Rep. Thomas Massie’s defeat at the hands of a Republican primary challenger backed by President Trump marked the merciful end of the wretched Epstein Era.
The Kentucky congressman’s involuntary retirement represents not just a notch in the belt of the MAGA political machine ahead of November’s high-stakes midterm elections, but a massive step out of the fever swamp for the country as a whole.
By giving the conspiracy theorists bipartisan cover, Massie bears much responsibility for keeping their circus on the road.
Jeffrey Epstein was an execrable man who used his money, fame and power to commit terrible crimes.
But in the years since his death, scores of similarly execrable actors have committed terrible sins of their own under the guise of pursuing justice for Epstein victims.
Chief among them was Massie, the gadfly who, alongside Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), championed the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
A lot of good that’s done: Their grandstanding and circumvention of a legal process designed to protect innocents resulted in the amplification of smears against countless people, from Trump to the four private citizens falsely accused of wrongdoing after Massie and Khanna reviewed unredacted Justice Department files.
Khanna mourned his partner-in-opportunism’s loss on Tuesday, declaring that Massie sacrificed his career for having “the guts to take on the Epstein class.”
If that’s a euphemism for “the temerity to use others’ pain and righteous outrage into a blunt, poorly wielded political weapon,” then right on, Ro.
The Epstein drama took on new life last year as Trump began his second term.
The president’s reflexive enemies in both parties saw his past relationship with Epstein — which ended sometime in the early-to-mid 2000s — as an chance to finally bring together the ever-closing walls around him.
But there was never any “there” there, so they had to settle for innuendo, dirty jokes and defamation.
The victims of this moral panic are legion — not even the Dalai Lama escaped unscathed.
And it’s no wonder why, what with social arsonists like Massie insisting that Epstein masterminded a “global sex trafficking scheme,” and that until “there are rich men in handcuffs being perp-walked to the jail . . . this is still a cover-up.”
So much for Massie’s “principled libertarian” schtick — or the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.”
His whole construction gives up the game: If authorities haven’t discovered enough evidence to lock up wrongdoers, that to Massie is proof of a conspiracy.
This con, often paired with an insidious barrage of antisemitic nonsense, became the centerpiece of Massie’s reelection campaign.
Despite the fact that his principal antagonist was Trump himself, and his opponent was funded by American citizens, Massie repeatedly claimed that Israel was “trying to buy an election.”
Without ever presenting a shred of evidence to support it, he spent months advancing the conspiracy theory that Epstein was working with Israeli intelligence services, and “that’s why there’s so much effort in trying to stop this.”
Massie himself invited noxious bigot and fellow Epstein obsessive Marjorie Taylor Greeneto a fundraiser to make text of the subtext by railing against “Jewish billionaires.”
And during a recent sit-down with still another Jew-baiter, he nodded along as Tucker Carlson — with all the grace of a drunk panda — implied that Trump had murdered the late sex criminal.
“These are the people who are also funding my opponent . . . , the people who are changing, dominating our foreign policy decisions,” Massie replied, eager as ever to imagine a web of shadowy villains out to undermine him.
“They’re the billionaires, and these are also the same people who are in the Epstein files,” he declared.
The Epstein circus is merely a symptom of a larger disease that’s infected American political life.
Among the others: slothful gullibility, crippling pessimism and all-consuming paranoia.
Bad actors have discovered myriad ways to capitalize on the spread of this sickness.
Carlson is hawking a steady stream of juvenile junk merch (his latest triumph is the “FAGA” hat, a less-than-clever slur equating support for the president with homosexuality).
Candace Owens has become a mega-star by terrorizing Charlie Kirk’s grieving widow.
And Greene has spent the last six months basking in the left’s strange new respect.
In the marketplace, where these non-entities need only a small number of dedicated fans to profit, the conspiracy-theory grift — i.e. lying — has hit pay dirt.
But in politics, their antics have proven less than amusing to voters who want to hear real solutions to America’s problems, not some tortured explanation about why the Jews or the “Epstein class” are responsible for them.
Trump has wisely excommunicated these “losers” and “nut jobs” from his movement.
And on Tuesday Massie’s longtime constituents concurred, making a loser out of their own resident nut job.
Isaac Schorr is a senior editor at Mediaite.
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