Influential MAGA voices are suddenly trying to cast Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking accomplice in a more favorable light.
The Justice Department is reportedly meeting with Maxwell on Thursday and Friday, ahead of her scheduled deposition with the House Oversight Committee on August 11. The interviews follow weeks of mounting pressure on Trump from his base, who have clamored for more transparency regarding the Epstein files after the Justice Department contradicted prior statements from Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed client list.
Offering Maxwell as fodder to Trump’s hungry followers is a fascinating carrot-and-stick option to alleviate some of that tension, but convincing her to talk would almost certainly require some kind of deal—an option that pro-Trump conservative media networks started to imagine this week.
On Monday, Newsmax host Greg Kelly had already started to dabble in the new media line, suggesting on air that Maxwell didn’t deserve her 20-year prison sentence and openly embracing the idea that the Epstein associate could be wrongly convicted.
"And maybe she deserves it. Maybe she doesn’t. Again, not a very popular thing, but we’ll take a look,” Kelly told his viewers, even questioning if the child sex abuser had been legally tried in court. (She was.)
"She just might be a victim. She just might be,” Kelly said.
Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse as Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and associate.
"Maybe she wants immunity, maybe she wants some sort of protection, I don’t know,” Charlie Kirk said on his show Tuesday. “We just want the truth.… Some people say, ‘Can we trust Ghislaine Maxwell?’ Probably, but also probably not.”
Street Epistemology. The reason it works better is because it avoids confronting the person with a conflicting viewpoint and setting their defenses up. Instead the interest of what and why they think something is true lets them try to justify it, and (sometimes) that digging by themselves leads to a reevaluation. Even if it doesn’t work the first time, it can plant a seed of doubt about their world view that they didn’t have before (because they didn’t think too much about the WHY).
If that route is taken and they’re okay with the lack of validation of their own thoughts, there is nothing you can say to them to break out of that. They’re fine with the lack of facts, so how can facts change anything? As the saying goes, “you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into”, however like I said, you can give them something that might cause a break over time if you help them start a crack. But only they can do that.
I need to read more about this, thanks! I’m not even in the US or from it, so it’s not like I’ll ever actually discuss it with anyone, but I’m just fascinated by the whole MAGA phenomenon, in pay because other, hopefully less brain-washy right wing movements are popping up all over the world…
They definitely are other places as well to varying degrees. Some of it is just human nature and how our brains are wired to feed the ego when we believe we’re “right”, otherwise we wouldn’t have a history of constant disagreement, war, etc. over stupid stuff. The fundamentals of street epistemology is useful for any topic, from politics to religion to pseudosciences. It’s even helpful as self-validation, which will show how hard is can be to question your own beliefs, and maybe help understand how others can get caught up in thinking a certain way without actually thinking about it.