Is the ghost of Epstein breaking MAGA?

We made it nearly a year without having to cover Epstein, but with Trump and his allies consistently committing own-goals and bringing him up, the day has come. Today we’re talking about the Epstein files and what appears to be Trump’s most consequential weakness so far. Josie Duffy Rice joins us to talk about how and why Epstein became so central to the MAGA movement, and whether this could be the thing that finally cracks Trump’s base. Our guest Josie Duffy Rice is a journalist, writer, and law school graduate whose work you can follow on her website or @jduffyrice on Bluesky and Instagram. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Broderick?

  You know, simple question, like, do you think Epstein killed himself?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  I do.

• 0:05Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, you know?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  And I'd love to tell you why.

• 0:08Ryan Broderick?

  I would love to hear it, and I think by the end of the episode, I will have a great idea of whether or not he did. I oscillate back and forth, I'll be honest. A friend of mine in 2019 put Epstein didn't kill himself in his wedding speech, which I thought was a choice, a really interesting choice.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  If I wasn't married and he wasn't married, that might be my kind of guy.

• 0:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Because it's just crazy enough that I'm in the way, you know?

• 0:31Ryan Broderick?

  That's, that is not where I thought you were headed with that. That's fascinating.

• 0:50Ryan Broderick?

  The reason I started this episode with such a basic and easy question is because that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about the right-wing fervor around the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories. I'm Ryan Broderick. With me, as always, is Grant Irving, who definitely wasn't on Epstein's list, just bringing that up.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Was not.

• 1:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he was not. I thought I'd get that out of the way now, in case our audience was curious. And Panic World is a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality. And today, we are taking on a story that I have not wanted to touch with a 10-foot pole since we started this show. But it's very clear that this story is never going to go away. And it somehow is the most consequential weakness, at least so far, for Trump. So we wanted to help show how and why this became so central to the Make America Great Again movement, and ask a question that feels, you know, kind of crazy to ask, which is, you know, could this be the thing that brings down Trump and saves democracy? Joining us today is Josie Duffy Rice, a journalist, a writer, the proud owner

• 1:54Ryan Broderick?

  of a law degree. Hello, welcome. How are you?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Hi. I'm as good as I can be, given the world.

• 2:04Ryan Broderick?

  Uh huh, good. Have you been surprised by the resurgence of Jeffrey Epstein discourse this summer? Is it shocking to you that it's come back so strong?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  It's not shocking to me in the way that like, nothing can really be shocking at this point because there's no predictable logic to how certain things go, especially on right-wing internet. I guess I would say that generally, I'm surprised at how long its legs have been, but I don't know.

• 2:32Ryan Broderick?

  It does feel like a real own-goal for the Trump administration to bring it up so consistently. It would have remained a QAnon fixation, but even QAnon, the sort of right-wing conspiracy theory that underpins a lot of Trumpism, isn't really as powerful or as relevant as it was, you know, even a year ago. So, I agree that it's strange that this has come back so much. And just, as an example of, you know, where we are right now, The Wall Street Journal reports earlier this summer that Trump drew a doodle of a naked woman with his signature as the pubic hair for a birthday card for Jeffrey Epstein. Roseanne Barr is even mad about it. She tweeted in July, "Mr.

• 3:16Ryan Broderick?

  President, yes, we still care about Epstein. Is there a time not to care about child sex trafficking? Read the damn room." And I think it is understandable for an average person by this point to be a little confused about how we got here. So, we're gonna look at why this means so much to the MAGA movement. When did the Epstein scandal get on your radar? Like, going all the way back?

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Going all the way back? That's a great question. I feel, I'm trying to think of like, when I first heard about Epstein, and I'm not sure I could put my finger on it. What I do remember is Alex Acosta, a former prosecutor, federal prosecutor in Florida, who had basically given Epstein the sweetheart deal. I remember that, whatever I knew about Epstein before, suddenly he became kind of the center of this much bigger narrative about sex trafficking, about the federal government, about Trump. I mean, has brought him up in the context of prosecutors, when Trump is like, basically saying that lots of prosecutors can't be trusted because they prosecuted him, and then they gave Epstein a sweetheart deal.

• 4:18Ryan Broderick?

  I guess he was just not on my radar. Until I started working in newsrooms and even then, I mean,

• 4:25Speaker 01

  This was when?

• 4:26Ryan Broderick?

  And we're gonna get into the timeline. Uh, this would have been like the early 2010s.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 4:30Ryan Broderick?

  And, and just to actually to start our timeline here, Epstein receives his first criminal charge related to child trafficking in Palm Beach in May 2006. So like, I'm still in college and I'm like, I don't know, maybe, I think a lot of reporters go through this where like, you, you graduate out into the world and then you just realize like how little you know about anything. And I feel like the, all of the Epstein charges and all the prosecution of Epstein was happening as I'm like, sort of getting a sense of like, wow, like, there sure is a lot of stories that I have not been following as a child.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 5:03Ryan Broderick?

  You know, and now I have to understand what's going on.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:05Ryan Broderick?

  But, you know, I wanted to start with the sentence of child trafficking that Epstein received. And from like your background with criminal justice, like, is that a, is that a typical sentence for something like this? Like, the, the initial one in 2006?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  No, it's not. He was prosecuted in federal court, which already is one step more serious than like someone who's prosecuted example for like sexually assaulting a kid, like statutory rape or something like that. If it's someone you know and it happens in like in your state or in your district, like you're gonna be prosecuted by state authorities. So already the fact that he's prosecuted federally meant that like, there was more to it. Usually that means that something has crossed state lines and that can often mean like you're looking at child porn on the internet. In his particular case, I think it meant he actually was crossing state lines with women or with girls who were underage. So already the fact that it's in federal court usually means it's a bigger deal on something like this. And it was surprising

• 6:04Speaker 01

  that he got the deal that he did. Like, I think that's pretty unusual. What's notable, most notable about it, right, was the, the part where he got to go to work every day and he just had to come back to jail to sleep, go to prison to sleep. That was the deal.

• 6:16Ryan Broderick?

  That is-

• 6:17Speaker 01

  That was crazy.

• 6:18Ryan Broderick?

  Of all of the crazy details around this story, that is still one that I can't really wrap my head-

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Right. It's nuts. It is something that you would only get if you had money, right? Like, race matters here, etc. But like, money matters.

• 6:33Ryan Broderick?

  Martha Stewart didn't even get that.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But again, like, a lot of this has to do with how much attention is being paid on this, like, to the case at any point, right? And so in the case of Epstein, like, they would not have given him that deal if they could have seen what was coming, because they just didn't know that he was going to become kind of the center of this whole narrative around child sex trafficking, etc., or that anybody was going to really care. And nobody did really care for a good decade at any kind of like, public, big public way about that. The other thing I'll just say is that, like, people make crazy deals all the time in criminal cases. Like, people will, you know, someone could get convicted of first degree murder and get, you know, 10 years. Someone else could get six life sentences.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Like, the circumstances matter, the politics matter, the prosecutor matters, the... So I'm always like, a little hesitant to make it seem as if everything fell in category A and only he fell in category B. Like, I'm not saying it was singular, but I definitely think it was unusual.

• 7:37Ryan Broderick?

  Fun little background fact about me. My first job in college, like, professional job, was writing depositions for a defense attorney. I really enjoyed it.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Ooh, I love that.

• 7:48Ryan Broderick?

  It made me want to be a reporter, because I drove around and interviewed people about how they got screwed over by the cops, and then I, like, did research. And it was like, where can I do this as a job without going to law school? And they're like, boy, do I have a job for you.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:02Ryan Broderick?

  To your point about how-

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Actually, defense attorney is still a job, and media has kind of died, so you might have made the wrong call.

• 8:06Ryan Broderick?

  I may, I'm, yeah, I'm hosting a podcast now, instead of being a fancy lawyer, so you might be right there.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, same. And I went to law school, so, there you go.

• 8:15Ryan Broderick?

  To your point about how people weren't really paying attention, I think that is a really interesting piece of this, because from, like, 2008 until 2018, after the verdict, that's when you start to see this wave of lawsuits, you, all almost from anonymized Jane Does. And that's also when the flight logs and the little black book, you know, enter the public consciousness. That's when you start to hear about connections with Trump, with the Clintons, Prince Andrew in the UK. But it doesn't really feel like-

• 8:52Ryan Broderick?

  People can wrap their heads around it.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  People not being able to wrap their heads around it continues to this day and instead they've kind of like filled in the blanks with their own, like, there's a lot we don't know. There's a ton that we will probably never have insight into. And so that has just left this void that has allowed people to fill it in with, you know, whatever they want, contingent on their own kind of political leanings and like how much time they spend on Twitter. I feel like that's part of its salience is the fact that like, we know enough, but we don't even know the beginning of what we could know, probably.

• 9:30Ryan Broderick?

  Well, let's talk about what we do know. Because we do, we got a few things to sort of orient ourselves in this really weird, weird world. So between 2016 and 2017, Trump gets elected, the Me Too movement starts. Looking at the timeline that we put together for this episode, it is actually interesting that a lot of the early Epstein legal strategy from his victims actually became like a wider strategy during the Me Too movement of like, okay, if the courts can't handle this in a quick enough time, or a satisfactory way, like, we'll do it with civil lawsuits, we'll do it in any other way. And I had not actually put that connection together until I looked at it like literally just today.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that either. I wonder too, like, again, I think it's so hard to kind of tell what's influencing which, right? And the whole kind of legal systems approach to sexual assault or rape has shifted, obviously drastically since the Me Too movement, I think. I think it's, I think it is in general, a very different environment to bring a case like that. But I also think that there have always been kind of these people that the system doesn't listen to, and they always have to had to rely on civil consequences to kind of get what they want. Criminal consequences obviously have their own value to someone who might be victimized by a crime, but the value is

• 10:50Speaker 01

  kind of internal, it's not external, right? And there is something about being like, I was harmed and these are the damages I get for being harmed. It's not necessarily justice, but it's something, right?

• 11:01Ryan Broderick?

  We saw this with Alex Jones a few years ago where it's like this guy won't stop. And so we're just gonna sue him for defamation into the ground because like there's no other way to get this guy to stop. In terms of like the Epstein storyline here, uh, the, the big first, I think, moment where I think people who haven't been following this closely until now go like, whoa, what's going on here is 2018. In November, there's a huge expose from the Miami Herald, which brings Epstein's case basically into the national spotlight. It singles out, as you said, Alex Acosta, who was the United States Secretary of Labor by that point. It alleges that he was complicit in keeping Epstein out of jail.

• 11:41Ryan Broderick?

  All the information about, you know, Epstein's association with rich and famous men, that starts to come out, it becomes tabloid fodder. And now Trump is in the White House and I, I do think, I would, you know, there's a lot of times where I want to be like a little fly on the wall in like Democratic strategy meetings. Just like out of pure like grim schadenfreude. And this is one where I'm like, yeah, that would have been sick actually to watch. Those people freak out to realize that like Epstein's pal is now the president.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:09Ryan Broderick?

  Whoops, too late.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Right. I'm, I like, I think it's very, um, hopeful of you to think that there even are these strategy meetings.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  But I, I hear you.

• 12:23Ryan Broderick?

  This is also like an interesting year though, because I would, you know, if I had to sort of throw a dart at it, I'd say 2018 is the peak of the Me Too movement. And I come back to it here just because it, it feels very linked to me. Epstein is, even though like Epstein is its own beast and its own monster. It does feel very much like this giant global moment of going, okay, what do we do with very powerful men who are all predators? You know, like what do we do with this? Um, and now possibly that includes the president. It, it's, it's like something out of a bad horror movie.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:59Ryan Broderick?

  Do you have a sense like looking back on how both Epstein and the Me Too movement has, have changed specifically criminal proceedings? That's the world that I, I always wonder like, did anything happen? What is the legacy there for this?

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think that the Me Too movement has.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Change, from what I can tell, it has made it more likely that people who want to pursue charges against those who have harmed them, or like predators, or people who have sexually assaulted them, have more of a chance of doing that. The story I was just reading was about the woman who was sexually assaulted in college and then years, told people and said all this stuff, and then years later, someone, he messaged her and said, "So I raped you, and I'll never do it again." And then it took, basically, this has been like a 20-year thing for her, trying to get some kind of consequences. And I think the Me Too movement like made it possible for that to happen. As someone who is like skeptical of the criminal justice system's ability, skeptical is the kindest word I have, to

• 14:03Speaker 01

  actually like impart accountability, right? I think in many ways, it hasn't changed much at all. What we are seeing is kind of the same structure of accountability that has existed in the past, and I'm not sure how effective that is. And by that, I mean like, you know, we talk about carceral feminism, right? And we talk about this idea that women who are obviously much more likely to be the victims of sexual assault, or rape, who have kind of exist under a patriarchal structure in this country, often are relying on one of the most unreliable systems to bring them justice, or to find some sense of closure,

• 14:46Speaker 01

  or to hold someone accountable. And that that system itself is replicating kind of the same harms that we, that they're trying to address in the first place. And so what, what can the system really do for you? Right? I mean, along with the Me Too movement you think about right now, like, think about the end of abortion rights. You think about, like, as we were talking about before we started, the increase in surveillance. Like, my concern is always that we rely on On a system that in its own way has it out for all of us to like bring justice for women. And that to me seems like a pipe dream.

• 15:20Ryan Broderick?

  If you think of the criminal justice, quote unquote, system as actually baseline punitive, it doesn't actually work as a system for justice. It's a system for punishment.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. I understand that there is some kind of privilege in even being able to make that distinction, because if you're a woman who's like being stalked or harmed by a man right now, that like you, you're thinking, I need him away from me. I need him locked up. I need to be safe. And that's a very different, it becomes less theoretical then. And I understand that because we don't really have any other ways of addressing harm other than the system. Right. And so like we use what we have, like the movement has done a lot and nothing at the same time. That's, that's the way I would summarize what I'm trying to say.

• 16:00Ryan Broderick?

  Getting back to Epstein, it's hard to point to exactly how this has shaped culture, but it has had an enormous impact. And for Trump, it's been both an opportunity he's taken advantage of and potentially an existential problem. He's hit with federal charges for sex trafficking and he's arrested. And this happens in 2019. By this point, Trump is well into the White House. He's says that he's quote unquote, not a fan. That's his quote there.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 16:27Ryan Broderick?

  Not a fan, not, not a fan of the guy.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  The way I talk about like a grilled cheese.

• 16:30Ryan Broderick?

  So weird thing happens. He's deflecting this connection, but it's also going to be Trump's advantage that this is happening. And there was this group online of, you know, bored boomers who were happy to make Trump the hero of this story. Of course, I'm talking about QAnon. And we're going to get to them next. But for those not in delusion land, you know, not in the weird filter bubble that all the Trump supporters live in, this was always an issue with Trump. The New York Times reports that at one point, Roger Stone was told that the swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago was filled with young, beautiful girls. Sam Nunberg, a former campaign aide to Donald Trump, said that he raised concerns about

• 17:15Ryan Broderick?

  the candidate's involvement with Mr. Epstein before Mr. Trump officially began his presidential campaign. But Mr. Trump assured Mr. Nunberg that he had barred Mr. Epstein from entering his clubs after Mr. Epstein had tried to recruit a woman who worked at Mar-a-Lago. And this was reported at the time. So this has been around for a while. And then on August 10th, 2019, 4chan gets the scoop, actually, before any media on earth.

• 17:40Ryan Broderick?

  That Epstein had killed himself, which is one of those crazy things of history that I think is actually so insane that like people don't want to think about it.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are prison guards on 4chan and there are a lot of them. Yeah.

• 17:51Ryan Broderick?

  Which honestly, like, I'm gonna guess that like a mass amount of 4chan users are prison guards, but like probably started as like 4chan users and then became prison guards as adults.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  It could go in either direction. I mean, look, when you look at like the dredges of the internet, like the worst parts of the internet, it's a lot of cops and it's a lot of prison guards, like.

• 18:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  And I think it goes both ways, that those are the kind of people who choose, in some ways, those are the kind of people who choose those jobs, but also those jobs are, make you a worse person, just the day to day of those jobs, like tears at your moral and emotional integrity. So I feel like, yeah, I would draw the same conclusion, like definitely a prison guard told 4chan.

• 18:32Ryan Broderick?

  For sure. Trump at the time.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Was, do we already know about the list at this point? Like the list and the island and that.

• 18:39Ryan Broderick?

  What we know is we know about the flight logs and we know about the existence of the little black book. I believe, and we're gonna get further into sort of like how this has evolved since, but I believe the basis of the quote unquote list is the little black book.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:54Ryan Broderick?

  And the flight logs. So like the idea would be like, if you can figure out who was going on the Lolita Express, like you could create a list of his clients and then, you know, that's the Epstein list. I think the Epstein list quote unquote is like those, is like one of those things like the DNC servers where like the DNC leaked servers from the Clinton hack are not servers. It's like an email list, you know, it's like, it's like what it just gets called in popular culture. So, uh, Trump responds to Epstein's alleged suicide by retweeting a post immediately that blames the Clintons for it. And that post included stuff like hashtag Clinton body count and hashtag Clinton crime family.

• 19:32Ryan Broderick?

  So it's not like any of this was subtle. And there's like a ton of interest bipartisan, weirdly enough, to investigate the suicide. Epstein's lawyers argue he was murdered, the jail guards are charged with negligence, not with posting on 4chan, weirdly enough. And then the case gets shut down. That is sort of the birth of all of this. And by all accounts, this, this story should have ended here, but because of the circumstances around his death, like. It also can't ever end. It it it's like who shot JFK kind of, but for the 21st century.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 20:09Ryan Broderick?

  Do you have a sense of how the like, how average people think about this? Like, like, this is like the Thanksgiving conversation for 2019 into 2020, which is insane.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think the pandemic, and I'm only sort of realizing this as I'm talking to you guys. Like, the timing of the pandemic contributed a lot to the narrative around this.

• 20:32Ryan Broderick?

  Hundred percent.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Around this conspiracy, not just because like, everybody was at home and forgetting how to socialize and had like, nothing to do and was just online. But also because there was all of this conspiracy around the pandemic as well.

• 20:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  What, you know, and so it contributed to this idea that like, everybody in government is in it together. And, you know, they're doing all these things. They're getting sick. They're inventing diseases for Big Pharma. You know, they're on Epstein's island and he has all their secrets. So like, I feel like the pandemic is when the social fabric, even more than Trump's election, really started to fray in a way that I I am continually surprised by today. I think the Epstein thing only contributed to that. In terms of like, what do regular people think? It's a good question. I mean, I don't know that I know that many regular people on like, a day to day basis.

• 21:21Ryan Broderick?

  Cool.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Like, you know, my kids are in school. I meet like, their parents, but I'm like, not like, we're not cool enough that Epstein would come up, right? Uh, you know, like, you know, like, what are you doing for after school this year?

• 21:32Ryan Broderick?

  Hey, do you think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, by the way?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. What I do think is that, so I was recently in LA visiting my in-laws and my husband and I went to this party of a friend and like, I started talking to this girl and she was like, what do you guys do? And I go like, we're journalists. She was like, do you think Epstein killed himself? And someone else came up and was like, do you think Epstein killed himself? These people like, work in, I don't know, they don't, I have no idea what they do, but they, they're more well adjusted than us, right? They don't work in media or government. And so I, I do feel like it's not just an in-game thing.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Most people genuinely do not think Epstein killed himself. I think I'm in the minority, a far, far, far minority.

• 22:15Ryan Broderick?

  I question it. Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:17Ryan Broderick?

  I think that sounds right. I mean, and your point about the pandemic is really sharp. Culture freezes and it just sort of stops and everyone comes online because they're bored. It's like people just speedrunning 20 years of like internet brain rot simultaneously. And Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself as a meme starts to spread at this exact period of time. So you see it pop up when a Fox News guest references it on Jesse Waters' Fox News show.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Right. Oh, I remember that. Yeah.

• 22:50Ryan Broderick?

  A woman who sues Epstein wears it on a friendship bracelet in court. John McAfee, the billionaire who may or may not have had sex with a whale and may or not have killed himself, made a crypto token called Epstein Didn't Kill Himself and then wrote, "I never said Jeffrey Epstein..."

• 23:09Speaker 01

  That is the worst sentence I have ever heard in my entire life.

• 23:14Ryan Broderick?

  You're welcome.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  It included billionaire. It included sex with a whale. It included crypto. Like it had all of it. One suicide, like everything that's awful.

• 23:24Ryan Broderick?

  I'm really...

• 23:25Speaker 01

  I'm so impressed. I'm so impressed.

• 23:27Ryan Broderick?

  I'm really proud.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  You should be.

• 23:29Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you. I feel proud. Just for clarification, McAfee later said, "I never said Jeffrey Epstein was murdered. I said he didn't commit suicide. Not the same. Could be alive, could have never existed, maybe murdered. I don't know. I don't know."

• 23:43Speaker 01

  This is the guy who started the software, the like... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 23:47Ryan Broderick?

  And then went nuts. Yeah. He finished writing, "I only know Jeffrey Epstein didn't commit suicide." And then obviously...

• 23:58Ryan Broderick?

  Honestly, I love that idea, that like Jeffrey Epstein didn't exist. And speaking of conspiracies, we're going to talk about what the world of conspiracy theorists do with all of this after the break. But first, a word from our sponsor, MyPillow.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  I forgot about MyPillow.

• 24:18Ryan Broderick?

  I sleep on one every night and I can't move my spine. It's made of glass now. I am literally made of glass.

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• 24:44Ryan Broderick?

  You know, based on what we can see, the QAnon movement, you're familiar, right? Like, just sort of, okay. And I assume, I assume our listeners at this point are familiar with it as well.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Card carrying member of QAnon. Yeah, do you have the mug? I have the mug, I have this shirt.

• 25:00Ryan Broderick?

  Where we go one, we go all, guys.

• 25:03Ryan Broderick?

  So, the Epstein stuff obviously been kicking around, but it wasn't really mainstream when QAnon started. Like, QAnon was not a reaction to this, is what I'm saying. And this is actually from a Vox article from before the Epstein story broke, which reads, "Accusations of pedophilia aimed at celebrities, companies, and politicians are a critical part of QAnon. Roseanne Barr and others have tweeted that the purportedly unprecedented increase in sex trafficking arrests taking place under the Trump administration is the direct result of Trump working with Robert Mueller to arrest pedophiles nationwide. For the record, there has not been an unprecedented increase in sex trafficking arrests."

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 25:41Ryan Broderick?

  This was in the air during his election, but when he got to office and, you know, the world didn't change, there was an increased effort to believe he was working on exposing this massive, big pedophile plot. And intentionally or unintentionally, he gave them little bits for them to run wild with and turn into conspiracy theories online. For instance, the QAnon tagline, "The storm is coming", comes from a random press conference that Trump does in his first term. And this is how NBC News describes sort of the combination of these two worlds. "That disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was injured in his Manhattan jail cell has revived a decades-old conspiracy theory that baselessly links Hillary Clinton to a number of suspicious deaths.

• 26:24Ryan Broderick?

  The conspiracy theory related to Clinton first emerged in 1993 through a newsletter published by a former attorney in Indianapolis, Linda Thompson. In her letter titled "Coincidence or the Kiss of Death", Thompson posited that scores of people close to Bill and Hillary Clinton had died under mysterious circumstances." Like at this point in our timeline, so like post-arrest, pre-death, like what is your sense of how right-wing conspiracy circles are processing this?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  The interesting thing about some of this to me is I'm like, these people are doing bad things like all day long, but they make speeches about them, right? They're like, like all these people are responsible for many deaths. They are like warhawks. They are, you know, they are elitists. There's a lot, like, there's so much you can criticize about them. And then you kind of go to this extreme, random, obsolete, you know, list of possibilities that it is the like, meaning of it that matters to them. Like get rid of all the details. Like the point is that these people can have anybody that killed it that they want, that we would never know that, oh, well, they covered it up. Well, they, yeah, it says they got in a car accident, but they probably hired the person who drove the car. Oh, the person who drove the car was this person? Well, they were probably drugged by this.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Like, it's just, you can't unprove everything all the time. So, I mean, look, I feel like this is about the time where like this pizza gate and whatever. I'm like, I mean, I feel like Laura Loomer, I was thinking about a lot at this time, like, who's this crazy one?

• 27:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, this is right around when she got briefly banned from Twitter and like handcuffed herself to the door of Twitter. And I think, I think she was like wearing a diaper or something.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  She said she wasn't gonna leave until they like let her in. And then like three hours later, she was like, okay, I'm bored.

• 28:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, right-wingers love wearing diapers. It's like a thing that happens a lot, weirdly.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. So I think at this time, I, and this is the part of this entire story that I think I was just totally wrong about. Like, I was like, oh, these are just some extremist weirdos. Like even related to MAGA, these people are not mainstream. They're not normalized. They're not like, these are just some weirdos that will die out. And I was wrong about that.

• 28:32Ryan Broderick?

  I thought the same thing. I did not take QAnon as a serious. Player in like the online ecosystem for a long time because I just thought it was too stupid and now I will never make that mistake again. But the thing that you're talking about here, the kind of like how these people fit into the larger Trump world. The Atlantic takes a snapshot of this in 2019 that I think is really useful here. So they write, "The more we learn about the allegations against the reclusive billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, the more he seems like a figment of the online fever swamps. The wealthy financier arrested last week for underage sex trafficking is accused of operating an international sex ring that could implicate high-powered men across business, politics, and Hollywood. I definitely see it as a moment of vindication, David Seaman, a chief proponent of the so-called

• 29:16Ryan Broderick?

  pizza gate theory, told me. I think this is a turning point." Then, "This is just the beginning," said Liz Crocken, a prominent QAnon devotee in a video posted to YouTube. "The storm is officially here." And then finally, "I think I've been unnecessarily maligned," said Mike Cernovich, a right-wing social media personality who has claimed that every A-list actor in Hollywood is a pedophile. This shows I'm doing real things, man." Yeah, that's, yeah, sure.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  You know what's so funny? Cernovich being brought up, I feel like is really relevant because I used to read these blogs in the early, like, mid 2000s, right? About criminal justice. But I remember him from the comments of like these blogs and I've gone back and looked at them since. Sometimes what he says makes sense to me. It was like more of a systemic analysis about the way that systems hold power and like the way we focus on, we create bad policy out of like one bad situation, et cetera. Like I couldn't quote anything he said now, but I remember feeling like he was on, he was one of the people where I was like, I disagree with you a lot, but like there was something I could follow in his like process of thinking that made sense to me. It just shows you.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  How fragile all of our brains are.

• 30:29Ryan Broderick?

  I'm one, I'm one, two steps away. If this podcast doesn't do it all enough in our first year, like I'm going. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm be slow with it. I'm, it's like boiling frogs. The pivot to the right, you know, you gotta go really slow.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  It could be lucrative. You're a white guy, so it's not going to be as lucrative for you because there are a lot of those.

• 30:47Ryan Broderick?

  It's true. Yeah, it's a crowded market.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Now, for me, I feel like I could do great.

• 30:53Ryan Broderick?

  You could do great. Like, cause Candace Owen is gonna get sued into oblivion by Emmanuel Macron. So like, there's gonna be a big opening.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  All I have to do is be one step below saying that the first lady of France is like lying about her gender. And I could like, you know, I'm good.

• 31:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, you're, and you're totally good. But the, the, the Cernoviches of the world, the QAnon people, they are cooking in this stuff, you know, leading up to the pandemic. And all the energy has to go somewhere. And as you've said, there's now this vacuum. There's nothing actually happening with Epstein himself. The Maxwell case is going on, but like, it's not the satisfying conclusion that people need. Because these Trump supporters like desperately need catharsis because like, the whole thing is built around this grievance movement. So of course, that finally explodes on January 6th, 2021, where you get basically all of the Trump supporters storming the Capitol, calling every single person in the government a pedophile, you know, connected to Epstein, what have you.

• 31:51Ryan Broderick?

  Ashley Babbitt, who was killed on January 6th, one of her last tweets in 2020 was, "No the fuck you will not. No masks, no you, no Biden, the kid raper, no vaccines. Sit your fraudulent ass down. We the people, bitch."

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Beautiful last words.

• 32:07Ryan Broderick?

  Beautiful, yeah. And then, a couple of months after that, uh, John McAfee, your, your friend, dies mysteriously as well. And according to Business Insider at the time, "Word on the street, only time will tell if this report was true or not. An account with 61,000 subscribers shared on Twitter. Conspiracies alleging that McAfee had a dead man's switch or a device that activates when its owner dies were also being shared online. A 2019 tweet from the antivirus software mogul's verified Twitter account appeared to be emboldening some of these claims with a quote, "If I suicided myself, I didn't." So he dies in prison. There's a ton more conspiracy theories. His crypto coin is soaring in in value.

• 32:52Ryan Broderick?

  And in 2023, a couple of years after that, we get the a judge ordering that court documents in the Epstein trial are unsealed. And this is the beginning of the client list idea.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 33:05Ryan Broderick?

  So we we it's a massive story. There are betting pools. There's about who's going to be in it. And I think the assumption is like, we're going to get the list. And I guess from like a criminal justice point of view, like, how realistic was that idea that they were going to suddenly tell us the name of everyone that Epstein worked with? Like, was that ever going to be a possibility here?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  No, because I don't think I don't think there's a list. And by I don't think there's a list, I mean, I don't think there's like some.

• 33:33Ryan Broderick?

  Grant, you're in the clear.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Saying you're in the clear, Grant. I checked it. Neither of you are on it.

• 33:38Ryan Broderick?

  You're in the clear, man. He didn't write any names down. You're safe, buddy.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  But also, he only put on the really rich people so that could just mean you guys are, you know, not actually don't have enough money to make the list.

• 33:48Ryan Broderick?

  He didn't track the Jet 2 holiday tier of people who would take the Alita Express.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. And he flew commercial to Alita, you know, island. And you're like, you didn't make it.

• 33:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, the right.

• 34:00Speaker 05

  Right here. There's already comments saying that you need to bully me less. This is never going to go away.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  No, I want to say it for everybody. Grant is not on the list. Okay?

• 34:12Ryan Broderick?

  Grant's on the list. Thank you, because there's no list.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  So I mean, look, this is people watch a lot of TV and then they also feel like, I think, somewhat impotent in their like lives right now and like they don't have a purpose and like they're not important. And what that turns into is the Epstein conspiracy, because there's no list. There's no like, here are the, you know, 200 people who went with Epstein to his island and had sex with young girls there. I guess my thing is like, isn't it bad enough? We know that this guy had sex with underage girls and we know that he had like a lot of friends who if they didn't know he was having sex with underage girls, knew that He was like a creep and that to me feels really bad.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  This need for it to be more, the list is going to come out and then we're going to really be able to catch it. It's like they're right here. There are people saying they're victimized right now and you guys are ignoring them at the so that you can uncover all these other names of these people you don't like and therefore they must be pedophiles. So to answer your question about like, was it realistic for a list to ever come out? That depends on how the case went, what they needed, what evidence they needed, what could be helpful. I think it's like not likely that, given the fervor to which this had reached at this point, that it would have been irresponsible for prosecutors to like, just be releasing documents willy nilly without proof or charges. And that once you release them, then like you kind of are obligated to pursue these cases.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  And a lot of times you don't have evidence or whatever. So there are a lot of kind of,

• 35:45Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  There are a lot of variables that would have gone into whether or not something like this would have been released. It doesn't add up. It sounds, it would make sense in a two hour movie. But when you went home, you'd be like, well, that was kind of a plot hole, you know? Like it doesn't really make sense.

• 35:59Ryan Broderick?

  It's more a reflection on this desire for justice. And that desire is fascinatingly enough bipartisan.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:08Ryan Broderick?

  I had an editor years ago who was like, the invention of Instagram will lead to the invention of the new guillotine. Once people understand what the lives of the rich and powerful actually look like. And that we were not supposed to actually know. And that it'll be looked back on as this massive mistake of the 21st century to give people access through what would have been hidden in Versailles 200 years ago.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:32Ryan Broderick?

  And when I think about the Epstein list, I think about it as this idea of a new guillotine. The idea that like, we can finally have the pretext we need to arrest or in the case of QAnon, execute on the front lawn of the Capitol building, the rich and powerful people that we hate. For whatever reason, we hate them for.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:50Ryan Broderick?

  And. If you think about COVID as part of this story, like, nothing has done more to accelerate the feelings of like, social inequality in America that are felt like on a, on a ground level. And so like, the idea that like, as people are home and consuming the internet as their main mode of reality, and they're getting really angry about like, how rich people are riding out the pandemic, you see this massive spike in this desire for a list, a pretext to throw every rich person you know in jail. And that desire, I think, is easy to understand by most. But then, you know, you put it through their immediate ecosystem,

• 37:30Ryan Broderick?

  and it becomes a story, you know, about Trump and how he's gonna save them all.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  That makes sense. And that the other element of that is, it's related to this feeling that people have that like, there's not that much to hope for. So, for better or for worse, people don't want to be politicians anymore. They don't want to run for office. Everybody, like, nobody has any kind of respect for these positions of power, and they think of them as pure evil. Which, look, I'm as critical as of like, does the next person of the Zuckerbergs and the Clintons and all the people who like, have an inordinate kind of influence on our lives. Like, it's very comforting to think that the reason people have more than me is because they're bad. And the reason people have more than me is because they're connected, and they had to sell their soul to the sex trafficking

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Illuminati in order to have what they have. And I would never do that. And I'm, because I'm good. And that's also why I can't keep a job, and I don't have any money, and my kids won't see me or talk to me.

• 38:30Ryan Broderick?

  Right. They must be demons. They must be like, spirit cooking and child sex cabals and stuff. Yeah. And it's a, it's an impulse that Trump loves to play with. Trump at his heart is like, a tribal leader who wants to get you angry. He wants to like, he wants to make you, you know, associate with his in-group, which is all tied together by pushing conspiracy theories. So even if he doesn't bring it up himself, he can't throw water on the Epstein thing. In September of last year, Trump went on Lex Friedman's podcast, and he said, "I'll take a look at it." And then JD Vons, JD Vons, a horrible combination of two very awful men. JD Vance goes on Theo Von's podcast, and he says the same thing.

• 39:15Ryan Broderick?

  I find it really interesting that this was being asked of them. And so no one really noticed the tricky position that, you know, you put them all in. It's not something Trump or Vance wanted to bring up, but you can't have a base that you've spent, you know, the entire election telling them it was stolen and that all these elites hate them and that they're going to traffic their children and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then spin around and say, chill out. We're in power now. There's nothing more to see here. We don't know anything about this like evil pedophile in his secret island. And then the Guardian writes in October of last year, a former model who says she met Donald Trump through the late sexual abuser, Jeffrey Epstein, was has accused the former president of groping and sexually touching

• 39:57Ryan Broderick?

  her in an incident in Trump Tower in 1993, in what she believed was a twisted game between the two men. Stacey Williams, who worked as a professional model in the 1990s, said she met Trump first in 1992 at a Christmas party after being introduced to him by Epstein. It became very clear that he and Donald were really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together. This like kind of disappeared, even though like Jimmy Kimmel was making jokes about it in his monologue. For many reasons we've discussed on this show during the election, the Democrats have never figured out how to make any of their punches really land when it comes to this stuff. Despite all the connections between

• 40:38Ryan Broderick?

  Trump and Epstein, it really won't matter until Trump owns himself in an interview and makes it a massive problem. And so we're going to talk after the break, though, about what happens when it finally does pop the bubble. But first, a word from our sponsors, fluoride coming to a water supply near you.

• 41:05Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, you've sort of touched on it throughout the episode, but what do you think would have happened if Trump had just never made this a part of his second presidential campaign?

• 41:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I think what you're fundamentally asking is like, what's more powerful, the obsession around Trump or? The attraction to conspiracy.

• 41:24Ryan Broderick?

  I'm asking that question almost every episode of the show.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:27Ryan Broderick?

  I am trying to figure that out.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  And I don't know. I don't know the answer. I mean, do I think it would have faded someone in the background? Perhaps. But I do think this idea that now that Trump's in charge, he can tell us everything, probably would not have gone away entirely. But the early kind of promises, the early kind of focus on like, we're gonna figure this out, knowing that he was gonna put someone in DOJ who was not gonna probably be able to figure this out, probably was a bad decision in the long run. I think also, I have a real question of like, some of these people believe their own shit, man. Trump, maybe not, but I'm like, all of these other people who have like, powerful positions, I'm not sure that they knew that there was no there there on the Epstein stuff, or that they weren't gonna

• 42:11Speaker 01

  be able. I'm not, I just don't know. Yeah, that's a convoluted way of answering your question to say, I don't know.

• 42:16Ryan Broderick?

  I'm there with you. I don't know who's in on the bit and what they think the bit is. That's my central confusion around all of Trump 2.0, which is like, I don't know who knows what and what they think about what. Let's quickly talk here about, you know, how they, how they set up this bomb that is now going off. So, in February of this year, you know, Trump is in the White House, and they invite like, a bunch of hapless doofuses from Twitter to the White House, and they give them binders titled, "The Epstein Files, Phase One."

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Phase One.

• 42:49Ryan Broderick?

  Phase One, like a Marvel, like the Marvel Universe, yeah. It's a mess. It's just full of like, redacted Xerox copies of stuff that has been public knowledge since the Little Black Book and the flight logs were reported on, you know, a decade before.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Those pictures were so crazy.

• 43:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they were awesome. I mean, those people are the dumbest people that have ever lived. I

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Ever.

• 43:10Ryan Broderick?

  I'm a little jealous. Garbage Day or Panic World wasn't invited, you know, but maybe, maybe next time.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe next time. Yeah.

• 43:16Ryan Broderick?

  Start the right wing pivot.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:18Ryan Broderick?

  Starts, you know.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 43:20Ryan Broderick?

  But this is actually the same moment that right wing media starts to get a little grumpy with Trump. The New York Post writes a piece titled, "You Should Feel Frustrated." And it's about how all of the masseuses included on one of the documents were redacted, all their names. They seem to be very angry at the idea that this thing that has never been confirmed to exist in the first place, the client list, was not given to them.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  So it's crazy to be upset that the names of the victims were not really like.

• 43:51Ryan Broderick?

  Well, because they want to terrorize them.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they also want to help them. But I'm like, they don't want your help.

• 43:58Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Like, there's a, there's a much scarier, I mean, I, yeah, I think this is where we should bring this up. This is, this is, there's a much scarier version of what happened this year, where in February, the White House does unredact some stuff and does accidentally leak out victims' names or something. And you get a version of what happened during the Trump trial, where the jurors are being targeted by Twitter and doxed. Like, there's, there's a version of this where this conspiracy theory gets turned up to 11, because now, you know, right wing media and right wing influencers can figure out a way to make the, the victims themselves

• 44:41Ryan Broderick?

  look evil in some way, which has happened so many times before that I'm almost shocked it didn't happen this time. I thank God it didn't happen this time, but.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  But why, sorry, this is probably a dumb question, but why would they have wanted to make them? They would have made their lives miserable, but why would they have gone after them?

• 44:56Ryan Broderick?

  They expose the victim, the victim names a conservative. You know, like, there's a world where the cyber army is running defense, and they go after the victims and try to make them part of the conspiracy, which has happened a million times before.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 45:09Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so a couple of days after that, the Trump goon squad seems, you know, not only out of their depth, but. Totally stunned by this. Pam Bondi goes on Fox News and she says that she's shocked that there's no new information that was released. Take a listen.

• 45:25Speaker 06

  And I started asking for these documents right when I came into office. So I'm going through it and I kept saying, there has to be more. There has to be more. I'm assured that's it. I found out, you know, this week that a source told me, New York, SDNY, they're sitting on thousands of pages of documents regarding Epstein, but the American people have a right to know. And Donald Trump is the most transparent president in our nation's history. So not only will America get the full Epstein files, they will get JFK.

• 45:58Ryan Broderick?

  Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, who now run the FBI together, I guess, or whatever. They are mad and they say that Epstein killed himself. They get attacked by their own followers. And I'm just running through this really quick, just so everybody knows. So end of May, the MAGA base online, they get really pissed. They're upset. A former White House correspondent for Newsmax, she starts tweeting that Dan Bongino and Cash Patel know that they destroyed their credibility by claiming that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. It's floating around, but then the most online person in the world takes it into overdrive. Elon Musk has his little tiff, his little

• 46:42Speaker 06

  Oh, right. That was a good moment.

• 46:43Ryan Broderick?

  Great. With Trump.

• 46:46Speaker 06

  Early June, yeah.

• 46:47Ryan Broderick?

  Early June. He brings it up. He deletes it, but he does briefly accuse the president of being a pedophile. And every attempt to fix this just makes it worse. As of last month, we have this like day by day drip drop that leads to ultimately nothing. We get the new, the new Epstein tape that's missing a minute, but there reportedly is another tape that doesn't miss a minute, but it hasn't been released yet. What I can't really like wrap my head around is why they keep going like from the administration's point of view, like, why do you think they are still like self flagellating themselves like this in public?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  So it was so interesting that for a few days there, when Trump started saying, shut up about this, this isn't a big deal, why is everybody paying attention to this, get over it, when he started really having kind of like an angry reaction, there was so much backlash from his own people, right? And that to me, I found like, I was like, oh, you're trapped now, like, what can you do? Like, you've, you've created this monster, and now you're telling them, stop creating this monster, and they're like, no, we're close now, and we want to know what's up. I have noticed that in the past few days, and I don't have any kind of like, I don't follow right wing Twitter in any sort of methodical way, it's mostly just like, because I hate myself, and so sometimes I look at it, but I, I wouldn't say I'm like, you know,

• 48:06Speaker 01

  following it, like, carefully or to any healthy end, but like, it does feel like there is a kind of less discussion about it right now. I don't, I think Pam Bondi is a great example of someone who thought there was going to be more than there actually was. She like, was totally, it was, you know, drinking the Kool-Aid. And so I think that she probably thought she could get in there and, and have some records to turn over, and I genuinely think there's not that much to turn over. I think that giving up on this as the, for the administration to say like, we were wrong, or not even we were wrong, but we've given everything that there is, we don't have anymore, if there's more, it's, it's not in the hands of the government, it was destroyed, it was

• 48:49Speaker 01

  whatever, would be giving up an opportunity that they are going to want to wield later against whoever they want to wield it against.

• 48:55Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  It would do two things, right? It would like, reduce the fervor of some of the supporters who think that there's this big government conspiracy, this big American elitist politician conspiracy that Trump is like trying to destroy, and it would probably increase the fervor of another group of supporters who are like, even, you know, if he can't find it, what could they have done with it? They must have, you know, it would just, like, people are going to affirm their priors no matter what. In some ways, I think Trump is being proven right, that he sort of thinks he can beat this, and it seems to me like he might be able to.

• 49:30Ryan Broderick?

  I want to get there in just a second, because I have to make a bet on Paul Your Market tonight about this, so hold on. But, um. What you're sort of talking about is something that I believe came up in one of our episodes about Area 51, which is this idea that there's propaganda, there's misinformation, there's disinformation, and it's spread from a central source. So whether it's the CIA, or it's, you know, the Soviet Union, or whatever it is, right? And then the problem is when you do that, when you surround yourself with propaganda, with misinformation, with disinformation, to try to get people to be distracted, or confused, or to attack your enemies, you run the risk of then hiring people who believe

• 50:11Ryan Broderick?

  it. And I think Pam Bondi and Dan Bongino are like, prime examples of the kind of people you get in your inner circle, who come in believing what they saw on the propaganda channels. And they end up embarrassing themselves, and that's the best-case scenario. Because the worst-case scenario is they get inside the inner orbit, and they go, well, we have to make it real.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Correct. But can I, can I add something to that? Because I think you're totally right. A major part of this is January 6, right? Because once January 6 happened, and Trump had isolated and pissed off a lot of kind of like mainstream Republicans, and I don't even just mean like mainstream elected Republicans, but I mean like, just like, regular people, and also like, the Federalist Society.

• 50:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  His first term was a lot about getting a lot of these people who had rejected him to accept him as the head of the Republican Party.

• 51:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  His second term has basically been to reshape the Republican Party in the image of what were formerly the extremists, right? You don't have any other choice at this point. You've, they, this is part and parcel of like, who, who he has at this point. Dan Bongino is at the fucking FBI. It's insane.

• 51:24Ryan Broderick?

  It's insane. Yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  It's crazy. You know, like, a, like, a fitness influencer is like, running the, running like, the biggest police organization on the planet.

• 51:34Ryan Broderick?

  I would say there are several fitness influencers running important state organs in America right now.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Too much power. Right.

• 51:41Ryan Broderick?

  Also, it's funny to watch Trump not even be able to keep all this straight. Because, look, I'm not gonna go down the road of like, does he have diminished mental capacity because he's the demented old man? You know, that's a whole other episode we could do.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:53Ryan Broderick?

  But, he can't even hold this stuff together, because, at the end of last month, you know, right as, as you said, like, it's starting to dip down again. He's on Air Force One and he's asked by a reporter, you know, what's going on with the Epstein investigation? And he drops the totally unprovoked bombshell that one of his underage spa girls was stolen by Jeffrey Epstein, confirming a, an entire narrative being put, you know, put out there by a former Epstein victim, Virginia Guffey.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:24Ryan Broderick?

  He didn't have to.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 52:26Ryan Broderick?

  He just.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  No, but does it matter? What price is he paying? That's a, that's not rhetorical, that matters.

• 52:32Ryan Broderick?

  No, so this, this is where I wanted to end today's episode, which is, I have, in certain moments over the la, over this summer, thought to myself, okay, the Republicans have basically stalled out and run out the clock and they won't let anyone back until September because they don't want, they, they want this thing to blow over. And now Fox News is pumping the airwaves with stuff about Sydney Sweeney and her genes. They, they're just trying to shake the keys in front of the baby to make everyone forget that this is happening. Is there a world where come September, the Democrats grow a spine, or I don't know what they do, but this, or.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Can already answer that.

• 53:10Ryan Broderick?

  Or, in my more fanciful ideas, is there a world where like, the J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel contingent, I don't know, figure out a way to do knives out at Trump? And, and, and, but, does this end with Trump, with a, with a Trump impeachment? Like, if, if he can't shake this stuff?

• 53:31Speaker 01

  No. Not a chance. Nope. Here's the thing, I don't, I think that there probably does not exist any evidence out there that Trump was having sex with underage girls. I, I would be very surprised, in part because I think that Trump is an optics guy, not a, like, I don't think Trump likes to put his future in anybody's hands, and I think that's always been kind of the case, right? And so like, regardless of what he wants to do, my suspicion is that he. Is a control freak in a way that that, you know, some of these other people you can see doing, being sloppy, because essentially that's what a lot of this is, sloppiness, right?

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Sloppiness and depravity, but like, you have to be both in order to get yourself mixed up in this. So that's my suspicion, but nobody has the political power that Donald Trump has. Like, they don't have it. He has people hypnotized. Even at the beginning of this term, I would have said something, I think I underestimated his power. Right? He has people hypnotized in a particular way, which is that if it's between reality, what people can see with their own two eyes and him, they pick him every time. He is a comfort to them in a way that like a cult leader is, right? Like, that is essentially what we're working with. I don't see a world where he's betrayed by his people and ends up impeached. I don't think this is going to be the thing that takes him down.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  When I look over the past few years, I realize how comfortable people have had to get with their own kind of internal contradictions in a way that previously I think they would have had to grapple with them. And this is true of everybody, right? You like, believe yourself to be a good person. There's someone or something you have an investment in and care about and like. You find out something bad about that something or someone, you reject it because you believe yourself to be a good person. So it's very hard for us to kind of like, acknowledge that something that we're invested in and that we want to continue to be invested in is bad, right? It is so particularly true about Donald Trump, and I felt like that especially when the Wall Street Journal thing came out, which was, or New York Times said, Pam Bondi told this.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  He was in the files. That makes a lot of sense. It makes it make sense why he hasn't fired Pam Bondi. Makes it make sense why he like, has kind of avoided some of this stuff, you know? And the response online, and I know Twitter isn't real life, but it's real enough for me, is that he, everybody knew he was on the list, they used to be friends. Trump told him to get out of Mar-a-Lago. Trump rejected him. Trump wasn't part of the... Like, I'm almost like, what could, would there have to be a video? I don't know what would have to happen for people to be, and if we think of there were a video, they would say the girl lied about her age. Or it was AI. Like, or it was AI. I just don't think we're in a world where it matters. It matters in theory to these people because they want to fight to fight and they want to feel good and they want to feel like all the people who have more than them are pedophiles,

• 56:24Speaker 01

  but they don't want to feel like any of the people that are on their side are pedophile. Like, this is, this has always been kind of illusory, right?

• 56:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, all right. None of this matters. Thank you for coming on. That was great.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  All right.

• 56:35Ryan Broderick?

  No, I, I.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  I mean, I want to hear what you think. Do you think it would matter?

• 56:39Ryan Broderick?

  The thing that I've been trying to figure out since January is like, how much of, like, the status quo pre-Trump 2.0 is still in play? And I go back and forth on it every couple of weeks where I'm like, we are in, straight up, we are in an authoritarian state, the rule of law is gone. And then some days I'm like, ah, actually, it's probably a little overblown. I was doing that kind of oscillation in the first Trump administration, but I'm doing it much more often now. I'm like, we are all going to go to camps now. And then I'm like, eh, it's all right. This is fine. Cory Booker is doing like a weird dance up on stage or whatever. Like, this is fine. Business as usual. And so with the Epstein thing, like, there are some days where I go, like, this is it.

• 57:24Ryan Broderick?

  Like, this is, I think, I think he's cooked. And then there's other days where I'm like, it just doesn't matter. That no one will care about this in two weeks. There'll be some new thing.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:34Ryan Broderick?

  And I guess, like.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  I was with you until a few weeks.

• 57:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  I thought this could, I thought this could be it.

• 57:40Ryan Broderick?

  I thought so, too. I can see a world where he can't shake it, and he becomes a liability to, like, the J.D. Vance Project 2025 center of his regime. And I would have to know more about the sort of inner fighting of the Trump administration, which I'm sure there's just so much of it. I just don't know how cutthroat the inner world of Trumpism right now is. But I could see a possibility where journalists don't let up, the few journalists that are left don't let up. They find something damning enough, and he gets jettisoned by his own team. When I say it out loud, I sort of, I feel a little embarrassed that I think that.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  No, I, you might be right.

• 58:24Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, these, these things do happen in, in authoritarian regimes.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Well, here's a part of it that I would agree with. Like, this is unsustainable, right? Like, the way that Trump runs.

• 58:35Ryan Broderick?

  100%.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  The country and the government is unsustainable, and it might be unsustainable for 20 years. It might be sustainable for 50 years. I don't know. But like, this kind of like. Organization around one person, this kind of look over there, look over there, look over there, always this, you know, just total lack of fealty to the truth, I think, is unsustainable. Like, I hope when my kids are my age, they're not living under-

• 58:58Ryan Broderick?

  Baron. It'll be Baron, right?

• 59:00Speaker 01

  We're barren. I know. I know. God. But I also think that the inability to know what's real does not actually make people more set on figuring out what's real. It makes them less set on it. What you decide to do is say that, like, everything I'm seeing fits into my, I'm gonna make sure that everything I'm seeing fits into my worldview. And I think that persistence is really evident this time around. The economy is bad. Everything is bad. Like, this guy is not winning, literally, at anything. I am glad he's putting cane sugar back in Coca-Cola.

• 59:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that is one victory we can all agree on.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. We can all agree on. Yeah. But in general, I'm like, you're walking around on the roof, like, if Biden did that, can you even imagine? He'd be, like, strung up as we speak. The land of, like, consequence is nonexistent anymore, to me. It would require not as much something to happen to him, but something to happen to us, as like, an audience, as a electorate. Because the other thing is that, like, Trump, I realize more and more, serves as a social function for so many people.

• 1:00:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Like, it has created social, social environments, friends, people, like, get together. This is like how you connect with your neighbors.

• 1:00:10Ryan Broderick?

  It's how Grant and I met, yeah.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  And so, you know, do you guys have, like, monthly meetups? Is there, like, a monthly list meetup?

• 1:00:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  You can't tell me?

• 1:00:17Ryan Broderick?

  We can't talk about it, yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fair.

• 1:00:21Speaker 05

  You're gonna have to say something so you never get invited back to Five Four in order to get on that list.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  I can also confirm that nobody on Five Four is on the list.

• 1:00:29Ryan Broderick?

  That's right. I've heard that they're not on the list either, yeah.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  They're not on the list. Yeah, yeah. Here's my theory of how we, people snap out of it, and maybe how they turn on Trump. I think the way that people, like, conservatives see liberals right now is so crazy, that when we are, like, theory at the beginning, like, the first Trump administration, where it was like-

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  You don't have to go to Thanksgiving and talk to your MAGA uncle. You don't have to talk to your MAGA parents anymore. You can cut people off, like actually you can't. And like, if, if you can afford to, meaning like, you're not trans, or like, they're, these aren't, you're not, you know, not like, undocumented, these people aren't like actually coming for your neck every single minute of every single day. I'm like, you gotta be out there talking to these people, so they can just see you're normal. Because they're, they have gone from thinking that like, that Hillary Clinton, et cetera, are lizard people, to thinking we're all lizard people. Right?

• 1:01:19Ryan Broderick?

  There's probably not an easy, one size fits all, like, way that this ends. It's possible that we just like, are plagued with Jeffrey Epstein updates throughout the remainder of Trump's life in power, however long that may be.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Well, it's not gonna end, and it, Ghislaine Maxwell is gonna come out and

• 1:01:43Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  point her finger at some people and get out and, you know.

• 1:01:46Ryan Broderick?

  So, it's gonna, she needs to stay alive past this recording being published. So we'll see how all that goes.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  She's not gonna kill herself, she knows she's gonna get a pardon.

• 1:01:55Ryan Broderick?

  Look, she got moved to a minimum security prison in Texas. The clock is ticking, uh, so we'll see what happens to her.

• 1:02:01Speaker 05

  Josie, you, you said, isn't this bad enough? But there can't be no bad enough, because like, people always want the game, they don't actually want the game to end. And the issue became that there is no one in the way of stopping the game to end. So as long as this keeps being a drip drop thing, they'll wait for forever, because it lets them to keep speculating and have their, have their hero.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:28Speaker 05

  That's okay, there's no, there's no like, this is now closed, because then it unfolds their entire reality that this guy's the Messiah, who's exposing the deep state. They can believe that for forever, as long as they don't ever, like definitively say it's closed.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Right, that makes sense to me, yeah.

• 1:02:45Speaker 05

  The thing I could see, fan communities turn on their, the person that

• 1:02:52Speaker 05

  Gotham there?

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:02:55Speaker 05

  I do think that this is the core of MAGAism. The idea that like, we're gonna kill all the elites. And the longer it goes out, they're gonna need to believe something more extravagant or believe in somebody else who's gonna kill all the elites so their lives finally become good.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense to me. And I think what you're kind of getting to is like, meaning to their lives that like, this has given them meaning to their lives, right? And that like, without it, they don't really have that. And therefore, like, they need to keep believing and there needs to be something and there needs to be a bad guy and there needs to be some wins because otherwise, like, what do I have to live for? Which sounds dark, but I think is actually not. Yeah.

• 1:03:37Speaker 05

  You know? No one's, no one's here for the tax plan. They're here for an idea that tomorrow is gonna be better than today and like, that there's gonna be something exciting. And it's like, the anticipation is better than any actual answers. Like, there's nothing that could be in there that was ever going to be satisfying. You need the show to continue and like, the later seasons you get into, the more daffy it becomes.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Speaker 05

  I can think of this better as TV than I, because I think it's much closer to TV, than I can think of it as like, uh, uh, politics.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  You know, you, you say something that like, I think gets back to what I would, like, gets back to this idea that they also think all liberals are monsters, right? Which is like, what would it be like for these people to kind of realize that most people are monsters? Like, most people aren't monsters and most people, like, maybe they would even, like, some of these people they hate and maybe trans kids aren't out to ruin their kids' lives and maybe no one is trying to track them to the bathroom and maybe like, you, you know, maybe there isn't someone always waiting to kill or kidnap their children or murder them or whatever. To me, as someone who grew up scared of everything and everybody, and then finally it was like, oh, most people are actually pretty good and there's not as much, many things to worry about, as you may think. Like, that was relieving. But I think to some people, it would be.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  It would almost be disappointing. It would almost be like too boring.

• 1:04:57Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's like definitely an isolation and a boredom thing combined with like just being like baseline racist, but I think it's also just boredom for sure.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Can I ask you guys a question though?

• 1:05:09Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  If you were Epstein, wouldn't you have killed yourself?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  I would have killed myself. I'm not suicidal. Like I'm, I'm not trying to die, but like you are going to be tried for some serious crimes. You know, you are, you're used to being very rich and connected. You're in prison. It's miserable. What's keeping you here?

• 1:05:27Speaker 05

  After everything that's been said on this episode, I'm not answering.

• 1:05:30Ryan Broderick?

  There's still a chance I could write the, the great American novel and I feel like that would have kept me going, you know?

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  That's because you have like goals and like

• 1:05:40Ryan Broderick?

  We don't, we don't, we don't know.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Beyond just being a fucking weirdo.

• 1:05:43Ryan Broderick?

  We don't know, you know, much about Jeffrey Epstein's inner life, you know, who knows what?

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. Maybe he was, maybe he was getting his MFA.

• 1:05:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, exactly.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:55Speaker 05

  Hitler had his paintings and Epstein had his haikus. Yeah.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And Hitler killed himself too. So there you go, you know?

• 1:06:04Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's right. Or did he?

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Or did he?

• 1:06:08Speaker 05

  Let's help people who are not part of this world, understand why this is the thing that's sticking to Trump. So my question is, do you think if Epstein, do you think that like without Epstein Q would have been a thing that would have proliferated? And can like, as like concisely as possible, can we explain why this is the thing? That has stuck to Trump when nothing else sticks to him?

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Do I think, I suspect that without Epstein Q would still have proliferated some, but not as much. In part because Epstein is kind of the most solid evidence they have for their theories about, you know, the world of like sex ring, you know, elite sex rings, et cetera. Like I think that there is some, some there, there where often there isn't. And so it has really helped. And I think part of the reason that Epstein has stuck to Trump is because Trump's. Deep state, I'm going to dismantle the deep state. I'm going to uncover the deep state. That is his whole thing. His whole thing is there are a lot of powerful people that are fucking you over. They're bad people and I'm a good person who's going to come in and make, you know,

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  make them pay for their mistakes.

• 1:07:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  I definitely think when you hold yourself out to say, I'm always going to tell you the truth, I'm going to uncover everything, I'm going to put the fitness influencer in the FBI, we're going to whatever, drain the swamp. You don't really have the luxury of saying, don't pay attention to this. You don't have it, right? That being said, it has not been the political obstacle for him than it would have been for anybody else.

• 1:07:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. I think, I think we can all agree that we live in hell. I want to thank you for coming on the show. This is great. If people want to follow you, where could they do that?

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Um, I am no longer on Twitter, but I am on Blue Sky and I am on Instagram and my username is Jay Duffy Rice and follow me, you know? Thanks.

• 1:08:02Ryan Broderick?

  Thanks so much.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  I'm going to be on the internet till I die, probably in prison.

• 1:08:05Ryan Broderick?

  This was a delightful conversation about one of history's greatest monsters. So, thank you.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, thank you. Thank you guys for having me. This is great.

• 1:08:16Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Kevin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Couga is their Director of Marketing and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Lastly, here's my advice for you.

• 1:08:59Ryan Broderick?

  Chill out and touch grass while you still can.