Matt Taibbi is not the first prominent alternative media figure to run cover for the perpetrators of child sexual abuse operations. Alexander Cockburn, the founder of the influential alt media publication Counterpunch, argued that 1983’s McMartin preschool child molestation case was utterly absurd. The reason why he could do so without too much pushback, and while being platformed by outlets like the LA Times, is because these arguments are fully in the interests of the ruling-class forces which orchestrate Satanic ritual abuse. Within the narrative sphere that Cockburn had embraced, there is always plausible deniability when it comes to Satanic crimes.
The way that Cockburn framed his defense of the McMartin perpetrators, though, made it seem like this story was nothing but a psyop on behalf of Reaganite austerity policies. This was how he explained the prevalence of such stories:
Satan-mongering is an industry of sorts, served by repugnant legal stratagems and nourished by bogus experts. But with day-care panics in more than 100 cities, the scare seems to reflect something more than the preoccupations of shut-ins, pay-TV preachers and fundamentalists. Satan may be trying to subvert American families, but so is Washington. Day care is so much in demand because of the rising number of families in which both parents must work. This is at least partly the consequence of the sharp increase in the ranks of the working poor that began with the Reagan era. Some states’ “workfare” legislation actually requires poor mothers to place their children in day-care centers while they work menial jobs. Their benefits are docked if they stay home with their own children, but if they hand their kids over to an institution, they can be paid to scrub floors by the state while the state pays the institution. Lesson: Poor women raising their own kids are lazy welfare queens, but poor women raising somebody else’s kids are gainfully employed, at least until they get hit with the grotesque charges facing the Kellys and their helpers.
It’s this logic, wherein Satanic and pedophilic designs within our ruling class are seen as myths to score political points, which would drive both Cockburn’s later commentary and the recent arguments made by Taibbi. In 2003, Cockburn defended guitarist Pete Townshend from child pornography accusations by saying the prosecution believed that “if you have a photo of a kid in a bath on your hard drive, and the prosecutor says you were looking at it with lust in your heart, that is tantamount to sexually molesting an actual kid in an actual bath.” Cockburn omitted how Landslide Productions, the child porn site that Townshend had accessed, was proven to have specialized in “the torture, rape and sexual abuse of children as young as two.”
Was Cockburn simply unaware of this detail? We can’t ask him since he’s no longer alive, but his role in steering the discourse away from the reality of ruling-class child abuse is worth looking back on. Because today, we have individuals like Taibbi who are here to continue Cockburn’s tradition. When Taibbi has asserted that the focus on Epstein is a “moral mania,” and that there’s no evidence Epstein has something to do with Zionist blackmail, he’s used the same type of rhetorical tactic that Cockburn employed. He’s portrayed the reality of the Zionist state’s blackmail operations as a conspiracy theory, of the same kind as the “Russiagate” narrative; with the argument being that when we talk about this reality, it serves the establishment, like Russiagate did:
Bret Weinstein suggests we posit that the “cartoon view” of Epstein as an intelligence front is true, in order to ask if the spook services have so much leverage over us that “the democratic nature of our society is a fiction.” Tucker Carlson, whom I obviously also know well, has been outspoken in saying Epstein was part of a “blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services.”…It shouldn’t need pointing out that “who’s really running the White House?” was a common trope of the Russiagate period. So were stories that catalogued “links,” read into tales of “secret backchannels,” or declared people “assets” of a foreign country, all practices coming back into vogue. The Epstein story has more force than Russiagate because it has a firmer floor of compelling facts, both in the tales of sexual abuse and procurement and in the area of Epstein’s political ties. Still, verifiable reports linking these two things are almost totally absent. With Russiagate, deep-seated fears about the communist enemy helped drive the mania. Here, it looks like newswriters are depending on darker attitudes to help audiences to make the needed connections on their own.
Another familiar tactic Taibbi uses is to assert that the accused have plausible deniability, when the circumstances show that such deniability is negligible or nonexistent; Taibbi said in a more recent article that we don’t know whether Epstein trafficked to other powerful men, yet accounts of Epstein having introduced Trump to underage teens are right there. This story keeps repeating itself: the public gets a better sense of how extensively their leaders are involved in pedophilia, then we have supposedly subversive voices who tell us this is nothing but sensationalism.
To understand where these arguments come from on an ideological level, we have to look at how the hegemonic mode of discourse can define the way commentators think—even when they have the sense that they’re independent actors. When Cockburn says that Satanic ritual abuse is a Reaganist bogeyman, and when Taibbi says that Epstein is a largely manufactured scandal, what political paradigm are they arguing in relation to? They’re arguing from the strandpoint of bourgeois “democracy,” with its narrow range of thought. When somebody is trying to win in the game of hegemonic discourse, where everything is made to revolve around the debates the established parties have, they end up picking a side over issues that are truly beyond such tribalist competition.
Satanic ritual abuse and blackmail are things that one can only really grasp when they’re thinking outside the confines of this game, and investigating the bigger picture of today’s power struggle. This whole matter is larger than partisan politics. Taibbi points to how it’s being exploited by partisan actors, and interprets this as proof that it’s overblown. The reality is that when the Democrats talk about Epstein, they’re trying to manage a crisis that could end up exposing the whole of the ruling class. This is the context you’re missing if you believe the issue is exaggerated because the Democrats use it to attack Trump; Epstein is about something bigger than the Dems or Trump.
There is a long-standing and extensive campaign by ruling-class propagandists to deny the existence of Satanic ritual abuse. Taibbi is only a recent face who’s been put forth to reinforce the denial narratives, which still follow the same script they have in the past but are now being used in a more desperate way. Never before have the masses become so aware of ruling-class crimes against children; this is what Taibbi is truly reacting to when he acts as if this thing has spiraled out of control. The hope of the narrative managers is that this backlash will fizzle out, but America may be headed for a crisis of perceived legitimacy for its government, where the people can’t be placated by a few token recognitions of the evils our rulers have committed.
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