. And, most importantly, the base latched onto Epstein as a core component of their MAGA movement.

So now there’s a mutiny that won’t go away. Unlike most stories that cycle out in less than 24 hours, this one just keeps going. On Thursday night the Wall Street Journal released an article that Trump didn’t want them to publish. He reportedly spoke directly with the paper’s editor in chief in an effort to prevent this one from coming out. And once you read it, you can see why:

Note within a birthday card from Trump to Epstein. Card included a lewd drawing of a naked woman.

Trump and Epstein were friends, close friends, and it’s hard not to speculate about their secrets — it’s hard for MAGA to not speculate about their secrets. As Will Sommer recently wrote, there’s a right-wing civil war going on right now over Epstein. Some influencers, many with financial ties to Trump world, are following their marching orders and preaching the “get over it” line. Others, like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, are refusing to go along and refusing to let Epstein die. Some, like neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, are furious. On his podcast Fuentes recently said, “Fuck you. You suck... This entire thing has been a scam. We're gonna look back at the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in history.”

The point is not that these broken clocks are right for once. The point is that these influencers are deeply responsive, far more responsive than politicians, to “the base.” Their income is dependent on the far-right masses, and as much as they shape the perspectives of the rank-and-file MAGA, they also respond to their followers, and are sure to never stray too far from what their listeners will agree with. So what we’re seeing here is a huge chunk of the GOP base refusing to let Epstein go.

When some influencers, like Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk, along with plenty of MAGA politicians, try to dismiss Epstein, they’re flooded with thousands of angry comments. And, just as significant, influencers who ‘lean right’ are listening to their audience. Theo Von, a podcaster with a massive platform who has cultivated a right-wing base while not being primarily political, tweeted out a clip from his show, in which JD Vance calls for the list to be released, with the simple comment: “Yeah what changed?”

Polling from just days ago shows that 59% of Trump voters think the government is now covering up something in the Epstein case (not to mention 81% of Harris voters). But Trump is doubling and tripling down. He’s calling the whole thing “bullshit” and calling his own supporters “weaklings” for continuing to care about it. The question is, will MAGA’s attachment to this case prove strong enough to hurt the right in any meaningful way?

To answer that question we need to go back and look at how the ruling class and the far-right have created a Frankenstein monster that they might have a little less control over than they thought. The base of the Republican Party is a version of something that’s always existed in America: masses of people fed hate and fear by the ruling class both to distract from the reality of their condition and to foster a more exclusionary society.

In her non-fiction book Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison examines how the white identity in America was deliberately constructed in opposition to Blackness. One of the central questions of the book is: “What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described as ‘American’?” She uses a review of classic U.S. literature to exhume this often concealed process of creating whiteness, and in the process we see how the defining characteristic isn’t anything remotely inherent, but rather the absence of Blackness, the contrast with Blackness. The manufacture of whiteness was, from its inception, intended to separate and used by the ruling class to divide poor white folks from enslaved Africans.

This process continued in multiple ways. Every day we see the right try to create and shape their base in opposition to so-called illegal immigrants (people coming to this country in search of a better life). We’ve seen periods where Muslims were the primary foil, we’ve seen “elites” used as a foil, and of course “gangsters” and “thugs” and other thinly veiled racist euphemisms still run rampant as foils for MAGA. All of this is so common that it’s often taken for granted, left unexamined, seen as a fixture of life in this country. But now, of all scandals, it’s the squashing of the Jeffrey Epstein case that’s lifting up the log and throwing this dynamic into the light.

What’s coming into focus in this MAGA civil war over Epstein is the limits of creating a Frankenstein monster as a political strategy. From racism to xenophobia to the deliberate dumbing down of the population the ruling class has gotten its way by catering to the most base instincts of the population for centuries. But that approach might finally be coming up short.

Creating a political regime absent of anything positive, structured on hatred for “the other,” creates a base that runs on negative emotion. The Epstein case was, far-right influencers and their handlers thought, the perfect vehicle for them, the perfect way to channel working class anger in particular. In a country with soaring inequality and growing anger at billionaires, the Epstein case presented an opportunity for the right. Here’s the perfect encapsulation of “the cabal” that QAnon and related far-right personalities have spent years talking about. Here’s a billionaire who not only trafficked minors for sex, but whose Rolodex was seemingly the who’s who of the rich and powerful.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

The Epstein case had the key element of conspiracy culture going back generations, centuries even, a shadowy group of powerful people doing terrible things. And for a U.S. filled with rising class antagonism, what better place to divert the anger of the masses? Don’t look at capitalism, don’t look at the system, don’t look at society at large, look at this specific man and the specific people he allegedly catered to, or blackmailed, or was associated with. This is the container for your anger, neat, defined, and, most importantly, limited.

And it worked. MAGA has talked about being a working-class movement, but it’s never materialized. Instead they captured the anger of ordinary people through conspiracy, and siphoned it into scapegoating. A deliberately anti-intellectual population, led away from critical thinking and into base emotions, latched on to Epstein as the vehicle for so much of their rage. So now, when Trump and his administration suddenly pivot on this case, that betrayal doesn’t hit intellectually, it hits the black bile that fascism runs on, the hate and anger and white rage of impotence that fuels their movement. And Trump now risks putting himself in the crosshairs of this behemoth he helped create.

It’s hard to know just what the long-term impact of the Epstein fallout will be. If a chunk of the base stays home during elections, tunes out of MAGA, becomes disaffected, that’s a great start. But, there’s also a more sinister option. The goal of the far right isn’t to keep winning elections forever, it’s to stop having elections. That is, their Frankenstein monster isn’t built for democracy, they cultivated it to end democracy. Their route out of this mess, their route out of the base potentially turning on them, is to make their base unnecessary.

Granted, even authoritarians need the support of a good part of the population. Trump and his accomplices want fascism, but they want and need people to come along with them. Every day that this Epstein story keeps growing, keeps doing damage, is a bad day for them. But the harm it’ll do to MAGA, even in the best scenario, isn’t enough. To defeat fascism we don’t just need to defeat Trump, we need to defeat his monster and the whole system that created it.

This Frankenstein monster is a crude allegory for the far-right base, with the ruling class and the far-right leadership being Dr. Frankenstein. People being pulled away from the behemoth, being pulled away from complete subservience to their leader and his movement, is a great start. But winning the world we need requires helping folks become autonomous, helping them think critically, reigniting a sense of agency in those who leave the cult. As organizer and writer Grace Lee Boggs said, “We are responsible for the evolution of the human species.” In her eyes, the transformation of society and the transformation of the people in it were inextricably bound up.

So while the right has an offramp for Frankenstein’s monster, while they see fascism as a way to end democracy and avoid being held to account by the masses they’ve plied with hate and fear, we need a different way out. We need more fully developed people, we need educated people, we need true democracy, which involves millions of people seizing their agency and increasing their capacity to think and feel and connect. We need new organizations and structures and systems that are built as we reshape ourselves. This goes far beyond voting into consistent organizing and education and building and the willingness to reshape the world. And it’s hard work.

Photo by Pau Casals on Unsplash

To the degree that people break from MAGA it’ll be messy and ugly. Some will move farther right, plenty will dive deeper into conspiracy, and some will become more nihilistic. But the coalition will be weakened, and some people will begin to change. Everyone with a mic should hammer this story home. From the Wall Street Journal to casual conversations, this is a moment to be seized.

The Epstein case is so powerful because it encapsulates how the richest people on Earth have no concept of enough, how they seek increasingly perverse ways to exercise dominance, how wealth corrupts and how the corrupt get wealth. But we’ll never get where we need to go just by targeting individuals. We have to target systems, build their replacements, and change ourselves all at the same time. It’s not easy, but it’s the work ahead of us. And right now we have the opportunity to make a surprising leap forward if we treat the rift opened by Trump and Epstein not as an end, but as a beginning. - JP

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P.S. I’m excited to say that I’m linking up with Comrades Education to do their Summer Rejuvenation program. It’s an online program designed to support activists, allies & everyday people taking action across multiple fronts this summer.

Designed to be immediate & rejuvenating, each live session of this program will focus on one storytelling guest and one nourishing reflection or meditation led by spiritual movement leadership.

I’ll be joining the session Sunday, July 27 as the storytelling guest, focused on Mutual Aid & the Collective Soul along with Katrina Messenger!

Full course details and link to registration: https://www.comrades.education/summer-rejuvenation-series