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MAGA hunts for pedophiles where they don't exist and ignores where they do.
Prosecuting pedophiles and sex traffickers binds the diverse coalitions of MAGA. From the fringiest parts of QAnon, which claims that Democrats and Hollywood stars maintain an underground sex trafficking ring, to the evangelical wing of MAGA, which promotes films and ministries devoted to saving the victims of sex traffickers, heroically saving the world from these horrible criminals presents a powerful narrative. Yet, these groups tend to fall silent when the pedophiles are Republican or evangelical leaders.
Last week, the previous leader of My Faith Votes, and evangelical-MAGA organization, pled guilty to possession of child pornography.
On Monday, Scott Soucek was arrested on 10 counts of downloading child pornography. Soucek is the husband of Stephanie Soucek, a 2024 Trump delegate and chair of the Republican Party of Door County, Wisconsin. In an October 2024 Facebook post explaining why he supports Trump, Scott Soucek wrote in part, "I'm voting to fight against human/child trafficking ...."
Former Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz was investigated for sex trafficking, drug use, and rape. His legal defense was that he thought the 17-y-o he paid for sexual favors was 19 years old. His associate, Joel Greenberg, pled guilty to six federal crimes, including child sex trafficking.
One of Trump's most high-profile evangelical supporters, former megachurch Pastor Robert Morris, was indicted in March on child sex crimes.
And then, of course, there are the most notorious child sex traffickers of all — Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
The Epstein scandal checked all the boxes of MAGA's anti-pedophile narrative: underage victims, high-profile clients, secret islands, redacted documents, sweetheart plea deals, and a suspicious suicide. Electing Trump was supposed to uncover the hidden secrets of this scandal while demolishing the "deep state."
At the time of this writing, I don't know if President Donald Trump will pardon Maxwell, but he certainly seems to be building a case to do so. And while there's no evidence that Trump was involved in Epstein's crimes, he continues to behave like he's hiding something. And we now know, thanks to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, that he started behaving this way after his attorney general informed him that he's named in the Epstein files “multiple times.”
So is this where the MAGA movement parts ways with Trump? For some podcasters who backed Trump, such as Joe Rogan, that appears to be the case. Others, however, not so much.
MAGA-evangelical podcaster Dave Hayes told his followers to trust Trump on Epstein. "I know, it’s terrible optics for the people who are seriously interested in ending child trafficking and seeing accountability. This is a very bitter pill to swallow. I get it," Hayes remarked, according to Christianity Today.
Polling shows Republicans similarly split. A YouGov poll released Monday showed only 49% of Republicans approved of Trump's handling of Epstein while 28% disapproved. When asked if Trump was involved in Epstein crimes, 11% of Republicans answered yes while 21% said they were unsure. When MAGA Republicans were asked in a Tuesday Washington Post poll if the Epstein files contain embarrassing information about Trump, 21% said yes. (For comparison, 61% of Democrats said the files contain embarrassing information about Democrats.)
But given the number of Republican pedophiles that escape the attention of MAGA, I have to wonder if the concern among many in this movement is really for the victims of pedophiles or if it's simply motivated reasoning.
ICYMI …
What We’re Reading
The Atlantic: “The Discourse Is Broken: How did a jeans commercial with Sydney Sweeney come to this?”
The trajectory of all this is well rehearsed at this point. Progressive posters register their genuine outrage. Reactionaries respond in kind by cataloging that outrage and using it to portray their ideological opponents as hysterical, overreactive, and out of touch. Then savvy content creators glom on to the trending discourse and surf the algorithmic waves on TikTok, X, and every other platform. Yet another faction emerges: People who agree politically with those who are outraged about Sydney Sweeney but wish they would instead channel their anger toward actual Nazis. All the while, media outlets survey the landscape and attempt to round up these conversations into clickable content—search Google’s “News” tab for Sydney Sweeney, and you’ll get the gist. (Even this article, which presents individual posts as evidence of broader outrage, unavoidably plays into the cycle.)
Although the Sweeney controversy is predictable, it also shows how the internet has completely disordered political and cultural discourse. Even that word, discourse—a shorthand for the way that a particular topic gets put through the internet’s meat grinder—is a misnomer, because none of the participants is really talking to the others. Instead, every participant—be they bloggers, randos on X, or people leaving Instagram comments—are issuing statements, not unlike public figures. Each of these statements becomes fodder for somebody else’s statement. People are not quite talking past one another, but clearly nobody’s listening to anyone else.
Our information ecosystem collects these statements, stripping them of their original context while adding on the context of everything else that is happening in the world: political anxieties, cultural frustrations, fandoms, niche beefs between different posters, current events, celebrity gossip, beauty standards, rampant conspiracism. No post exists on an island. They are all surrounded and colored by an infinite array of other content targeted to the tastes of individual social-media users. What can start out as a legitimate grievance becomes something else altogether—an internet event, an attention spectacle. This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people feel upset at scale.
NPR: “'Hell on Earth': Venezuelans deported to El Salvador mega-prison tell of brutal abuse”
Since their release, NPR has spoken with Terán and two other former detainees about their time at CECOT. They described being subjected to violence — and, in some cases, sexual abuse — by prison guards, denied adequate food, and forced to endure inhumane conditions.
Listen to or read the whole thing here. Warning: it includes depictions of rape and violence.
AP: “Senate confirms Trump’s pick for counterterrorism agency, a former Green Beret with extremist ties”
Yet Democrats strongly opposed his confirmation, pointing to his past ties to far-right figures and conspiracy theories. During his 2022 congressional campaign, Kent paid Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right military group the Proud Boys, for consulting work. He also worked closely with Joey Gibson, the founder of the Christian nationalist group Patriot Prayer, and attracted support from a variety of far-right figures.
During his Senate confirmation hearing, Kent also refused to distance himself from a conspiracy theory that federal agents had somehow instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, as well as false claims that Trump won the 2020 election over President Joe Biden.
Reuters: “Exclusive: US diplomats asked if non-whites qualify for Trump refugee program for South Africans”
In a diplomatic cable sent July 8, embassy Charge d’Affairs David Greene asked whether the embassy could process claims from other minority groups claiming race-based discrimination such as "coloured" South Africans who speak Afrikaans. In South Africa the term coloured refers to mixed-raced people, a classification created by the apartheid regime still in use today.
The answer came back days later in an email from Spencer Chretien, the highest-ranking official in the State Department's refugee and migration bureau, saying the program is intended for white people.
NYT: “Denver Pastor and Wife Face Charges in ‘God-Inspired’ Cryptocurrency Scheme”
A pastor in Denver who said that God told him to sell cryptocurrency to his followers was indicted this week on dozens of theft- and fraud-related charges, along with his wife, for selling a digital coin that prosecutors said had no real value.
The pastor, Eligio Regalado, and his wife, Kaitlyn Regalado, were indicted on Tuesday on 40 counts of theft, securities fraud and racketeering by a grand jury in Denver District Court. The couple created and sold a “God-inspired” cryptocurrency called INDXcoin and raised nearly $3.4 million by marketing it to their Christian followers, the Denver District Attorney’s Office said.
But that money was used to support the couple’s lavish lifestyle, not their cryptocurrency business, prosecutors said.
What We’re Watching
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