The Status Kuo

11/13/2025

For years, we had to endure QAnon: a wild conspiracy, bought into by about a quarter of Americans, that insisted an elite group of pedophiles was operating at the highest levels of government. It promised that President Trump would arrive like a storm to expose and dismantle that evil ring of child sex traffickers.

Trump himself fed this conspiracy by sharing memes of himself portrayed as the coming storm.

But remember one of the key rules about Donald J. Trump: Every accusation is a confession.

You have to hand it to the 2025 writers for today’s plot twist. It turns out that, crazy as the QAnon conspiracy sounded, there really was an elite cabal of pedophiles at the highest levels of power, one that operated outside of the law and counted among its members tycoons, a prince, a prime minister and apparently a president.

But this wasn’t a bunch of Democrats operating inside a D.C. pizza parlor. QAnon and MAGA must come to terms with a mind-blowing twist. Rather than taking down the pedophile ring, Trump himself was part of it all along. The QAnon call came from inside a Florida mansion.

Normal people, of course, have suspected this for some time, given how hard the White House sought to prevent release of the Epstein files. But now that a key tranche of it—some 20,000 documents from the Epstein estate itself—has been made public, the QAnon dam is breaking.

There’s a lot of information, much of it new, so it’s time to get out some corkboards, pictures and string so we can piece together what we know—and still don’t know—so far. Today’s discussion won’t cover everything (that would take a book or two), but it should help set the scene. Let’s begin by asking some basic questions and comparing them to what evidence we now have, as if we’re junior investigators on the case.

*****

What we saw yesterday is still likely just a taste of what other evidence exists. The Justice Department is still sitting on troves of evidence, and it’s now clear that Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and Todd Blanche, no doubt at the direction of Trump, whether implicitly or expressly, have all actively sought to prevent the truth from coming out.

The discharge petition, set to bring the bill to the House floor, will trigger another crisis within the GOP. It is bound to pass the House, and then the Senate GOP will have to decide whether to filibuster it and be labeled the party of pedophile protectors, just at the moment fresh evidence of Trump’s deep involvement has emerged.

QAnon itself could hardly have concocted a more bizarre, twisted and shocking story. But at least one thing now is certain: It is not going away any time soon.