Let me get this straight. The reason MAGA’s upset about the Epstein scandal is they have blue balls over not getting their holy grail: a list of pedo Democrats? Not because their hero used to pal around with Epstein?

They’re pissed because they’d been promised a fantasy of proof, maybe pictures of Hillary Clinton clutching Hunters laptop in a pizza parlor, but have no interest in actual proof, like videos of a young, sleazy Trump doing the funky chicken with Epstein’s harem of teenage girls?

This, despite the multiple sexual assault lawsuits,

…the Access Hollywood tape, the leching on his own daughter with Howard Stern. So you wanna say, “c’mon, how did you not see this coming?” but of course everyone involved is in miles over their head; they don’t see Tuesday coming. — Shower Cap blog

Remember that Richard Prior sketch, where he described telling his wife she had it all wrong when she caught him in bed with another woman: “Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?”

Trump’s fans opt for the former.

Conspiracy

Our red-hatted brethren must be experts, by now, at suppressing any doubts that might arise about their man. They must have a locked dumpster in their brains that stores his crimes and moral travesties.

But let’s back up from this for a moment. Is the trafficking of underage girls only understandable in terms of the American culture war?

The Epstein case is important because it implodes the fiction of deep divisions between Democrats, who had no more interest in releasing the Epstein files than Trump, and the Republicans. They belong to the same club. — Chris Hedges

Framing it as a MAGA issue, the current media frenzy hinges on the the notion of a “conspiracy theory,” a buzz phrase creaking under the weight of partisan baggage. It was once used to discredit activists who exposed the FBI campaign against MLK Jr. These days it’s used in reference to QAnon-type fantasists.

But to view the scandal solely through the lens of our current deranged political landscape distracts us from the fact that the hideous cesspool of Epstein World, and its many iterations throughout history, is a scum layer atop the swamp of patriarchy. If there’s a conspiracy here, it’s the systemic conspiracy against girls and women, against the vulnerable, against decency.

To be a member of this slimy club, you don’t have to belong to a particular political party. You don’t even have to be rich. You just have to be a despicable man.

Old news

With the Epstein case, one of MAGA’s most fervid obsessions has come back to bite Trump in the ass. But this dust-up does not mark the end of Trump or of Trumpism.

The stakes for ourselves and the country remain dizzyingly high. We need to stay alert to the games being played. For example, Trump’s use here of the “old news” gambit, one of his favorite gaslighting tricks. This trope should be ridiculously transparent; after all, “Nothing to see here” is a joke tagline. So why has it worked so well for Trump?

It works because it matches the manipulations of the mediasphere.

Sizzling scandals

As I write, the Epstein scandal is sizzling in the collective brain pan, crowding out everything else. But next week, our oversaturated neurons may be trying to process some other crisis/ controversy/ celebrity malfunction.

For the sake of our sanity, let’s try to put a millimeter of distance between the specific current events that grab our attention, and the way those events are reported and consumed.

It’s received wisdom, by now, that capitalism + the internet has turned our society into an attention economy. But what remains unknown is how a constant flow of intel affects our understanding of that intel.

Do we have enough bandwidth, between headlines, to make sense of anything?

The way the news comes at us, machine-gun-like and incessant, keeps our minds at the edge of panic mode. Even the “current,” in “current events,” has changed its meaning. Events barely have time to register in the popular mind before their currency expires.

Speed isn’t the only problem. Even more reality-distorting is the weird confluence of serious information with utter slop. We’re likely to come across an above-the-fold story, about a flood or a mass shooting, side by side with the news that Gwyneth Paltrow has decided to go back to eating cheese.

Jia Tolentino has written brilliantly about the damage wreaked by the efflorescence of information in the digital age upon our sense of the real. She sees it as having created

an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, [there is just] the endlessly resupplied now. The phone is a chronophage, a time-eater…showing too much of the world, too quickly.

How might our poor beleaguered brains best cope with the onslaught?

Astrologically speaking, the tech quagmire we are in is not an accident. The wired world is facing a steep learning curve, symbolized by the conjunction of Saturn (time) and Neptune (unreality), peaking in the sky right now. The transit has myriad practical and psychological levels, even spiritual implications for those who use it for consciousness growth.

Flooding the zone

Alas, the evolution of group entities is slower and clumsier than that of individuals. In the USA, there’s a dawning recognition that the tech revolution is linked to a whole slew of mental and social disorders, but we haven’t figured out what to do about it.

In the meantime, we find ourselves with a head of state whose expertise lies in exploiting our collective ADHD.

President Zone-Flooder knows that his edicts, no matter how extravagant, will be forgotten by next week, so it won’t matter when he walks them back (the Muslim Ban, the border wall, aid to Ukraine, the tariffs — still the subject of flip-flopping as I write).

He may have disliked being called TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), but he knows that this back-and-forthing has been a winning strategy. He often tops it off, later, with a dusting of lying about what he originally said.

Or even about what somebody else said, as when his American Boy Doll defense secretary paused those weapons shipments to Ukraine without mentioning it to the boss.

Is Hegseth playing God or just drunkenly passing out atop large red buttons?– Shower Cap blog

As Trump slips further into cognitive decline, his attempts to appear in charge, while at the same time struggling to maintain deniability, read like an Abbot and Costello routine.

Reporter, asking him on July 9th who ordered the munitions halt: “What does it say that such a big decision could be made inside your government without you knowing?”

Trump: “I would know if a decision was made, I will know. I’ll be the first to know. In fact, most likely I’d give the order, but I haven’t done that yet.”

The laws of the doomscroll

Despite having nary a clue about the affairs of his office and only the slimmest grasp of the modern world (“It’s all computers!”), the old boy plays the news cycle like a puppet master. When proven wrong about something, he’ll double down. He understands the laws of the doomscroll.

If we want to avoid drowning in the crazy, we, too, need to understand these laws. And we need to keep in mind how the ploys of this vaudevillian president fit into the mediasphere as a whole.

Consider what happened last month. Public opinion was souring fast on the tariffs. People were getting hip to Trump’s RobinHood-in-Reverse bill, which proposed cutting his base’s Medicare while spending more on ICE than Israel spends on its whole military. With his poll numbers tanking, Donnie McWeathervane needed to change the channel.

He was hoping his dictator parade would do the trick. Too bad for him, its timing coincided with the joyous No Kings protests, which broke records in the one way that’s closest to his tiny, shriveled heart: crowd size.

He wasn’t about to let that humiliation linger in people’s minds.  Remember the movie “Wag the Dog,” where a scandal-ridden politician hires the Dustin Hoffman character to create a war to distract the public?

Cue the death drones.

Vanity bombing

With Iran, Trump abandoned his signature “I’ll tell you in two weeks” move, whereby he tends to wait and see how things work out (if they do, he takes full credit; if they don’t, he gins up the blame engine). Perhaps he sensed people were getting hip to that trick. Now, instead of waiting, he pulled a bait-n-switch with the timing, green lighting the missile strike asap.

Still, according to insiders, he was dithering up until the last minute. Not because he was consulting the generals or Congress – not his style – and not because he was weighing the humanitarian repercussions — are we kidding? — but because he was stressing about how the bombing would play in the polls. He was in a tizzy of indecision all the way up until someone said, “Going through with it will make you look like a winner.” That’s all he needed to hear.

Michael Wolff called it a vanity bombing. To tempt Trump into the act, somebody in his circle proposed they call it “Operation Midnight Hammer.”

Sounds like Pete Hegseth’s theme stag party. –Scott Galloway  

Ever the impresario, Trump did it for the headline. He told his staff he wanted the attack to be “very on-script”: an “In-Boom-Out” operation. When complications arose, he was so pissed off that he dropped the F-word to a reporter.

Not your grandmother’s war

Bombing Iran was a pretty globally impactful decision, right? But there wasn’t much fuss about it in the the public or the press.

 Trump will get his Macho Participation Trophy and we all move on. — Scott Galloway

What a contrast, popular-reaction-wise, to the mass outrage provoked by the Iraq war, twenty-odd years ago. At that time, the streets of cities all over the world were filled with passionate protests. The difference, of course, is that Dubya’s war happened before the mass mind hopped online.

At the moment, last month’s bombing seems So Last Year. As for the Iraq war, that bloody fiasco might as well be ancient history. It makes you wonder. Without a sense of context, can a society avoid repeating its follies? Can we learn from something we don’t even remember?

Consider how the past few weeks have played out. In staging his jackboot parade, Trump benefited from the fact that the public forgot about the disastrous National Guard deployment in Los Angeles, two weeks before. When he bombed Iran, a week after that, he was counting on us forgetting about the disastrous parade. Now, as we obsess over the Epstein files, we’ve forgotten about the bombing of Iran.

What bomb will drop to make us forget about the Epstein files?

Memory Loss

Let us recognize that we’re living in an era of short-term/ medium-term and longterm memory loss. To avoid entering into the mass dysfunction, we need new ways of staying cohesive, intellectually, psychologically and spiritually.

This means deliberately grounding ourselves in our own sense of time, and our instinctive sense of reality.

Stay tuned.

Images

Open Boat, Angelo Musco Tehom

Trump & Epstein, NY Times

Paltrow, Brittanica 

Don’t Drink the KoolAid, Believer’s Church