The Epstein Story Wouldn't Have Gotten This Far Unless MAGA Was Ready to Cut Trump Loose

Dissecting the structure of most conspiracy theories seems to indicate that MAGA is willing to consider a post-Trump future. Is this another mirage, or does MAGA think it doesn't need him anymore?

The bad news is that since the Epstein conspiracy theory sets an immovable force against an unstoppable object, I have no idea whether or not MAGA goes back to Trump.

The good news is if I can't see the outcome of this, there’s no way the mainstream media can, so they have to keep reporting on it. Democrats would frequently wonder why they wouldn’t get the media to report breathlessly on their procedural stunts the way the media stayed glued to the exact same stunts performed by Republicans, when Democrats had already communicated to the media that no one should worry because they were going to back down before anyone got actually hurt like the responsible adults in the room that they were. The whole reason the media had to report breathlessly on the procedural stunts of Republicans was because you had no idea whether or not the Republicans were actually crazy enough to default on the national debt, make Donald Trump the Speaker of the House in the middle of his felony trials, or rewrite the First Amendment to say ‘Congress shall make no law, except about flag burning, obviously we don’t allow flag burning’. It’s like if the San Francisco 49ers had agreed in advance with the Kansas City Chiefs to lose by three points in overtime, then wondered why the TV ratings for Super Bowl LVIII went down.

If you know what’s going to happen, all you need to do is read a summary once and move on with your life. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, you have to stay pinned to every update. And keeping you “informed” with wild speculation every day for two weeks is a much more sustainable financial model for the media than just selling someone the box score once.

Whenever I’m stuck on a mystery, I find it best to look back to what I know for sure. Throw out all my speculation, break down all the facts that I do have, build a model out of what I already understand, and see if that leads me to draw any conclusions that I had missed the first time.

And strangely, when I do that with the Epstein conspiracy theory and how it’s circulating, the conclusion that I’m drawing is that the MAGA movement seems like they’re mentally preparing to move on from Trump.

This is a big swing. People desperate to go back to ‘normal’ politics from the Biden administration to the New York Times to the National Review have all hallucinated the idea of a post-Trump future since the 2016 Republican primary the way a man dying in the desert sees the sand in front of him as an oasis full of fresh water. The Access Hollywood tape, January 6th, Trump’s various felony convictions - every single one of these straws has been grasped at by people insisting that this time, Donny Trump wouldn’t wriggle his way out of this jam, and we would never again have to live in a world where the unilateral right to destroy human civilization was held in the hands of a man who believes that F-35s have a Romulan Cloaking Device and that tariffs are a way to let you collect taxes from the rest of the world in a way that has no further economic consequences whatsoever.

I’m not saying that MAGA will leave Trump. But I am saying that the mere fact that they’re considering the Epstein conspiracy theory seems to imply to me that they’re starting to consider it as something they might have to or even want to do.

Let’s break down the anatomy of a conspiracy theory.

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For me, the easiest conspiracy theory to understand has always been the Procter and Gamble Satanism conspiracy theory. It has a number of qualities that make it very easy to dissect, like a frog that you’d give to a middle schooler. It is obviously, blatantly, self-evidently untrue, so no mental effort needs to be spent on investigating the factual claims made by the conspiracy theory or even really concering ourselves with whether or not people capable of dressing themselves could be genuinely tricked into believing it. The things that the people spreading the conspiracy theory get out of sharing it are easily understandable and very obvious once you read the text in context. And the conspiracy theory has a number of natural defense mechanisms that encourage the people who are too respectable to actually spread it themselves to take an anti-anti-conspiracy theory view, saying that the people who do believe it and do spread it must be innocent dupes rather than malicious liars. Let’s break these things down step-by-step.

The Procter and Gamble conspiracy theory is ‘simple’. It is also staggeringly stupid and impossible, but that doesn’t matter.

The chain email, as reproduced by Snopes, follows: all errors are as they were in the original.

PLEASE MAKE A DIFFERENCE

 

The President of Procter & gamble appeared on the Phil Donahue Show on March 1, 1994. He announced that due to the openness of our society, he was coming out of the closet about his association with the church of Satan. He stated that a large portion of his profits from Procter & Gamble Products goes to support this satanic church. When asked by Donahue if stating this on t.v. would hurt his business, he replied, "THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH CHRISTIANS IN THE UNITED STATES TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE." 

Yes. This sounds ridiculous to you.

“Why is the President of Procter & Gamble appearing on a daytime talk show? They’re really boring guests. Couldn’t they have gotten someone more interesting?” “He’s donating a large portion of the company’s profits to the Church of Satan? Did the board of directors approve this? Is it charity or a business expense? Which Church of Satan is he donating to?” “Does the Chief Financial Officer make these decisions about which cults of Satanists to support, or the Chief Executive Officer?” “Why would Phil Donahue try to get him to stop saying this? It’s great TV. Why isn’t he promoting his show with ‘We have corporate presidents admitting to being Satanists on-air!’”

Do not think for a moment that it doesn’t sound equally ridiculous to the people who are spreading it.

I have never liked Jonathan V. Last of the Bulwark’s “Cletus voice” that he uses in order to mock low-information voters that he thinks are particularly stupid. This is because I do not think they’re stupid. I think they’re malicious and pretending to be stupid, because we, as a society, are not supposed to hold being stupid against people.

Let’s dissect it piece by piece.

The conspiracy theory about Procter & Gamble was originally started by Amway distributors. Amway is a multi-level marketing organization that sells the fantasy of becoming a self-sufficient salesperson of household cleaning products, primarily to Christian housewives. Procter & Gamble makes a number of cleaning products that directly compete with Amway’s knockoff versions of the same product. Saying that Procter & Gamble was financially entangled with El Diablo is the same thing as the Bush Administration saying that marijuana smokers helped fund Bin Laden; if you want to discourage the consumption of a product, just say that anyone buying the product is funding the most evil thing you can think of.

But that explains why a small number of people in the Evangelical community would start the rumor; to either defame the company or to just create the sense that Procter & Gamble was somehow controversial, counting on people to assume that where there’s smoke, there’s probably some sort of fire. In order to go viral - so viral that Procter & Gamble had to create a dossier they distributed to churches where they got Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell to state that Procter & Gamble was not now and never was a member of the Satanist party - people who aren’t actually getting direct financial benefit out of the conspiracy theory need to want to spread it. And this conspiracy theory has a number of elements that give them a reason to.

The distant President of Procter & Gamble (a company that the person hearing this rumor knows almost nothing about the job of) appears on a daytime talk show (the hated liberal media - further revisions of this chain email would change the host the President hails Satan to to Oprah, allowing for an added spice of racism to be added to the mix) to publicly announce that, “due to the openness of our society”, he was “coming out of the closet” as a Satanist (implying that since our society occasionally accepts that two men might love each other, they’d be equally fine with Satanists going around kidnapping babies to sacrifice them, because both of those things are wrong mainly because God tells you not to do them), dismissing any possible brand threat to the company he manages by saying that there “aren’t enough Christians in the country to make a difference.”

It has always amazed me just how white Protestant Christians in this country can say with a straight face that they’re being persecuted. I remember telling someone once during the Obama administration that, god willing, the next President of the United States might be a Christian; or maybe even the forty-fifth Christian to hold the office in a row. (Turns out I was wrong! Mugged by Reality regrets the error.)

This conspiracy theory asks very little of its target audience and gives them a lot in return. They are asked to stop using Procter & Gamble products and tell blatant, hateful lies about the company. In exchange, they get the ability to demonstrate their loyalty to Christianity by refusing to allow Procter & Gamble products in their home and ostentatiously using Amway products instead. (More importantly, they get to reassure themselves and others that they are much better Christians than all of the other Christians who do still buy Tide detergent and Crest toothpaste.)

They also get to outrageously lie that the liberal media - with a female black celebrity in a prominent role - saw nothing wrong with broadcasting to the country that a huge multinational corporation was giving away stockholder money to Satan, because the liberal media had already had plenty of people say that they were fine with gay people, and gay people are equally as bad as a criminal conspiracy that existed to kidnap and sacrifice Christian babies. It’s fun to lie about how awful the people you hate are. It’s even more fun to lie about how they lie, pretending that they found out too late that there was going to be a backlash and they all worked together to cover it up after broadcasting it to the entire nation. After all, your fellow churchgoers when they lie to you are far more trustworthy than the liberal media when it tells you the truth.

Some people; either people with a broad reach like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham (who might want to keep collecting donations from people who work at Procter & Gamble - Satanists buy sneakers too, but you shouldn’t be seen taking their money) or people who have too much self-respect and value their own credibility too much to lower themselves to telling such obvious, blatant lies will refuse to repeat the claims about Procter & Gamble, but they certainly won’t go out of their way in order to go to bat for Procter & Gamble. A church is a community, and communities that kick out their members by imposing standards on them is a community that shrinks.

Plus, if confronted with the truth, the person telling these hateful, obvious falsehoods can just pretend that they were so overwhelmed by how evil the worldly world is once you leave the confines of their church that they naturally thought that anyone as successful as a multinational CEO had to owe their good fortune in secular life to a pact with the Devil. And besides, the chain letter said at the end of it “THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH CHRISTIANS IN THE UNITED STATES TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.” They just wanted to be a Christian and make a difference! Shouldn’t you forgive them for that?

The thing that infuriates me the most about the world is that when someone does something that hurts other people and benefits themselves, like lying about their enemies in order to humiliate them, they can just say “No, no, I wasn’t being evil! I’m just too stupid to understand basic cause and effect!” And society expects us to believe that. Even though, mysteriously, every time they fail to understand basic cause and effect, they fail to understand it in a way that benefits them. They never, ever make one of these ‘mistakes’ that hurts their friends; only ever their enemies.

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So. With that frog thoroughly dissected, what are the primary elements of a good conspiracy theory?

1. The conspiracy theory should have an extremely low buy-in. People should not need to inconvenience themselves as a result of the theory, and it is good if the actions they take as a result of the theory are either public signals of group loyalty (buying Amway products from your fellow churchgoers) or fun to do (‘decoding’ Q ‘drops’ by engaging in creative writing exercises to show how recent events were foretold by Q).

2. The conspiracy theory should implicate people that you already hate as both deeply malicious and fundamentally incompetent. (The President of Procter & Gamble declared his loyalty to a criminal conspiracy on air, because he thought no one would object.) By saying that your enemies are so powerful that they currently control the world but are also so stupid that their downfall is assured, you both forgive all previous failures by your in-group (our enemies are so powerful, it’s only natural that they’d defeat us) but you assure everyone that your group is destined to eventually succeed (our enemies are so stupid, it’s impossible for them to win forever.)

3. The conspiracy theory should involve a layer of ablative armor insulating the people who spread it from social consequence for knowingly spreading lies, usually taking some form of saying “Well, our enemies are so evil, it’s only natural that I’d think something like this could happen”, or a motte-and-bailey argument where “George W. Bush sent teams of demolitionists to spend six months wiring the World Trade Center to blow before 9/11” becomes “George W. Bush was not fully honest with the country when invading Iraq”, so that you can say that anyone who calls you on the first point obviously is so deluded that they agree with the second.

It should go without saying that the actual truth or falsity of a conspiracy theory very little to do with whether or not it spreads. (In fact, if a conspiracy theory is required to remain plausible due to the incentives of the people who are spreading it, that’s another restriction on it that prevents it from evolving into a possibly less plausible but more viral version of the conspiracy theory.) For the purposes of this article, I am completely agnostic as to where Donald Trump falls on the spectrum of “someone who hardly knew Jeffrey Epstein and was used by him to make Epstein seem more famous, expanding Epstein’s social circle” to “was fully aware of everything that Epstein was doing and shared a couple of ‘enigmas’ with him”. It is an important question, but for the purposes of this article, which focuses entirely on why and how conspiracy theories spread, it is almost completely irrelevant.

The conspiracy theory needs to not demand much of either the people spreading it or for society. Talking about how awful your enemies are is good for you, but actually doing something is extremely bad. Saying that every single Democratic staffer in Washington D.C. knows that there are children tied up in the basement of Comet Ping Pong and delivers them to Hillary Clinton so she can frazzledrip them is good; actually responding the way someone would to knowing that children are being regularly, ritually murdered by the ex-First Lady at a public restaraunt and showing up with a rifle to try to break them out is very, very bad.

This is another reason that implausible conspiracy theories are more likely to spread than plausible ones; the more obviously untrue they are, the less likely someone is to act on them. No one is going to actually arrest Ted Cruz for being the Zodiac Killer, because the last confirmed Zodiac Killer murder happened before Ted Cruz was born. It’s completely costless to jokingly say that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac; no one is going to take it too seriously and show up at his house with a gun, unless they were already so seriously disturbed that nearly anything might have set them off. Everyone talking about Ted Cruz as the Zodiac understands that it’s all kayfabe, a gimmick, a joke - a good conspiracy theory should communicate the same thing to the people who care about it the most.

The juice of the matter - the reason for spreading the conspiracy in the first place - is to talk about how horrible the subject of the conspiracy theory is. This is good for a bunch of reasons. One, if you want to look thin, hang out with fat people; by saying that people outside your in-group are a bunch of depraved monsters, you look better by comparison. Two, it’s just plain fun to lie about how awful the people you hate are. Lastly, and most importantly, the people who read and study the rumors will understand that these conspiracies don’t actually exist and that they aren’t supposed to actually do anything about them. The people who just vaguely overhear the conspiracies will assume that there’s something weird and suspicious about the target of those conspiracy theories and assume that they’re distasteful and not something they should be associated with.

Did the Clintons have Epstein killed? Well, if Hillary Clinton kills people for interfering with her political ambitions, why on earth is Carlos Danger still alive? But if you turn “Epstein didn’t kill himself” into a joke and repeatedly flash around a fake tweet saying that Epstein was about to reveal secrets about Hillary Clinton, then the idea that there’s something suspicious about Epstein’s death will soak into the cultural lexicon, and Hillary Clinton will be assumed to be responsible for it in some way, even though Epstein dies under Trump’s Department of Justice and Trump made the prosecutor who cut the corrupt plea bargain with Epstein in the first place Secretary of Labor.

A conspiracy theory without a villain is going to be a conspiracy theory without an audience. Bonar Menninger wrote a book called Mortal Error about the JFK assassination, the subject of which was a theory that JFK had accidentally been shot in the head by his own Secret Service agent who was attempting to return fire at Lee Harvey Oswald. This would explain (though not justify) a government coverup, and there seems to be at least some evidence suggesting it’s a plausible theory. No one hates it more than conspiracy theorists. The entire point of JFK conspiracism is to retroactively put your preferred policies in the hands of a young, physically attractive, and popular President, and then say that shadowy enemies killed him in order to prevent utopia from being born. JFK dying as the result of a tragic accident is literally the only outcome worse for the conspiracy theorists than Oswald acting alone.

Lastly, the conspiracy theory must be either justifiable or deniable; when you are, in the manner of someone finally forced to choose in a liferaft between cannibalism and starvation, pinned down and required to tell the truth (usually in a court of law), you must either claim that you genuinely believed in the obvious nonsense you were saying, or that you were never making grandiose claims in the first place but were just rhetorically exaggerating a legitimate argument or were joking around for the purposes of satire.

The inherent tension between these points is why successful conspiracy theories have so many safety valves. Yes, Democrats and celebrities are kidnapping children in order to harvest the glands inside their brains; but Donald Trump is doing something about it, the people responsible have already been secretly arrested and are only appearing in public with conveniently hidden leg bracelets, and they will be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay any moment now. Yes, Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election due to widespread ballot fraud brought about by a hundred thousand mules; but there’s no reason to investigate any of the other elections on the same ballot, because those mules only bothered to fix the election in favor of Joe Biden, and there’s certainly no need to actually find any of these mules or figure out how to prevent them from fixing future elections. Yes, Q predicted a number of very specific things that very evidently didn’t come true; but that’s just because Q needed to trick the people watching him share this vital information with us, random Trump supporters on the internet, about a conspiracy of Democratic pedophiles on a message board that split off from 4chan because 4chan’s rules didn’t allow for child pornography, and the people who have secret, hidden insight into the true nature of the unseen world can ‘decode’ the Q drops so that their true meaning is derived.

Trust The Plan.

Patriots Are In Control.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Actually Shoot Up Comet Ping Pong. The optics would be bad.

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So with this basic structure of a conspiracy theory in place - it doesn’t demand anything of its adherents, it implicates the enemies of those adherents, and it can be stated without embarrassment; why did the Epstein conspiracy theory take off? And why did it take off, right now, among MAGA?

Donald Trump’s links to Epstein were well known all throughout the first Trump administration. Acosta would resign as Secretary of Labor due to his involvement in the Epstein plea bargain. Trump’s 2002 statement to Vanity Fair that Jeffrey Epstein likes young ladies was a matter of public record, as was the Access Hollywood tape and numerous accounts of him barging in on the locker room of underage beauty pageant contestants - no word as to whether or not he shared any subsequent “locker room talk” with them while he was there. After divorcing his second wife, Donald Trump dated a nineteen-year-old. It was known that Donald Trump’s name and phone number appeared in Epstein’s address book, that he flew on Epstein’s plane seven times, and the picture of Trump and Epstein mugging for the camera together were all known before Donald Trump had even come down the escalator to announce his 2016 Presidential run.

There were a few new details; mostly the ‘bawdy letter’ featuring a naked woman hand-drawn by Donald Trump and wrapped around a typewritten imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein sent for a 50th birthday party. (Without commenting on whether or not the imagined conversation is inherently incriminating, I will note that while Donald Trump has an absolute 1st Amendment right to write real person chatfic, I do still regard it as an impeachable offense.) These raise interesting questions about who Donald Trump has recently lost at the Wall Street Journal and exactly how long they’ve been keeping a folder around saying “If Donald Trump threatens the Federal Reserve, break glass”, but even if we naturally assume that Rupert Murdoch is doing this because pedophilia is one thing but firing Jerome Powell is quite another, we can’t extract from that why the MAGA base is willing to go along with this conspiracy theory now.

All of the elements they needed to accuse Donald Trump of being involved with Jeffrey Epstein existed a decade ago. Why would the MAGA base suddenly be open to talking about it now, just because the Wall Street Journal threw one additional piece of admittedly juicy chum into the ocean? The ocean was already full of chum.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I said to myself, “because the core of a conspiracy theory is that it costs the believer almost nothing to participate in, but rewards them by accusing their enemies.” I tried to work it out in my head a second time. “There was already more evidence that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were accomplices than there was that Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein were accomplices; but MAGA believed that Bill Clinton was involved with Epstein because they wanted Clinton to be involved with Epstein, and they refused to believe that Trump might be involved with Epstein because they didn’t want Trump to be involved with Epstein.” Everything I knew about conspiracy theories told me that this shouldn’t be happening, but e pur si muove - MAGA influencers were defying Trump in order to continue to spread the Epstein rumors. “This only makes sense if MAGA thinks that they’re not going to pay a price anymore for abandoning Donald Trump, and somehow thinks they’re going to get more of what they want if they ostentatiously abandon Trump and make a show of no longer supporting him.”

The truth hit me like a lightning bolt.

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What does Donald Trump offer his voters? Why were they so loyal to him in the first place? What did he offer that a dozen other candidates did not?

Some people said that it was star power; that he was a celebrity who was easily recognized and that allowed him to luck out a win in a divided Republican primary field; then he won elections in heads-up races against Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton, then lost it to the anonymous Vice President of Barack Obama’s term. Other people said that he was rejecting the failed Republican orthodoxy of more wars and more upper-class tax cuts, and that people were supporting him ‘in spite of the tweets, not because of the tweets’; then he bombed Iran and cut Medicaid while cutting taxes to explode the deficit by several trillion dollars, but that didn’t seem to bother his defenders all that much. There were plenty of people who offered in the 2024 Republican Primary the exact same thing as Donald Trump; Ron DeSantis tried to stake out positions to the right of Donald Trump on policy but refused to follow him into the authoritarian territory of making explicit calls for violence against his political enemies, on the assumption that Trump’s voters were here for the policy, not for the violence. They were not.

What does Donald Trump offer his voters? We have the answer. He offers them cruelty, humiliation, revenge, and violence.

His voters affirmatively rejected every opportunity to get what they claimed to want without cruelty, humiliation, revenge, or violence. If someone misses ten off-ramps in a row, you have to draw the conclusion that they want to be on this highway.

But now that he’s been elected for a second time… hasn’t Donald Trump outlived his usefulness to the MAGA Movement?

He could run for President a fourth time, obviously. Sure, the Constitution clearly says that no President can be elected to a third term, but it also says that wars must be declared by Congress and insurrectionists against the United States are barred from holding office. A Constitution is just words on a paper, and if people declare their intent to violate it, there’s not really anything the paper can do to stop them. Certainly our current Supreme Court won’t be leaping out of bed in order to tell Donald Trump he’s not allowed to do anything he wants to do.

But could he win a third term? And even if he did win a third term, even by stationing masked ICE agents at every ballot box in America with orders to deport any ballots that were insufficiently Republican, what would him winning a third term give his MAGA followers?

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Trump is seventy-eight years old. He refuses to exercise, eats fast food religiously, and has been showing up in public with mysterious bruises and recently admitted to “chronic venous insufficiency”. His medical records are like his tax records - secret from the public, and only ever mentioned by him in order to tell outrageously obvious lies about them.

If Donald Trump runs for President in the year 2028, which he insisted that he might, and subsequently wins, through fair means or foul, he would be over 81 when he takes office and over 85 when he sends an armed mob in 2032 to kill the holders of California’s electoral college votes. MAGA is aware of this. They pretend not to be, the same way Democrats pretended not to be aware that Joe Biden was old, and dismissed it as much as possible. But they were very, very aware of it.

MAGA knows that there isn’t really that much juice left in the fruit to squeeze. They were happy to put him back in the Oval Office in 2024, because when he was in the Oval Office, he quickly started putting a guy who wrote a children’s book with an enemies list in the back in charge of the FBI, a recovering drug addict with a literal brainworm who blames measles vaccines for causing measles as the Secretary of Health, an alcoholic rapist with tattoos that aren’t technically Nazi symbols at Secretary of Defense, and, of course, a Russian agent as Director of National Intelligence.

All of these things were great for MAGA; they really showed that deep state full of people who actually care about whether or not the government functions who was in charge. They got a lot of cruelty, humiliation, revenge, and violence and can laugh themselves to bed thinking about how USAID’s closure is going to result in the deaths of probably twenty million Africans, because they’d rather pay money to burn food than give it away for free.

But now that Trump has done all those things, what more does he have to offer MAGA?

Is he supposed to replace Hegseth with someone more unqualified and more eager to commit war crimes? Where would he even find such a person?

Now that Donald Trump has scaled the mountain and started a program of purging everyone that MAGA wants out of the government, why would MAGA need to continue supporting him?

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Cutting Trump loose gives MAGA everything they want. By putting him in office on a platform of deporting twenty million people, destroying the global trade system with a series of tariffs thought up by ChatGPT, and abandoning Taiwan and Ukraine to conquest by their authoritarian neighbors in order to bomb the rubble in Yemen and Iran a few more times, MAGA destroys the system that liberals value, and gets to enjoy their tears as they watch American society crumble.

And then, by saying that they don’t support what Trump is doing in order to destroy it, MAGA gets to disclaim all responsibility for anything that Trump damages in order to make those liberals cry.

MAGA is aware that plenty of responsible people are saying that tariffs are a bad idea, that firing the chair of the Federal Reserve will have awful long-term effects, and that Donald Trump is destroying everything that makes America actually great. And by stopping their support of him the second it’s too late to prevent him from destroying everything, they get to say that they don’t approve of the destruction even as they get to enjoy watching it happen.

This is why MAGA is willing to entertain the idea that Epstein and Donald Trump were involved in a conspiracy together now; because there’s nothing more that Donald Trump can give them that he hasn’t already given them. Before Donald Trump was given the power to destroy the world, he had to be protected. Now that he’s in power, anything he does with that power is a liability, one that can be easily disclaimed.

I don’t know whether or not they’re consciously aware of all of this. Everyone exists in a quantum kayfabe superposition of mark and smart. People are good at doing two things; they’re very good at seeing what’s in their selfish, self-centered interest to do and doing it, and then they’re very, very good at finding ways to justify why doing the thing that they just did was actually a laudable moral act completely unrelated to whatever benefit they happened to extract from it.

But as I’ve said; assuming that these people are stupid is the wrong assumption. We allow them to pretend to be stupid, because the alternative is admitting that they’re evil. Even the people who get involved in Amway aren’t actually as stupid as they claim to be. If we want to predict their behavior, we need to remember that.

These people may be fools, but they’re not stupid.