On Sunday some readers were, fairly understandably, skeptical of a certain assertion made toward the end of a very freaking long piece titled “The History of the Decline and Fall of the MAGA Conspiracy Empire.” The assertion in question, the somewhat nebulously supported idea that what I understood by an anonymous White House source to be an admission to a Rolling Stone reporter that the latest “Obamagate” offensive from the Trump Regime really is the desperate distraction op from the Epstein shitshow everyone already fucking knows it to be. And that the admission represented a pivotal moment signaling the inevitable end of the “MAGA conspiracy empire.”

JOHN SOLOMON: If we don't see action on the Russia collusion hoax, if we don't punish the behavior that we now know exists,

You are going to handicap the future of this country and destine it to be a banana republic because the Democrats got away with it.@jsolomonReports pic.twitter.com/awKXehkbTW

— Bannon’s WarRoom (@Bannons_WarRoom) August 4, 2025

The truth is I had worked on the piece for the better part of five hours across two days and I was getting rushed out the door to go to a picnic in freaking Jersey City when I hit publish. Really could’ve used maybe another 30 minutes of work on refining and fortifying that main point.

Which I still stand by. If anything I actually feel even more confident in it two days after the New York Times, though backgrounded still without an actual direct quote from a source, printed this: “It is not clear whether Mr Trump, who is marking his first six months in office, would have pushed quite so forcefully for the [DOJ] to act against his perceived foes if the Epstein case was not still smoldering political fire. But it has certainly added to the urgency, administration officials said,” emphasis added on that last bit to emphasize that this is what their sources in the White House are telling them.

Now am I 100 percent confident that I’m properly articulating this very narrow point? Not especially so, no. I could very well have overstated the significance of such admissions. However the larger context, the why of it all, like the pretty palpable pants-pissing going on in that above clip of Steve Bannon and John Solomon? As confident as untold millions of other mediocre white men.

Are those guys constantly full of shit? Of course. Are they simply working to rouse the “WAR ROOM” audience into harassing the Trump Justice Department on social media to start arresting Team Obama? That’s one way to listen to it (though back in 2021 Bannon called on his fans to run for school board elections. A similar specific call to action seems missing from here). Are they actually worried that people who supposedly committed treason are going to get away with it? I guess.

But they seemed way more concerned with what them getting away with it would mean for the 2026 midterms. Or maybe not seemed so much as actually were way more concerned that such a failure would sap the turnout from a coalition that was already flaky before they turned in over five fucking million ballots marked for Donald J Trump and no one else last year, costing the GOP at least four Senate seats and God knows how many in the House in a presidential election.

Plus all the not actually lowering gas and grocery prices and the health insurance fuckery, but let the National Review dorks and wieners like Marc Thiessen worry about that stuff. Bannon and Solomon are concerned with the freaks who actually believe all the masturbatory fan fiction stories Solomon printed at The Hill before they fired him and appended lengthy fact checks to every piece he wrote.

Maybe that adjacent outer layer of this extremely tear-inducing onion is what I was getting at when I said there’s been a change over the last month. My spider-sense isn’t perfect. It’s not bad either and it’s been tingling a lot about the turbulence the MAGAverse is experiencing right now even if I can’t fully put all the different pieces together into one concise estimate of the situation.

If they really want Todd Blanche to go on fucking Joe Rogan’s show to try to sell his listeners on the idea that everything’s on the level with the Epstein files then maybe it doesn’t really require me or anyone else to overthink it. Nor does that they went with goddamned Hillary and Obama when Joe Biden’s “autopen” was supposed to be the “crime of the century.” That the Epstein clusterfuck really is that bad and it will continue to hang over the MAGA Reich indefinitely – or permanently.

Epstein survivor Annie Farmer sure as hell wasn’t going on CNN to talk about Hillary’s horse tranquilizers or the “burn bags” that Kash Patel supposedly found next to Agent Mulder’s office.

And as far as the “Decline and Fall” goes? Of course there will always be new right wing conspiracy theories minted every single day. What I believe however is that going forward the ones that come from the top of that pyramid just won’t put these asses in the seats like they used to. That they’ll all be viewed as coming from a weak old has-been who failed to deliver on two of the ones most central to their belief system – Epstein and the “Russia hoax” – and that the fans will just roll their eyes instead of fondling their loins with anticipation the way they did the past decade.