The Epstein files need to be released. But more importantly, the survivors need to be honored properly. That means not turning their pain into a political show, or using it as a cudgel in a proxy war between pro- and anti-Trump forces.
It’s bittersweet to see Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie leading the charge for transparency. On the one hand, it’s tempting to see it as a moment of courage, as a break from party machinery in service of a just cause. On the other hand, my experience in politics has taught me how often party institutions don’t suppress dissent. Instead, they assign it.
Greene’s history of inflammatory rhetoric and her central role in mainstreaming a crude identitarian politics make her a strange flagbearer for survivors. Her politics emerged as a perfect echo of the post–civil rights backlash machine. A kind of reactionary avatar built by decades of grievance, moral panic, and cultural resentment.
Massie is different. He’s long styled himself as a libertarian maverick. His Kentucky district is safely Republican (R+18), and his voting record shows real breaks from Trump, not just rhetorical ones. He opposed Trump’s major 2025 spending package, resisted airstrikes on Iran, and frequently invokes constitutional concerns over party loyalty. So his stance on transparency, like it or not, is at least ideologically consistent.
Greene, meanwhile, continues to straddle the fence. Just this week, she said Trump’s rhetoric was harming her, but that she still supports his administration and broader agenda. That’s not rebellion. That’s positioning.
Which brings me back to what I’ve seen too often: internal dissent that isn’t insurgent, it’s sanctioned. When a scandal breaks that implicates the powerful, institutions often pick designated detractors—just enough rebellion to appear responsive, but never enough to threaten the structure. In this case, the House (where drama plays better) is full of noise. But the Senate is as quiet as a sealed file.
And now the usual centrist media suspects, many of whom spent years ignoring or downplaying Epstein’s elite connections, are suddenly praising MTG and Massie as brave truth-tellers. That’s where my skepticism sharpens. Because I’ve seen how pain, even trauma, gets commodified into spectacle. Especially when the scandal is too big to bury and too useful to ignore.
There’s also a certain hopium guiding the anti-Trump establishment, a belief that this scandal will finally fracture his movement. That his own allies are turning on him, and it spells the end. But hopium, when consumed long enough, becomes opium, or a narcotic for the political class that clouds structural analysis with shallow spectacle.
The reality is that Trump didn’t invent the rot; he exposed it, albeit crudely, destructively, but undeniably. The Epstein revelations don’t just implicate him. They implicate everyone: the donors, the Ivy League elites, the law firms, the feds, the banks, the social clubs. The power networks. The rot isn’t partisan, but infrastructural.
So yes, I’m weary of Greene and Massie playing transparency champions. Not because the files shouldn’t be released, but because I fear this might be just another rerun in the scandal industrial complex, where outrage is monetized, pain is weaponized, and survivors are once again turned into a backdrop for elite drama.
If the Epstein files become just another act in our long-running national melodrama, one where outrage is aired but nothing changes, then we haven’t honored the survivors. We’ve cast them, again, in a play they never asked to be part of.
Behind the Curtain: The Center-Left That Never Was
The Democratic Party is going to have to move leftward, not because the country demands radicalism, but because the center it’s been defending for decades no longer exists. It doesn’t need to lurch toward the far left. It just needs to recalibrate to a center-left posture it’s actually willing to fight for, rather than settling for the scraps of a failed center-right consensus that it mistook for pragmatism. The party is at its weakest when it listens to those who came out of the Bush/Clinton machine, bless their expert hearts.
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