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Gizmodo
7 days ago
- Politics
- Gizmodo
Conspiracy Theorists Think the Elon-Trump Feud Is Just a Ruse to Expose the Real Pedophiles
Elon Musk dropped a bombshell in his new feud with Donald Trump on Thursday, claiming the president is 'in the Epstein files,' a reference to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The billionaire claimed it was why the files hadn't yet been released, despite ongoing and increasingly desperate promises from Attorney General Pam Bondi. But conspiracy theorists are too smart to believe Trump was actually in cahoots with Epstein. In fact, they believe the entire war of words between the president and the Tesla CEO is all a ruse to finally expose the real pedophiles. Or something. Conspiracy theorist Dinesh D'Souza, the director of the discredited 'documentary' 2000 Mules, posted to X on Thursday that perhaps the fight between these two men was actually the start of something much bigger. 'Is this some sort of perverse scheme to force the release of the Epstein files?' D'Souza wrote. 'How great it would be to have a horde of bad guys publicly exposed. Then Trump and Elon break out the champagne. Elon says, 'Told you I could get Democrats to scream for that list.' Laughter!' Obviously, D'Souza's logic here doesn't make any sense. The Trump administration doesn't need Democrats to get upset for any files to be released. The attorney general said they would be released, and instead, she invited a bunch of far-right weirdos to the White House back in February to hold up binders with no new information in them. D'Souza was granted a pardon by Trump in 2018 after he was convicted for illegal campaign contributions, but he's one of the relatively mainstream pundits who all think Musk and Trump are playing 10D chess. There's also an army of absolute dipshits who believe in the QAnon conspiracy theory currently insisting on social media that it's all a ruse. And they're pointing to tweets from Democrats as proof that it's the other side who should be worried. The Democratic Party's X account seized on the dispute Thursday, writing, 'What is Trump hiding? Release the Epstein files.' And that caused people like Liz Crokin, a journalist-turned-QAnon lunatic, to insist, 'They already took the bait hook line & sinker!' In another tweet, Crokin called it the 'fake Trump-Elon feud' referring to it as kayfabe, the wrestling term for portraying staged events as real. Crokin joined the likes of fellow conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in arguing that there's no evidence Trump was doing anything nefarious with Epstein: 'I've also been investigating President @realDonaldTrump ties to Jeffrey Epstein for the past decade and came to the same conclusion @AlexJones has. There's zero evidence implicating Trump in any crimes!' Jones initially seemed open to the idea that Trump was doing something sketchy with Epstein on Thursday but later framed his tweets as just asking questions. By Friday, Jones was on his show InfoWars putting his finger to the wind trying to defend both men, while insisting the Democrats were the real criminals. 'Almost everybody was asking are you on Trump's side or Musk's side and I said I'm on neither side. I'm on team humanity, which means I'm on the side of truth,' Jones said on his show Friday. 'If the Democrats had any real proof of Trump involved with underage girls with Epstein you'd heard about it nine years ago.' The people who believe in conspiracy theories like QAnon are firmly planted in the MAGA camp and need to accomplish some incredible feats of mental gymnastics to hold the beliefs that they do. Jeffrey Epstein was well known as a friend of Trump's when the two lived in Palm Beach. And Epstein told a journalist over the course of 100 hours of discussion that he had photos of Trump with 'young girls' who were 'topless.' The way Trump supporters rationalize all of this is they insist Trump distanced himself from Epstein because the late pedophile tried to hit on the daughter of a club member at Mar-a-Lago. But other reports suggest their friendship actually ended over a real estate deal that went south. Whatever happened, there's no question that Trump and Epstein were very close, something the president has previously acknowledged in a 2002 interview that he was 'fun' and a 'terrific guy.' Conservative media has long tried to distance Trump from Epstein, with a Fox News segment in 2020 even editing the president out of a photo with the notorious sex criminal. And Fox News was clearly off balance on Thursday night, unsure who to root for. Musk also has his connections to Epstein, even if they're not quite so direct as an open friendship. Business Insider reported back in 2020 that Epstein set up Musk's brother Kimball with a girlfriend. And, of course, there's that infamous picture of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell with Musk at a party in 2014. The billionaire has tried to say she just photobombed him but it's not clear what was actually happening there, since other reports have come out that they talked. For his part, Trump said in 2020 that he 'wished her well' when Maxwell was found guilty of sex trafficking. But people who have previously celebrated both Musk and Trump seem to be forced into choosing a side. One of the things that's getting lost in the fight between Trump and Musk is that Musk seems to be admitting he somehow had access to tightly held files at the U.S. Department of Justice. And that's certainly believable, given Musk's access to the private data of American citizens over recent months. Among all the conspiracy theories online, there were also jokes. So many jokes. As social media's most legendary account @dril put it, 'the president wont see your cheap dunks against jeffery epstein. But your friends who have ties to state sponsored pedophilia will.' And then there were the memes. Just endless memes. It remains to be seen what impact this fight may have on the real world, from Musk's contracts with the federal government to all those DOGE staffers who've wedged themselves into the nooks and crannies of the federal government. As Wired reported this week, guys like 19-year-old Edward 'Big Balls' Coristine went from Special Government Employees to full-time government staff raking in some of the highest possible salaries. There are plenty of people who are insisting Trump and Musk could quickly reconcile and all of this could be old news by next week. And that's entirely possible. But it's really hard to just go back to being best friends after you play the pedo card, something that Musk likes to do frequently. Remember when Musk got upset at the cave diver in Thailand after that soccer team got stuck in a cave? The diver said Musk's idea for a rescue submarine wouldn't work, which incensed the billionaire. Incredibly, Musk won a defamation suit filed by the diver after the Tesla CEO said he didn't literally mean to call him a pedophile. It doesn't seem like either man is going to file any lawsuits over their current spat, but they're both extremely litigious. And if Trump makes good on his threats to pull NASA contracts from SpaceX, you can bet Musk will try to retaliate in any way he can. These guys love their retribution, which is good for them when they're working together on the same team. But aiming that hatred at each other could get messy very quickly.
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Virtues of Ideological Art
What is successful right-wing art? I posed that question to Jonathan Keeperman, who runs the far-right publisher Passage Press, on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, and you can tell that it's a tricky question because he took two separate bites at answering it, offering one response in our conversation and a revised one in a subsequent post on his Substack. In the first answer he suggested that we should understand 'right-wing art' as any art that tells the whole truth about the world, free from the ideological strictures and sensitivity reads imposed by contemporary progressivism. To me that seemed conveniently circular — reality has a well-known conservative bias, therefore any truthtelling art is inherently right-wing — and he tacitly acknowledged as much in his follow-up; there he suggested that the very concept of 'right-wing art' might be a category error, since art can't be circumscribed by politics and the artist's job is to be a truthteller and let the political implications take care of themselves. The second answer is the more attractive one for creators and critics, but I don't find it quite satisfying either. Certainly it doesn't resolve the tension inherent in Keeperman's own publishing project, which is trying to break away from the agitprop that often defines right-wing culture in modern America (think Dinesh D'Souza documentaries and Christian message movies), while also trading on the idea that there is special aesthetic value in the forbidden territory of far-right prose, among writers (from H.P. Lovecraft down to Curtis Yarvin) deemed dangerous because of their racism or sexism or authoritarianism. The same tension shows up in more mainstream quests to fix conservatism's broken relationship to the higher forms of culture. In his new book, '13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven't Read),' Christopher Scalia is self-consciously trying to educate conservative readers into a deeper appreciation of literary culture — to add more literary fiction to the works of political theory and history that many right-wing readers favor, and to expand the familiar list of novelists beloved by conservatives beyond 'Lord of the Rings,' 'Atlas Shrugged' and maybe 'Brideshead Revisited.' In doing this he's aware of the risk of instrumentalizing the works he's celebrating, and so he cautions that 'any artist who elevates his political point above the techniques and elements of his craft is creating propaganda, not art.' But he's still urging people to read Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walter Scott and P.D. James because they illuminate a particular philosophical or ideological perspective on the world, not for the sake of their artfulness alone. Which leaves open the question of whether conscious philosophical or ideological motivations can themselves create particular artistic value, rather than yielding inevitably to propaganda. I think the answer has to be yes — that the concepts of 'successful right-wing art' and 'successful left-wing art' are both meaningful descriptions, not just category errors or excuses for agitprop, insofar as both 'right' and 'left' perspectives on the world capture aspects of reality that can be non-propagandistically portrayed. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Time of India
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Beyond the White House: What the American President pays for out of pocket
Image credits: Getty Images Former first lady of America, Michelle Obama recently appeared on " The Diary of a CEO " podcast and shared a bit about her life in the White House. One of the most viral comments in the interview is where she shared that many might not be aware of the fact that living in the White House is "expensive." "You're paying for every bit of food that you eat. If you're not travelling with the President if your kids are coming on the Bright Star, which is the first lady's plane. We had to pay for their travel to be on the plane. It is expensive" said the 61-year-old former first lady. — DineshDSouza (@DineshDSouza) But how much does the President of America have to pay out of his own pocket while residing in the White House? Find out below! Personal food and groceries Image credits: iStock On various occasions, Obama has revealed that the first family is billed for their food items and groceries. She has mentioned it in her memoir 'Becoming' and even explained a bit about it in a 2018 interview with Jimmy Kimmel, saying, 'If you say you want some exotic fruit, 'Yes, ma'am, we'll get that right away,' and then you get the bill for a peach and it's like, that was a $500 peach!?' Staff for non-official duties Image credits: iStock While the president does not have to pay for the staff in the White House, they do have to pay for non-official staff such as personal trainers, stylists, hairstylists and more. Designer clothes and dry cleaning Image credits: Getty Images All the designer garments worn by the President and the First Lady have to be paid for by them. And if a designer gifts them outfits, they have to be donated after one wear. 'I was amazed by the sheer number of designer clothes that I was expected to buy, like the women before me, to meet the expectations for a first lady," wrote former First Lady Laura Bush in her memoir 'Spoken From the Heart' Additionally, the first family has to pay for their own dry cleaning, according to the CNN. Vacation expenses Image credits: Getty Images When the president and family go on a vacation, they have to pay out of pocket for their accommodation, food and incidentals during the getaway. However, the security and the expenses to and fro are paid for. Gifts and personal items Image credits: Getty Images When the president receives an official gift, it becomes government property. If they wish to retain the gift they have to purchase it at the appraised value. Additionally, according to Jennifer Capps, curator and historian at the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site in Indianapolis, when they give a dignitary a gift, they have to pay for it out of their own pocket.
