A few years ago, during the COVID lockdowns, I wrote about the disturbing treatment of a Victorian couple by the Western Australian government during the height of that state’s zealous protection of its border. These parents were grieving their son who had taken his life in Perth. Both of them were inoculated, had tested negatively for COVID and were happy to submit to a police chaperone so that they might visit their dead boy’s apartment and to see him in the morgue.
Despite all this, the Western Australian government demanded the parents spend a fortnight in a quarantine hotel – an order that rendered the trip both impractical and intolerably painful. They declined.
After interviewing the mother, my belief at the time was that this was monstrous – and for expressing as much, I was described by some readers as a reckless libertarian and morally suspect.
But I’m unsure if, a few years later, anyone would respond the same way today – as I’m unsure if anyone from that time might now honestly acknowledge the weirdness of their anxieties and insistence upon the righteousness of the Victorian government’s response to the virus.
Tribal opinions change, but those changes are rarely acknowledged. But I see them, and so do many others. I see the swiftness of their adoption, the aggression of their enforcement, and the convenient forgetting of their possession when they change.
But popular zealotry still leaves it mark, however subtly the positions are abandoned. If you ever pondered the efficacy of wearing masks outside during COVID, you were anti-science and anti-social.
If you thought that there was a chance that the virus had leaked from a Chinese lab, you were a hysterical racist. If you thought that President Biden was evidently unwell, and that it was disturbing that the leader of the free world could not always remember the year his adult son died, then you were ageist and aiding the return of a fascist.
And if you thought that this Jeffrey Epstein chap was shady as hell and the provenance of his wealth and influence bafflingly opaque, then you were a mouth-breathing MAGA conspiracist.
But something’s happened recently. A change of opinion amongst— well, call it what you will. Amongst “mainstream media”, or “gatekeepers”, or “the zeitgeist” – whatever you might call the Blob of liberal conventional wisdom – it has vanquished its allergy to the Epstein story.
At last! The man who seemed — who still seems – like a Mossad asset who ran a global sex-trafficking and honey-pot scheme to ensnare the rich and influential, who hosted several Israeli Prime Ministers at his grand penthouse beside New York City’s Central Park, and whose father-in-law was an Israeli spy who died mysteriously, we’ve finally taken an interest in.
Liberally-minded media, just like their ideological counterparts, have long decided what’s permissible to think or say – even as they genuinely believe that they’re simply honest arbiters.
They decide between what’s healthy scepticism, and what’s monstrous credulity, and I think this management of thought has become so instinctive that many practitioners can no longer see it – they’re merely fish, and their smug certitudes are the water they swim in.
The saltier virtues of irreverence, independence and scepticism are no longer admired – in fact, they’re often thought to be the province of weirdos wading in intellectual swamps and destructive fever dreams. Better to uphold sanctioned opinions, however sterile, pious, repetitive or false.
But if liberal writers don’t notice, normal folks do. Normal folks see the fanatical drawing of boundaries, the imperious curation of thought and, ultimately, they sense their severe condescension.
After January 6, 2021, when the US Congress was murderously stormed by Trump fanatics encouraged by their cult-leader to protest his “stolen” victory, it seemed unthinkable to almost everyone that he might be returned to the White House.
That he has been cannot merely be attributed to whatever congenital faults one might assume his voters to suffer. For Trump to have returned, the left had to have become popularly insufferable. And they were.
So now, Epstein – and Trump’s long relationship with him – has become The Big Story, which is curious because most of the grounds for this interest were already long public. Trump’s serial biographer Michael Wolff, who has some hundred hours of tape with the late Epstein, has been talking about this for years.
Personally, I’m grateful for the story’s late revival. But I haven’t forgotten the recent history of indifference to it. Nor the circling of wagons around all the other stories mentioned above, when a position was assumed amongst ideologically tribal media and any scepticism or anger about the patronising curation of stories was dismissed as paranoia or bigotry.
So, I vainly pray that the left might disavow piety and the anti-democratic instinct to silence “rogue” voices instead of debating them. Pray that the left cease to contemptuously wag fingers, ignore uncomfortable things, and acknowledge when their smug certitudes (trigger warnings, “Defund the Police”) have not only been politically alienating but badly wrong.
The Epstein story is not new. Only certain parts of the media’s interest in it.