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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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Welp, turns out more Epstein files are finally getting released!

Apparently there will be a vote coming out to release even more, but the docs released so far have been negative for Trump's claims to be innocent of the whole matter.

This, combined with the ruckus over Trump arguing we need foreign talent, has caused a massive cratering amongst online confidence in MAGA. From my perspective, confidence in MAGA at least online is the lowest it has ever been. Many feel betrayed by Trump when it comes to his America First promises.

Add in the storm over Fuentes and Israel, and I feel I'm seeing the conservative coalition fall apart in real time, extremely quickly.

Is this inevitable, the narcissism of small differences? Or is it just Trump not being a very principled man?

This is like when Russia had Trump’s pee tapes. Or when Stormy Daniels had Trump’s blackmail. Or when the courts would finally prove Trump raped that woman in a shopping plaza thirty years ago and she forgot about it until just now.

There is no pedophile network running Washington DC, Donald Trump is neither a child rapist nor a sex trafficker, Trump’s connections to such are extremely thin and the emails being discussed don’t even show what people claim they do.

No one will remember this in a few years because the evidence is so embarrassing it expires and becomes unappetizing like refrigerated fast food. Cold French fries. Hopefully sooner.

While I get the impression you’d say this no matter what was in these files, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I don't think this is the right analogy here. I'm not sure if there's a comparable platitude, but the stopped clock one implies a 1% success rate that happened to get lucky, while I think this is more of a 99% success rate that we should expect to generally be right.

The vast majority of people are not child rapists or sex traffickers. Even if we restrict ourselves to wealthy powerful people, the vast majority of them are still not child rapists or sex traffickers. Even if we restrict ourselves to wealthy powerful people who are kind of sleazy like Trump, which probably have a much higher rate of child raping or sex trafficking, the rate is still much much much lower than 50%. The only reason Trump was ever suspected at all was because of wolf crying: his political opponents really really want it to be true, so they preemptively say it's true. That's not actual evidence, it should do nothing to shift our priors.

A broken un-watch that always tells you the time is NOT 6:30 is not very useful, but it's more truthful and less annoying than a broken watch always telling you the time is 6:30 and letting off a constant alarm that won't turn off.

Any wolf crying on the part of Trump's opponents is a relatively recent phenomenon. The narrative among the conspiracy-minded for the better part of the past five years was that the Biden Administration was concealing the Epstein Files to protect prominent Democrats, and that Trump would release them so these people could face the music. Or at the very least everyone would learn how depraved they all were. The only comments about this I ever heard from IRL friends on the left was that the logic behind this was ridiculous because Trump was close with Epstein and it would take a lot of faith to believe in the conspiracy yet not any involvement from Trump. And it wasn't a topic that came up that frequently. I didn't hear Democrats talking about this much at all until Trump went out of his way to say there was no conspiracy and prominent Republicans started echoing that sentiment. People like Charlie Kirk reversed course on the whole thing. Now my friends on the left started saying that they weren't suspicious before but were now because otherwise why would Trump be so adamant about keeping these confidential?

Any wolf crying on the part of Trump's opponents is a relatively recent phenomenon.

About him being a paedophile and child sex trafficker, maybe. They were crying wolf about his genocidal ambitions, alleged Hitler parallels, aspirations to transform the US into Gilead etc. throughout the 2016 election and the entirety of his first term.

No, "Trump went to Epstein's island" and "Trump was on Epstein's plane" and "Trump was in the files" have all been said before. As far as I know the latter two are technically true and the first is outright false.

Theyve been said before but theyre one of the few things still being said. Turns out "Trump is a racist nazi who wants to deport all brown people!" turns out to be the reason why he was voted in, so the attack angle must be retired. Maybe a few months later the progs will examine why that statement didn't work, but the priority is to find something that sticks.