I want to be careful here. I want to be very careful. Because the moment a person in my position — a classical liberal, a genuine moderate, someone who has been called 'annoyingly fair' by three separate dinner guests — raises even a procedural concern about the way this story is being told, the internet does what the internet does. So let me say it plainly, at the top, where it cannot be taken out of context: Jeffrey Epstein did terrible things. Horrible things. I have said this. It is in writing.

Now.

Is it possible to hold that truth while also asking whether the woke discourse machine has, once again, consumed a story whole — leaving no room for the kind of slow, patient thinking that complex situations demand? I believe it is. I believe that is, in fact, the only intellectually honest position available.

What strikes me, watching the online left work itself into its customary frenzy, is the absence of proportion. Epstein — and I want to reiterate, a deeply, profoundly, irredeemably bad man, I cannot stress that enough, it is stressed — was also a man of considerable accomplishment. He moved through rooms that most of us will never enter. He cultivated relationships across science, finance, and government in ways that, when examined outside the current emotional climate, reveal a person of genuine organizational ability. An ability he used for monstrous ends, let me be clear. Monstrous.

But the mob does not do nuance. The mob sees a name trending and arrives already certain. The accounts with the profile pictures and the pinned posts and the vocabulary that changes every eighteen months — they have decided. They decided before you finished the sentence. And once the mob decides, the story is over. There is no appeal. There is no process. There is only the ratio.

I find myself asking: what does it say about us, as a society, that we cannot discuss even the most clear-cut cases — and this is a clear-cut case, Epstein was a criminal, I want that on record — without the loudest voices in the room immediately drafting the obituary and moving on? What are we losing when we replace judgment with performance?

I'm not defending Epstein. I am defending the idea that a civilization capable of distinguishing between a person and a symbol is a more durable civilization than one that cannot. The left has made Epstein a symbol. A convenient one. A symbol that asks nothing of them and delivers the warm sensation of righteousness at zero personal cost.

Meanwhile, the real questions — about systems, about complicity, about the institutions that enabled a man I have now described as horrible in this column no fewer than five times — go unasked. Because asking them requires sitting with discomfort. Asking them means the story gets complicated. And complicated doesn't trend.

I don't expect the people I'm describing to read this. They rarely do. Or rather, they read the first two sentences and the last, and then they screenshot it.

For everyone else: the standard for engaging with history is not whether it makes you feel good. It is whether it is true. Epstein was guilty. He was also a real person. Both of these things can be in the same column.

I'm told that last sentence will be taken out of context. I'm leaving it in anyway. That's what intellectual courage looks like.