None of This is an Accident
Why the Epstein Files are still hidden
When right-wing news outlets flooded the zone with election fraud accusations after Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, many of the victims of their lies filed lawsuits against them. The most famous are the defamation cases filed by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. And when the media entities and right-wing talking heads were called into court to defend their lies, they made a very specific argument, one that I believe is going to become relevant again very soon.
One example of this argument can be found in the judge’s ruling in the defamation case filed by former Playboy model Karen McDougal against then Fox News Host Tucker Carlson. McDougal took a payoff from Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election in exchange for staying silent about their year-long sexual relationship, then later sued Carlson for defamation after he accused her on air of “extorting” Trump:
That’s right. The argument is that “no reasonable person” would believe what is presented as truth by Fox News on their air. When right-wing message makers are forced to put their hand on a Bible and answer for themselves, with perjury penalties attached, they defend themselves by saying that anyone who believes them is an idiot. And in the McDougal case, the argument worked. The judge dismissed the case.
If we fast forward to today, I believe it is long past time to apply the “no reasonable person” standard to most of our representatives, even the ones many of us support.
Last week, I argued that many of our laws simply do not matter, not because they are irrelevant or that they have no reason to exist, but rather because we pass them with no intention of actually enforcing them. And sadly, when I make this claim today, I am speaking specifically about The Epstein Files Transparency Act, and I am saying out loud that “no reasonable person” should believe we will see the Epstein Files anytime in the next several years, if we ever see them at all. And just last week, the DOJ told the court that no one has the authority to force them to release the Epstein Files. Not the courts, and certainly not We the People.
Now, I cannot argue with any certainty that the legislators who wrote the law never intended to enforce it, but I can credibly argue that “no reasonable person” should believe the lack of an enforcement mechanism is anything other than intentional. I mean, when it takes years for us to get nuclear secrets out of Trump’s bathroom, what makes us think this will be any different?
Remember this as Democrats flood the airwaves with rage-bait and flood our inboxes with fundraising emails: They could have written a law with teeth, and they chose not to, and they chose not to just in time for campaign season.
I am not telling my readers why they did this, because I don’t know. But I am telling you it’s not an accident, because it isn’t.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.