No one has done more to shape the current global political landscape than early MAGA mastermind and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. He’s spent the bulk of his career trying to harness the chaos of the internet and the fury of chronically online men to move the levers of real world political power.

From his earliest experiments running a gold farming operation in World of Warcraft, to his stint as Breitbart executive chairman, puppeteering then-video game columnist Milo Yiannopoulos and the mainstreaming of Gamergate, to his eventual role as Trump’s right-hand man, Bannon has worked tirelessly to create the world we’re currently suffering through. A world where powerful men are shielded from consequence by an endless torrent of viral garbage. A world decimated by Bannon’s central political philosophy, which he best summarized in 2018 as, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

And so it’s somewhat fitting that the same week we learn of Bannon’s close personal relationship with notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, we are also being completely inundated with memes about President Donald Trump giving former President Bill Clinton a blowjob. It has made the release of Epstein’s communications, in many ways, the true test of Bannon’s decade of politicking. Can MAGA survive the mounting evidence that its biggest diehards were either working with Epstein or, in the case of figures like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, his useful idiots?

Until the US House Oversight Committee’s release last week of a new trove of documents related to the Epstein investigation, there was very little ever reported about Bannon’s ties to Epstein. PBS Newshour had a story in 2017 about Bannon’s connection to Epstein associate and fellow powerful sexual predator Harvey Weinstein, but made no mention of a direct relationship with Epstein. There was a Politico story from 2017 about Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Epstein, which has a fascinating passage about right-wing influencer Mike Cernovich threatening to release dirt on Trump’s relationship with Epstein as retaliation if Bannon was fired by the Trump administration. (Bannon was fired by Trump in late 2017 and Cernovich never made good on his threat and was even part of the botched Epstein binder influencer meetup at the White House earlier this year.) And Page Six reported in 2018 that Bannon was spotted visiting Epstein’s New York mansion, speculating that Epstein wanted to “use his millions to work his way close to political power again.” The Page Six story was careful to point out, of course, that Epstein “has mostly given money to Democrats.”

What we learned from the emails released last week, however, is that Bannon and Epstein were in close contact during Trump’s first presidential term. Based on the emails and texts we now have between the two men, they gossiped and schemed with each other as Bannon traveled Europe in 2018, attempting to franchise his far-right populist movement across Europe.

As The Byline Times reported, while Bannon was spreading conspiracies about Democratic sex cults like QAnon, he was also both plotting the end of democracy with Epstein and serving as Epstein’s unofficial PR advisor — and receiving advice in turn. In one surreal exchange, Epstein advises Bannon to compliment a major Qatari politician on his 25-pound weight loss before a lunch meeting in Paris. Epstein even helped Bannon catch a flight during Bannon’s 2018 UK tour. (Epstein jokingly asked Bannon how it felt “to have the most highly paid travel agent in history,” and told him that massages were not included in his services.) The two semi-seriously discussed forming a church, with Bannon suggesting they target “populist/nationalist[s] first,” and “Conservative Christians (Catholic/Evangelical) next.” They also explored using crypto to fund their ransacking of the global order and spent a whole lot of time gleefully sharing different media outlets writing about how dangerous Bannon is.

“I just spoke to one of the country leaders that we discussed, I will fly there tomorrow night,” Epstein said in another email to Bannon. “We should lay out a strategy plan.” A few months later, they texted each other about French President Emmanuel Macron having a “boyfriend.” And in 2019, Bannon texted Epstein, “Now you can understand why Trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”

It’s a shocking portrait of, at the very least, how important Epstein believed himself to be, how useful Bannon thought he would be to his cause, and how seemingly inconsequential Trump seemed to Epstein and his powerful associates. Not the global strongman he has demanded the world see him as, but, instead, a dog in constant danger of getting off the leash. “He feels alone and is nuts!!! I told everyone from day one,” Epstein wrote of Trump in an email in 2018. “Evil beyond belief mad, and most thought I was speaking metaphorically, it’s obvious he could crack.” According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump is mentioned in 1,670 of the 2,324 email threads we currently have access to. In a text in late 2018, Epstein writes of Trump, “I am the one able to take him down.”

And it’s hard not to come away from these emails with the creeping sense that the political chaos we’ve lived through over the last two decades was orchestrated, at least in part, by Epstein. “Epstein trafficked not just in the bodies of the children he abused but also in social connections that could bring elites together,” Jeet Heer in The Nation wrote this week. ”He well understood that the ‘desperation of those in power’ could make them eager to buy what he was selling: connections with other powerful figures and security systems to clamp down on dissent.”

The emails also raise the question of whether or not Epstein may have been providing financial support for Bannon’s conquests. These documents make it pretty clear that Epstein chartered at least one plane for Bannon during his 2018 tour of Europe, and Bannon was traveling with a large entourage and staying in fancy hotels. The suite that was his headquarters in Rome for an appearance at an event organized by future Italian prime minister and far-right populist, Georgia Meloni, for example, listed at a rate of thousands of euros a night.

Given that Bannon was also increasingly close to conservative Vatican circles around the far-right Cardinal Raymond Burke, his ties to a convicted pedophile are even more notable.

Epstein’s now-public digital communications, both with Bannon and others, function as a front row seat to the toppling of the global order across the 2010s. In one text exchange with an unknown recipient, as the Argentine economy was collapsing, Epstein wrote, “Whole South America, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina. Don't know why they are so dirty given the fact that there are so many maids. Soon to be the best investment of a lifetime.” Far-right libertarian Javier Milei would be elected president of Argentina, with the full backing of Trump and American conservatives, five years later.

Even more unsettling, and even more proof that we are still very much living under the shadow of Epstein’s global machinations, he wrote in that same text, “Venezuela. More oil reserves than Saudi.”

Epstein also seemed to know before the world did that Slovakia’s prime minister would resign in 2018. A move that, at the time, was reported as “puzzling,” with Epstein writing, “[Slovakian politician Miroslav Lajčák], president of UN, will guide the EU project if you like him. His government will fall this week — as planned. :)” And Epstein was also particularly obsessed with former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, writing in a 2018 text, “Makes Donald [Trump] look like [Albert] Einstein.” Drop Site News contributor Waqas Ahmed wrote on X, “Four years after this email, Khan was removed by the Pakistani military, backed by the [US] State Department. Pakistani military has now started normalizing ties with Israel. It cannot be more plain,” alluding to Drop Site’s reporting on Epstein’s connections to Israeli intelligence.

And Bannon and Epstein were apparently even in contact both before and after a previously unreported meeting between Bannon and Senate Intelligence Committee staffers in November 2018. Bannon complained about the eight-and-a-half-hour meeting and told Epstein that he had been a topic of discussion. “Grilled me when I said I knew you, about relationship with [Trump],” Bannon wrote. “Did they ask you if I had a silver bullet,” Epstein responded.

Epstein’s emails and texts are also a who’s who of far-right personalities. Aside from Bannon, The Telegraph reported Epstein was in contact with someone in the inner circle of notorious white nationalist British soccer hooligan Tommy Robinson. And in 2018, days after Trump associates Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort were both found guilty of financial crimes, Epstein mused in a text to an unknown recipient that he could reach out to Fox News’ Sean Hannity to stage an “intervention.” He also spent the summer of 2018 texting with an unknown recipient about putting pressure on then-Senior Advisor to the President Jared Kushner, writing, “Is there any way you can mediate the difference with Jared? He is s0000 outclassed by you, it’s like child abuse.”

Getting any of this out to the public meaningfully, though, has been difficult. Publications around the world are racing to report out what they can from the House Oversight Committee’s data dump, but “news,” as we used to think of it, no longer exists within the barriers of an article and is now experienced almost entirely as fragments shared by whatever accounts happen to go viral on whatever app you happen to have open as that news is breaking. And only one of these fragments has been able to climb the attention economy to the top of digital platforms and even Saturday Night Live. And, of course, it’s the rumor Trump was photographed giving oral sex to Clinton.

All of this is based on a 2018 email between Epstein and his brother Mark, where Mark asks Epstein, “What is your boy Donald up to now?” To which Epstein replies, “All good. Bannon with me,” referring, once again, to Steve Bannon. Mark then replies, “Ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba?”

In almost every other email containing the name “Bubba,” it’s a reference to Clinton. Mark Epstein put out a statement over the weekend, which was shared to X, saying that the “Bubba” in the 2018 email is not Clinton, however. As Mark Twain once wrote, “An email from a notorious pedophile claiming the current president went down on a former president sloppy style can travel around Instagram normie accounts and over to Reddit’s homepage while a press release strategically denying only one specific part of that email is lacing up its boots.”

To say this has gone viral would be an understatement. Mark Epstein’s denial did not do much to quell the torrent of memes. There is an obligatory Hawk Tuah edit and Monica Lewinsky mashups. There are AI videos of Trump going down on Clinton TikTok and Reddit, complete with a viral rap song about it. The Hamilton remix might be the most out of pocket one we’ve seen so far though.

It’s not surprising that the internet quickly turned this into a joke. But it also didn’t take long for some users to point out the grim reality underneath all the memes. As X user @doubleveenus wrote, sharing a photo of someone wearing a “Best Friends” shirt featuring Trump and Epstein, “Turning everything into a meme like what’s funny about walking around with two rapists and sex traffickers on your shirt with ‘best friends’ sprawled over it.”

But, good taste aside, the question of who “Bubba” might be and what Trump may have done to him and who may have photos of it has been impossible to escape. And this is doubly true for the extremely online keyboard warriors the president surrounds himself with. The fact that both groyper leader Nick Fuentes and right-wing news account AF Post have talked about the Bubba memes means it’s pretty likely Trump’s inner circle know everyone’s talking about it. Not to mention, even X’s anti-woke AI Grok is saying that Clinton is “Bubba.” And while we don’t know how the posters in the White House like Vice President JD Vance or White House Communications Director Steven Cheung are reacting to the entire internet calling Trump THROATUS, it seems like these revelations have come crashing down hardest on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Greene has spent the last few months distancing herself from the Republican party over its reluctance to release Epstein files, while rebranding herself as an economic populist. And this weekend, Trump and Greene finally came to blows. Trump, on Truth Social, over the weekend, went on a posting spree, calling Greene a traitor, calling her “Marjorie Taylor Brown” (because grass turns brown when it rots???), and writing, “I can’t take a ranting lunatic’s call every day.”

Greene replied on X, writing, “I now have a small understanding of the fear and pressure the women, who are victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his cabal, must feel.” And other prominent conservatives, including Bret Weinstein and comedian Tim Dillon, are now pulling their support from Trump. Meanwhile Laura Loomer and Alex Jones are duking it out in X posts.

And Greene’s personal quest to save the soul of QAnon is only matched in its patheticness to Jones’. As X user @SevaUT wrote, “What a tragedy for Alex Jones to see his prophecies come true. Turns out the government is actually a bunch of drug-addled pedophiles and masked regime thugs are grabbing people off the streets. But vindication is denied to him. The poor man has to pretend it's a hoax.”

Indeed, how depressing must it be to learn that your crusade against a global pedophile ring was propped up entirely by the de facto leader of that pedophile ring. The only thing more depressing would be to reach the highest office in America and have someone like Epstein clearly plotting against you. And knowing what we know now about how Bannon and Trump fit within the hierarchy of Epstein’s network, Trump’s complete disavowal of Bannon and his continued refusal to bring him back into the fold, even all these years later, makes a lot more sense.

Trump, when he dismissed Bannon in 2017, wrote, “Steven pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was.” It seems as if Bannon wasn’t Trump’s only direct channel to Epstein. In a text message in March 2019, just four months before Epstein was arrested, he wrote “[Trump]. Now really down on [Vice President Mike] pence”, and then ignored the unknown recipient’s response, “How did u hear?”

The punchline here is that Trump now appears to be falling back on his former advisor’s guiding philosophy, that our attention spans can be completely and totally hijacked by the internet. For days, Trump’s administration has had to suffer through the blowjob memes, anemically posting photos of Trump kissing Melania to try and remind their deranged shitposting supporters that the president is still straight. And this week, Trump surprised everyone, saying that the full Epstein investigation should be released in full. The idea seemingly being that more information will cancel out what we’ve already learned.

But in a world completely and totally flooded with shit, now governed by politicians dependent on the same viral dynamics the rest of us are, continuing to flood the zone makes it impossible to play defense. Perception is what matters most now. And the second Trump administration has been very good at never having to play defense, by always changing the conversation to stronger ground. Now that they can't change the conversation, their only hope is scrambling the airwaves and overloading the servers, turning this all back into convenient static. Which is a dangerous strategy when a random TikToker can quickly turn your emails with the world’s most famous pedophile into a rap song everyone in the country is dancing to. As one TikTok user wrote this week, “The news is fast, but TikTok is faster.”

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