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Jeffrey Epstein’s files have once again become a political cudgel, and Alan Dershowitz called it exactly what it looks like: the new McCarthyism. His blunt warning on Sunday was not some academic provocation — it was a shot across the bow at a culture that now rushes to publish names and ruin reputations before any court or due process can weigh the evidence.
The heart of the fight is the so‑called demand to “release the Epstein files,” a demand that promises transparency but risks turning unverified leads into lifetime convictions in the court of public opinion. Federal prosecutors and the FBI have said the investigative record is massive and complicated, and officials have pushed back against turning every scrap of an active or closed file into a sensational headline. That pushback has been framed by critics as a coverup, and the resulting chaos is what Dershowitz warns will become normalized.
Those calling for wholesale dumps of records should remember the human cost of premature accusations — Dershowitz himself has been entangled in this saga, once accused in connection with Epstein and later the subject of withdrawn or disputed claims about identity and memory. The messy, highly public back-and-forth over who said what years later is exactly why conservative skeptics have urged caution and why legal protections against guilt-by-publication matter.
Make no mistake: transparency is a worthy goal, but transparency weaponized is not. When political operatives and partisan media set out to create a list of suspects for political mileage, what follows is not justice but a feeding frenzy that punishes the innocent and distracts from real reform. The American people deserve full factual disclosure where it is lawful and responsible, not a partisan hit list masquerading as accountability.
Conservatives should lead on demanding that any release of material be carefully redacted to protect privacy, preserve ongoing investigations, and avoid the very cancel-culture rush that ruins reputations overnight. We can call for sunlight and for safeguards at the same time — sunlight for legitimate oversight, safeguards to prevent weaponized smear campaigns. Turning every rumor into a headline makes the nation less safe and the political class more powerful, not less.
This episode should remind citizens that legal rights and standards of evidence are not optional progressivist niceties but the bedrock of a free society. Dershowitz’s decades defending unpopular clients is part of the point: lawyers, due process, and presumption of innocence matter even when the accused are easy targets for righteous outrage. To abandon those principles in the name of immediate gratification is to abandon the rule of law itself.
The proper conservative response is clear: push for lawful transparency where justified, demand accountability where the evidence supports it, and reject any partisan campaign that trades careful adjudication for clickbait and character assassination. Americans who love freedom should insist that investigations proceed on facts and procedure, not on who gets named on a list designed to score political points.
