Epstein in Advent: Ritual, Redaction, and the Sedating of a Nation

The latest release of Epstein-related files–with familiar redactions and familiar disappointment–is once again stirring the public imagination. Names are scanned. Screenshots are shared. Anger spikes, then will invariably dissipate. And a quiet sense settles in that something important has happened–or nothing has happened at all–even if no one is quite sure what those two competing senses mean.

This pattern should feel familiar by now. And those competing senses? That’s intentional schizophrenia spelled on us by an ancient enemy. It is menticide, the killing of the mind. It is murder.

“He was a murderer from the beginning.”

For years, the Epstein saga has functioned less as a legal reckoning and more as a recurring civic ritual, looping back and forth just enough to keep people hooked and hoping. Information is unveiled just enough to reignite outrage, then carefully contained before it demands conversion–personal or institutional. Each release promises clarity and delivers ambiguity. Each moment of exposure feels like progress, yet leaves the structure intact.

Trump’s seeming stance on child trafficking in 2017 was the only reason I got behind him when I did.

It is tempting to interpret all of this as mere incompetence or cowardice. But Advent teaches us to look deeper, not louder.

Advent is not a season of answers but of waiting–of learning to distinguish between illumination and distraction. And that distinction matters here. Because exposure–even if it were without redaction–without repentance does not heal a culture; it desensitizes it. We learn to live with darkness by managing it, naming it, posting about it–without ever confronting what it reveals about us, without confronting what the enemy truly looks like.

If we lived our lives according to Christ’s commands, the list wouldn’t even matter. We wouldn’t care enough about those we’ve made into idols for it to be a story in the first place.

Plus they’re not even touching the torturous, ritualistic, and sacrificial nature of it all. What they’re creating is a false drama around a sort of true enemy. But the trick is to get us squabbling inside a false binary–keeping the true source and summit of the evil hidden, or discussed only by “conspiracy theorists,” who we scorn because we think we are the ones who have the cutting-edge information.

In other words, the enemy controls the counter-official narrative as well.

Christ and his narrative is the only place where the Epstein story continues to matter, even when “the list” does not.

The great deception of our age is not that evil exists, but that believing it is some natural psychological condition and going to therapy is the same as resisting it. We have been trained to believe that awareness is virtue, that outrage is action, that sharing information on Facebook is moral courage. But none of these require transformation. None require sacrifice. None require God.

The repeated cycles of conversation about and release of Epstein material–withholding much more than it reveals–keeps us inside that illusion. It allows us to feel awake while remaining unchanged. It feeds the sense that historical textbooks are being managed somewhere we can trust, when in reality they are part of the ruse. They are controlled by powers that answer to no one. They subtly train us to put our faith in the State, in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to wait for someone somewhere out there to tell us when things get really important rather than attend to our own souls now.

This never-ending trust in tomorrow is not accidental.

It is part of the menticide, part of a humiliation ritual that has us participating actively in our own demise.

A culture that cannot repent–that cannot look away from the shadows on the wall–must be entertained by these loops of false disclosure. A people that has lost a sacramental orientation will substitute hierarchy with brotherhood, confession with commentary, and penance with posting on social media platforms controlled by the very same enemies. The danger is not that we are deceived once or twice. It is that we become comfortable living inside the cave–arguing over shadows while the real work of conversion remains untouched.

Advent and the remnant Church persist in resisting all of this.

The Church does not prepare for Christmas by demanding documents or names in a story that should have long been exposed in full. She recognizes the ongoing deception and prepares for the martyr’s death by fasting, watching, praying, and reordering love. She insists–against the instincts of modern life–that the world is not healed from the top down, but from the bottom up, the inside out. No list, no file, no revelation can substitute for authentic repentance beyond I messed up but I’m saved.

This does not mean the crimes do not matter–especially since the true crimes well surpass the one they’re dangling in front of us. It does not mean justice is irrelevant. But justice detached from truth, and truth detached from God, cannot sustain a civilization. It becomes a political tool of management rather than instruments of sacramental, hierarchical restoration.

And the Infant King we await this Advent? He does not arrive with dossiers or disclosures. He arrives quietly, demanding allegiance that disrupts families, habits, careers, and comforts. He does not promise safety in this life. He promises order. And that order begins not with institutions, but with hearts rightly oriented toward him.

Perhaps this is why each Epstein release feels simultaneously explosive and empty.

A little bit like Schizophrenia.

As the remnant Church waits–not anxiously, but attentively–she offers a different response to the spectacle. Not denial. Not obsession. But discernment. A refusal to confuse information with wisdom, or disclosure with salvation.

The files and the psyops will continue to come. Redaction in all its many forms will remain. Outrage will always flare and fade.

But the question Advent places before us is quieter and far more demanding: will we wait for the next release of… whatever–or will we prepare room for the King who alone can judge, heal, and restore what has been so thoroughly disordered?

That waiting, though hidden, is for a list that Christ will check, and when time runs out, he won’t be checking it twice.