Epstein Files Feeding Frenzy Is No Moral Panic, Expert Declares

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

 

I have been singled out for censure in a guest op-ed published at MSNOW (the erstwhile MSNBC). So has Quillette proprietor Claire Lehmann. So has Reason contributor Brendan O’Neill. I don’t know how the Washington Post’s Jason Willick escaped the opprobrium that is his due, but he belongs in this odious bucket, too. Our offense was to have seen in the reaction of America’s public figures to the so-called Epstein files the telltale signs of a classic moral panic. It turns out that we’re just not expert enough in the subject to know what we’re talking about.

 

Indeed, in the estimation of Pace University communications and media studies professor Marcella Szablewicz, we’ve gone so far as to “debase the concept of a moral panic” as a means of laundering into the discourse more monotonous complaints about “cancel culture.” You see, Szablewicz “studies moral panics” and is therefore equipped to determine that the “Epstein scandal is not one.”

 

Szablewicz defines her terms. Moral panics “are short-lived,” she contends. They tend to surround a “once-threatening change” in social circumstances, the “fervor” around which dies down only when those changes are “eventually accepted by society.” Most crucially, “moral panics are not just about folks getting emotionally riled up over an issue.” Rather, they are “about people in positions of power and privilege policing the status quo in the face of progress, whether it’s social, cultural, or technological.”

 

I cannot begin to express how tiresome the invocation of this Marxian dialectic — a framework in which everything boils down to power dynamics — has become. It would be a misnomer to call it an argument. It is a thought-terminating cliché. To those who subscribe to it, violence cannot be understood as just violence, nor can crime be merely criminal — not unless we conduct an audit of the social structures the perpetrators spent their lives navigating.

 

If there is a power imbalance between perpetrator and victim (particularly if the victim is the state, and, therefore, all of us), only the erudite among us can fully comprehend what we’re looking at. Common definitions cannot be understood but by a clerical caste that has the requisite knowledge and credentials to interpret events for us. It is a rhetorical trick that intimidates only a narrow, cosseted group of intellectuals who delude themselves into thinking it can be effectively wielded against the rest of us, too.

 

There is more to the author’s argument. “First,” Szablewicz writes, “we may assume that the wealthy white men implicated in the files are the deviant ‘folk devils’ who are threatening to change the status quo.” I have no idea what that means or why an editor at a general-interest publication did not strike it. But at least it precedes a comprehensible contention. Subsequently, Szablewicz alleges that we are “arguing that Epstein’s friends and associates are being unfairly targeted in a so-called witch hunt.”

 

That’s a ponderous misreading of (at least) my argument. What I wrote is that the efforts by lawmakers in Congress to reveal the names of individuals who appear in Epstein-related documents, even if they’re not accused of a crime or even being investigated for their suspected involvement in one, sacrifice proper procedure to the fierce urgency of now. Those who would do the sacrificing are encouraging emotional reasoning over logic, and those emotions are being harnessed by unscrupulous political actors to further their careers, no matter whom they hurt in the process.

 

For example, when Jasmine Crockett’s staff combed through Google with the goal of impugning Republicans whose names appear in these documents, inadvertently maligning and slandering an anonymous American unlucky enough to have been saddled with the name “Jeffrey Epstein,” it was evidence of the illogic of our moment. And it was not harmless.

 

Maybe Crockett just isn’t powerful enough to satisfy Szablewicz’s subjective criteria. She sure isn’t a white male “folk devil.” But the victimization of poor Mr. Epstein is not unique. As the Wall Street Journal’s editors documented, “heinous accusations are circulating against prominent people, without any evidence they’re true.” In our national “frenzy,” as the Journal put it, innocent people are being made victims, and Epstein’s true victims were victimized again when their identities, addresses, and emails were accidentally released in the haste necessitated by Congress’s decision to, in Congressman Clay Higgins’s righteous estimation, abandon “250 years of criminal justice procedure.” That may not matter much to Szablewicz, but those of us who have not succumbed to “frenzy” remain duly protective of the rule of law.

 

Crockett and many others justify their impertinence as a necessary response to the imminent threat in which Epstein placed children — a threat that his untold legions of wealthy and influential abettors surely represent today. “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,” I wrote in all my ignorance.

 

Perhaps Szablewicz recognizes these as classic moral panics, even though, blessedly enough, these manias were not “accepted by society” but abandoned. But these were not social phenomena that were imposed on the public entirely from above. There are both top-down and bottom-up components to moral panics.

 

When over a thousand epidemiologists, doctors, social workers, medical students, and health-care professionals signed an open letter deeming “pervasive racism” a “paramount public health problem” at the height of the Covid pandemic, only to promote the notion that breaking social-distancing guidelines was “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States,” was that a moral panic? Was it only the powerful who insisted on it? Or did these professionals sacrifice their reputations in response to the sentiments bubbling up from the digital street?

 

Surely, the very act of questioning whether those who committed no crime deserve permanent reputational damage even if their behavior was ugly and condemnable is enough to render the questioners suspect too. As Willick observed when he stood bravely in opposition to the mob, “the inability to distinguish criticism of a bureaucratic process with support of a person’s behavior is fatal to any sort of public deliberation.”

 

I don’t know if that is a recognized feature of all moral panics. After all, I’m no expert. But I’d much rather argue logic without any claim to credentialed expertise than to retail illogic that is buttressed primarily by my degrees.