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“It was all a lie,” Marjorie Taylor Greene recently said about MAGA, capping off an unexpected career turn in which she parted ways with the president and resigned from Congress. A handful of factors precipitated Greene’s about-face, but chiefly she felt betrayed by Donald Trump’s efforts to stymie the release of the so-called Epstein files. Greene was one of four House Republicans who broke with their party in November to compel the Department of Justice to disgorge millions of pages of emails and other material related to Epstein. The fallout has been unremitting.

The tranches of files — the largest of which was released on January 30, comprising more than 3 million documents, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images — contain reams of reputation-staining correspondence between the late sex offender and a seemingly endless list of VIPs, including MIT’s Noam Chomsky, Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, New Age guru Deepak Chopra, Katie Couric, Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and whoever else’s name will surface next as people make their way through the searchable justice.gov database.

Thanks to Greene’s apostasy, she is being received as a changed woman, invited onto talk shows that until recently characterized her as a rage-driven conspiracymonger. “I was just so naïve” is the quote The New York Times Magazine chose for the headline of a profile of Greene that refers to her as a “former believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory.” But in a way, Greene hasn’t changed much, and it is everyone else who looks kind of naïve, including the lawmakers and journalists who were seemingly content to let the Epstein story fade away.

QAnon is premised on the idea that a global cabal is engaged in the rampant sex-trafficking of minors, and one takeaway from the never-ending Epstein blowback is that we really are governed by an overclass of degenerate elites. What’s more, the crude underlying logic of QAnon is being reinforced with every new screen-grab of a terse missive........

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