Many progressives regard hostility toward people of colour and transgender individuals as a defining hallmark of the political movement colloquially known as MAGA (an acronym for “Make America Great Again”), a force that helped fuel Donald Trump’s rapid rise to the U.S. presidency.

Many in the MAGA movement are transparent about their bigotry toward transgender people, seeking to justify it by invoking the trope that “they fraudulently feign gender identity issues to infiltrate spaces where they may engage in sexual predation on children.” Many MAGA supporters also espouse contemptuous views about non-white people, often portraying them as morally and intellectually inferior to white people.

The release of the Epstein files—which almost exclusively implicate white, cisgender individuals in the sexual exploitation of predominantly white children—has posed a daunting challenge for a movement that regards itself as ordained to condemn vast groups of people based solely on the supposed inherent superiority of a white, cisgender identity, and that has long vilified many on the basis of unsubstantiated accusations of wrongdoing that pale in comparison with the crimes documented in those files.

However, before any self-doubt could materialise—prompting a genuine re-evaluation of all the time, effort and resources that MAGA has devoted to pursuing policies to combat the growth of supposedly nefarious trans and DEI influences in the name of “protecting the children” or “doing what is best for them,” policies that many around the world have plainly called “callous” and “ridiculous”—the MAGA faithful found a saviour.

Steve Bannon, a prominent MAGA figure, has stepped forward to confront the challenge of preserving the movement’s pride in its white, cisgender identity, come what may. In an opinion piece published on Breitbart, Bannon offered what many are calling a “perversely optimistic” take on the recent disclosures.

“I am sickened by the horrific and depraved things that the rich elites have gotten away with in this country for generations, with complete impunity. Jeffrey Epstein seems to have been the worst of the worst,” Bannon writes.

“But you’ve got to give him credit for one thing—he had refined taste and only associated with, and preferred violating, the finest genetic specimens. We should all be relieved that the highest echelons of our society, as reprobate as they may be in some respects, remain unsullied by trans and DEI ‘infestation,’ thus saving our children from exploitation by brutes,” Bannon notes in his article.

Bannon himself features extensively in the Epstein files, a fact his article blithely dismisses as “the inevitable consequence of Jeffrey Epstein’s penchant for surrounding himself with the best and the brightest.”