Is the Jeffrey Epstein Document Hunt Descending into a Moral Panic?

The Washington Post’s Jason Willick is engaged in an experiment on social media. Its initial results suggest that Willick’s thesis is sound:

As Willick observed, the (online and, therefore, admittedly unrepresentative) reaction to his observation “has underscored to me that the inability to distinguish criticism of a bureaucratic process with support of a person’s behavior is fatal to any sort of public deliberation.”

Now, as private institutions, Harvard University, OpenAI, and anyone else are free to dissociate themselves from Larry Summers by virtue of the conduct in which he engaged in his correspondence with the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. His conduct in those emails did not speak well of Summers’s judgment or character. Perhaps he invited his fate, but “Jeffrey Epstein” didn’t.

Whoever Dr. Jeffrey Epstein is has had his life turned upside down by the “reckless moron,” as our own Jim Geraghty aptly put it, Representative Jasmine Crocket. The representative knew when her staff “used Google” to track down the late pedophile’s supposed donations to Republican politicians that she was likely defaming a private citizen. In her efforts to defend herself, Crocket dug herself an even deeper hole, insisting that her own knowingly slanderous accusations should teach Republicans a lesson. You, too, could ruin an innocent person’s life if you’re as thoughtless, impulsive, and heedlessly ambitious as I am. There but for the grace of God, and all that.

Those who are inclined to excuse that behavior have indeed succumbed to a moral panic. But so, too, have the demagogues who insist that anyone who doesn’t demand the release of unredacted Epstein-related documents lacks the requisite concern for the safety of America’s children or the integrity of the federal government.

“No hiding, no game playing, no covering up,” the Democrats’ failing Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in his demand for “the full, unredacted files” relating to Epstein in the Justice Department’s custody. Only that would reassure the American public that the documents were “not warped by a corrupt DOJ who’s hell bent on hiding the truth, bending the law and protecting Trump.” Anything less amounts to a “cover-up.”

As Jasmine Crockett’s indiscretion indicates, if Schumer got his way, we can be certain that the names that would be released to the public would be permanently tarred by their association with Jeffrey Epstein, even if they had committed no crime, even if they were not even the target of an investigation. Those who care little about the collateral damage their zeal might produce are in the throes of hysteria.

A social imperative based around the need to save the children from some malevolent force will do that to a person. The need to save the children is what gave us the “satanic panic” of the 1980s, the junk science around “recovered memory,” and the “Pizzagate” shooting.

There’s nothing noble in subordinating one’s better judgment and elementary civic decency to a herd mentality, but that is what moral panics encourage. They radicalize the otherwise well-adjusted, compelling perfectly rational people to operate as though they are navigating an environment defined by imminent threat. They encourage emotional reasoning over logic, and they are too often used by opportunistic political actors to further their respective careers, no matter who they hurt in the process.

To the extent that we don’t yet know the whole story around Epstein’s evil works and those who supported them, and that extent may be far more limited than the feverish news cycle around the so-called Epstein documents indicates, creating new victims in the pursuit of justice for Epstein’s is a depraved enterprise. We can call it a panic, but there’s nothing moral about it.