Migrants: Conspiracy's Favorite Punching Bag

A Sunday column on America's voiceless scapegoat.

WASHINGTON — Everyone thought it would blow the roof off. The list. The names. The files. The “black book” Pam Bondi swore sat on his desk like a loaded gun. And then? Nothing.

A shrug. A pivot. A press conference where Trumpworld’s foot soldiers stared at a stack of nothing and called it justice.

For a movement built on exposure—on torching the veil, pulling back the curtain, naming names—this was the moment. And they flubbed it. Not with sabotage, not with suppression. Just... with nothingness. The kind of anticlimax that collapses a whole mythos under its own weight.

MAGA, to its credit, is pissed.

Rightly so. Because for years now, they’ve been sold stories. That the swamp is real. That the global elites dine on children. That Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t just a man but a map—to power, to corruption, to hell.

And for a long time, the fuel was just enough: a whisper here, a sealed file there, a blurry photo, a logbook scrawled with familiar names. Truth? Maybe not. But certainty? That came cheap.

Now it’s running out.

I’ve seen this before. Back in COVID days, I lived with a philosopher. Brilliant. Argumentative. Slightly unhinged. He had theories about everything: man-made natural disasters, 9/11, vaccines, alien disclosure. The works. We’d spend days swimming in epistemological sludge, debating the fine line between knowledge and belief. He wanted answers. I wanted proof. But mostly, I just wanted out.

Still, I listened. Because somewhere in the wreckage of all that paranoia, there was something recognizably human: the urge to understand. To blame. To see.

Fast-forward to now. My phone’s lit up like a flare in a blackout. Old friends, diehard Trump people, texting with confusion and fury. What happened to the list? Where are the files? How can they say there’s nothing?

How indeed.

Kash Patel said he had it. Pam Bondi nodded like a backup singer. Steve Bannon declared a reckoning. And then—silence. No bombshells. No prosecutions. No arrests. Just the long, hollow hum of disillusionment.

The movement built its house on suspicion—and now it’s being evicted by reality.

And not just on Epstein.

Tariffs. Trade wars. Foreign aid. Election machines. Immigrants. Everything MAGA ever railed against has come back, not with a bang, but with a quiet correction. The enemy was never who they said. The crime was never what they screamed. And when the smoke clears, the only thing left is the mirror.

Immigrants feel it most.

They are the conspiracy’s favorite punching bag. The scapegoat with no voice. Every time the system fails, it fails on their backs—raids, detentions, disappearances. And every time the conspiracy shifts, it finds its footing in them. They are the problem. They are the plot. They are the ones coming for your job, your vote, your country.

It’s always them.

And yet, under the strobe light of mass deportations and ICE theatrics, the truth peeks out. Migrant labor props up our farms. Our economy leans on their sweat. Our culture is already theirs. But instead of policy, we get performance. Instead of reform, we get rage.

The Democrats aren’t helping.

They’ve made a brand of standing still, hands raised in protest while the building burns. Expose the cruelty, yes. But what next? They’ve stopped being a party of solutions. They’ve become the camera crew filming the wreckage.

Their hope? That horror will drive voters home. That when Trump goes too far, America will crawl back to the “adults in the room.”

But adults do something. They don’t just wait for the villain to monologue.

Immigration advocacy groups, too, have lost the plot. In chasing symbolism, they’ve abandoned clarity. They let the other side define the terms. Now the country sees immigrants through shadows, not stories.

And the press?

We like our clicks. We like the drama. We chase the outrage and forget the origin. We write about “the border” like it’s a haunted house and forget the people inside.

Conspiracies fill a vacuum. They thrive when the truth is too boring, too painful, or too complex. And when we fail to explain reality—when we let it rot in silence—others fill it with ghosts.

Yes, sometimes conspiracies touch on something real. A flash of light in a dark room. But most of the time, it’s just us. Our fears. Our failures. Our unwillingness to sit with hard, uncomfortable truths.

This Epstein fiasco was never about justice. It was about faith.

Faith that someone knew something. Faith that the people in charge were finally going to do something. Faith that the movement would deliver.

But faith needs truth.

And truth, in this town, has been missing for a very long time.

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