Epstein, Grok, and the right’s epistemic collapse
What happens when you really believe that reality is liberally biased?
Jeffrey Epstein was a big player in American politics but he’s become larger-than-life after death thanks to Donald Trump and his allies who have reneged on wild promises to release full details on the sex-crime organization that Epstein was convicted of running in 2019, including a supposed “list” of his former customers. The president and his administration’s continued stonewalling on the matter has torn MAGA in two, not just because Trump has broken a major campaign promise, but also because it was this particular one.
To most political observers, the Epstein case is a sordid tale of horrible criminality, power, and the undue privileges of wealth. It means so much more to Trump devotees, however. Since the invention of the Pizzagate conspiracy and its spin-off QAnon, tens of millions of reactionary Americans have become convinced that the country is being run by a secretive ring of pedophiles.
While far-right Christians have no evidence for this opinion, it seems very possible that reactionary concerns about secret child molesters in high places actually stem from something real. Worship centers have been convenient places for sex criminals, because adults in supervisory positions over children often have little accountability for their actions, a recipe for abuse, as clinical psychologist Anna Salter detailed in her book, Predators, Pedophiles, Rapists, and other Sex Offenders. Offenders who have affiliations with religious organizations have more and younger victims, according to social science researchers.
And contrary to right-wing expectations about gays, trans people, and drag queens, it is the less-liberal denominations that have had to deal with sexual abuse scandals. In recent years, several prominent conservative-leaning denominations have attracted international attention for clergy child abuse scandals, including the Southern Baptist Convention, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A 2019 study out of Germany found that 4.4 percent of all Catholic priests examined had been accused of pedophilia, far higher than the percentage of the general population accused of such monstrous acts.
Sexual abusers also seem to be more common among far-right politicians as well. According to a study of nearly 11,000 reports of sex crimes against children by attorney Kristen Browde, among people described as politicians, 67.4 percent were Republicans, 13.5 percent were Democrats, and 2.2 percent were Libertarians.
These alarming statistics ought to be provoking howls of outrage against Republican politicos and far-right pastors, but instead of trying to clean their own houses, reactionary elites have encouraged their supporters to latch onto mythologies about imaginary Democratic pedophiles to such a degree that this it’s become almost core to being a Republican.
While the particular conspiracies about Epstein, pizza parlors, and various Democratic politicians are all new, the belief in covert Satanic crimes has been a fixture of reactionary discourse for centuries, most infamously in the Salem Witch Trials, in which women were accused of making secret pacts with devils, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which aggregated centuries of conspiracy theories against Jewish people; the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, which put millions of fundamentalist Christians on the hunt for the Satanists living next door or working at the local daycare.
These various panics arguably have little in common in terms of their targets, but they actually proceed from the same epistemic outlook. Republicans are loathe to admit this, but people with right-wing opinions are much more likely to believe in conspiracies, regardless of their target or origin. It’s a conspiracy-minded viewpoint that flows from a larger epistemic orientation against empirical truth that psychologists like Bob Altemeyer have classified as a “right-wing authoritarian” personality. This is the second reason why the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case has been so upsetting to his most devoted followers.
While Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI director Kash Patel, and assistant director Dan Bongino are all trusted figures by the MAGA movement, their statements that the federal government has no list of Epstein clients have landed like a lead balloon, just like Trump’s earlier admonishments to his supporters to get vaccinated against Covid-19. The belief that Jeffrey Epstein was in charge of a global network of sex criminals and the feds covered it up has grown too entrenched for even Trump to overcome.
Much remains to be known about who Epstein’s clients were and why Trump seems so oddly deferential toward the man he once described as a “terrific guy” and his former accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. The government owes the public a lot more information. At this point, however, it seems extremely unlikely that the Epstein mania is going to go away. There is too much at stake epistemically, psychologically, even spiritually.
As humanity’s knowledge has become distilled and made available through search engines and generative artificial intelligence, politics in the United States and many other countries has become more about psychological differences than ideological ones.
The increasing epistemic polarization we’ve seen in terms of religious attendance and community residence choice even shows up in Large Language Model artificial intelligence systems, as Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot recently demonstrated when it began repeatedly endorsing Nazism and calling itself “MechaHitler.” The July 8 meltdown was far from the first high-profile incident in which the xAI app went full fascist. Previously, the bot was known for engaging in Holocaust denial and having promoted false claims about white farmers in South Africa being murdered.
There’s no evidence that Musk deliberately orders Grok to engage in openly extremist language, but these outbursts are inevitable because of the deliberately broken epistemology which Musk is trying to force onto his chatbot. Although he has no technological expertise, Paul Krugman’s decades of experience analyzing right-wing viewpoints about climate change and tax reductions have allowed him to understand the underlying cognitive problem:
It all goes back to Stephen Colbert’s dictum, almost 20 years ago, that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” What he meant, of course, was that to be a conservative in good standing, you have to deny reality, which was true even then and is far more true now.
Now, LLMs don’t reveal reality. On issues like climate or economic policy, however, they usually do a pretty good job of summarizing expert, informed views about reality. Since Republicans have staked out positions on these issues that run completely counter to informed views, they consider the answers AI gives on such issues left-wing.
Hence the Musk/MechaHitler disaster. Musk tried to nudge Grok into being less “politically correct,” but what Musk considers political correctness is often what the rest of us consider just a reasonable description of reality. The only way to move Grok right was, in effect, to get it to buy into conspiracy theories, many of them, as always, involving a hefty dose of antisemitism.
So, going back to my starting point, will there really be an internal war within MAGA between crypto boosters and AI enthusiasts? I have no idea. But MAGA really does have a problem with AI, because LLMs too often give answers the movement doesn’t want to hear. And there’s no good fix for this problem, because the fault lies not in the models but in the movement. As far as we can tell, there isn’t any way to make an AI MAGA-friendly without also making it vile and insane.
Trump couldn’t get his supporters to take the Covid-19 vaccine, there’s no way he can ever call them off Jeffrey Epstein, a man who has become larger-than-life dark figure.