A solo essay on why the reopened Jeffrey Epstein scandal, triggered by a single Elon Musk post and the White House declaration that no client list or files exist, threatens to fracture the MAGA coalition. Pinchbeck announces at the outset that he will use psychoanalytic theory to read the reaction, working from the concept of disavowal named in the title. He walks through the oddities of the case: Les Wexner handing Epstein control of his fortune and properties, Epstein's hiring at the Dalton School by Donald Barr, father of William Barr and author of a novel about oligarchs running child sex slavery, Pam Bondi's claims about video evidence, and the death of Jean-Luc Brunel in French custody. He ends on Musk's growing hold over the online right.
In brief
- Pinchbeck argues the Epstein affair is better explained by the psychodynamics of a dissociated, entitled power elite that mutually attracts than by a clockwork intelligence or dark money operation, though he concedes Israeli intelligence lurks in the background.
- He contends that MAGA's symbolic architecture rests on the claim that child sexual abuse is the ultimate evil peculiar to liberals, so evidence that Trump is no different from other elite figures collapses the ideology and leaves nothing behind it.
- He notes the movement's indifference to other abused children, including those harmed by its own immigration enforcement, as evidence that the QAnon framing was never about protection.
- He argues that what is documented in Epstein's case, however despicable, does not reach the depths of the trafficking and ritual abuse networks described in Anneke Lucas's memoir Quest for Love or the Jimmy Savile case in Britain.
- He describes Laura Loomer, Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec as effectively vassals in Musk's media empire, owing more loyalty to him than to Trump.
- He concludes that Musk has an exceptional instinct for power struggles and may hold dictatorial ambitions, and that the tweet attack was the opening move in a fight for control of the right and of the country.
Full text
We've been all I don't know about you, but I've been quite surprised that the return of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has exploded with such incredible force that it seems like it could actually blow apart the entire MAGA coalition, the MAGA univer. iverse leaving just screaming, you know, frenzied shards of what it was. Uh, I don't know about you, I'm also kind of shocked that this civil war was launched by just a single Elon Musk tweet. So, I thought we could explore, you know, how and why this is happening, what it could mean for the future of the US and the movement. Uh, and we're going to use some theory tools for that.
I always assume that the MAGA world, which includes its influencers, its uh tech oligarchs and dark triad personalities and neo-Nazi racists and white Christian nationalists, I assume they all knew that Trump was lying through his teeth about his relationship with Epstein. I assume they understood that so-called Epstein files, whatever that actually means, would never be released. Yet, the declaration by the White House that there was no Epstein list and no files, that the case was permanently closed, has set off like a massive firestorm. The scandal is so big that it threatens to permanently fracture Trump's base. Uh could even lead to him being dethroned from power perhaps.
So, I think part of the ongoing fixation with the Epstein case comes from its murkiness and weirdness and its ambiguity. And it feels like no new clarity ever seems to emerge despite massive waves of media attention and public focus. The details just remain kind of funky. I mean, for instance, what was going on with Victoria's Secret founder Les Wexner? Why did he give Epstein so much power, so much money, control over his fortune estimated in the billions, plus his $77 million Park Avenue mansion and his Ohio estate? I mean, did Epstein blackmail or hypnotize Wexner in some way? Where did otherwise where did Epstein's wealth even come from?
You know, how did this 21-year-old Epstein even get a job as a math teacher at Dalton, which is one of New York's most prestigious private schools, without having a college degree? Did he lie in his resume? So, was he just a talented confidence man from the beginning? What was this like strange power, this sort of spengali like power he seemed to wield over so many people? Just to take a little dive into how weird and insular and even surreal the whole Epstein story is. It turns out that the man who hired Epstein originally at Dalton was Donald Bar. Donald Bar was the headmaster at Dalton. Donald Bar was also the father of US attorney William Bar who would later investigate Epstein's death.
Now Donald Bar was also a science fiction writer. One of his novels, Space Relations, which I think came out in 1973, is literally about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery and rape against uh, you know, young young adolescents. So, I sense the Epstein story is not primarily about hardcore intelligence agencies seeking to blackmail the wealthy and powerful, although obviously I could be wrong about that and it's obvious that Israeli intelligence lurks in the background here. Nor is it about the insidious workings of dark money in any kind of precise or clockwork or organized way. I suspect the story is more about the fuzzy psycho dynamics found among certain members of the power elite.
My sense is that certain personality types and deviant psychologies attract each other magnetically and naturally mesh. So there was a quality in Epstein's particular brand of sociopathy and disassociation that exerted a kind of magnetic pull on other similarly dissociated vaguely sociopathic character types. This ranged from you know Bill Clinton to Bill Gates to Donald Trump to Prince Andrew and so on. So all of these guys share an overarching belief in their own entitlement, their innate superiority. And for many of them, this includes believing they have the right to indulge in their erotic proclivities, their desires, even if those fall outside of the eagle legal system. Unless I'm missing something or more comes to light, Epstein's sexual abuse, rape, and the grooming of poor young girls to pass along to his cronies.
I mean, of course, it was utterly despicable, immoral, and illegal. Even so, it never reached anywhere near the kind of sadian depths of wickedness practiced by the European network of child traffickers and even ritual murderers that are chronicled in Aniki Lucas' harrowing memoir, Quest for Love. Obviously, until the last century, it was more or less accepted that old wealthy men would sexually exploit teenage girls. Of course, that doesn't make it right. Of course, it's horrible. But I mean, unless there's far more to the story, what happened with Epstein really wasn't so horrible compared to what went on in England with Jimmy Savile or in Belgium, uh, as Enk Lucas Chronicles.
And you can really check out those cases if you want to be deeply shocked and horrified by these elite networks of wealthy nihilist libertines. And of course, we still don't actually know what else took place. We don't know what was done in that bizarre gold dome, the Byzantine temple on Epstein's Island. We don't know what's in those tens of thousands of hours of video that former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi mentioned. I mean, unless of course she was also lying about that, which is quite possible, if also very confusing. Why lie about that? Then there's Jeanluke Brunell, founder of modeling a agencies and an Epstein procurer, who died in a French prison under suspicious circumstances that were absolutely identical to Epstein's, you know, quote unquote suicide.
So why is this such a sticking point for MAGA? So according to the QAnon myth and the MAGA rhetoric, the sexual abuse of, you know, children, particularly young white women, was meant to be this incredibly terrible thing. This is this is the thing that vile Democrats and WF Wall Street bankers did, you know, World Economic Forum, you know, monstrosities. This was like the ultimate evil that underlies every other form of corruption and rot. And it explains why liberals are actually secretly far worse than anybody on the right. So if it turns out that Trump is no different from all these other power players and covering up this like dark truce, then the ide entire ideology, the symbolic architecture of the MAGA movement kind of collapses and there really nothing left to hold it up.
They really don't have any other values they support. I guess except making the United States into a you know tech fascist white Christian nation you know when most people are reduced to surfs using massive cruelty against the poor and immigrants and maybe you know claiming that border security is some like ultimate thing and ironically you know the movement doesn't really care about other abused children at all. I mean check out this uh video Nazis. We can hear you kids. you. Nice Nazis. So, I had assumed the brainwashed MAGA cult and its influencers understood that it was all After all, Qidon is itself an obvious fraud fraud.
Trump is a grifter and an veteran liar. Epstein was Trump's best friend for a decade. We already know from criminal investigations that Mara Lago was in itself used to sex traffic girls to Epstein who actually just lived right down the street. So, I never imagined the Epstein files would be revealed and assumed everybody knew that. However, I now see there was a deeper layer that I was missing. There's a symbolic order propping up the MAGA movement and this is not easy for Trump even to escape. So the deeper analysis provides some hope although I don't want us to get too excited that the Epste epste scandal could in fact critically wound the Magna Magault and eventually even take down the fascist right.
uh and to understand why this is so we would first need to explore some ideas from uh psychoanalysts Sigman Freud and Jack Lan who talked about fetishism patriarchal authority and disavow disavowel and this can give us some surprising insights into the situation. I also believe that when we go into this analysis we understand what Musk is trying to do instinctively as he goes after Trump. uh for for those who don't know uh you know we talked about who was Jacques Lan I'm sure you all know Freud uh so yeah Lan's ideas might be central for to help us understand what's happening here Lan was a French psychoanalyst who lived from 1901 to 1981 he's probably the most influential psychoanalyst after Freud himself Jacqu Lan took Freud's insights about the unconscious and desire and he developed them through the lens of structural linguistics and philosophy and his work is very very difficult almost impenetrable to he wrote in a deliberately kind of mandarin obscure style but I think even so there are core insights there that can be useful and even profound as we try to understand uh what's happening with the magabase lan argued that the unconscious is structured like a language and that we're fundamentally split subjects always seeking something we can never fully have he developed concepts like the symbolic order, the realm of language, law, and social structure that we must enter to become functioning subjects. He also explored how power operates through what he called master signifiers, words or symbols or sort of icons that anchor an entire worldview, even when they don't refer to anything concrete. Most importantly, for our purposes, Lan D understood that people don't just rationally choose their beliefs.
Instead, they're driven by unconscious desires and fantasies that organize their entire relationship to reality. This is why purely rational political analysis often fails to explain why people support obviously contradictory or self-destructive movements. Okay, with that context, let's examine how Trump's supporters or the broader MAGA movement operate not just as a political block, but as a psychological formation that must hold a symbolic structure together. So, the MAGA cult works by investing the followers liidal drives into a deep indiva identification with their leader Donald Trump. The MAGA worldview constructs a constricted psychic economy built out of fantasy. Lan uses the word juissance which translates roughly as perverse enjoyment to describe the kind of dark pleasure experienced by Donald Trump's followers.
Trump functions for them as this master signifier, this fetish object that anchors their sense of self and worlds. According to Leanian theory, contradictions are not errors to be corrected. They are essential features that support their fantasy. So the magultist doesn't simply repress these contradictions. They sort of enjoy the dissonance produced by them. The contradictions actually provide an effective energetic charge. And this is why Trump supporters can simultaneously believe Trump to be a billionaire magnate and a voice for the forgotten, a Christlike redemptive hero, as well as a man of vulgar excess and uh disgusting even repulsive character flaws. So these are not just glitches. The the sort of friction or the fission of the contradictions are structural features that intensify the fantasy that the MAGA cultists maintain.
Fantasy functions as like a screen. It organizes the subject's desire in relation to what Lan called the real, the traumatic core of social antagonism that cannot be symbolized. These are real things like class warfare, racial anger, sexual anxiety, and those things need to be suppressed because they're too threatening to face directly. So you retreat into the fantasy, to the screen, the projection. From a Leanian perspective, Trump acts as this kind of phallic principle or master signifier who promises to protect his devotees from the chaos of the real uh so they don't have to confront their you know what's what Freud called castration anxiety in a social and psychological sense.
Hence you know Trump's popular slogan I alone can fix it. Lan draws a distinction between knowledge and belief. Someone might know Trump has lied or acts in ways that contradict what he says, but they do not believe it in their unconscious depths. Lan has a name for this type of disavowel from I know very well, but all the same. So despite and because of these contradictions, Trump's followers continue to invest in the symbolic structure. At this point their liidal economy their whole identity depends on it. And it is important also to remember that identity is never a fixed thing. It always is relational. It always changes or can change.
And that is what makes this particular juncture this kind of loss of faith and belief so fascinating. So the maga cult has positioned Trump as a kind of father figure in this lanian sense. Not an actual father but the one who gives structure to the symbolic order. Laden calls this the the name of the father or nam dupair. In Ladian psychoanalysis the name of the father is a central concept. It marks the entry of the subject into the symbolic order language law and social structure. This originates in lan's rereading of Freud's edipus complex where the child's early desire for the mother must be interrupted or castrated by the paternal function.
This interruption is not necessarily the literal father, but a symbolic operation, the imposition of a prohibition that redirects desire and anchors the child within the shared universe of language and culture. Trump acts out his followers fantasy of a mythic return to order, power, and potency, a symbolic remembering or decastration. His contradictions are absorbed, even embraced as signs of his authenticity. And this includes his transgressions of social propriety, his insults, his vicious attacks on his enemies. For the lower classes, the MAGA movement is quite obviously not about rational self-interest. In fact, Trump's policies will be disastrous, even fatal for many of his followers. So, it's about a kind of enjoyment, luxuriating, and a dark masochistic form of pleasure.
That's what they're getting from it. Lan's concept of jewance helps us see why humiliation of liberals, elites, or even of the followers themselves is actually part of his appeal. Trumpism enables a shared enjoyment in transgression, cruelty, and even societal collapse or breakdown. This is why the scandals often reinforce his supporters fervor. They intensify the pleasure of identifying with it with him through all of the crises and contradictions. So, what about the Epstein revelations? Why are they such a threat? Well, the Epstein revelations pose a threat because they point to an internal contradiction that cannot be easily disavowed or suppressed. So if Trump instead of being a misunderstood outsider is really completely implicated and in fact belongs to the same elite pedophilic network that MAGA has defined itself against that may actually permanently fracture their fantasy.
uh the fantasy will be dissolved in a way that can't be invaded or repressed or covered over and this kind of fracture could bring the maga subject too close to the real the traumatic core that the fantasy was constructed to avoid. Uh in Lcanian terms this could trigger a breakdown of the symbolic order a psychotic foreclosure a collective disident disidentification. If the name of the father is stripped of authority, this exposes the subject to a form of symbolic castration, a loss of coherence and faith in the ideological structure that holds his or her fragile world together. So Trump functions as this kind of fetish object, this master signifier. And we have to move beyond normal categories of political analysis to understand the role he's playing in the magga psyche.
You know, of course, we all know he's a demagogue, he's a liar, he's a narcissist. Those labels are all true, but they're not getting at the psychic core of his appeal to his masses, um, to his to his MAGA base. And in psychoanalytic terms, Trump is something far more structurally important. He's both a fetish object and a master signifier. His presence organizes desire and belief. He resolves, or at least he covers over the otherwise unbearable contradictions hunter haunting the inner psychic lives of his followers. According to Freud's theory of fetishism, the fetish emerges as a defense against traumatic knowledge. Originally for Freud, the boy's realization that the mother doesn't have a penis.
She lacks a penis. Freud believed that this insight threatened the boy's sense of his own integrity. And to preserve psychic wholeness, the subject splits. He both accepts and denies the truths. The fetish object, it could be a shoe, a piece of hair, a certain gesture, becomes the standin for what has been lost. Uh Freud wrote, "The horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the fetish. The fetish substitutes for the eternal fallus the little boy once believed in and does not want to release." Trump becomes a fetish object in the Freudian sense because he covers over the lack that animates the MAGO worldview, the lost authority of the white patriarch, the collapse of American exceptionalism, the hum humiliation caused by globalization and cultural liberalism, and the MAGA base's own economic dispossession.
So they're suffering from a kind of totalizing social and psychological form of castration anxiety. and they can't resolve it, but they can use a fantasy to mask it over, which is what Trump provides. So his transgressive and obscene kind of presence, his image stands in for the power that his followers don't admit that they have forfeited or lost forever and therefore they go into this idea that America is going to be great again under Trump. You know, that's another one of his slogans. So Trump plays the role of what Lan calls the master signifier. It doesn't refer to a particular concept, but rather it is an empty center that anchors the subject's entire symbolic universe.
He ties together disperate and even contradictory threads, evangelical Christianity with its kind of purist pur puristism, casino vulgarity, bluecollar resentment and billionaire indulgence, victimhood and messianism. it all is is kind of conflated together under one unifying construct. So what the Epstein Epstein case threatens is not just Trump's reputation but his structural position as both fetish and master signifier. If the suppressed truths that he was part of the elite sexual political pedo game from the start with all the other people they hate, this could pierce the screen and the entire economy of the fantasy then collapses. The MAGA cult victims can no longer hide or cover over the lack because they realize they are in it.
They personify it. They embody it. And the fetish object of cultic belief becomes contaminated with the real. It needs to be discarded. So what happens then? So here you know Lollum's theory is not going to be able to predict Maga's future behavior for us. But it can help us think structurally about the situation. If the fantasy collapses that disillusionment could turn inward could become depression or apathy or it could be channeled into even more extreme forms of reactionary aggression if it's pushed outward. The dark desire for coherence might reconfigure around even darker conspiracies as a way to restabilize this dark pleasure, this Jewish son despite facing this disintegration of identity.
Or the maga cult may seek a new fetish object, a new master signifier or name of the father. In political terms, this would mean pivoting to a new leader such as RFK Jr. or Elon Musk. So I think we can see that you know Musk's original post on X or what was once called Twitter that launched this crisis uh in MAGA symbolic order was actually on his part kind of a genius strategic intervention. Um when Musk said Trump was on Epstein's list, he forced MAGA to demand to know why the list had not been released yet. This forced the White House to finally take a stand and reject the very existence of the Epstein files and try to close the case altogether.
Even though releasing all of the Epste material is one of the main promises Trump and all of the MAGA influencers had made to their followers over and over over and over again. So I think you know one inter interpretation of what's happening is that Musk and Trump have actually entered into a very serious power struggle. Uh, and Musk possesses a great deal of control over most mega influencers through his platform X since he can demonetize or promote them at will. They're all dependent on the subscriptions, the paid subscriptions they get through his site. In a way, Laura Loomer, Charlie Kirk, Jack Pobiac, and so on are like, you know, vassels in Musk's media empire.
They're like employees or data surfs working the fields of their technofudal overlord. They owe him feelalty. They owe him perhaps more loyalty than the loyalty they owe to Trump. And we now know that Musk isn't as likable or intellectually sophisticated as he once seen. We've had years of posts that have showed Musk's political proclivities, his love of neo-Nazi and racist and anti-semitic content, his willingness to lie brazenly and do whatever it takes and so on. Uh, but we also can see unfortunately that Musk is a kind of genius at power struggles and at winning power games. I mean, he has a very powerful instinctive power drive.
Um, and he's brilliant at it. He's managed to maintain his position as CEO at several huge corporations, overcoming any opposition while he's tweeting hundreds of times a day, pretending to be amazing at video games and running like this huge fascistic political operation of Doge. So what I would conclude from all of this, you know, another thing that's happening is, you know, the Supreme Court is kind of dismantling, you know, the Constitution, the rule of law. So everything in America is sort of coming up for grabs. And you know, it it could be the case that that Musk has maintained um ambitions, dictatorial ambitions about gaining control over the United States.
And we're what what we're witnessing right now is just the very beginning of a battle for control of the right and also the country as a whole between Musk, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump. And Elon Musk's tweet attack was just the first strategically brilliant salvo. So I don't know if anybody can say what will follow at this point or who will win as uh you know any any result seems possible. By the way, if you enjoyed this essay, please like, please subscribe to my You Tube um and um yeah, we'll we'll we'll we'll we'll think about this uh more soon, I hope.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.