I grew up in New York City and now live in Boston and I’ve never encountered a pickpocket. I’ve been mugged three times and had a mentally unbalanced homeless guy punch me in the face unprovoked, but I’ve never been pickpocketed.

Yeah, I’m getting that impression. I think there was a lot of hope when he pardon all those Jan-sixers, but Dan Bongino going on TV and announcing Epstien didn’t kill himself seems to have been a turning point for a lot of them.

My wife and I were Honeymooning in Paris, purchasing subway passes from an automated kiosk, when a guy who was pretending to be really interested in his phone started getting uncomfortably close to her. She felt him touch her, so she elbowed him real hard, knocking the phone out of his hand, and yelling, “Oh no, are you OK, I’m so sorry, I broke your phone!” real loud (which was true, she cracked his screen). I don’t think he was expecting a 5’2" woman to assault him, because he grabbed his broken phone and started booking it before I could react.

A very nice Parisian came over and told us we needed to be more careful and watch ouf for thieves. We thanked him, but my wife was laughing a few moments later because she just assumed he was a pervert. I thought maybe the phone screen had already been broken, and he was trying to run some sort of, “Hey, you broke my phone, give me money!” scam but chickened out when he saw how aggressively my wife reacted. We live in a major American city, so we’ve experienced crime before, but it never occurred to us that he was trying to pick her pocket. Felt almost quaint, like a Dickens novel.

I don’t think that it’s facts that will wake them up, I think it’s that Trump is moving to end the delusion. You can explain how child abduction isn’t nearly as prevalent as they think it is, you can debunk their Wayfair child-trafficking conspiracy, you can prove that Comet Ping-Pong doesn’t have a basement, and they will ignore those facts. They’ll tell you it’s deep-state propaganda to stop Trump. But if Trump tells them there’s no deep-state and that they’ve wasted the last decade on a LARP? That’s not gonna go over well.

And again, this is for the true-believers; some of them are vile, some of them are misguided, a lot of them are somewhere in between, but in the end, they all believe in the deep-state, human-trafficking, satanic-panic bullshit. There are plenty of Trump supporters who are just cruel little goblins who want Trump to hurt people, and they’re not gonna give a shit about this.

This is probably the only thing that will wake the MAGA diehards up. There are a lot of vile people that will vote for anyone who promises to, “own the libs,” but the real Trump true believers have built an entire mythology around this Epstien/QAnon/Deep State bullshit. They’re not going to accept, “Oh, nm, it was a suicide and there are no tapes or lists, my bad,” as an answer. Couple this with the even sharper decline in their standard of living that’s coming soon and they might actually turn on him.