Why MAGA is so concerned with Epstein

With the latest shift by President Donald Trump on releasing the Epstein files held by the U S Department of Justice he s now for it after being against it after being for it the MAGA base may at last get to view the documents it s long yearned to see On the afternoon of Nov the House voted overwhelmingly to seek release of the files with only one Republican voting against the measure The Senate later in the day agreed unanimously to pass the measure and send it on to the president for his signature The Conversation s politics editor Naomi Schalit talked with scholar Alex Hinton who has studied MAGA for years about Make America Great Again Republicans sustained interest in the incident of accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein Hinton explains how MAGA s interest in the occurrence fits into what he knows about the group of die-hard Trump supporters You are an expert on MAGA How do you learn what you know about MAGA I m a cultural anthropologist and what we do is field work We go where the people we re studying live act talk We observe and sort of hang out and see what happens We listen and then we unpack themes We try and understand the meaning systems that undergird whatever group we re studying And then of unit there s interviewing It appears that MAGA Trump s core supporters are very concerned about various aspects of the Epstein story including the release of documents that are in the possession of the U S cabinet Are they in fact concerned about this The answer is yes but there s also a sort of no implicit too We need to back up and think first of all what is MAGA I think of it as what we call in anthropology a nativist movement a foregrounding of the people in the land And this is where you get America First discourse It s also xenophobic meaning that there s a fear of outsiders invaders coming in It s populist so it s something that s sort of for the people Tucker Carlson interviewed Marjorie Taylor Greene and he commented I m going to go over the five pillars of MAGA Those were America First this is absolutely central Borders was the second You ve got to secure the borders The third was globalist antipathy or a recognition that globalization has failed Another one was free speech and another one he mentioned was no more foreign wars And I would add into that an emphasis on we the people versus elites Each of those is interwoven with a key dynamic to MAGA which is conspiracy theory And those conspiracy theories are usually anti-elite going back to we the people If you look at Epstein he s where a large number of of the conspiracy theories converge Stop the Steal The Big Lie lawfare deep state replacement theory Epstein kind of hits all of these that there s this elite cabal that s orchestrating things that ultimately are against the interests of we the people with a sort of antisemitic strain to this And in particular if we go back to Pizzagate in this conspiracy theory that there were these Democratic elitists who were you know demonic forces who were sex trafficking and lo and behold here s Epstein doing precisely that Related MAGA s conspiracy theory fails to distract from Epstein There s kind of a bucket of these things and Epstein is more in it than not in it He s all over it He s been there you know from the beginning because he s elite and they believe he s doing sex trafficking And then there s a suspicion of the deep state of the regime and this means cover-ups What was MAGA promised Trump noted we re going to give you the goods right Kash Patel Pam Bondi everyone disclosed we re going to tell you this stuff And it sure smacks of a cover-up if you just look at it But the bottom line is there s a realization among countless people in MAGA that you ve got to stay with Trump It s too much to say there is no MAGA without Trump There s certainly no Trumpism without Trump but MAGA without Trump would be like the tea party It ll just sort of fade away without Trump People in MAGA are supporting Trump more than more mainstream Republicans on this So I don t think there s going to be a break over this but it certainly adds strain And you can see in the current moment that Trump is under selected strain The break that we are seeing is Trump current with one of his leading MAGA supporters Marjorie Taylor Greene not the MAGA supporter emerging with Trump With Greene sometimes it s like a yo-yo in a relationship with Trump You fall apart you have tension and then you sort of get back Elon Musk was a little bit like that You have this breakup and now she s sort of backtracking like Elon Musk did I don t think what is happening is indicative of a larger fracturing that s going to take place with MAGA It seems that Trump did his about-face on releasing the documents so that MAGA doesn t have to break with him It s absolutely true He s incredible at taking any story and turning it in his direction He s sort of like a chess player unless he blurts something out He s a couple of moves ahead of wherever whatever s running and so in a way we re consistently behind and he knows where we are It s incredible that he s able to do this There s one other thing about MAGA I think of it as don t cross the boss It s this sort of overzealous love of Trump that has to be expressed and literally no one ever crosses the boss in these contexts You toe the line and if you go against the line you know what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene there s the threat Trump is going to disown you You re going to get primaried Trump has ostensibly made a brilliant strategic move which is suddenly to say I m all for releasing it It s definitely the Democrats who are these evil elites and now we re going to investigate Bill Clinton and all these other Democrats He takes over the narrative he knows how to do it and it s intentional Whoever says Trump is not charismatic he doesn t make sense Trump is highly charismatic He can move a crowd He knows what he s doing Never underestimate him Does MAGA care about girls who were sexually abused There is concern you know especially among the devout Christians in MAGA for whom sex trafficking is a huge issue I think if you look at sort of notions of Christian morality it also goes to notions of sort of innocence being afflicted by demonic forces And it s an attack on we the people by those elites it s a violation of rights I mean who isn t horrified by the idea of sex trafficking But again especially in the Christian circles this is a huge issue Alex Hinton Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Director Center for the Review of Genocide and Human Rights Rutgers University Newark This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license Read the original article Read more about this topic Heard there are no files Rogan mocks Trump for changing his story on Epstein Larry Summers exits OpenAI following Epstein emails release How Trump s MRI spurred the Epstein vote The post Why MAGA is so concerned with Epstein 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