James Baldwin Reminds Us of What’s Really Important about the Epstein Files, RFK’s Anti-Vaxing Campaigns, and the GOP’s overall Trumpist Cruelty

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The Department of Justice yesterday released thousands of files related to investigations of convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein regarding his alleged decades-long sex-trafficking enterprise that left, at a minimum, dozens of sexually-abused and traumatized young girls in its wake.

Epstein, of course, was found dead in his cell in August 2019, the result of an apparent suicide, before he was able to be brought to trial for the charges of sex-trafficking minors in New York and Florida.

The short-circuiting of his trial prevented survivors of his abuse from receiving some measure, insufficient as it might have been, of accountability and justice. and, in a larger sense, let the nation as a whole avoid a long overdue reckoning with its own moral abdication when it comes to protecting and recognizing the rights and humanity of women and children and confronting the violence endemic to and sanctioned in America’s male supremacist culture and society.

The much-anticipated release of the files, from the most hopeful perspective, promised to provide validation and accountability for survivors of the abuse inflicted by Epstein and his rich and powerful cronies and also, perhaps, chart the beginnings of path for America out of the moral wilderness and wretchedness in which its sick soul suffers as a result of its participation in typically denying, in our courts and culture at large, the experiences of sexual abuse and violence women, children, and men, too, suffer in this country.

Skeptics worried the Department of Justice (DOJ), functioning as an extension of Trump’s authoritarian rule, would find a way to continue the decades-long cover-up of the Epstein sex-trafficking ring that purportedly involved a bevy of rich and powerful men, including, of course, Donald Trump.

The skeptics won the day, as the DOJ failed to comply with the mandates of Epstein Transparency Act, passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed into law by Donald Trump last November.  First, the release of files was woefully incomplete. And second, only the names of the victims were to be redacted, whereas hundreds of pages are fully redacted.

The response from the news media and politicians has tended to focus primarily on the “politics” of the issue rather than on pushing Americans as a whole to confront its ongoing moral failure and soul sickness. Representatives Jaime Raskin (D-MD) and Robert Garcia (D-CA) are threatening to bring criminal charges against the DOJ.

The narrative that the Epstein saga is one that exposes a two-tiered justice system that provides no accountability for the rich and powerful elite still dominates.

Don’t get me wrong. It would be great to have the DOJ indicted for its criminal behavior and have some semblance of a rule of law restored. And it’s always encouraging when our media, politicians, and Americans overall show some awareness of the injustices and unequal power dynamics of the U.S. class system.

Nonetheless, these responses, this coverage, also distract us from, or constitute an evasion of, a more fundamental issue brought to mind in my recent readings of the works of the late renowned author and social critic James Baldwin.

In his 1980 essay “Notes from the House of Bondage,” written as, in part, a lament for the poor choice available to Americans in the 1980 presidential election that featured Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan as candidates. He opens the essay, writing,

The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality. Or, I am saying, in other words, that we, the elders, are the only models children have. What we see in the children is what they have seen in us—or, more accurately perhaps, what they see in us.

Baldwin here really boils down any political or moral menu to its most basic element: the need, the imperative, to take care of and do right by the world’s children. Think about it. What if we assessed any political policy or behavior in terms of whether it affirmed and supported the lives and well-being of our children domestically and globally?

The question really takes politics and ideology out of the equation and roots our deliberations and evaluations in a simple moral criterion. Are we feeding and providing for the health of our children? Are we educating them and providing the means and opportunity for them to fully develop their talents so they can share them, give them back, to our society? Are they housed and safe? Are their environments healthy and properly-stewarded?

You get the picture.

This simple moral criterion serves two important functions.

First, it provides an analytical and evaluative framework that helps us understand issues and decisions facing us—and consequences--in the starkest and most basic terms, hopefully cutting through the obfuscations of political partisanship and ideology.

I’d like to think that, for example, in the case of Epstein’s, making sure our children can live safely in the world, free from sexual abuse and harm, would be more important than, say, “owning the libs,” such that the issue would be transcend partisan politics.

Second, applying this simple moral criterion also enables us to assess seemingly disparate policies, behaviors, and decisions in relation to one another on the basis of a common criterion.

So, for example, rather than assessing the Epstein scandal and all the issues associated with it in isolation from other policies, we can look at the Epstein situation as part of an overall agenda and assess the effects and consequences in the most fundamental and elemental human terms, rather than in political, ideological, or partisan terms.

Consider the policies pushed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy which call into question and even dismiss the effectiveness of traditional and proven vaccinations. The U.S. is now experiencing measles outbreaks in Arizona, Utah, and South Carolina, with outbreaks reported in 42 states. Two children died from an outbreak in West Texas earlier in the year, and 97% of those infected in Arizona and 92% of those infected nationwide are unvaccinated.

One doesn’t have to a be rocket scientist to determine that anti-vaxing politics and policies are harming, even killing, our children.

The Trump administration’s closure of the U.S. Agency for International Aid (USAID) has by all credible reporting resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children worldwide.

The failure of a Republican-led Congress to extend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies promises substantial increases in health insurance premiums, threatening access to health care for millions of American families and their children. The “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed last July amid much fanfare, included healthcare spending and changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and the ACA which are likely to leave 34 million Americans without health coverage.

Are we helping children yet and affirming and supporting their lives?

One could go on, but hopefully the point is clear: asking this basic question clarifies our priorities, the consequences of our political decisions and positions, and our most basic moral content of our national character.

In his earlier powerful work No Name in the Street (1972), which is largely a reflection on America’s failure to embrace and institute civil rights for all, particularly African Americans, Baldwin again invokes this issue of how we treat our children, again providing a road map to move through the distractions presented by other “political” issues to get at, with moral clarity, what is most fundamentally at stake. He writes,

In benighted, incompetent Africa, I had never encountered an orphan: the American streets resembled nothing so much as one vast, howling, unprecedented orphanage. It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all: to keep calling it that is a way of avoiding the problem. The problem is rooted in the question of one treats one’s flesh and blood, especially one’s children.

Other issues recede, or we approach them with a renewed clarity, when we measure our world and assess our behaviors and policies in terms of the health and overall condition of our children.

At this moment, it appears that many Americans are beginning to reject Trump’s lies about how great the U.S.  economy performing for them, as they assess the lies against their own experience and well-being.

Baldwin asks us to do the same for all of our children.