A lot of people online have been very, very upset over the Trump Department of Justice's two-fold conclusion, announced last Sunday, that Jeffrey Epstein's death in jail in 2019 was a suicide and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had no "incriminating 'client list'" among its Epstein files.
The tremendous uproar against the Justice Department and FBI has crossed partisan lines; if anything, it has been many conservative commentators and some Republican elected officials who have expressed the most outrage, with accusations and implications that the government is hiding something about the case to protect powerful individuals.
It is not merely that the underlying subject matter here -- the feds reviewed 'over ten thousand downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography,' per the Justice Department -- is inherently sordid. It's also that this week's uproar is a political distraction from substantive issues far worthier of our collective time and energy.
The Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files has not been its finest hour. During a February interview on Fox News, Attorney General Pam Bondi said, in response to host John Roberts' question about whether the Justice Department would release a "list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients," that the list was "sitting on (her) desk right now to review." It is an astonishing about-face for Bondi to now disavow that investigators have any such list. The Trump administration owes us all a clear explanation.
With that large caveat aside, though, the fact remains: This is just not the biggest deal in the world -- and if you think it is, then you probably need to log off social media.
The midterm elections next fall are not going to be determined by the existence -- or absence -- of a "client list" for an extravagantly wealthy dead pedophile. Nor will they be decided on the absurd grounds of whether FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have somehow been "compromised." (They haven't.) Instead, the election -- and our politics -- will be contested on typical substantive grounds: the economy, inflation, immigration, crime, global stability and so forth. This is as it should be.
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More to the point: There are simply better uses of your time than fuming over the government's avowed nonexistence of the much-ballyhooed Epstein client list.
You might, for instance, consider spending more time, during these midsummer weeks, with your family. Maybe you can take the kids camping or fishing. Maybe you can take them to an amusement park or to one of America's many national park treasures. You can spend less time scrolling Instagram and TikTok and more time reading a good old-fashioned book; you will learn more, you will be happier, and you will be considerably less likely to traffic in fringe issues and off-putting rhetoric that alienates far more than it unifies.
Instead of finding meaning in the confirmation biases and groupthink validations of social media algorithms, perhaps you can locate meaning where countless human beings have found it since time immemorial: religion. Spend more time praying, reading Scripture, and attending services at your preferred house of worship. All of these uses of your time will fill you with a sense of stability, meaning, and purpose that you will never find deep in the bowels of an X thread on the Epstein files.
Many people today, deeply engaged in America's combustible political process, have forgotten that there are more important things in life than politics. And even within the specific realm of politics, there are plenty of things that are more deserving of attention and emotional investment than others. Above all, it is conservatives -- those oriented toward sobriety and humility, not utopianism and decadence -- who ought to be able to properly contextualize America's political tug-of-war within our broader lives and who ought to then be able to focus on the meaningful political issues to the exclusion of tawdry soap opera drama.
Like many others, I expect that the Justice Department's recent -- and seemingly definitive -- waving away of the Epstein files saga will not actually prove to be the final word on the matter. To the extent that I think about this sideshow, I certainly hope that the administration squarely addresses the many legitimate and unanswered questions now being asked by a frustrated citizenry that has seemingly been misled. But I also hope that the extent of this past week's rage might serve as an edifying moment. Let's return to the real things in life and focus on what matters most.
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