Conservatives Are What They Accuse
The Epstein saga has laid bare a core principle of the modern conservative movement. By portraying liberals in advance as the spendiest, elitistest, pedophiliest people, they inure the public against later revelations of their own fiscal mismanagement, unpopular policies, or, now, sexual abuse. The popular idea among voters that “all politicians are all the same” is weaponised to mask their own misdeeds.
For a decade, the whackiest right wing trend in the United States has been QAnon. Wikipedia’s description explains:
QAnon centers on fabricated claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals known as "Q". Those claims have been relayed and developed by online communities and influencers. Their core belief is that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic child molesters in league with the deep state is operating a global child sex trafficking ring and that Donald Trump is secretly leading the fight against them.
Jeffrey Epstein’s widely reported high class underage sex trafficking ring is the obvious personification of this deep state league of child molesters. It has been linked through QAnon to numerous mostly progressive politicians with varying degrees of factual basis.
The QAnon belief that Trump was the anti-Epstein, secretly shutting down this child sex trafficking ring of pedophiles, was a bit a major source of support for Trump.
By spreading rumours over the past decade about Democrats being clients of Epstein, there was clearly a hope that when the information finally came out showing who his clients actually were, the public would dismiss it with the equivalency of so many other conservative attributes preemptively pinned on liberals.
If Epstein can be spuriously linked to people like Clinton and Trudeau, then the numerous photos of Trump and Epstein together as the client list is disappeared by Trump’s administration must also then be spurious.
It is a long tried and true strategy.
In Canada, the Conservatives have always underfunded the military, increased our debt, reduced government services, treated us as a client state of the United States, hurt minority rights, and worked toward the neoliberal ideal of upward wealth transfer.
In each case, they sew together a long-term narrative that it’s the Liberals that do those things, even when empirical evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary.
It is to the point that if you want to know what a Conservative or Republican candidate actually intends to do, listen to what they are accusing the Liberals or Democrats of secretly wanting. They are preemptively framing the narrative so they can pursue unpopular policies and then say “at least we weren’t as bad as those liberals were going to be.”
Stephen Harper sank military spending below 1% of GDP and added $150 billion to the national debt. The only budget his administration balanced was a residual balanced budget from the previous Liberal government. The ostensibly balanced 2015 budget was done by selling off Canadian capital assets, which is rather like selling your home to pay your mortgage. The last time a federal Conservative government took Canada from deficit to surplus was in the 19th century.
But if you listen to Conservative rhetoric, they are the country’s great fiscal managers and Liberals will spend us into oblivion. It is they that will invest in our military, they who will cut our crime rates, they who will bring middle class prosperity back.
The right attack journalists with ferocity, as well, unless they’re like Fox News in the US or Rebel News in Canada, parroting their talking points and attacking the left, rather than doing anything resembling journalism. It is not hard to understand why; journalists empowered to report the facts would reveal the conservative scam for what it is.
Back, then, to Epstein. After a decade of peddling the non-sense that the left wing are a bunch of deep state child molesters, it came time to reveal the actual list of clients to Jeffrey Epstein’s abusive island. At the last moment, the administration suddenly declared that there is no such list, and it is obvious that Donald Trump was an important entry in this missing data.
The right wing leadership knew it all along. They took nearly a decade to plant the seeds of the idea that the left wing is full of child molesters and pedophiles. That way, if news ever broke of Trump paying Epstein for sexual relations with minors, he wouldn’t be any worse than the liberals.
All politicians are the same, after all.
Unfortunately for them, they may finally have jumped the shark on this one.
Sick