After Cayden McBride finishes class in Rome, Georgia, the 19-year-old goes home, opens his laptop, and starts searching. For the past few months, he has been spending hours at a time combing through the Jeffrey Epstein files on the US Department of Justice (DOJ) website, and following others online who are doing the same.
Flight logs. Transcripts. Images. Videos. The material released by the DOJ has given new insight into the crimes of Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, and into his high-profile connections.
McBride believes the Epstein files still matter, even if the headlines have moved on to the Iran war recently.
“As a Christian, I don’t believe anybody should endure what these women have been through,” he says. “There is so much bad stuff in these files.”
McBride was a self-described “Trump guy” and “very anti-establishment”. He said he would always defend the president in the belief that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (Maga) movement stood for exposing corruption. But the DOJ’s delay in releasing all the files, and the perceived lack of accountability afterwards, has left him and many others disheartened with the movement, the president and especially with Pam Bondi, Trump’s former attorney general.
Yeah I was gonna say, I have total respect for him being 19. Everyone’s a dipshit when they’re a teenager. I’m not gonna blame someone for not understanding US politics while they’re still figuring out who they are as a person, and total respect for someone turning it around as they grow up.
I’m not so sure he has changed that much.
He is definitely still going to vote Republican.
Maybe so, but I think it’s a big step in the right direction. People like Trump rely on unthinking loyalty. If someone is willing to ask questions and decide what’s right for themselves, I think they have a much better chance of finding the right path than someone who needs to hear from someone else what they should think.
He’s still young, and people don’t change overnight, so I’m far more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt than most other MAGA morons.